Cyril Scott: “The Father of Modern British Music” and the Occult

Abstract

Cyril Scott showed early musical talent and, in 1891, at the age of 12, his fairly wealthy parents sent him to the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany, where he studied for 18 months and during a second stint from 1895 to 1898. He became known as a member of the so-called Frankfurt Group of five British composers, including Percy Grainger and Roger Quilter (figure 1.1), who “stood apart in outlook and education from the mainstream of the conservative British musical establishment,”² though they were united, not so much by a common musicality, as by a common dislike of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. All of them were interested in pre-Raphaelite art, which often had Orientalist overtones, and the work of William Morris, the spiritual leader of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Scott introduced the others to the work of the Belgian Symbolist and philosopher Maurice Maeterlinck, whose play Palléas et Mélisande (1892) inspired composers throughout Western Europe, among whom were Claude Debussy in 1902, Arnold Schoenberg in 1903, and, indeed, earlier in 1900, Scott himself. Also, he made them familiar with the work of the German poet Stefan George, with whom he had become friends in Frankfurt (he actually translated a volume of George’s poetry into English in 1910 and wrote a book in German on his life and work in 1952). According to J. W. Burrow, George’s world touched, on the one hand, “the esoteric, ineffable mysteries of the French-bred aesthetics of the Symbolist movement in poetry and drama” and, on the other, “the more down-to-earth German world of Ariosophic occultism,”³ being a fusion of Theosophy, including the notion of an ancient Aryan wisdom, and German folklore and mythology.

It is to those who find orthodox religious creeds too illogical or sentimental, and materialism too unsatisfactory and negative, that occult philosophy will prove acceptable, for it renders life vastly more interesting, more intriguing and more romantic. It shows cosmic life to be other than that mechanical “order of things” which the materialist postulates, and it shows personal life as the “adventure magnificent” which does not merely begin with the cradle and end with the grave. Furthermore, it shows the raison d’être for all religions worthy of the name, for cults, movements, philosophies, arts and sciences, their evolution and various phases. It explains the apparently unexplainable without making impossible demands upon faith, advocating reason as the most reliable stepping-stone to knowledge.

(Cyril Scott, An Outline of Modern Occultism, 1935)¹