Give me a second to catch my breath. Tracking the exploits of the great Percy Scholes is exhilarating… and exhausting. ‘Great?’ Well, Scholes was every inch a hero – a man of the people, utterly devoted to helping the ordinary listener get the utmost out of live music, gramophone recordings and wireless broadcasts. He once compared learning to listen to practising for a sport: ‘If you want to listen properly to lots of the very best music, you have to learn about it and then to practise listening… [then] you get the enjoyment.’
‘Scholes was simply unstoppable in his relentless commitment to the cause,’ says Megan Prictor of the University of Melbourne. ‘The sheer volume of output is unbelievable.’ Through his career, Scholes accumulated the roles of music historian, biographer, researcher, lexicographer, editor, project manager, feature writer, critic, lecturer, broadcaster, event organiser, founder… The record of his doings, represented in a dizzyingly varied personal archive, occupies 50 metres of shelving at the National Library of Canada
