Raymond Scott

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Raymond Scott (actually Harry Warnow , born September 10, 1908 in New York City , † February 8, 1994 in North Hills, Los Angeles ), was an American composer, band leader , pianist, engineer, recording studio tinkerer and inventor of electronics Musical instruments.

He was born in Brooklyn , the son of Russian Jewish born immigrants. His older brother Mark Warnow, conductor, violinist and music director of the radio program "Your Hit Parade" , promoted his musical career.

His music is known to an audience of millions as background music for cartoons, as it was adapted by Warner Brothers for over 120 classic Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck films. Scott's tunes were also featured in twelve Ren-and-Stimpy episodes (in the original version), while others were quoted in The Simpsons , Duckman , Animaniacs , The Oblongs, and Batfink . His composition “Powerhouse” can not only be heard in more than 40 cartoons, but also in the feature film Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003). Scott never composed with this intention (with the exception of three advertising jingles ).

Early career

In 1931 Scott graduated from the Juilliard School of Music , where he studied piano, music theory, and composition. He began his professional career as a pianist with the CBS radio house band. In 1936, while he was working for CBS , he and some colleagues founded the "Raymond Scott Quintet" (his spelling). There were six musicians, but Scott found the word quintets sounded “crisp” and “sextet” distracted from the music. The quintet tried to liven up the swing through dense, varied arrangements and less improvisation . Scott called his style "descriptive Jazz" and gave his idiosyncratic pieces unusual names, such as "New Year's Eve in a Haunted House" ( "New Year at the Haunted House" ), "Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals" ( "Dinner music for a pack of hungry cannibals " ; also recorded by the Kronos Quartet in 1993) and" Reckless Night on Board an Ocean Liner "( " Wild night on board an ocean liner " ). It had success with the audience, but was rejected by the jazz critics.

Working method

Scott was a firm believer in composing and making music "by ear". He did not compose on music paper, but "on his tape" - by humming phrases to his fellow players or playing riffs and rhythms on the piano and expecting them to understand his instructions. Nothing was written down, a process Scott called "head arrangement". Scott, who was also a good sound engineer, took all the samples, took the vinyls home and reworked them, rearranged, deleted, and pasted in to achieve the desired composition. During the development of a piece, the musicians were still allowed to improvise, after this phase everything was relatively fixed and only a few improvisations were allowed - which many jazz purists and critics rejected. Scott liked to lean on classical motifs when composing, which earned him the anger of some serious music authorities who rejected such machinations as "trivializing the classics". The audience, who bought his records a million times over, was indifferent to this dispute.

Big Band

The Raymond Scott Quintet existed from 1937 to 1939 and had numerous sales successes, including "Twilight in Turkey", "In An Eighteenth Century Drawing Room", "Powerhouse" and "The Penguin." In 1939 Scott was looking for a new challenge in the swing era and expanded the sextet to a big band , u. a. with bassist Chubby Jackson . Both her records and the concert tours were a success. When Scott was named Music Director of CBS Radio in 1942, he made history by breaking the "racial barriers" of the day and creating the United States' first mixed radio orchestra. He hired some of the hottest black jazz heavyweights of the day, including saxophonist Ben Webster , trumpeter Charlie Shavers and drummer Cozy Cole .

The cartoon connection

Not only did Scott never compose for cartoons, he never saw them. His accidental fame as "the man who made the cartoons swing" began in 1943 when Scott sold his exploitation rights to Warner Brothers . Carl Stalling , music director of Warner's Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies , was allowed to use everything from the Warner music catalog and immediately began to spice up his arrangements with quotes from Scott.

In addition to his well-known cartoon melodies, "The Toy Trumpet" is one of Scott's most famous compositions. In the 1938 film Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm , Shirley Temple sings a version of the song with lyrics. Another long-running favorite is “In An Eighteenth-Century Drawing Room”, a swing adaptation of the first theme of Mozart's Piano Sonata in C major, KV 545.

ToyTrumpetFinale.PNG
Beginning bars of the melody of "The Toy Trumpet"

Broadway

In 1946 the musical Lute Song , for which Scott had made the composition and instrumentation , was produced on Broadway. It contains Scott's catchiest and most-covered pop song "Mountain High, Valley Low", and others. a. interpreted by Eartha Kitt , John Anderson , Percy Faith and Dinah Shore .

Electronic period

Scott, who attended a technical high school in Brooklyn , was one of the earliest pioneers of electronic music and a daring sound engineer . In the 30s and 40s he was sometimes more in the control room to regulate the sound (sometimes with revolutionary means) than to fulfill his bandleader duties. In 1946 Scott founded Manhattan Research, Inc. to "design and manufacture electronic music devices and systems." Robert Moog , inventor of the Moog synthesizer , met Scott in the 1950s, developed circuits for him in the 60s, and called him a major influence. Scott not only designed innovative musical instruments such as the Clavivox and the Electronium , but also recorded purely electronic records, such as the 1963 albums "Soothing Sounds for Baby" (Vol.1: 0-6 months, Vol.2: 6-12 months, Vol.3: 12-18 months). Scott's intention was to compose lullabies, but today's listeners are more reminiscent of the ambient music played by Tangerine Dream , Brian Eno and others in the mid-1970s . a. was recorded. The Billboard magazine wrote about "Soothing Sounds for Baby" : "astoundingly ahead-of-their-time examples of inspired and impeccably recorded electronic music. Predating by more than a decade such innovators as Brian Eno and Kraftwerk "and DJ Spooky said" I look to Raymond Scott as one of the originators of a techno aesthetic. "

In the late 1940s Scott, like Les Paul and his wife Mary Ford at the same time, began multitracking pop songs sung by the singer Dorothy Collins (later his second wife) with a multitrack recorder . The published records were not as successful as those of "Les and Mary". For a short time Scott had his own label, "Master Records". When his brother Mark died in 1949, he took over his position as band leader on the popular radio show "Your Hit Parade". The following year the show switched to television and Scott remained its band leader until 1957.

This position was well paid, but Scott always saw it as a pure livelihood and put the fees into the research and development of his electronic music. He built some of the first devices that could automatically play a sequence of tones. He later described himself as the inventor of the sequencer , even if his electro-mechanical devices no longer have any resemblance to the fully electronic devices of the late 1960s. He started working on a machine that could compose independently and which he later called "The Electronium".

In the second half of the 1960s Scott withdrew more and more from the public; he did not talk about his inventions, hardly gave interviews or recorded any records. In his circle of friends there were fewer and fewer musicians and more and more electrical engineers. One of his friends at the time was the later Muppet Show inventor Jim Henson , for whose "Muppet" forerunner Scott composed and recorded electronic soundtracks.

In 1969, Motown CEO Berry Gordy heard about this mad scientist and visited Scott in his Long Island lab to see the Electronium in action. Impressed by the innumerable possibilities, Gordy hired him in 1971 to head the research department at Motown in Los Angeles. Scott held this position until 1977. So far, however, no Motown recordings could be clearly identified in which Scott's electronic inventions were used.

After that Scott was more or less unemployed, but anything but inactive. He improved his inventions, also integrated computers and primitive MIDI devices. He suffered several heart attacks, ran out of money and was all but forgotten at some point. In 1987 Scott suffered a severe stroke that left him unable to work or speak. Most of his records were out of print, his electronic instruments were out of date, and his royalties had dried up.

Rediscovery

The tide turned in 1992 when Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights, the first CD compilation with pieces from Scott's groundbreaking six-man quintet, was released. Also in the early 1990s, John Kricfalusi began spicing up his "Ren and Stimpy" cartoons with recordings of the Scott quintet. In the late 1990s, the Dutch group "Beau Hunks" recorded two albums of Scott's music. The Polish jazz pianist Vladislav Sendecki released the album "A Tribute to Raymond Scott" in 2005. Other artists who have sampled or remixed Scott's music include Gorillaz , J Dilla , Madlib and EL-P .

Scott's “Powerhouse” has been used extensively in recent years, including a. by jazz clarinetist Don Byron , the rock band Rush , the indie bands They Might Be Giants , Steroid Maximus ( JG Thirlwell ) and Devo and many others. The credit card company VISA used the piece in 2006 for a commercial.

The film composer Mark Mothersbaugh , previously known as the singer of the band Devo, bought Scott's defective electronium in 1996 to repair it, but so far without success.

Private life

Raymond Scott was married to Mitzi Scott (* as Mathilde Waldman on July 18, 1918 in New York City, † May 3, 2012 in Santa Clarita, CA) from January 1967 , with whom he was in Farmingdale, Long Island, on the industrial estate Willow Park lived where he had rented a larger property that had both living and study areas. Mitzi organized the administration of Scott's business when he was developing his electronic instruments and the electronium . After Scott was brought to the Motown label by Berry Gordy in 1971, the couple moved to Los Angeles, where Mitzi took on logistical tasks.

Film music

The following films contain recordings and / or compositions by Raymond Scott:

Discography

  • Manhattan Research Inc.
  • Microphone Music
  • One Touch of Venus & Lute Song
  • Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights
  • Rock 'n' Roll Symphony
  • Soothing Sounds for Baby 1 - 3
  • Toonerville Trolley 1940-44
  • The Unexpected - Raymond Scott & Secret 7
  • Three Willow Park: Electronic Music from Inner Space 1961-1971

Scott compositions interpreted by today's formations

  • A Tribute to Raymond Scott The Beau Hunks Sextets
  • Chesterfield arrangements 1937-1938 by Metropole Orchestra & Beau Hunks Saxtette
  • Classical A-Go-Go from Frankenstein Consort
  • Kodachrome by Metropole Orchestra
  • Powerhouse from the Raymond Scott Project
  • Pushbutton Parfait by Raymond Scott Orchestrette (2002)

literature

  • Simon, George T .: The Big Bands . With a foreword by Frank Sinatra. 3rd revised edition. New York City, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co and London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1974, pp. 410-412

Web links

swell

  1. ^ Baumgärtel, Tilman: grinding. On the history and aesthetics of the loop . Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 2015, p. 137-155 .
  2. ^ Electronium
  3. ↑ Obituary for Mitzi Scott (2012)  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.voy.com  
personal data
SURNAME Scott, Raymond
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Warnow, Harry (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American composer, band leader , pianist, engineer and inventor of electronic musical instruments
DATE OF BIRTH September 10, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 1994
Place of death North Hills, Los Angeles