Circle Machines and Sequencers

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

           
 

MOTOWN MAESTRO

Refining the Electronium was Scott's primary focus throughout the 1960s, when integrated circuits made smaller and more efficient designs possible. Scott asked Moog to "sophisticate my equipment. The concept is the same as I've had for many years now. And you're the scientist who will make these things small, more compact, and with fewer parts." Moog replaced Scott's 8-stage "sequential timer" relays with electronic stepping switches.

Despite another bout of heart trouble in 1967, Scott continued to focus full-time on his Electronium. By the end of the 1960s, he had invested more than a decade—and more than a million dollars—in refining his brainchild. But Scott's health was failing, and his once-substantial royalties were dwindling.

FIG. 4: Scott’s keyboard synthesizer, the Clavivox, was patented in 1956. The pictured Clavivox, which resides in the Audities Foundation collection, was recently used by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

In August 1970, Motown Records founder Berry Gordy read an article in Variety about Scott's work. The Los Angeles-based music mogul immediately phoned Scott and asked to see - and hear - this miraculous invention. Soon, a sizable Motown entourage arrived at Scott's Farmingdale, New York, facility in a fleet of limos. "It was genius meeting genius," Motown executive Guy Costa said in 1997. "Berry certainly respected Ray and his knowledge, and Ray admired Berry."

Gordy was impressed by Scott's Beethoven-in-a-box. "Berry felt that the power of the Electronium, the ability to numeralize the music process, was important," Costa said. "Berry was always a formula man; he'd find a rhythm or a progression and build on that. The Electronium gave you the ability to play a chord, and the ability to store rhythms, and resequence those things. To have all these new effects was a turn-on."

One month later, Gordy placed an order for an Electronium. The initial down payment was $10,000, but it would eventually cost Motown millions. Costa arranged for shipment of the device from New York to Gordy's home in Los Angeles. Scott planned to spend six weeks tutoring the Motown chief on the device. When Gordy asked Scott to make further modifications, the inventor was happy to comply and continued working in Southern California, with his client involved in the progress.

Eventually, Gordy offered Scott a position as head of Motown's Electronic Research and Development department. Scott accepted, and in 1972 he relocated to the West Coast with his third wife, Mitzi. Equipped with his own research studio facility, Scott continued to develop the Electronium and other technologies. "Berry was looking at the Electronium as a source of inspiration and new ideas, and as a methodology—as a sophisticated programmable sequencer," Costa said. "It was an idea stimulator, a creative thought processor. Maybe [they would] find combinations that hadn't been tried. It could have done anything he wanted it to do."

Following a serious heart attack in 1977, Scott retired at age 69. "Ray was a wonderful guy," Costa said. "I can't tell you how much fun we had together. He was the experimenter; the mad professor." What Motown had to show commercially for its investment remains a mystery, as no tapes have yet surfaced from the company's vaults.

THE CLOCK RUNS OUT

After continued heart problems in the late 1970s, Scott was no longer on music technology's cutting edge. He tried to upgrade his devices with microprocessors but lost valuable research time due to illness. "By then, he had destroyed the Electronium by vandalizing it for parts for other things he was working on," Costa said. "And new electronics had come so far, that they could do with one little chip what he had tons of wiring doing on the Electronium. It didn't pay to keep working on it."

But Scott didn't give up. Despite deteriorating health (including heart bypass surgery), he continued to work, even while bedridden. In the mid-1980s, he modified a Yamaha DX-7 and used MIDI to connect the keyboard to his Electronium through a PC purchased in 1981. "I got involved in an exciting project," the 75-year-old wrote in his journal in June 1983. "For three months I slept an average of about 50 hours weekly. Then I folded. Symptoms of folding: extreme fatigue, wobbly walking, accumulation of chest pains, zero energy output capability." A major stroke in 1987 closed down the shop completely. Even more tragic, Scott could barely speak, rendering him unable to answer questions when interest in his work revived in 1992. He died in February 1994 at age 85.

VISIONARY OUTLOOK

FIG. 5: This is the final version of the Raymond Scott Electronium, created for Berry Gordy of Motown. This “instantaneous composition/performance machine” was capable of playing highly complex music and is now owned by Mark Mothersbaugh.

"I understand his ideas about the collaboration between man and machine, which to me is the most important thing he did, in terms of electronics and music," says Berklee professor Dr. Thomas Rhea. "He anticipated some artificial intelligence concepts and some compositional concepts that people believe somebody else did. The idea of collaborating with a machine, and allowing the machine to make certain decisions, was pretty avant-garde.

"I appreciate everything Cage did, and Stockhausen," Rhea says. "But there's a whole tradition here that's being ignored, and Raymond Scott is one of those people." Moog recently spoke to the BBC about his old colleague. "Raymond was the first," Moog said. "He foresaw the use of sequencers, and the use of electronic oscillators, to make sounds. These were the watershed uses of electronic circuitry."

Jeff Winner is the creator of RaymondScott .com and coproducer of Manhattan Research Inc., a two-CD and book set of Raymond Scott’s early electronic work. Irwin Chusid is the director of the Raymond Scott Archives. His study of outsider music, Songs in the Key of Z, was recently published by A Cappella Books. For audio examples of Raymond Scott’s instruments, visit www.raymondscott.com/sound.