Percy Alfred Scholes (1877–1958) was a musician, journalist and prolific writer, whose best-known achievement was the compilation of the Oxford Companion to Music.

He was born in Leeds in 1877 and was educated privately, owing to his poor health as a child. He became an organist, schoolteacher, music journalist and lecturer. At various times he was music critic for the Evening Standard, The Observer (1920-1927) and the Radio Times (1923-1929). Leeds Coat Of Arms Map sources for Leeds at grid reference SE297338 Leeds is a city and metropolitan borough in Yorkshire in the north of England. ... Headlines of the Evening standard on the day of London bombing on July 7, 2005, in Waterloo station The Evening Standard is a newspaper published in London. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... Radio Times is the BBCs weekly television and radio programme listings magazine. ...

He wrote over 30 books, mainly concerning music appreciation, but his best-known work is the Oxford Companion to Music, which was first published in 1938. 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. The Bible (sometimes The Book,Good Book, Word of God, or Scripture), from Greek (τα) βιβλια, (ta) biblia, (the) books, plural of βιβλιον, biblion, book, originally a diminutive of βιβλος, biblos, which in turn is derived from βυβλος—byblos, meaning papyrus, from the ancient Phoenician city of Byblos which exported this writing material), is the...

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 attributed 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. In the Oxford Companion to Music, itself, 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.' George Frideric Handel (German Georg Friedrich Händel), (February 23, 1685 – April 14, 1759) was a German Baroque music composer who lived much of his life in England, a leading composer of concerti grossi, operas and oratorios. ... The 1748 Haussmann portrait of the composer Johann Sebastian Bach (21 March 1685 – 28 July 1750)[1] was a German composer and organist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra and keyboard drew together almost all of the pre-existing strands of the baroque style and brought it to... Alban Maria Johannes Berg (February 9, 1885 – December 24, 1935) was an Austrian composer. ... Arnold Schoenberg, Los Angeles, 1948 For the American music critic and journalist, see Harold Charles Schonberg. ... Anton Webern (December 3, 1883 – September 15, 1945) was a composer of classical music and a member of the so called Second Viennese School. ...

Percy Scholes died in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1958, aged eighty-one. Vevey is a small city in Switzerland, located in the canton Vaud, on the north shore of Lake Geneva, at 46°28′ N 6°51′ E, not far from Lausanne. ...

References

• Percy A. Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, First Edition, Oxford University press, 1938