''It was the size of a football field! More than half
a dozen big rooms, impeccably set-up. The floors were painted like a high class
industrial laboratory. He had a whole room of metal-working equipment, a room
full of wood-working equipment, and this huge barn of a room for electronics.'' – Bob Moog
Raymond Scott was an architect and a visionary. A composer, a bandleader and an inventor,
he was one of the first to dive in the mesmerizing world of electronic music. Parting
away from the French musique concrète
and following Meyer-Eppler’s revolutionary idea of elektronische Musik (found in his 1949 thesis “Elektronische
Klangerzeugung: Elektronische Musik und Synthetische Sprache”), Scott was moved
by the infinite possibilities that computers represented for the future of
sound. Among his creations are the Electronium, - one of the first machines to
use artificial intelligence in the composition of music - the “Karloff” and the
Clavivox (as can be seen in the picture above).
During his career he worked with the likes of Bob Moog (inventor of
the Moog synthesizer) and director Jim Henson (most famously known as the
creator of the Muppets). His electric compositions were also used by Carl
Stalling in many of Warner Brothers’ comic-sketches and celebrated cartoons.
And although forgotten in the threads of time, his creation still lives in the
consciousness of today’s automated music, his name listed among those who
pioneered in the realm of the futuristic computerized sound creation like
Tristram Cary, Kid Baltan and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Born as Harry Warnow in 1908, Raymond always displayed a natural talent
for music (and even though he insisted in his vocation for engineering); he was encouraged by his brother to enter the music scenery and in 1931 he
graduated Julliard School of Music where he studied piano, theory and
composition. He then began his professional career as a pianist for the CBS
Radio house band where his brother conducted the orchestra. But being
a visionary he quickly grew sick of the dull music played by his fellow musicians and soon started presenting his own pieces. In 1936 he finally created his own music
group, a six-piece band that went by the name of “Raymond Scott Quintette” (reasons are he liked
the sound of it). His Dadaist compositions and their senseless names, like “Dinner
Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals” and “New Year's Eve in a Haunted House”, soon
made a hit and in 1938 he became the music director of CBS expanding
his quintet to a big-band. He then dropped for two years to take his band on
tour but returned in 1942 assembling at this time the first racially-mixed
studio orchestra in broadcast history.
He was now more preoccupied with composition and directing and
little by little he left the performance entirely to others. His obsession
with perfectionism and the avant-garde scene drove him to the world of
electronics where he pursued a successful career in producing commercial
jingles for radio and television. In 1946 he founded the first electronic music
studio (in his house), the Manhattan Research Inc. which he happily described as
"more than a think factory - a dream center where the excitement of
tomorrow is made available today.”
His electronic compositions invoke the vision of what one sitting in
a 1956 Mercury XM Turnpike Cruiser Limbo with browline glasses, a Homburg hat
and a grey flannel suit would imagine the future to be like. It invites us to
space-travelling outside the boundaries of the mind; just imagine yourself
sitting in the car and listening to some commercials like Nescafé, Twinkies, Auto-Lite and
Vicks: Formula 44 (“ahora Pancho es feliz!”),
tripping all the way to your job. Things get even more whacky in Scott’s own
experiments outside the realms of commercial projects like the remasterization
of his own early jazz hit Twilight in
Turkey, the minimal sound of Cyclic
Bit or the 1968’s trippy Backwards
Overload. It antedates the prominent use of synthesizers in psychedelic and
progressive rock in the 1970s and today’s electronic music of the psychedelia
wave. Some of his most iconic pieces can also be found in the soundtrack of
some of Jim Henson’s experimental films like Limbo: the Organized Mind, a trip through the brain of a man, or in
Paperwork Explosion, a piece-cut commercial
for the revolutionizing IBM MT/ST machine.
Raymond Scott was a dreamer, a visionary, an electronic castle-builder!
