Grove's dictionary of music and musicians

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SCOTT SCOTTISH MUSIC 391
SCOTT, John, nephew of Jol\n Sale, jun.,
was bom about 1776. He was a chorister of
St. George's Chapel, Windsor, and Eton College
afterwards studied the organ under William
Sexton, organist of St. George's, Windsor, and
became deputy for Dr. Arnold at Westminster
Abbey. He was also chorus-master and pianist
at Sadler's Wells. On the erection of the first
organ in Spanish Town, Jamaica, he went out
as organist, and died there in 1815. He was
composer of a well-known anthem, Praise the
'
Lord, Jerusalem,' as well as of a famous comic
song, 'Abraham Newland,'i the words of which
were also sung to the Rogue's March ' ' ;
[the
composition here referred to was more commonly
ascribed to Tipton, a Vauxhall writer, and was
written about the end of the 18th century.
F. K.]. w. H. H.
SCOTT, Lady John Douglas, an amateur
composer of Scottish songs. Born Alicia Ann
Spottiswoode, in 1810, she was the eldest
daughter of Mr. John Spottiswoode, of Spottiswoode
in Berwickshire. On March 16, 1836,
she married Lord John Montague-Douglas Scott
(son of the fourth Duke of Buceleuch), who died
in 1860. In 1870, under the will of her father,
she resumed her maiden name.
Her best claim to remembrance, musically,
is her composition of the song Annie ' Laurie,'
which was first published without composer's
name in the third volume of Paterson and Roy's
'Vocal Melodies of Scotland' in 1838. So
popular was the song during the Criinean war,
that a letter from the composer herself, in her
last years, by mistake refers to it as being
composed about that period. It may he added
that the words are altered from a song first
published in A Ballad Book collected by Charles
.Kirkpatrick Sharpe, and privately issued in
1824. A few other of her songs gained but
scant favour, although she is sometimes credited
with being the composer or adapter of ' The
Banks of Loch Lomond,' a Scottish song still
much sung.
Throughout her life she upheld the ancient
Scottish customs in a manner verging on eccentricity.
She died on her estate at Spottiswoode,
March 12, 1900, aged ninety. F. K.
SCOTTISH MUSIC. As national music,
that of Scotland has long been held in high
esteem. Early notices of it may be meagre,
but are always laudatory. Unfortunately, there
are no means of proving what it was in remote
times, for the art of conveying a, knowledge of
sounds by comprehensible written signs was a
late invention, and music handed down by mere
tradition was most untrustworthy. Even after
the invention of musical writing, the learned
men who possessed the art employed it almost
entirely in the perpetuation of scholastic music,
having apparently an equal contempt for melody
1 Abraham Newland waa the Chief Cashier of the Bank of
£Dg1aDd.
in general, and for the tunes prized by the
uneducated vulgar. The earliest Scottish music
was probably constructed on the Pentatonic
Scale, which is not, however, peculiar to Scotland,
for airs of a similar cast have been found
in countries as wide apart as China and the
West Coast of Africa. Many conjectures have
been made as to the sources of British music in
general, but in the absence of any real evidence,
they must be held to he more or less fruitless.
[In 1780, William Tytler of Woodhouselee
contributed A Dissertatimi on the Scottish Music
to Arnot's History of Edinburgh. He attempted
to date various well-known Scottish airs, and
though not very trustworthy or scientific has
been taken as authoritative by many later
writers. F. k.]
^
It is a remarkable fact that the first to write
a history of Scottish music based on research
was an Englishman, Joseph Ritson, a celebrated
antiquary and critic, who wrote towards
the end of the 18th century. He seems to
have been a man of irascible temperament, but
love of truth lay at the root of his onslaughts
upon Johnson, Warton, Percy, Pinkerton, and
others. Any assertion made without sufficient
evidence he treated as falsehood, and attacked
in the most uncompromising manner. His
Historical Essay on Scottish Song has so smoothed
the way for all later writers on the subject that
it would he ungenerous not to acknowledge the
storehouse from which his successors have drawn
their information—in many cases without citing
their authority. The early portion of the Essay
treats of the poetry of the songs, beginning with
mere rhymes on the subject of the death of
Alexander III. (1285), the siege of Berwick
(1296), Bannockburn (1314), and so on to the
times of James I. (1393-1437), whose thorough
English education led to his being both a poet
and a musician. His ' truly excellent composition
At Beltayne or Peblis to the play is still
held in high esteem, ' but of his music there are
no remains. This is the more to be regretted
as a well-worn quotation from Tassoni states
that James ' not only wrote sacred compositions
for the voice, but found out of himself a new
style of music, plaintive and mournful, diiiering
from every other.' That James improved'
Scottish music need not be doubted, but it is
altogether absurd to suppose that he invented
a style that must have been in existence long
before his era. The quotation, however, serves
to show that in Italy James and not Rizzio
most gratuitously supposed to have aided the
development of Scottish music—was believed
to have originated or amended this style. As
Tassoni flourished soon after Rizzio's time, he
had an opportunity of knowing somewhat more
of the question than writers who came a century
and a half later. George Farquhar Graham has
at some length controverted the Rizzio myth.
Graham was a very competent judge of such