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Music, Theosophical spirituality, and empire: the British modernist composers Cyril Scott and John Foulds*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2008

Bob van der Linden
Bob van der Linden
Affiliation:
c/o Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam, Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article deals with the life and work of the early twentieth-century British modernist composers Cyril Scott and John Foulds, in the context of British national music and ‘imperial culture’ at large. Through a discussion of their Theosophical spirituality, Indian musical exoticism, and modernist aesthetics (for all of which they became outsiders to the British music establishment), it tentatively investigates their ideas as part of an ‘alternative’ ideological cluster, which equally influenced British ‘imperial culture’. Furthermore, it discusses the role of Theosophists (such as Annie Besant, Margaret Cousins, and Rukmini Devi) in Indian nationalism and the making of modern South Indian music. This situates the cases of Scott and Foulds within Theosophy as a global movement, and illustrates how cosmopolitan radicalism, Western self-questioning, modernist aesthetics, and anti-establishment thinking linked up with the emergence of non-Western anti-imperial nationalism through an intricate network of personal relationships in metropolis and colony.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , July 2008 , pp. 163 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 Jeffrey, Richards, Imperialism and music, Britain 1876–1953, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001Google Scholar; Said, Edward W., Culture and imperialism, London: Vintage, 1994Google Scholar; Peter van der, Veer, Imperial encounters: religion and modernity in Britain and India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.Google Scholar

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4 A serious study of the life and work of Cyril Scott has not yet appeared, although the groundwork for it has been done by Laurie J. Sampel in Cyril Scott: a bio-bibliography, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Malcolm MacDonald is the chief authority on John Foulds, and his main work is John Foulds and his music, London: Kahn & Averill, 1989.

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8 Janaki, Bakhle, Two men and music: nationalism in the making of an Indian classical tradition, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005Google Scholar; Martin Clayton, ‘Musical renaissance and its margins in England and India, 1874–1914’, in Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon, eds., Music and Orientalism in the British empire, 1780s–1940s: portrayal of the East, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, pp. 71–93; Bob van der, Linden, ‘Sikh music and empire: the moral representation of self in music’, Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture and Theory, 4, 1, 2008, pp. 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lakshmi, Subramanian, From the Tanjore court to the Madras music academy: a social history of music in south India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006Google Scholar; Amanda J. Weidman, Singing the classical, voicing the modern: the postcolonial politics of music in South India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

9 See for example: Jonathan, Bellman, ed., The exotic in Western music, Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1998Google Scholar; Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, eds., Western music and its others: difference, representation, and appropriation in music, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000; Gerry, Farrell, Indian music and the West, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999Google Scholar; Timothy B. Taylor, Beyond exoticism: Western music and the world, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

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13 Owen, The place of enchantment, pp. 24–6.

14 Risseeuw, ‘Thinking culture through counter-culture’, p. 185.

15 Bob van der Linden, Moral languages from colonial Punjab: the singh sabha, arya samaj and ahmadiyahs, New Delhi: Manohar, 2008. For the relationship between Sikh music and the singh sabha moral language, see especially my ‘Sikh music and empire’.

16 Bevir, ‘Theosophy as a political movement’.

17 Subramanian, From the Tanjore court; Weidman, Singing the classical.

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21 Ibid., pp. 179–80.

22 Partly because of the introductory note, his A yoga in sound (1938) for piano also remains an interesting piece of Theosophical musical exoticism.

23 Weidman, Singing the classical, p. 120.

24 See for example on the role of the Theosophy in the Netherlands East Indies: Laurie J. Sears, ‘Intellectuals, Theosophy, and failed narratives of the nation in late colonial Java’, in Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray, eds., A companion to postcolonial studies: a historical introduction, London: Basil Blackwell 2004, pp. 333–59.

25 Boehmer, Empire, p. 8, emphasis in original.

26 Viswanathan, ‘Ireland, India’.

27 Stephen Lloyd, ‘Grainger and the “Frankfurt group”’, Studies in Music, 16, 1982, p. 111 (as cited in Sampsel, Cyril Scott, p. 4).

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30 Cyril, Scott, Bone of contention: life story and confessions, London: Antiquarian Press, 1969, p. 83.Google Scholar

31 Arthur Eaglefield Hull, Cyril Scott: the man and his works, London: Waverley, 1925 (first published 1914). He also wrote Modern harmony: its explanation and application, London: Augener, 1914, which includes examples of Scott’s piano music.

32 Richards, Imperialism and music, p. 160.

33 MacDonald, John Foulds, p. 36.

34 Colin Scott-Sutherland, Arnold Bax, London: J.M. Dent, 1973, p. 39 (as cited in Sampsel, Cyril Scott, p. 2); MacDonald, John Foulds, p. 14.

35 Scott, Bone of contention, pp. 132–5.

36 Diana Swann, ‘Cyril Scott (1879–1970)’, British Music Society News, 71, 1996, p. 256 (as cited in Sampsel, Cyril Scott, p. 18).

37 Cyril Scott, Music: its secret influence through the ages, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian Press, 1958 (first edition 1933), p. 200.

38 Scott, Bone of contention, p. 221.

39 His first autobiography was My years of indiscretion, London: Mills and Boons, 1924.

40 See, for example, Maud Mann (Maud MacCarthy), ‘Some Indian conceptions of music’, Proceedings of the Musical Association, 38th session, 1911–12, pp. 41–65.

41 MacDonald, John Foulds, p. 101.

42 Ibid., p. 83. See also John Foulds, Music to-day: its heritage from the past, and legacy to the future, London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1934, pp. 343–6.

43 MacDonald, John Foulds, p. 57.

44 Ibid., p. 70.

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50 Cyril Scott, The philosophy of modernism: its connection with music, London: Waverley 1925, (first published 1917), appendix 3 (‘Percy Grainger: the music and the man’), p. 135.

51 See, for instance, Scott, Music, Part III; Foulds, Music to-day, pp. 159–77.

52 Foulds, Music to-day, pp. 166–7, emphasis in original.

53 Ibid., p. 103; Scott, The philosophy, appendix 1 (‘The occult relationship between sound and colour’).

54 Scott, Music, p. 133.

55 Foulds, Music to-day, pp. 281–2.

56 Ibid., p. 124. Cf. Scott, The philosophy, appendix 2.

57 Foulds, Music to-day, pp. 17–18, 224.

58 Ibid., p. 58.

59 Scott, Music, pp. 199–200.

60 Ibid., p. 142.

61 Ibid.; Foulds, Music to-day, pp. 132–9.

62 Scott, Music, pp. 155–7.

63 Risseeuw, ‘Thinking culture through counter-culture’; van der Veer, Imperial encounters, pp. 64–5, 143–4.

64 Hardy, The British piano sonata, p. 66.

65 Foulds, Music to-day, pp. 140–51. Cf. Sampsel, Cyril Scott, pp. 133, 136.

66 Foulds, Music to-day, pp. 179–84.

67 Vaughan Williams, National music, pp. 3, 10.

68 Foulds, Music to-day, pp. 20, 253.

69 Jonathan Harvey, Music and inspiration, London: Faber and Faber, 1999, pp. 8, 76–7.

70 Taylor, Beyond exoticism, pp. 2–5, 209.

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72 Scott, Bone of contention, p. 195.

73 Mellers, Percy Grainger, pp. 18–26.

74 Neil Sorrell, ‘A composer in the twilight of the Raj: John Foulds (1880–1939)’, in Seminar on Indian Music and the West, Mumbai: Sangeet Natak Academy, 1996, p. 51.

75 Ibid., p. 53; Weidman, Singing the classical, pp. 233–4.

76 Sorrell, ‘A composer’, p. 54.

77 MacDonald, John Foulds, p. 81.

78 Ibid., p. 124; Mann, ‘Some Indian conceptions’, pp. 62–3.

79 Cf. Maurice Delage (1879–1961) and Albert Roussel (1869–1936) and their relationships with India in the French imperial context: Jann Pasler, ‘Race, orientalism, and distinction in the wake of the “yellow peril”’, in Born and Hesmondhalgh, Western music and its others, pp. 86–118.

80 Scott, Bone of contention, p. 12; Foulds, Music to-day, p. 276.

81 Foulds, Music to-day, pp. 271, 289.

82 Michael, Short, Gustav Holst: the man and his music, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.Google Scholar

83 Clayton, ‘Musical renaissance’, p. 92.

84 See Richards, Imperialism and music, p. 160.

85 Boehmer, Empire; van der Veer, Imperial encounters; Viswanathan, ‘Ireland, India’.

86 Owen, The place of enchantment.

87 Jonathan, Harvey, In quest of spirit: thoughts on music, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999Google Scholar; John, Tavener, The music of silence: a composer’s testament, London: Faber and Faber, 1999.Google Scholar

88 Taylor, Beyond exoticism, pp. 104–5.

89 After more than eighty years, Foulds’ A world requiem was performed on the 11 November 2007 in the Royal Festival Hall, London. It was broadcasted live on BBC radio and released on compact disc. Since the 1990s, in fact, there has been a revival of the music of Scott and Foulds. See http://www.cyrilscott.net and http://www.bluntinstrument.org.uk/foulds (both consulted 30 April 2008).