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First name: Cyril M.
Last name: Scott
Dates: 1879-1970
Category: Quartet
Nationality: English
Opus name: Opus 16 in E Minor (1899)
Publisher: Boosey
Peculiarities: to download: imslp; http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Piano+quartets%22
Information: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Cyril Meir Scott (27 September 1879 – 31 December 1970) was an English composer, writer, and poet. Scott was born in Oxton, England to a shipper and scholar of Greek and Hebrew, and Mary Scott (née Griffiths), an amateur pianist. He showed a talent for music from an early age and was sent to the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany to study piano in 1892 at age 12. He Studied with Iwan Knorr and belonged to the Frankfurt Group, a circle of composers who studied at the Hoch Conservatory in the late 1890s. His first symphony was performed (through the good offices of his friend Stefan George, the great German poet) when he was only twenty years old. In 1902 he met the pianist Evelyn Suart, with whom he had a long artistic association. She championed his music, premiering many of his works, and introducing him to his publisher, Elkin, with whom he remained for the rest of his life. Evelyn Suart was also a Christian Scientist, and it was through her that Scott became interested in metaphysics. Scott dedicated his Scherzo, Op. 25 to Evelyn Suart. (Her daughter Diana Gould was a noted ballerina and the second wife of Yehudi Menuhin.) Those who heard Scott play the piano commented on the extraordinary vitality of his playing, above all his always well judged rubato, and subtleties of tone and pedalling. These can be appreciated from the reissue on a Dutton CD (Collected Piano Music, vol. 1) of his performance (in the 1930s) of eight of his own pieces on piano rolls. Scott married Rose L. Allatini in May 1921. They had two children: Vivien Mary Scott (born 1923) and Desmond Cyril Scott (born 1926). He separated from Rose following World War II. In 1943, he met Marjorie Hartston, a clairvoyante, who remained his companion until his death, and persuaded him to go on composing, despite the indifference of the musical world to his work. He composed up until the last three weeks of his life, dying at the age of 91. By the time of his death he was only remembered for a few popular pieces (such as 'Lotus Land') that he had composed over sixty years before. But his work is now (2011) coming back into favour, as far as recordings are concerned, though live performances remain rare. Scott was essentially a late romantic composer, whose style was at the same time strongly influenced by impressionism. His harmony was notably exotic.as it became steadily more refined and more varied in his later years. Indeed it is his late works (written between 1950 and his death) that are the most individual, with their ever-shifting harmonic colours and wayward inflections of phrase and mood, capturing perfectly the way the mind shifts, backwards and forwards, between reminiscence, regrets, and self-assertion.