Leslie De'Ath has taken up the banner for the music of Cyril Scott, which many feel is long overdue for unfurling again, with a series on Dutton of his piano music. It is easy to hear in the pieces on this first volume why Scott was called "The English Debussy." The extremely colorful, translucent harmonies he uses make his music entrancing, sometimes mystical. The miniatures on the first disc tend to have uncomplicated textures. The Soirée Japonaise, in fact, sounds more like one of Grieg's Norwegian Dances than it does ...
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Leslie De'Ath has taken up the banner for the music of Cyril Scott, which many feel is long overdue for unfurling again, with a series on Dutton of his piano music. It is easy to hear in the pieces on this first volume why Scott was called "The English Debussy." The extremely colorful, translucent harmonies he uses make his music entrancing, sometimes mystical. The miniatures on the first disc tend to have uncomplicated textures. The Soirée Japonaise, in fact, sounds more like one of Grieg's Norwegian Dances than it does Asian. And that is part of the reason why Scott's music fell out of favor. He, like many of his contemporaries, was impressed by the exoticism of the East, but wrote with a kind of pseudo-Eastern harmony that carried an air of inauthenticity. However, Scott's uses frequent shifts of tonality and modality, and meter, in simple lines to create a sense of the exotic in his music more than just writing in a pentatonic scale. He changes the key in almost every measure of the Courante of his...
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