Cyril Scott

1879-1970

Two "Pierrot" Pieces Op. 35:

#1 Lento "Pierrot Triste"

Tuesday, November 23, 1999

How many times do you ever pick up a piece of music you've never ever heard before and try to learn it? How often was it suggested to you by a friend that you should try and learn such a piece by perhaps a composer you may not have even heard of before? Plenty of times I hope. This is how we broaden our pianistic outlook, enlarge our repertoires, develop our technique, etc.

Well, my acquaintance with this particular piece began when a friend suggested that I try and learn it. I had heard of the British composer, Cyril Scott, but really didn't know anything much about him. I'd heard that he was sort of an English Debussy, a composer who was quite influential but seemingly forgotten. One would have thought that he either died young or stopped composing at an early age as did Jean Sibelius. Neither, it turns out, was the case. Cyril Scott lived to be quite ancient was composing fairly late into his life. But hardly anyone plays his music. Is it really that bad, or was Scott's obscurity as a composer the result of something else?

Besides composing a lot of music, Cyril Scott was the author of at least seven books, only one of which relates directly to music, Music: Its Secret Influence Throughout The Ages. I haven't read this or any of Scott's other books. Maybe I'll try and find a copy, read it and report back what I find. But at least three of Scott's other titles seem to deal with his immersion into the occult and here we may have discovered the basis of Scott's obscurity as a composer. It seems that Scott did not just dabble in the occult, he was "really into it". Three of his extant titles deal with it explicitly; Initiate, Initiate in the New World and Initiate in the Dark Cycle. I'm not likely to read any of these titles, so I wont likely report on any of them. But when I said earlier that my first impression of Scott was as a sort of English Debussy I wasn't far off. Though Claude Debussy was far more successful as a composer, he was no less than Scott immersed in the occult. Debussy was named in the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail as the Grand Master of the Priory of Zion, an ultra secret organization. If you have any further interest in these subjects you can follow them up with your own research.

Cyril Scott was also into something else that has seen a resurgence in recent years; homeopathy or natural healing. He wrote two books which probably have something to do with the uses of crude black molasses and cider vinegar. Well he lived a good long time so I guess some of it worked for him.

But musically, Cyril Scott was known and admired by the likes of Edward Elgar and he played with the likes of Fritz Kreisler. He was known by H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw among others. It was fashionable in the London of those days, to be a dabbler in spiritualism. So, Scott was a bit more than a dabbler. And I suppose in a century that has seen the demise of many traditions including the classical idea of a composer, Cyril Scott's musical obscurity was no more a mystery to him than it is to us. Music was just another thing he did.

All this may be interesting, but what of this piece that my friend wanted me to learn? Well, it is short, only four pages. It is basically a study in very large homophonic chords with harmonies that slide around and sort of blossom by their own tendencies. Some of the harmonies sound more modern than 1914 when they were originally penned. But in another sense this piece is as typical a parlor piece of its time as the works of Richard Strauss were to the concert hall or the operas of Puccini were to the opera house.

This piece is called "Pierrot Triste". "Triste" is sad or melancholy. "Pierrot" is the forever personification of a jester or clown. This piece is in the not so very somber key of D flat major, which is relatively hard to read at first and the chords are so large that it would seem impossible for any six year old child to play it as my friend claimed she had done. But it is exactly what one would expect, a big lush sounding parlor piece that depicts as impressionism does, the melancholy of a jester or a clown, or melancholy in jest; that is, not all that sad after all.

The piece is only four pages long and the whole theme is repeated so that once you've learned it, you've got half the piece. It's biggest technical challenge is in playing a huge chordal homophony. It takes big mits to play it well, unless you're going to roll every chord, which would make it sound way too schmaltzy. It's sort of on the "oh so sweet" side as it is. What you want to accomplish with this piece is to play it as mostly "barely there" as possible, a sort of purposeful background music for a grand parlor of the times before the Great War, broken in upon a bit at the climax in the middle which is played at a slight hurry through some arching ascending harmonies. This is perfect turn of the century parlor music and should be attempted by more pianists, as so should as much of Scott's music as possible.