Raymond Scott
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Raymond Scott (born Harry Warnow, September 10, 1908 – February 8, 1994), was an American composer, orchestra leader, pianist, engineer, recording studio maverick, and electronic instrument inventor. He was born in Brooklyn to a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants. His brother, Mark Warnow, a conductor, violinist, and musical director for the radio program Your Hit Parade, encouraged his musical career. Though Scott never scored cartoon soundtracks, his music is familiar to millions because of its adaptation by Warner Brothers in over 120 classic Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck animated features. Scott's melodies have also been heard in twelve Ren & Stimpy episodes (which used the original Scott recordings), while making cameos in The Simpsons, Duckman, Animaniacs, The Oblongs, and Batfink. His composition "Powerhouse," besides being heard in 40+ classic WB cartoons, was quoted ten times in the major motion picture Looney Tunes: Back in Action. The only music Scott actually composed to accompany animation were three 20-second electronic commercial jingles for County Fair Bread in 1962.
Early Career
A 1931 graduate of the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied piano, theory and composition, Scott began his professional career as a pianist for the CBS Radio house band. In 1936, while at CBS, he recruited a band from among his colleagues, calling it the "Raymond Scott Quintette." It was a six-piece group, but the puckish Scott thought Quintette (his spelling) sounded "crisper" and told a reporter he feared that "calling it a 'sextet' might get your mind off music". The Quintette was an attempt to revitalize Swing music through tight, busy arrangements and reduced reliance on improvisation. Scott called his musical style "descriptive jazz," and gave his idiosyncratic pieces unusual titles like "New Year's Eve in a Haunted House," "Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals," and "Reckless Night on Board an Ocean Liner." While popular with the public, jazz critics disdained it as novelty music.
Electronic period
Scott, who attended a technical high school in Brooklyn, was an early electronic music pioneer and adventurous sound engineer. During the 1930s and 1940s, many of his band's recording sessions found the bandleader in the control room, monitoring and adjusting the acoustics, often by revolutionary means. In 1946, Scott established Manhattan Research, Inc., which he announced would "design and manufacture electronic music devices and systems." Bob Moog, developer of the Moog Synthesizer, met Scott in the 1950s, designed circuits for him in the 1960s, and acknowledged him as an important influence. As well as designing novel instruments such as the Clavivox and Electronium, Scott recorded records of entirely electronic music, such as 1963's groundbreaking Soothing Sounds for Baby, a series of albums designed to lull infants to sleep, and which today sounds uncannily like the ambient work of Tangerine Dream or Brian Eno from the mid 1970s. In those days, his electronic music did not find much favor with the record-buying public, but his electronics lab, "Manhattan Research, Inc." had considerable success in providing striking, ear-catching sonic textures for broadcast commercials.
In the late 1940s, contemporaneous with guitarist-engineer Les Paul's studio work with Mary Ford, Scott began recording pop songs using the layered multi-tracked vocals of his later-second wife, singer Dorothy Collins. A number of these were commercially released, but the technique failed to earn Scott the chart success of Les and Mary. In 1948, Scott formed a new six-man "quintet," which served for several months as house band for the CBS radio program, Herb Shriner Time. The ensemble also made studio recordings, some of which were released on Scott's own short-lived Master Records label. When his brother Mark Warnow died in 1949, Scott succeeded him as orchestra leader on the popular radio show Your Hit Parade. The following year, the show moved to television, and Scott continued to lead the orchestra until 1957. (Collins was a featured singer on YHP.)
Although the high-profile position paid well, Scott considered it strictly a "rent gig," and used his lavish salary to finance his electronic music research and development, albeit largely out of the public limelight. Scott developed some of the first devices capable of producing a series of electronic tones automatically in sequence. He later credited himself as being the inventor of the polyphonic sequencer. (It should be noted that his electromechanical devices, some with motors moving photocells past lights, bore little resemblance to the all-electronic sequencers of the late sixties.) He began working on a machine which would compose using artificial intelligence. He later dubbed it "The Electronium."
Scott and Dorothy Collins divorced in 1964; in 1967 he married Mitzi Curtis. During the second half of the 1960s, as his work progressed, Scott became increasingly isolated and secretive about his inventions and concepts; he gave few interviews, made no public presentations, and released no records. From time to time he welcomed curious visitors to his lab, among them the eccentric outsider Bruce Haack, who also built electronic instruments and (with no involvement from Scott) recorded numerous LPs of somewhat subversive children's music. During his jazz/big band period, Scott had often endured tense relationships with musicians; however, when his career became immersed in electronic gadgetry, he made friends with and seemed to prefer the company of technicians, including Bob Moog, Thomas Rhea, Alan Entenmann and future Muppetmaster Jim Henson (for whose early experimental films Scott composed and recorded electronic soundtracks).
In 1969, Motown impresario Berry Gordy, tipped off about a mad musical scientist engaged in mysterious works, visited Scott at his Long Island labs to witness the Electronium in action. Impressed by the infinite possibilities, Gordy hired Scott in 1971 to serve as director of Motown's electronic music and research department in Los Angeles, a position Scott held until 1977. No Motown recordings using Scott's electronic inventions have yet been publicly identified.
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