In late 1896, as Scott turned seventeen, he returned to the Frankfurt Conservatory in order to study composition, an area which had come to hold more interest for him than piano performance: “It was one thing to create music of one's own: it was quite another to spoil one's pleasure in other people's by playing it over and over again till one was sick of the very sound of it.” Being a little older on this visit, Scott rented out some rooms by himself and hired a grand piano to compose with during his studies. Scott stayed in Frankfurt for three years. He studied composition with Iwan Knorr, a German professor with markedly Russian tastes: “he was distinctly Russian in appearance; he lived for many years in Russia, and married a Russian woman, and had been able to count Tschaikowski among his few friends.” Knorr, who had studied with Reinecke, had arrived at the Hoch Conservatory in 1883, teaching piano and, from 1886, composition. He eventually took over the directorship of the Conservatory in 1908 from Bernard Scholz. Scott and his youthful colleagues had irreverently dubbed Scholz a “musical ass” and a “pedant of the worst type” for his strictures on professor-student liaisons—strictures that, according to Scott, had resulted in many of the Conservatory's most renowned professors being asked to resign. It was also Scholz's musical conservatism that drove another of the “Frankfurt Group,” Balfour Gardiner, to leave the Conservatory and take private lessons with Knorr.