Marion M. Scott (1877–1953)

Marion M. Scott was born in London, the eldest daughter of Sydney Charles Scott, a solicitor and pianist, and Annie Prince Scott, an American born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia. Marion was privately educated and began writing as a child. She also began music lessons at an early age. Eventually she took up the violin, and by age 15 was performing regularly in public with her father as accompanist. In 1896, she entered the Royal College of Music to study violin with Enrique Fernández Arbós, piano with Marmaduke Barton, and composition with Charles Villiers Stanford and Walford Davies. Later she served as editor of the Royal College of Music Magazine.
She established her own string quartet, The Marion Scott Quartet, mainly to introduce contemporary British music to London audiences. She also wrote poetry and in 1905 published her only collection, Violin Verses. In 1909, Marion began publishing articles about music in London newspapers, including the Daily Express. She opened the field of music criticism to women when in 1919 she became the London correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor. From then on, her essays, articles, and music criticism also appeared in dozens of music and mainstream publications, including the Radio Times, Daily Telegraph, and The Observer. She wrote program notes for the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Society, delivered papers to the Royal Musical Association, produced broadcasts for Music Magazine, and wrote entries for Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In 1938, her brief study of Felix Mendelssohn was added to the Novello series of Biographies of Great Musicians.

Marion Scott's pioneering work as a music critic and musicologist encouraged other women to work in fields previously closed to them. Along with her friends Katherine Eggar and Gertrude Eaton, she was the moving force behind the founding of the Society of Women Musicians. She established herself as an international authority on Joseph Haydn, publishing dozens of articles and studies about him between 1930 and 1952. She published her own editions of Haydn's music with Oxford University Press; however, her book about his chamber music was left incomplete at the time of her death. In 1934, she published her only full-length book, Beethoven, which remains a classic study of the man and his music that is still quoted today.