Circle Machines and Sequencers

Dec 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Jeff Winner and Irwin Chusid

           

When the Raymond Scott revival kicked off nearly a decade ago, the composer's name was commonly confused with noir novelist Raymond Chandler and actor Randolph Scott. Lately a different case of mistaken identity has emerged. Was Raymond Scott (1908-94) a quasi-jazz alchemist from the late '30s Swing Era whose melodies later underscored Bugs Bunny and Ren and Stimpy cartoons? Or was he the unsuspecting godfather of the modern genres of techno, electronica, and ambient music?

These two historical roles might seem incompatible, yet they coexist within the same enigmatic figure. The two roles aren't paradoxical; instead, they exhibit an idiosyncratic continuity.

SCOTT'S SECRET SCIENCE

Many of Scott's playful riffs—originally recorded from 1937 to 1939 by the Raymond Scott Quintette—are genetically encoded in almost every human being, thanks to their use by Warner Bros. music director Carl Stalling in 120 episodes of Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes animated classics. More recently, these and other themes were featured in a dozen episodes of Nickelodeon's Ren & Stimpy Show. The popular rediscovery of Scott's original novelty jazz recordings (which began with the 1992 Columbia CD release Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights) led to a belated reappraisal of Scott's timeless—and long forgotten—genius.

Throughout the 1990s, his early works were covered by the Kronos Quartet, Don Byron, Foetus, Holland's Metropole Orchestra, the Beau Hunks Sextette, and countless other admirers. David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet said his first introduction to Scott's music in 1992 "was like being given the name of a composer I feel I have heard my whole life, who until now was nameless. Clearly he is a major American composer."

Awareness of the other side of his career, as an electronic music pioneer, began in 1997 with the reissue of Scott's 1963 Soothing Sounds for Baby trilogy. These albums, largely overlooked upon their original release, contained gentle—and all-electronic—works meant to calm and delight infants. Scott's pioneering and little-heard explorations of synthesized rhythmic minimalism and low-key ambience foreshadowed the subsequent conjurings of Terry Riley, Phillip Glass, Kraftwerk, and Brian Eno. That most of Scott's ethereal music was performed on vacuum tube- and transistor-rigged music machines - ones he designed and built - made the reemergence of these recordings seem like the Dead Sea Scrolls of electronica.

But Soothing Sounds for Baby couldn't possibly prepare the world for the exotic artifacts found on the recent two-CD set, Manhattan Research Inc. The 69 tracks on Manhattan Research Inc. cover Scott's groundbreaking electronic work from 1953 to 1969. Forays into abstract musique concrete can be heard alongside decidedly nonkiddie collaborations with a young, pre-Muppet Jim Henson.

In addition, Manhattan Research Inc. presents some of the first TV and radio commercials to employ electronic music soundtracks. The package moved Can's Holger Czukay to disbelief. "Raymond Scott belongs to the phalanx of unique people like Les Paul, Oscar Sala, and Leon Theremin, to whom we owe so much in developing our own musical identity today," Czukay says.

ELECTRIFIED SWING

Before Scott embarked on a professional music career in 1931—at his older brother's insistence—he intended to pursue engineering. As a result of his fascination with technology, Scott's knowledge of radio and recording studios showed a sophistication rarely seen among composers and bandleaders. Throughout his life, Scott explored music technology with a Nobel laureate's dedication. He revolutionized the art of microphone placement, and spent many of his band's recording sessions in the control room, monitoring the mix.

A June 1937 article in Down Beat, titled "Engineer-Musician Electrifies Swing World With Ideas," described Scott's New York City apartment as "divided into two parts: in one the dominant note was the piano and phonograph; and in the other was all sorts of recording equipment, with microphones all over the place and long wires trailing across the floor." The feature explored Scott's science of "creative acoustics," which involved using a mic to manipulate and capture sounds that differ from those heard by the naked ear. A November 1937 Popular Mechanics feature, "Radio Music of the Future," described Scott "placing a `dead' microphone beside the piano and then turning it on only after the keys have been struck [to] catch the ghostlike effect" of aftertones that are "ethereal, disembodied, [and have] a sense of great space."

MANHATTAN R&D

As a composer, Scott was a strict perfectionist with little tolerance for improvisation, which triggered the ire of many jazz purists. He earned notoriety as a session tyrant and was commonly criticized for treating his sidemen and vocalists as hardware. "All he ever had was machines—only we had names," said drummer Johnny Williams. Singer Anita O'Day, who worked briefly with Scott's early 1940s big band, called him "a martinet" who "reduced [musicians] to something like wind-up toys."

In 1946—the same year he composed the score for the Mary Martin/Yul Brynner Broadway production Lute Song—Scott established Manhattan Research Inc. to expand the horizons of electronic sound generation (see Fig. 1). From 1950 to 1957, Scott financed his technological excursions by conducting the orchestra on NBC's cornball, but highly rated, chart-countdown show, Lucky Strike's Your Hit Parade (a gig he allegedly despised for its banality). Raymond and his second wife, singer Dorothy Collins, were seen on the little screen in millions of American households every week. However, few suspected the alter ego lurking behind the conductor's forced stage smile.

FIG. 1: Raymond Scott in the studio in the 1950s. To test the sound of his recordings, he had an assortment of speakers. At his left is the studio’s main audio control center.

At the dawn of the '60s, Scott advertised Manhattan Research Inc. as "the world's most extensive facility for the creation of Electronic Music and Musique Concrete." A slogan for his venture was "more than a think factory—a dream center where the excitement of tomorrow is made available today."

By spending more of his time soldering circuits and less with union-scale sidemen, Scott eventually dispensed with the human element altogether. He was more comfortable around machines; Scott spoke their language—or taught them to speak his. As Electronic Music Foundation president Joel Chadabe says, "Scott's music is so perfectly crafted, so lyrical and easy, so completely charming and good-natured, that it seems all the more wonderful, even mysterious, that much of it was created with the sophisticated and complex technology he invented. Scott developed his instruments to make his music and did it so well that what you hear is the music."

The inventions evolved according to the whims of Scott's boundless curiosity. In March 1946, he patented an electromechanical synthesizer called the Orchestra Machine. An obscure ancestor of the tape loop-based Mellotron, it featured a keyboard that could simulate an ensemble of traditional musicians. "This machine is a device incorporating a number of multiple soundtrack units, that may be selected as would the musical instruments in an orchestra," Scott wrote in the patent disclosure. "The entire mechanical driving system's speed may be varied in order to select any particular musical pitch."

Two years later, he began a decade of work on a behemoth sound-effects generator that he eventually christened Karloff (after horror-film legend Boris Karloff) (see Fig. 2). Scott demonstrated the unit to columnist Joseph Kaselow of the New York Herald Tribune. "The heart of the unit is a control panel with some hundred or so buttons and dials from which Scott can get an infinite number of rhythms and sound combinations—treble, bass, beeping, swishing, honking - you name it," Kaselow said. "Scott's machine, actually a control console which selects, modifies, and combines sounds produced by electronic means, has 200 sound sources and is capable of quickly producing infinite and varied musical and electronic effects. The machine uses several electronic tone generators, and others can be added. The control panel directs pitch, timbre, intensity, tempo, accent, and repetition. It can sound like a group of bongo drums. It can give impressions which suggest common noises. It can create the mood of musical tone-poems. And it can also produce limitless emotional variations to suit a variety of musical styles. All, of course, if Scott is at the controls."