Very few English people know of the "founder of British modern music" Cyril Scott (1879-1970). I suspect this is partly because the English have a deep inferiority complex about their abilities as 'high artists'. We are always prone to assume that a great painter is more likely to be Italian or French, a great composer to be German. When Europeans mock English art, we are often quick to join in with a touch of self-flagellation!
Scott was a virtuoso pianist and composer. Like many serious artists he wrote 'pot-boilers'. One of these is nonetheless an immortal work. Lotus Land (1905) was immensely popular in its time. A dreamy, somewhat Oriental piece for solo piano, it has the effect - like Satie - of putting the performer in a trance while playing it. The famous violinist Fritz Kreisler arranged it for violin and piano - a wonderful original recording of Kreisler playing Lotus Land may be heard here, if you can wait for 30 seconds of advertisement. It is an easy, delightful piece to play on piano especially if you have big hands.
Few have any idea how the great musical inspirations of that time pervade our music. Here is one example. Listen to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme - Resolution (live footage of the master himself) and you will hear the same mode, chords, even the same key as Lotus Land. This is not coincidental. The advanced harmony of French Impressionist music like Debussy, Ravel and Satie entered modern Jazz to pervade the 1950s and 1960s work of Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Coltrane etc. And so did the deep spiritual influences within this music.
Scott was very much a part of the turn of the century ferment of music, art and spirituality. Like many artists of his time, Cyril Scott was a Theosophist. And this is probably why the English establishment could not relate to him as to a national treasure like Ralph Vaughan Williams or an obviously 'important' composer in historical terms like Benjamin Britten. (RVW was a great composer, but he exemplified an 'Englishness' that tends to make him inaccessible to mainstream European sentiment. Britten, a prodigious genius, will be the subject of a later blog).
Alongside his prolific musical career, Scott wrote books on occultism, nutritional theory and other subjects; he was also a poet. Some idea of his range can be gained from this website. Scott is best known for his trilogy of works beginning with The Initiate, written in 1920. I have just reread The Initiate and it is without doubt one of the best of all Theosophical books. The first half is a series of impressions of an advanced English yogi with deep knowledge of Yog Vidya, referred to under the pseudonym of Justin Moreward Haig. JMH operates as a kind of benevolent trickster in English high society, cajoling people into discovering the happiness that comes from acknowledging unity, identification with the soul within, and abandoning vanity and selfishness, which then leads naturally on to spiritual practice. Fascinatingly, one of his main targets was sexual jealousy and the rigid English fear of expressing love, at least in England circa 1910. The second half is a magical parable or fairytale called The Circuitous Journey.
JMH comes across as a philosopher-sage, a very English Boddhisattva. To this day, rather like Castaneda's Don Juan, speculation rages as to whether there was any such person as JMH. But the proof of the pudding is that his personality rings true. This book, and its two successors The Initiate In the New World, and The Initiate In The Dark Cycle, were written when the Theosophical Society seemed to be going through a crisis. Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater had announced that the young Indian boy Krishnamurti was the mouthpiece of the World Teacher. The Theosophists conflated this concept with the coming of the Maitreya and in a way with the reappearance of Christ, as so often using the name Christ word with a sneakily tweaked Theosophical meaning. Up to 250,000 people joined the Order of the Star of the East before Krishnamurti himself declared he was not who all these people thought he was and disbanded the order in 1929.
Great western occultists like Rudolf Steiner and Dion Fortune ultimately left the Theosophical Society because of this unfortunate direction. To this day the New Age influenced by pop-Theosophy churns out all kinds of rubbish in the holy names of Christ and Maitreya. Yet there were those within Theosophy who tried to keep the Society to its original course. Scott and his circle were among the best.
The fate of the Theosophical Society and its relation to the substantially failed New Age movement is another story. Yet to return to the criminal neglect of Cyril Scott: it must be said, the English are barbarians. Lacking the brilliant intellectual culture of the Scots, the incomparable verbal dexterity and arch playfulness of the Irish, and the mysticism of those who self-identify as Celts, our culture is a mystery. The English can either be visionaries or total materialists; we are not thinkers, but we are inspired inventors. Without the Bible, poetry and some sense of connection to the stories of our land, we perish. I wish it were not so, but there it is.
The English must return to William Blake and the 'mad' religious poets; to Shakespeare and then to the Romantics; and above all to its folk tradition. It must rediscover its Arthurian and Christian Mystic roots and thus, taking its place in Christendom, go forth to meet the East in fraternity. There is a finite time this can be accomplished. Albion, awake!
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