Zahlen, bitte! For $50,000: Raymond Scott's marriage of music and electronics
Raymond Scott's his songs accompanied countless cartoons, and he also built groundbreaking but commercially unsuccessful synthesizers.
In 1964, the conductor, composer and pianist Raymond Scott was at the height of his career as an electronics fan. For the World's Fair in New York, he had created "future sounds" for the largest hall, General Electric's Futurama, and for IBM he worked together with Muppets inventor Jim Henson on a commercial about typewriters with electronic buffers.
He wrote: "Something really important is happening in the music business – the marriage of music and electronics – but the ceremony has not yet taken place. And I want to perform the ceremony. I need 50,000 dollars to build the second generation of an instrument I have named Electronium." He promised the unknown addressee of the letter a million-dollar business through the "renaissance" of electronic music.
Scott as a versatile musician
Raymond Scott had a solid career as a pianist, composer, conductor in popular music and as a recording engineer in recording studios behind him when, after the Second World War, he began to take an increasing interest in electronics in order to eliminate the musician as an intermediary. His first successful project was a sound effects generator called Karloff, named after the actor Boris Karloff, who became famous as Frankenstein's monster. His second project was the Clavivox, a theremin variant that was played using a keyboard.
(Image:Â William Morris Agency)
The necessary electronic components were supplied by the young student Robert Moog, who tinkered with circuits in the cellar with his father. Moog Junior and Senior also supplied important circuits for the first version of Scott's Electronium. Visitors to Scott's sound laboratory admired the "Wall of Dazzle", while the electronic musician Bruce Haack, who worked with Scott, mockingly called the ensemble the "Noodle Wall" because the patch cables ran all over the room.
At a young age, Harry Warnow, who came from a Jewish immigrant family, had to adopt the stage name Raymond Scott because after studying at the Juilliard School of Music, he began his career as a pianist in his eight-year-old brother's big band.
Successful jazz band
Once established, he landed a number of successes with the "Raymond Scott Quintette", a jazz band of six musicians, such as War Dance for Wooden Indians or Twilight in Turkey. He earned the money for his various electronic experiments with a TV show in which his wife Dorothy Collins was the star. Scott also patented his music machines, but had little success in marketing them.
For this Electronium, which kept him fully occupied in the second half of his life, Scott founded the Electronium Corporation. It was to market a range of sound gadgets, the Fascination Series. The small boxes were intended to play pleasant sounds in homes, which today is called ambient music.
Scott made a note of various sound scenarios, but had no intention of mass-producing them in large numbers. There were also patent applications for a document scanner and for electrically flashing jewelry, as is done today with LEDs.
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Hoping in vain for a breakthrough
He had a series of circuits developed and patented especially for his Electronium with its twelve tone generators. However, his constant search for new sounds led to him dismantling and rebuilding parts and the Electronium was never finished. The 50,000 dollars he wanted for the marriage of music and electronics was to go towards a "pretty Hammond organ-style device and form the basis of a business group for technically generated music that would earn millions from being the first – to market with the Electronium. With a first, beautiful-looking model of the Electronium, exciting to listen to, we will be able to convince investors in private demonstrations to give us the money to start production on a large scale." None of this materialized. The device never went into series production. Today, this Electronium is part of musician Mark Mothersbaugh's synthesizer collection.
One person who was truly interested in the melodies that Scott produced with his Electronium was "Muppet Master" Jim Henson. For the 1967 Expo in Montréal, Henson produced a short film in which his son played with cars to the music of "Raymond Scott". In 1967, Henson was commissioned by IBM's Office Products division to make a promotional film for the MT/ST (Magnetic Tape Electric Typewriter), a rudimentary form of text storage and processing for which the German IBM manager Ulrich Steinhilper invented the term "word processing". Henson wrote and edited the film "The Paperwork Explosion".
In addition to references to his music and interviews, the Raymond Scott website also contains functional drawings and circuit diagrams for his Electronium.
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The Electronium, later praised as the first self-programming synthesizer, was never built in series, unlike the devices of his more enterprising colleague Robert Moog. His sounds from his jazz band phase later became popular when they were released for recycling in comic clips. Raymond Scott, on the other hand, did not have much to gain from the unstoppable technical progress. He was unable to produce any income from his six US patents.
The marriage of music and electronics was celebrated more lavishly by others, such as the German composer Paul Thomas, who composed the music for the cult SCIFI TV series "Raumpatrouille" with his "ThoWiPhon" synthesizer (built by Siemens engineer Hansjörg Wicha). Both composed a similar soundtrack for life under water. Thomas for life after falling back to earth, Scott for the General Motors Futurama show at the 1964/65 World's Fair as "Life under sea". It is no coincidence that the name is reminiscent of a cartoon series: the Futurama shows were the namesake for the series, which is set far in the future.
(mho)
