Author Description

The Listener’s Guide is dedicated ‘to the concert-goer, gramophonist, and radio listener’. With his vast knowledge Scholes shows how composers use their tools and deal with their material. He explains the various forms (sonata and symphony, fugue and oratorio, for example), the instruments of the orchestra, and the historical development of the composers. First published in 1919, this edition contains several minor corrections and additions and includes brief notes on electronic music, serial composition, and musique concrète. Percy Alfred Scholes (1877 – 1958) was an English musician, journalist, and prolific author, whose best-known achievement was the Oxford Companion to Music, first published 1938. This work took six years to produce and consisted of over a million words (surpassing the length of the Bible). Scholes wrote virtually all the text himself, the only exceptions being the article on tonic sol-fa (with which he was dissatisfied) and the synopses of the plots of operas (which he regarded as too boring). Although the Companion was (and is) regarded as authoritative, the text of the first edition is enlivened by Scholes's own anecdotal and sometimes quirky style. In his writing here and elsewhere Scholes never believed in holding back his personal views in favor of a neutral point of view. He is credited with the description of harpsichord music as sounding like "a toasting fork on a birdcage"; and wrote that "Handel was the more elegant composer, but Bach was the more thorough". In the Companion itself some composers (Berg, Schoenberg and Webern, for example) were described in somewhat unsympathetic and dismissive terms. Similarly, his article on the composer John Henry Maunder states the composer’s "seemingly inexhaustible cantatas – ‘Penitence, Pardon and Peace’ and ‘From Olivet to Calvary’ – long enjoyed popularity and still aid the devotions of undemanding congregations in less sophisticated areas."