Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Library Sigla
- Introduction
- I PUBLIC INDISCRETIONS, PRIVATE CONFESSIONS: SCOTT'S LIFE AND INFLUENCES
- 1 Matters of Biography, Autobiography and Anonymity
- 2 “Music, Melancholy, Apprehension, Sex, and the Church”
- 3 “An Artist-Autocrat of the Most Pronounced Type”
- 4 “The Most Absorbing and Romantic Interest of My Present Incarnation”
- II ARTIST, PRIEST, PROPHET: SCOTT'S AESTHETIC THINKING
- Epilogue
- Select Bibliography
- Index
2 - “Music, Melancholy, Apprehension, Sex, and the Church”
from I - PUBLIC INDISCRETIONS, PRIVATE CONFESSIONS: SCOTT'S LIFE AND INFLUENCES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Library Sigla
- Introduction
- I PUBLIC INDISCRETIONS, PRIVATE CONFESSIONS: SCOTT'S LIFE AND INFLUENCES
- 1 Matters of Biography, Autobiography and Anonymity
- 2 “Music, Melancholy, Apprehension, Sex, and the Church”
- 3 “An Artist-Autocrat of the Most Pronounced Type”
- 4 “The Most Absorbing and Romantic Interest of My Present Incarnation”
- II ARTIST, PRIEST, PROPHET: SCOTT'S AESTHETIC THINKING
- Epilogue
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Cyril Scott was born on 27 September 1879 in Oxton, a few miles from the centre of Birkenhead, near Liverpool. He spent his childhood in the town and came to associate it not only with the unpleasant neuroses of his early years, but more broadly with an encroaching perception of the materialism of Victorian England. These associations were brought into particularly stark relief after his first period studying in Frankfurt. Birkenhead was an “unrefined place” and
a town so arid and sordid and un-prepossessing in parts, that even to walk through its monotonous murky streets, let alone to live in them, is to fill the soul with a mid-Victorian gloom; that most desolating of all gloom. For even if the sun succeeds, with a great effort as it were, to pierce the veil of fog which hangs like an evil wraith hovering over the vast array of houses and high factory-chimneys and smoky railway stations, its rays are bilious and unexhilarating, while all too often its contour may be seen, resembling not the sun at all, but a rather red diminutive moon instead.
On the positive side, though, Oxton was quieter than the town centre, and it is perhaps not surprising that he described his early memories there in terms of auditory characteristics: he was not
deafened by the roar of careering motor-cyclists and the discordant honks of motor-buses and similar vehicles, my world of sound being largely confined to the clip-clop of horses, the shouts of errand boys and newspaper sellers, with an occasional barrel-organ's music by way of contrast.
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- Information
- The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott , pp. 20 - 40Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013