FRANCIS GEORGE SCOTT (1880-1958)

 

Moonstruck

 

Milkwort and Bog-cotton, Crowdieknowe, Moonstruck, The Eemis Stane,The Sauchs in the Reuch, Heuch Hauch, Ay waukin O (Burns), Amang the trees (Burns), The Discreet Hint (Burns), Florine (Thomas Campbell), Je descendis dans mon jardin (Amy Sylvel), Lourd on my hert, The Watergaw, Country Life,Wheesht, wheesht, O, wha my babie-clouts will buy? (Burns), My wife's a wanton wee thing (Burns), The Innumerable Christ, I wha aince in Heaven's Heicht, An Apprentice Angel, Hungry Waters,The Deil o' Bogie (German, tr Gray),To a Lady (William Dunbar), Cupid and Venus (Mark Alexander Boyd), The Old Fisherman (George Campbell Hay), Im Tiroler Wirtshaus (Georg Britting), In Time of Tumult (Soutar),The Man in the Moon, First Love, Empty Vessel, The Wren's Nest (Burns), Love of Alba (Maurice Lindsay), The Wee Man (Willa Muir) unless marked, all poems by Hugh MacDiarmid

 

Lisa Milne (sop)

Roderick Williams (bass)

Iain Burnside (piano)

 

 

"I get it," Roddy Williams burst out, "he's the Scottish Charles Ives!". "Not at all," I came back at him, "he's Scotland's Hugo Wolf. Or perhaps Scotland's Gerald Finzi." …halfway through the next song I saw Roddy's point. Like Ives, Scott uses his songs as a sort of chemistry lab, the crucible for wild experiments in musical language, decades ahead of

his time. Like Wolf, his work falls naturally into songbooks - musically defined collections setting different poets. Like Finzi, Scott will be remembered above all for his closeness to a single poet. Where Finzi had Thomas Hardy, Scott has Hugh MacDiarmid; the vital difference is that Finzi was not Hardy's English teacher.

 

The settings Scott made of MacDiarmid poems in the 1920s and early 1930s are the heart of his work.  Their poetic range is extraordinary: the condensed madness in Moonstruck, the tenderness of Milkwort and Bog-cotton; self-mocking, grumpy Scottish agitprop in Lourd on my hert, heart-wrenching simplicity in Empty Vessel. It is in these Mac Diarmid settings

that Scott is at his most radical. Such harmonic daring, from a contemporary of Roger Quilter! A contemporary, but by no means a compatriot. Nothing in these MacDiarmid songs, musical or verbal, links them to musical life south of Hadrian's Wall. Scott's points of reference are European: a nod to Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire in Moonstruck, a wink to

Bartok in Country Life, with all its farmyard high jinks. Elsewhere, resonances of a French sound world appear. How tantalising, that Scott was offered a period of study in Paris; how sad that the hard choices of family life should have held him back. While Scott's musical vocabulary for Burns is more conventional, he remains true to his poet. Never is there a whiff of sentimentality, never a glimpse of the shortbread tin. At a time when Scotland is drawing new strength from its place within Europe, let us celebrate this most European of Scottish composers.

- Iain Burnside

 

Of Scott's non-vocal works an orchestral ballet score setting of William Dunbar's poem The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins was considered by Sadlers Wells but came to nothing.A concert overture, Scottish Renaissance similarly has been languishing in the archives of the Scottish Music Centre and the Scott collection in Glasgow's Mitchell Library, and deserves fresh performance.There is also an unrecorded series of piano pieces, Intuitions begun in 1943 and written into the 1950s. Glasgow University gave him an Honorary Doctorate in 1957 but by then he was an ailing man. He died in 1958 and is buried overlooking his native Hawick.

 

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