Some schoolteachers stay with you for life. For many of those who encountered him during his long career as a music educator, which ended only with his death at the age of 94, Austin Scott was one such.
As a pupil at Nottingham high school in the early 1960s, I spent several years under the spell of this gifted and volatile American, quickly learning – like so many others – to absorb the sudden gusts of temperament that would sweep down from the conductor’s rostrum and to appreciate his ability not only to teach us to play together, but to widen our musical horizons.
A high standard of performance was demanded and the creation of a symphonic wind band, an innovation in British schools music, enabled us to become acquainted with the adventurous work of such mid-century American composers as Howard Hanson and Vincent Persichetti, whose scores he arranged to be specially imported. In those strait-laced days, not every head of orchestral music would have been as happy, when I formed a mercifully short-lived jazz and poetry ensemble, to sanction the use of school instruments for such a bohemian extracurricular project.
Born in New York, Austin earned his BA at Guilford College in North Carolina, where he acquired a lifelong fondness for Appalachian music, and studied at the Juilliard conservatory in New York before completing his MA at Columbia University. The flute was his instrument, and his early studies were with Eugene C Rose, a pioneer of commercially recorded flute solos for the Edison company.
After moving to Britain, he taught for several years at West Bridgford grammar school in Nottingham, where his habit of splintering batons was first noted, before moving to the high school. His lasting impact on the school’s musical life was out of all proportion to the comparative brevity of his tenure. Among his pupils at that time were Andrew Massey, who became the principal conductor of several orchestras in the US, and Ian Hood, now the timpanist with Northern Ballet and a frequent performer with the BBC Philharmonic. Other pupils in Nottingham included Richard McNicol, for many years principal flautist of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and Nic McGegan, conductor of the Philharmonia Baroque orchestra in San Francisco for the past 25 years.
Having been principal flautist with the North Carolina Symphony during his student days, Austin spent 15 years in a similar role with the Nottingham Harmonic Orchestra until his decision in 1966 to recross the Atlantic and settle in British Columbia. There he was able to join the Victoria Symphony and to devote more time to composing chamber music, principally for woodwind groups. At the Victoria Conservatory of Music, where he was a member of the faculty from 1969 until his death, an annual scholarship is awarded in his name to a promising flautist.
He was predeceased by his wife, Mary Jane, and is survived by his son, Douglas, daughter, Rosalind, two grandchildren, Breeha and James, and four great-grandchildren.
