From Frankfurt with Love: Friendships Observed through Correspondence and Reminiscence

ON 17 February 1947, in a ‘Round Letter to Friends’, Percy Grainger wrote in his characteristic if quirky ‘Blue-eyed (Nordic) English’: All men … are trained to think of themselves as one-bodies ((persons)) & lone-handers ((individuals)), when, in real-hood ((reality)), we are merely pack-beasts (like the poor wolves). The 5 limbs of the ‘Frankfurt Group’ (Scott, Quilter, Gardiner, Sandby, Grainger) think of themselves as 5 othery ((different)) tone-wrights. In real-hood we are just one 5-fold man, struggling to voice the heart-stirs of Blue-eyed Man at the turn of the hundred-year-stretch ((Century)). Today we may think we see other-hoods of mood, style & taste between Scott & Sandby, Roger & Gardiner. But in 200 years time all our toneries will seem heart-breakingly alike. (Our business is to strive that it will seem at all.) All this meum-&-teum is flounderingness. Cyril Scott, Percy Grainger and their friends and contemporaries have often been classified as the ‘Frankfurt Group’, a term chiefly of convenience with which to denote the coterie of expatriate composers who, by studying abroad, stood apart in outlook and education from the mainstream of the conservative British musical establishment at the turn of the century. This term does not apply to the pianists Frederic Lamond and Leonard Borwick, who preceded Scott & Co.; to fellow English students Herbert Golden and Thomas Holland-Smith, who studied at the same time as Scott; or to others such as the Australian composer and pianist F. S. Kelly, who followed afterwards. Nevertheless, there may be some confusion as to the actual composition of the Group, since Grainger admits the Danish cellist Herman Sandby to his list, while noticeably absent is the name of Norman O'Neill, who had died tragically in 1934 as the result of a road accident. Grainger may well have been thinking of the ‘living limbs’ of the Group, but even though Scott properly numbers O'Neill among this gathering and writes warmly about him in his later autobiography (his Danse negre of 1908 is dedicated to Norman and Adine O'Neill), his name is omitted from the title page of Scott's first autobiography, My Years of Indiscretion (1924), which is dedicated to Grainger, Quilter and Gardiner as ‘the friends of my student-days’, a dedication that may itself appear odd because Scott's and Gardiner's periods of study at Frankfurt did not officially overlap.

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