Derek B Scott is a British composer of music for concert hall and theatre, including an operetta, Wilberforce, staged in 1983 as part of Hull’s sesquicentenary commemoration of the passing of William Wilberforce’s Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1807). His music has been broadcast by numerous radio stations in Canada, the USA, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia, and recordings of his orchestral, vocal, and instrumental works are available on Toccata Classics. 

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He is currently working on the completion of his Piano Concerto and orchestration of Apathetic Suite, due to be recorded and released in 2026 together with this Third Symphony.

 

Scott was born in Edgbaston, Birmingham, in 1950 and came to music largely through the encouragement of his maternal grandmother, who was a pianist. Her grand-uncle, George Hope Johnstone, a friend of Edward Elgar, had been influential in the musical life of Birmingham as Chairman of the Midlands Institute and the Triennial Music Festival (one of his first commissions was Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius). 

 

Scott studied for a higher degree in composition at the University of Hull (1972–74) with Anthony Hedges, one of the UK’s leading composers of light music. During his early career in the 1970s, he was the co-founder and musical director of a contemporary chamber orchestra (Kanon), which was based in Hull but also performed at nearby cities such as Lincoln and Scunthorpe. He was awarded three national prizes for his compositions in that decade. 

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He composed for performers ranging from the Northern Sinfonia to the Milton Keynes Chamber Orchestra in the 1970s, and in the 1980s, he became absorbed in researching the cultural history of music. In 1992, he was awarded a PhD in the sociology and aesthetics of music. He was also the recipient, later, of an honorary doctorate from the Sibelius Academy, Finland. His books include From the Erotic to the Demonic (2003), Sounds of the Metropolis (2008), Musical Style and Social Meaning (2010), and German Operetta on Broadway and in the West End (2019).

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His first appointment as a Professor of Music was at the University of Salford in 1996. It was at that University, which pioneered degrees in Band Musicianship in the UK, that he composed most of his music for brass band, which included two symphonies for brass and percussion (recorded by the Black Dyke Band in 2019 and recorded in their orchestral versions in 2022). 

 

His compositional output was usually driven solely by personal compulsion. For instance, as a player of the Highland Bagpipe, he felt an urge to write a short concerto for that instrument. 

 

In 2006, he was appointed Professor of Critical Musicology at the University of Leeds, retiring from the post in 2020. In 2014 he was awarded a large grant by the European Research Council for a project investigating the reception of English versions of German-language operettas in London and New York. He completed that research in 2019, and after his official retirement in September 2020 has returned to full time composition.