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English musician and writer (1877–1958)

Percy Alfred Scholes (pronounced skolz) OBE PhD (24 July 1877 – 31 July 1958) was an English musician, journalist and prolific writer, whose best known achievement was his compilation of the first edition of the Oxford Companion to Music. His 1948 biography The Great Dr Burney was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

He was born in Headingly, Leeds in 1877, the third of six children of Thomas Scholes, a commercial agent and Katharine Elizabeth Pugh. In 1908 he married Dora Wingate, a talented pianist. That year he founded the magazine The Music Student in 1908 (renamed The Music Teacher in 1921), and continued as its editor until 1920. During the First World War he directed the Music section of the YMCA for troops at home and abroad. He was made an Officer of the Star of Rumania in 1930 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries in 1938.

Scholes wrote more than 30 books, mainly concerning music appreciation. His best known work is The Oxford Companion to Music, which was first published in 1938. Like Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1878 89) the Companion sought to reach out beyond professional musicians to the amateur as well. This work took him six years to produce and consisted of over a million words (surpassing the length of the Bible). Scholes was assisted by various clerical assistants, but wrote virtually all the text himself. The only exceptions were the article on tonic sol fa (for which he was dissatisfied with his own article) and the synopses of the plots of operas (which he regarded as too boring). Although the Oxford Companion to Music was (and is) regarded as authoritative, the text of the first edition is enlivened by Scholes' own anecdotal and sometimes quirky style. He was also the author of Puritans and Music in England and New England: A Contribution to the Cultural History of Two Nations (1934). In 1947, he produced the two volume, 960 page The Mirror of Music, compiling, enlarging and commenting on material published in The Musical Times between 1844 and 1944. Scholes was deeply concerned with connecting music with a wider audience through musical appreciation in the tradition of Dr Burney, an influence he cited himself and the subject of his biography in 1948. Frank Howes (writing as "Our Music Critic" in The Times) called The Listener's Guide to Music (1919) "that masterpiece of simplification". He recognised very early the possibilities of the gramophone as an aid to knowledge and understanding of music. His First Book of the Gramophone Record (1924) lists fifty records of music from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, with a commentary on each; a Second Book followed in 1925. From 1930 onwards, Scholes collaborated with the Columbia Graphophone Company in The Columbia History of Music by Ear and Eye; this comprised five volumes, each containing an explanatory booklet and eight 78rpm records specially made for the series, including Renaissance vocal and instrumental items performed by Arnold Dolmetsch and his family. He also worked on the innovative 'AudioGraphic' project for the Aeolian Company creating richly annotated player piano (pianola) rolls, having joined as Secretary the Honorary Advisory Committee on the Use of Piano Player Rolls in Education, chaired by Sir Alexander Mackenzie, in 1925. In his writing for this work, and elsewhere, Scholes never believed in holding back his personal views in favour of a neutral point of view. He is credited with the description of harpsichord music as sounding like "a toasting fork on a birdcage"; when describing Handel and Bach, he said that "Handel was the more elegant composer, but Bach was the more thorough". Scholes led the public denunciations of Arthur Eaglefield Hull when his book Music: Classical, Romantic and Modern (1927) was found to include material borrowed from other writers. How much of this was plagiarism and how much a mere careless, hasty failure to cite sources is not known, but the scandal left Hull very upset. He took his own life by throwing himself under a train at Huddersfield station on 4 November, 1928. Scholes also made enemies amongst The Sackbut group which included Philip Heseltine and Ursula Greville. Scholes' criticism of Hubert Foss' Song cycle on Poems of Thomas Hardy infuriated Heseltine, who sent Scholes abusive letters, took to telephoning him late at night, and circulated a petition seeking his sacking from the Observer. Scholes sought legal advice on this matter but took no action. Reviews of Christian Darnton's You and Music (1940) were generally positive until Scholes catalogued so many serious and obvious errors (such as “Binary form may be represented by A. B. A.”) that he presented the work as an elaborate joke to trap unwary reviewers. In The Oxford Companion to Music some composers (Berg, Schönberg and Webern, for example) were described in somewhat unsympathetic and dismissive terms. His article on Jazz states that "jazz is to serious music as daily journalism is to serious writing"; similarly, his article on the composer John Henry Maunder states that Maunder'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."

Scholes died in 1958, aged eighty one, in Vevey, Switzerland, where he had been living for many years. Shortly before his death, his "professional" library was acquired by the National Library of Canada. This comprised approximately 50 linear metres of research files and correspondence. His former assistant John Owen Ward revised the Tenth Edition of the Companion in 1970. Ward considered it "inappropriate to change radically the characteristic rich anecdotal quality of Dr. Scholes' style." and left much of Scholes' distinctive work intact. In 1983 Oxford University Press produced The New Oxford Companion to Music, edited by Denis Arnold, which consciously tried to overcome some of the perceived deficiencies of the Scholes' work. This included taking a more eclectic line on music to be included, and resulted in a two volume work of some 2000 pages. The 2002 edition, edited by Alison Latham, reverted to the original title, and single volume format.