Raymond the visionary.
One day they told him he was going to die. It was 1958. It was the first of a long series of heart attacks. The doctor was serious and absorbed in his role: a year of life at most, he decreed.
Raymond smiled and shrugged. He knew it wasn't true.
Because Raymond saw the future.
He had seen machines that created music, rhythm generators, instruments capable of sounds never heard before, orchestras enclosed in a box, typewriters that wrote the music they then played.
And, while his eyes peered into the future, Raymond forgot about the present.
Harry Warnow, born in 1908, a brilliant student of electronic engineering and a skilled pianist had two passions: music and technology. Who knows, maybe a nonexistent pineal valve: the right and left lobes working in sync.
The first of the two passions seemed to have won out when, in 1934, thanks to his brother Mark - who was the director - he joined the CBS orchestra and gave up his degree.
So Harry became Raymond Scott (found the name in the phone book, he liked the sound), so as not to embarrass his brother. But he stayed in that orchestra for a short time, a couple of years, enough time to pick the right elements for his first group: the Raymond Scott Quintette.
The only quintet I know of formed by six elements.
Raymond had his ideas on composition: he insisted musicians learn the melodic lines he composed on the piano by ear – no transcription – because he was convinced that "you play better with your eyes closed," but he demanded they reproduce them with absolute fidelity. Those who saw them play thought they were improvising, but no: Raymond was inflexible, allowing no slip-ups.
It was difficult to play with him.
The critics were puzzled. What was that stuff? It seemed like Jazz but it wasn't Jazz.
And to complicate things, he also wrote an article for Billboard Magazine in which he defined swing as: 'Stagnant' Syncopation."
Raymond called it "descriptive Jazz" and came up with rather odd titles like: "New Year's Eve in a Haunted House," "Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals", "Bumpy Weather Over Newark,” Twilight in Turkey," "Minuet in Jazz," "War Dance for Wooden Indians," "Reckless Night on Board an Ocean Liner”. And his most famous: "Powerhouse,” "The Penguin” and "The Toy Trumpet".
The public liked it. Columbia signed him and CBS radio held him close.
The quintet became an orchestra – "Raymond Scott and his Orchestra" – perhaps the first racially mixed radio orchestra in history (it was the 1930s), where black musicians like Ben Webster, Cozy Cole, Emmett Berry, and others played (I told you he was a visionary).
With those jazz musicians, and others, he also set up a project called "the Secret 7" and recorded a great album: "The Unexpected".
And he composed music for films (he worked with Hitchcock too), for musicals, for ballets, and for radio programs.
But Raymond was not satisfied.
He sensed the limits of the “human component” of his music. He “saw” other sounds, manipulated by musician-technicians, other possibilities, other colors to add to the palette.
Raymond imagined recording studios that mixed, edited, reworked, and reinvented sound; he saw men who would be called Joe Meek, Phil Spector, George Martin, Brian Wilson, Alan Parsons, Adrian Sherwood, Martin Hannett….
And then he saw musicians programming machines that played by themselves, entire orchestras reproduced by a single instrument and a single performer, robots playing instead of musicians who sat among the audience, sound manipulators interacting in real-time with musicians, music composed with sounds never heard before, cosmic couriers, man-machines, ambient music, synthetic sounds.
But these musicians, these explorers, these innovators, these sound researchers that will come, will need to be given the instruments, the means, the machinery.
This is why the "Manhattan Research Inc." project was born.
But money is needed, a lot of money.
So, when Warner Bros. wants Raymond's music for its cartoons, he accepts even though he has never seen those cartoons, nor has he ever been interested in them (and they will never interest him). Even if those pieces of music were certainly not born for that purpose.
Warner entrusts those pieces to a composer and brilliant arranger who worked with Walt Disney: Carl Stalling.
What Stalling will do with Scott's music is amazing. Those compositions will make those cartoons extraordinary and unforgettable. You don't know how many times you've heard “Powerhouse”!
Stalling is a genius in arrangement. Those cartoons and those compositions mark an era. The problem is that everyone believes that those pieces are solely Stalling's. And so Stalling becomes a myth (all the nerds love to discuss his greatness), but no one remembers that the greater part of that music is Scott's.
But Raymond seems unconcerned.
He even finds time to marry for the second time to singer Dorothy Collins, with whom he will record some albums that anticipate all the "lounge music" that is to come, with fantastic titles like “ectoplasm”.
Then, his brother Mark dies at just 49 years old. And Raymond inherits "your hit parade", the hugely successful show he hosted on the radio.
In short, he doesn't stop for a moment: he plays, produces artists, composes, works for the radio, and invents strange sounding machines.
And the money comes in.
In 1946 “Manhattan Research Inc.” is a reality.
It's a laboratory, a trap of the future, a room full of absurd and science fiction machinery in which every type of music can be produced, composed, performed, manipulated, and recorded using only machines.
Machines with strange names: Karloff, Bandito the Bongo Artist, Clavivox, Videola, Bassline Generator, and many others. And the most important, the most ambitious of all his projects: the Electronium.
Mitzi, his third wife, will report that the Electronium was just like one of the family, it almost seemed that thing interacted with them, a true artificial intelligence applied to music.
Others will call them synthesizers, drum machines, oscillators, laptops, etc. etc. But can you compare the charm of those names?
And pay attention to the dates: we're in the '40s here. “Déserts” by Varése is from '54, Stockhausen begins composing in the '50s, “Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul” by Schaeffer is from '49, the “Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète” forms in '51.
In short, our Scott is ahead. He’s really ahead.
In the '50s at the door of Manhattan Research knocks a young man, a certain Robert Moog.
Raymond, however, is not interested in academic studies on noise, he doesn’t think of highbrow and cerebral music; his idea of electronic music is profoundly and sincerely "pop". He produces music for commercials and TV jingles, applications and skits, common-use musical objects (lighters, carillons, gadgets, even a sex toy that sounds differently depending on how it's touched….). He creates Raymond Scott Enterprise to market it all.
Music that will be collected and recorded in 2000 (and re-released in 2017) on a splendid double CD (or triple vinyl) with a rich booklet, by Basta Records titled “Manhattan Research Inc.” which I highly recommend.
But Raymond is not a great businessman.
He is a man of music. So, finally, he decides – only in 1963 – to compose and record music entirely his own, completely produced with his machines.
They will be three albums: the three volumes of “Soothing Sounds for Baby”. Accompanied by explanatory notes drafted by the Gesell Institute of Child Development, this music has a very specific purpose: to put children to sleep. They need to fill the environment, stay in the background, sound without imposing. They are not born to be listened to but to be used for a function.
Now replace "baby" with "airports" and wave goodbye to Brian Eno and all ambient music with your hand.
I don't think any child has ever slept with that music, sales flop, those records disappear immediately to reappear only after 2000 in chic editions by the usual Basta Records. Listened to today, those records have an incredibly estranging effect. Minimalism, drone music, ambient, retro-futurism, vintage, glitch, all together, all mixed in a mysterious timeless cauldron. Listened to without knowing their title and origin, I challenge anyone to guess the date and define the style.
But the years pass. The '70s arrive and the future begins to become present. Scott is all focused on perfecting the Electronium and doesn't notice what's happening around him.
And at his door knocks Berry Gordy, the boss of Motown. Berry has glimpsed enormous potential in Scott's work, has detected possible commercial returns and wants Scott with him. He proposes he head up a research and electronic music section at Motown, and he wants the Electronium. Scott agrees: he drops everything and moves to California.
Berry Gordy and Raymond Scott, can you imagine a stranger couple?
And, in fact, it doesn't work.
No Motown record will ever be produced by the research department led by Raymond Scott.
It will last until 1977, then Raymond will leave Berry Gordy and return to New York.
Without a job, now out of the loop and completely forgotten, Raymond continues to perfect "his" Electronium. It has cost him 11 years of work and more than a million dollars and it remains there, unused.
Because Raymond has experienced the worst thing that can happen to a visionary: his visions have come true. The future has become present. The Kraftwerk, the Tangerine Dream, Eno, the Suicide, the Throbbing Gristle, Steve Reich, the Residents, and dozens and dozens of others have made machines and robots play, explored space and the depths of the subconscious, given voice to the remnants of industrialization, searched for the human voice in dehumanization. And they have done it and do it with other instruments.
And then ambient, minimalism.
Soon synthpop will bring that music to supermarkets too.
Raymond Scott's influence on 20th-century music is enormous. Enormous.
But Raymond has not stopped looking forward. His new idea is machines that transport music through brain waves from the composer to the listeners. He is convinced that Electronium is still the future.
But the problem is health. That weak heart that fails, one, two, three times. They give him a triple bypass. Then, in 1987, yet another heart attack leaves him semi-paralyzed. He can no longer speak, write, or move autonomously.
He can dream. He can keep dreaming.
In the meantime, the public discovers Esquivel and Space Age Pop (then will come Stereolab, Broadcast, Lali Puna and later Hauntology and all retro-futurism). Hal Willner and Irwin Chusid remember Raymond Scott, sense that the time is ripe for a rediscovery of him. Chusid searches for him, finds his number and calls him.
Mitzi gets angry.
-Now you call him? Now you remember him? He can no longer speak, he can no longer compose….
The name, however, starts to circulate again. Collections are published, the three volumes of “Soothing Sound for Baby” are reissued. Of course, it cannot be called a success but it is something.
Then Raymond dies, in 1994.
But he never stopped imagining the future: music that crosses Space, dances of Stars, symphonies of electrons, beats of energy, brain waves transformed into sound waves, the bastions of Orion, the B rays flashing in the dark near the Tannhäuser gates.
And all this is lost, like tears in the rain.
“That’s all folks” (Bugs Bunny and Duffy Duck greet and walk away dancing).
Captain’s log. Stardate 2147 point 25. End of recording. Over and out.
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