Manhattan Research, Inc. by Piet Schreuders

This music is completely electronic, and has been created and produced on equipment designed and manufactured by

MANHATTAN RESEARCH INC. est. 1946

Features Raymond Scott’s inventions, including:

New Plastic Sounds and Electronic Abstractions

Clavivox Circle Machine Bass Line Generator Rhythm Modulator Karloff Bandito the Bongo Artist Electronium plus: Electronic Audio Logos and other industrial projects

Previously unreleased: 1950s & ’60s

COMPOSED AND PERFORMED BY

R AYM O N D S C OTT i

Manhattan Research, Inc.

More than a think factoryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; a dream center where the excitement of tomorrow is made available today.

Manhattan Research, Inc.

Gert-Jan Blom producer Jeff Winner associate producer Irwin Chusid editor

Scott in his electronics workshop, North Hills, NY, c.1959

Introduction

Beware! Warped Genius at Work by Irwin Chusid Director, Raymond Scott Archives

or decades, Raymond Scott (1908–1994) was renowned as a bandleader, composer and pianist, who led a unique six-man “Quintette” and an orchestra during the Big Band heyday of the ’30s and ’40s. He had a penchant for quirky titles (e.g., “New Year’s Eve in a Haunted House”), and for rewiring classical motifs for jazz ensemble. In the 1950s, Scott led the house band on TV’s long-running Your Hit Parade. And his melodies, through their adaptation by Warner Bros. music director Carl Stalling, found their way into countless Bugs Bunny cartoons. Scott was admired for his popular music legacy—and dismissed for it, as well, by some purists. Throughout Scott’s career in the public

spotlight, there were occasional reports of an alter ego—the inventor, the engineer, the professor in the lab coat, the electronic music pioneer. But little of this work received public exposure. In 1997, Basta reissued Scott’s 3-volume Soothing Sounds for Baby, a series of electronic recordings for infants that was virtually ignored upon its original 1964 release. Suddenly, Scott was hailed as an avatar in the ﬁelds of electronica, minimalism, ambient, and proto-disco. Critics popped champagne corks: “Scott was a musical visionary ahead of his time, and even today his music sounds like it’s beamed down from another planet…. Far from being soothing, his electronic 9

lullabies are often skull-splitting, a mixture of high frequency easy listening and sonic space-pop that, cranked up, would keep not only the baby awake and bawling, but half the neighborhood, too. Beware—warped genius at work.” —Edwin Pouncey, Vox (UK) “Astoundingly ahead-of-their-time exam ples of inspired and impeccably recorded electronic music. Predating by more than a decade such innovators as Brian Eno and Kraftwerk, Scott’s work exhibits impres sive sophistication, both conceptually and in terms of the performances.” —Paul Verna, Billboard (US) “These minimalist electronic discs are at once instructive historical documents (pre ﬁguring similarly minimalist electronic works by Fripp, Eno, Glass and Riley) and eerily sanguine lullabies that might turn even the sweetest babe into a little Damien.” —CMJ New Music Monthly (US) “A major ﬁnd for Raymond Scott fans and for those ambient/drone fans interested in precursors to Eno and Neu.” —Tower Pulse (E-Pulse on-line)

These quotes reﬂect the surprise and shock of those familiar with Scott’s quintet and orchestral work upon discovering the “warped genius” responsible for such “soothing sounds.” Yet—SSFB was just a warm-up. In this 10

album, prepare yourself for something beyond the pleasant parameters of pop. Scott’s electronic experiments took him to uncharted netherworlds. Since, for the most part, he wasn’t answerable to a boss, he was free to wander where his curiosity led. The results—rarely soothing—are intriguing, compelling, and occasionally downright demonic. Where SSFB offers relaxing ambience, the grotesqueries of Scott’s Manhattan Research, Inc. offer a sonic excursion to the realms of weightlessness, moon-craters, and six-armed aliens with twittering antennae. Scott long seemed destined to trade in his baton for a socket wrench. From his teen semesters as an engineering student in Brooklyn; through his Quintette days (1937-’39), when much of his recording time was spent in the control booth, monitoring sounds picked up by the mic but missed by the human ear; on to the formation of Manhattan Research, Inc. (est. 1946), later billed as “Designers and Manufacturers of Electronic Music and Musique Concrète Devices and Systems”—Raymond and technology were a perfect pairing. For all his accomplishments, no one ever accused Scott of being a “people person.” Johnny Williams, the Quintette drummer, noted, “All he ever had was machines—only we had names.”

Scott’s business stationery from the 1940s (top) and 1960s (left)

Singer Anita O’Day called Scott “a martinet” who “reduced [musicians] to some thing like wind-up toys.” It was simply a matter of time before he dispensed with the human element. Scott was more comfortable around machines. He spoke their lan guage. Or taught them to speak his. The “personnel” on this album consists of existing sound devices (e.g., the Ondioline and tone generators), and Scott’s own inventions, such as the Clavivox, a portamento keyboard originally designed to simulate the eerie theremin, though Scott later rewired it to produce a wide array of sounds, similar to a synthesizer; the Electronium (a.k.a. Scottronium), an instanta-

neous composition-performance console; polyphonic sequencers, including his “Circle Machine;” the Rhythm Modulator; and the Bass-line Generator. The recordings range from detergent jingles to decidedly non-commercial (uncommercial, even) experimental ventures into musique concrète. Aside from several examples of Scott re-tooling old vehicles (“The Toy Trumpet” and “Twilight in Turkey,” both written for his original Quintette, and the standard “Night and Day”), the remainder is new material. Also included, for the ﬁrst time in commercial release, are mid-1960s collaborations between Scott and Muppet-master Jim Henson. 11

Although he was largely unrecognized as such during his years of electronic music research, Scott was a transitional pop figure. Before him, during the infancy of electronic music and its wider development in the academic and “serious” music realms, electronic composition was roughly grouped in two categories: 1) abstract and/ or musique concrète, as far removed from Western tonal traditions as Jupiter is from Earth; and 2) interpretations of popular and classical standards. Particularly on Soothing Sounds for Baby, Scott proved to be one of the first composers to merge the Brave New World of electronic sounds with a rhythmic pop sensibility. Before him, most (certainly not all) electronic music tended to be either “difficult” or banal. Scott seemed determined to challenge the prevailing market concept that electronic music was inaccessible to the broader listening public. Had he spent more time actually attempting to reach that market instead of hunkered down in the woodshed, he might have achieved recognition for his efforts during his lifetime. Certainly his (quasi-anonymous) success as one of the first composers of electronic TV commercial jingles—many included in this package—helped pave the way for broader public acceptance of these extraterrestrial noises. 12

Because Scott suffered a stroke in 1987 that left him largely unable to communicate verbally (he passed away in February, 1994), and because he rarely gave interviews during his reclusive years of electron ic exploration, we asked those who worked with Scott and those who knew him well to share their observations for this booklet. In the process, a remarkable paradox emerges. During his orchestral career, Scott had a reputation as a bully on the bandstand, someone who demanded perfection, ﬁred musicians impulsively, and wouldn’t hesitate to insult players who failed to meet his exacting criteria. In contrast, those who worked with Scott during his electronic years recall him with affection, respect, and admiration. They occasionally view his ideas as quixotic, and his modus operandi as daffy as the cartoons that used his melodies. But they always saw method to his madness. And their anecdotes reveal a chapter of electronic music history you won’t ﬁnd in most existing books on the subject. Welcome to Manhattan Research, Inc.

More background on Raymond Scott can be found in the liner notes of other Basta releases listed at the end of this booklet.

METRONOME, MARCH, 1950

“You can’t, incidentally, have too many relays. An electronic music studio wants to grow, and grow, and grow, and grow. And relays get used up very fast.” —Raymond Scott, from a 1962 lecture 13

Schematic from Scott’s U.S. Patent #2998939, ﬁled October 16, 1959

Gentlemen: I have a story that may be of interest to you. It is not widely known who invented the circuitry concept for the sequential perform ance of musical pitches—now well known as a “sequencer.” I, however, do know who the inventor was—for it was I who first conceived and built the electronic sequencer back in 1960. This concept for my musical pitch sequencer was triggered by the introduction in 1959 of the Wurlitzer Drum Machine called the Sideman—a rotating mechanical disc switching device that produced an electronically generated sequence of drum sounds. It immediately occurred to me—Why not build a device that would automatically sequence through a string of musical pitches? Using thyratron tubes and relays I constructed my first electronic“sequencer” by the spring of 1960. With the introduction of Unijunction Transistors about ’61, ’62 I built my second “sequencer” this time with UJTs and relays. Incidentally, I may have owned the first polyphonic synthesizer, built for me, but constructed by Bob Moog in ’63 or ’64. It was also about this time that Bob Moog, who visited me occasionally at my lab on Long Island, was among the first to see and witness the performance of my UJT-Relay sequencer. [over] —2— 15

Decided about this time that I should try to build a solid state version—no relays— but this was beyond me. I asked Moog to build it for me. He suggested that Dumont had a solid state electric switch—and that maybe I wanted something like that. When he showed me the schematic he had designed for me, he had labeled it “sequencer.” I believe he coined the word “sequencer” to describe this device. To digress for a bit: During these early 60s I was so secretive about my development activities—perhaps neurotically so—that I was always reminding Bob that he mustn’t copy or reveal my sequencer work to anyone. I understand, now, my personal need for secrecy at that time. Electronic music for commercials and ﬁlms was my living then—and I thought I had this great advantage—because it was my sequencer. I did, however, show my sequencer to two members of the electronic music facility at Columbia University, Vladimir Ussachevsky and Mario Davidowsky, and Myron Schaeffer of Toronto University Music Department. Word naturally got around about the nature of what my device accomplished but Bob Moog continued to be loyal. I must say Bob Moog is a most honorable person. He steadfastly refrained from embodying my sequencer in his equipment line until the sheer pressure of so many manufacturers using the sequencer forced him to compete. Yet, he used the simplest version, though he knew about my most advanced sequencer. Quite a gentleman, and a super talent besides. Now, with the passing of years, I guess I regret my secrecy and would like for people to know of what I accomplished.

Raymond Scott, c. 1980

(unaddressed letter found among personal papers)

Raymond Scott: Inventor and Composer by Joel Chadabe Joel Chadabe is a composer, president of Electronic Music Foundation and director of the electronic music studio at Bennington College

music history is often por E xtrayed as a history of the art. The ﬁrst milestones along that historical path lectro nic

include Jean Cocteau and Eric Satie’s Parade in 1917, George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique in 1926, John Cage’s use of found sounds in and after the late 1930s, and Pierre Schaeffer’s formulation of musique concrète in 1948. All these milestones occurred in the pre-tape recorder age, and these works inevitably led to the embrace of all sound as music. xxHowever, the concurrent development of electronic technology facilitated new artist ic explorations. The arrival of tape recorders in the marketplace around 1950 led to a new round of music by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Edgard Varèse, and others. The invention of computer music in

1957 made possible the early works of James Tenney, Jean-Claude Risset, and John Chowning. The easy availability of electronic components following 1960 made it possible for David Tudor, Pauline Olive ros, Alvin Lucier, and many others to assemble their own instruments. And the introduction of the voltage-controlled synthesizer in the mid-1960s brought Morton Subotnick and Wendy Carlos to promi nence. This history, of course, continues to evolve. xxThe history of electronic musical instrument invention is every bit as important as the history of the art. Although there were portents of electronic instruments as early as 1759 with Jean-Baptiste de La Borde’s Clavecin Electrique in Paris, and many experiments with electricity and music in Europe and North America during the 19th century, the history of electronic instrument invention truly begins at the outset of the 20th century with Thaddeus Cahill’s Telharmonium. By today’s standards a large synthesizer (estimated at approximately 200 17

tons), this remarkable invention was installed in New York’s Telharmonic Hall at 39th Street and Broadway in 1906. Ironically, Cahill was driven by a fundamentally entrepreneurial goal. He was aware that electronic instruments contained the potential to produce any sound, yet his focus was on the business concept of transmitting electronic sounds via telephone cables to private homes and such public spaces as restaurants and hotel lobbies. Cahill thus foreshadowed Muzak. There were other early-20th Century business-minded instrument inventors. These included Armand Givelet and Eloy Coupleux, who developed the Givelet/Coupleux Organ in France in the early 1930s; Georges Jenny, who developed the Ondioline in France in the late 1930s; and the immensely successful Laurens Hammond, whose Hammond Organ, developed in the U.S. and utilizing sound-generation techniques similar to the Telharmonium, was ubiquitous by the 1940s. xxThere were, of course, many early-20thcentury instrument inventors who were not businessmen. Although the theremin did enjoy brief commercial exposure with RCA in 1928, its inventor Leon Theremin was not market-savvy. Maurice Martenot, who presented his ondes Martenot in Paris in 1928, and Friedrich Trautwein, who unveiled his Trautonium in Berlin that same year, were compelled less by business than by curiosity 18

about sonic creation. Hugh Le Caine, who designed the Electronic Sackbut in Canada in 1946, was supported by the Canada Research Council to provide manufacturing opportunities for Canadian companies. But Le Caine was the quintessential engineer and businessman’s enemy, whose ongoing process of reconfiguring and upgrading his inventions made it impossible to freeze his designs long enough to build a product for commercial release. xxRaymond Scott not only invented electronic instruments; he invested considerable resources in doing so. Synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog recalled, in a phone interview with Scott archivist Irwin Chusid in 1993, that he and his father visited Scott at his four-story home in North Hills, Long Island, around 1955. As Moog described it, “[Scott] had room after room of fancy machines. It was a football field down there, half a dozen big rooms, impeccably set up. The floors were painted, like some high class industrial laboratory. He had nothing but the best and the biggest machines. He had a whole room of metal working equipment and a room full of woodworking equipment, and this huge barn of a room for electronic stuff.” As Moog pointed out, no one puts together an extensive laboratory overnight. Scott had been at it for years, and he was familiar with electronic music machine originators like Trautwein, Theremin, and Le Caine.

1938 (Age 29)

“Scott used to rummage through the war-surplus electronic stuff on Canal Street in Manhattan at the close of WWII to nd parts for his electronic devices. He obtained a tape recorder that would only record for 1 minute. It was put to use by Scott before any commercial tape recorder was yet available.” N.L. Bates, RS orch. bassist Raymond Scott’s 1946 Patent disclosure: The Orchestra Machine

xxBuilding on the work of his predecessors, and employing his own intuitive sense of what he called "primitive engineering," Scott developed the Clavivox, the Circle Machine sequencer, and the Electronium, which are discussed elsewhere in this booklet. xxThe Electronium, which Scott began to develop in 1959—and like Le Caine’s Sackbut never ﬁnished to the inventor’s ultimate satisfaction—was an electronic system that employed processes based on controlled randomness to generate rhythms, melodies, and timbres. Scott intended it to be a composing-performing machine, a very compelling idea that was in the air by the late 1960s and that was explored independently by several people in different ways. Both the multi-sequencer CEMS (Coordinated Electronic Music Studio) System, which I designed with Robert Moog in the late 1960s for the State University of New York at Albany, and the SalMar Construction, a digitally-controlled instrument built by Salvatore Martirano at the University of Illinois, were based on interactive pseudorandom composition. xxFrom Moog’s verbal and Scott’s privately written recollections, and, for that matter, from Scott’s almost complete lack of published information about his instruments, one could observe that Scott’s unwillingness to disclose his inventions caused his business and historical-recognition indices to rate in 20

the negative numbers. How, after all, can you run a business inventing instruments if you don’t tell anyone about them? How can you get recognition for technological advances if you keep them secret? xxScott expressed his paranoia in other ways as well. In an unpublished 1980 letter, he mentioned that Vladimir Ussachevsky, Mario Davidowsky, Myron Schaeffer, Herb Deutsch, and Morton Gould had all seen his sequencer, and he observed, “Word naturally got around about the nature of what my device accomplished....” It was an interest ing statement that lends evidence of both Scott’s “paranoia” and a very egocentric view of progress, wherein technology is developed by one person and then stolen by others. xxIn fact, popular ideas often evolve at a particular time and are realized more or less simultaneously by different people. The idea of an electronic sequencer was prevalent in the 1960s, and technicians with different perspectives and histories, such as Donald Buchla, also realized the idea in hardware. xxInnovative, visionary, and deeply involved as he was, instrument invention was but one side of Scott’s professional life. The other side was music. And in music, Scott was a huge commercial success—from the Raymond Scott Quintet in the 1930s to the electronic commercial jingles he wrote for TV and radio in the 1960s. In 1964 he

c.1953

“The art of magnetic tape recording has developed to an extent where a large number of channels or tracks can be applied to magnetic tape. The tracks are parallel to each other and are normally adapted for carrying independent signals.” —Raymond Scott,

1953 (from his US Patent #2783311)

Scott’s music speaks for itself and his instruments speak through his music. His music is, indeed, 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. xxAnd that is really the point: Scott devel oped his instruments to make his music, and he did it so well that what you hear is the music. © 1999 Joel Chadabe

released Soothing Sounds for Baby, a series of electronic compositions aimed at different levels of infant development between one and 18 months. The recordings were not a commercial success, but it was a fascinating project in the minimalist quality of the music itself, in its assumptions about what babies could and should listen to, and in the business sense of targeting a particular market. It could be that Scott deﬁned his public too narrowly. In the context of the minimalist music of the 1980s and 1990s, Soothing Sounds for Baby developed a second life in the 18-month to 90-year range.

3-album series “Soothing Sounds for Baby,” featur ing Scott’s electronic music, was issued under auspices of Gesell Institute of Child Development xx

“Solenoid 47 is provided to withdraw armature 43 from contact 42 and to close a second circuit through contact 48. This establishes the high speed operation through wires 45 and 49, the spring 46 maintaining such high speed operation.” —Raymond Scott, 1953 (from his US Patent #2779826)

In the early 1950s, Scott installed tape components and a control panel on his piano, allowing him to electronically modify the piano’s sound while recording the results.

Facing page: Scott and wife (Dorothy Collins) at work in home studio. From the cover of The Jingle Workshop promotional LP, 1957 Right: Promotion al poster for Scott’s commercial music company, The Jingle Workshop Below: element from RS business stationery

MANHATTAN

RESEARCH INC.

ESTABLISHED

1946

A DIVISION OF RAYMOND SCOTT ENTERPRISES, INC.

Robert Moog “Scott was in the forefront of developing the technology, and he was in the forefront of using it commercially as a musician.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Herb Deutsch “I remember distinctly what he told me—he wanted to take the work out of being a composer. That used to get me really upset!” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Jim Henson and Raymond Scott

by Karen Falk and Irwin Chusid . . . . . . . 52

Alan Entenman “The Electronium would never be ﬁnished. He was always changing and modifying it. What it did one day was not necessarily what it would do the next.”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Thomas Rhea “The idea that he anticipated some artiﬁcial intelligence concepts and some compositional concepts that other people believe somebody else did, I think is very important.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

Mitzi Scott “He would come in for lunch. I would put his lunch on the table and go back to the kitchen to get mine. By the time I’d get back to the table, he was gone—back in the lab.”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86

Additionally… TRACK NOTES: 26

by Jeff Winner. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

Mining the archives

by Gert-Jan Blom and Jeff Winner . . . . . . 100

â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Raymond Scott, 1949

Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog Synthesizer and proprietor of Big Briar, Inc., was interviewed at his home in Leister, NC, via phone by Irwin Chusid on May 19, 1993.

Robert Moog 30

IC: When did you ﬁrst meet Raymond Scott? Moog: Sometime around 1955. I lived with my parents, in Flushing, New York, and was selling theremins out of their basement. I was going to Columbia University and my father—an engineer—and I sometimes worked together on things. Scott wanted to obtain the electronic part of the theremin to incorporate it in something he was work ing on. So my father and I went out to Scott’s four-story house in North Hills, on Long Island. We had never seen anything like it. I remember Scott showing us around the place—the whole basement was like a wet dream for a handyman. Scott described what he wanted, although he didn’t tell us how he was gonna use it. He showed us his prototype of a keyboard instrument. There was a very light vane, about an inch wide and a foot and a half long, positioned across the backs of the

“Scott was in the forefront of developing the technology, and he was in the forefront of using it commercially as a musician.” key levers. The vane was pivoted at the high—the right-hand—end of the keyboard. When you pressed a key, the vane went up; the higher the key, the more the vane would rise. He’d attached a small metal electrode to the free end of the vane, and had wired in our theremin so that the vane electrode would ‘play’ the theremin. I think his prototype also had a weighted reed that vibrated about six times a second, thereby introducing vibrato into the tone. IC: Do you remember him asking you to help design a sequencer? Moog: No. I’m not saying that didn’t happen. My way of working back then, up until 1968 or so, was really a hobby. If somebody asked me to design something, I did it in a matter of hours or days. Often there was no documentation. IC: Scott credits you with coining the term “sequencer.” Is that true? Moog: I don’t think so. The ﬁrst sequencer [by name] I can remember Buchla came out

with. I knew about it around 1967, but Buchla had developed it two or three years before. IC: One of Raymond’s first sequencers was called a “Circle Machine.” We have a videotape of filmed commercials for which Raymond did electronic soundtracks around ’60-’61. There’s a couple for Auto-Lite batteries that use what’s obviously a sequencer, with a series of pitches. Moog: That 30 feet of wall space that [Scott associate] Herb Deutsch talked about [in an article in Music, Computers and Software] seeing in 1965 did exist, and I can’t remember the first time I saw that much stuff. But you don’t go from having nothing one day to having 30 feet of equipment the next. Scott probably was fooling with that kind of stuff for years and years. And if you have something that has sequential sound from ’61, it could have been that Scott had begun this in 1956 or ’57 when I was first down there. 31

IC: Can you put Scott’s overall contribution to electronic music and studio recording and engineering in historical perspective? Moog: He had two careers. His Lucky Strike Hit Parade gig and the Raymond Scott quintet were what he did for money, for a living. But what really interested him was inventing. Unfortunately, he didn’t have that much inﬂuence. Because of his paranoia, any inﬂuence he had on other musical instrument designers resulted from information that leaked out. There are lots of people who publish. Publishing was the last thing Raymond Scott would have done. He knew all about [Friedrich] Trautwein [inventor of the Trautonium (1928)], he

POPULAR MECHANICS, SEPTEMBER, 1959

IC: It would put him in the forefront of developing this technology. Moog: Oh, deﬁnitely! No doubt about that. He was in the forefront of developing the technology, and he was in the forefront of using it commercially as a musician.

The Clavivox, one of Scott’s keyboard synthesizers (applied for 1956, granted 1959—see page 38/39)

“Scott was always very guarded about his current projects. I don’t believe he ever told me exactly what all the stuff we were designing and building for him was going to be used for.” 32

“For writing film scores, Scott has developed an instrument which he calls the "Videola." The mechanism operates a movie film in a projection room in another part of the house by remote control. The movie is flashed on a television screen, so that Scott can watch the film as he composes appropriate music. A record ing apparatus is hooked up to the Videola, as well, so that he can stop, play back, listen, rub out, and rewrite.”—POPULAR MECHANICS

Scott, wife Dorothy and daughter Deborah relaxing in their North Hills (NY) home, 1957 (Radio/TV Mirror)

“I have been putting together an electronic laboratory for years — I guess about 20 years now, and I have a rather deep interest in things electronic and things electro-acoustical.” —Raymond Scott, mid-1960s

knew all about Theremin, he knew all about Harold Bojé [one of Stockhausen’s collaborators at the WDR studios in Cologne]. These people wrote articles, and there were few enough articles back then that if you wrote something, everybody knew about it. But Scott didn’t do that. It was word of mouth and very hard to substantiate.

that have been built since the turn of the century that you could call a synthesizer. For instance, there was something that used 15-kilowatt electrical generators, called a Telharmonium. It was built around the turn of the century.

IC: And Scott. Moog: Yeah.

IC: Anything which creates sound electron ically could be considered a synthesizer? Moog: Well, anything that creates sound and has the capability of being reconﬁg ured. An instrument that you turn on and play, like a theremin, is not a synthesizer. But an instrument that you turn on, and you can turn this and turn that and ﬂip this switch and put that patch cord in and actually change the quality of the sound—that’s a synthesizer.

IC: Scott credited him with inventing one of the ﬁrst synthesizers. Someone said that Raymond had a synthesizer as early as 1949. Moog: Well, there are all sorts of things

IC: They weren’t calling it a synthesizer back then, were they? Moog: I can remember the word ﬁrst being used consistently with respect to one invention—the RCA electronic sound synthesizer,

IC: Have you ever heard of Hugh Le Caine? Moog: Oh yeah! There’s a book on his life. Le Caine worked for the National Research Council in Canada, and everything of Hugh Le Caine’s was published. Hugh Le Caine had a profound inﬂuence on people like me.

“Raymond Scott had brilliant intuition—he once said to me, ‘The trouble with you is that you believe just because you think about something, then it's done.’ Back then I was having a hell of a problem managing my time—Raymond put his nger on part of the problem.”—Robert Moog

in the late ’40s. Two of them were built. They were four-voice instruments. One of them still exists—or did until recently—at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. It’s been described in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. It was completely programmed from a paper roll, like a piano roll. To compose on it you would punch holes in the roll. IC: Scott had all these inventions—the Clavivox, the early sequencer, the Electronium. Why weren’t these commercially developed? Why did Raymond never capitalize on them, other than using them in his music or commercials? Moog: Well, I think there was something irrational there. It’s like giving away your child. The last thing he needed was to make more money. The guy had this four-story house…. IC: 32 rooms… Moog: Yeah, it was a big place! It had an elevator going from one ﬂoor to the other. Dorothy Collins lived on one ﬂoor, he lived on another, and the basement was this incredible playground. Anyway, after 1957, when my father and I built this thing for the Scott Clavivox, Raymond contacted us every now and then. 36

He’d tell us about this, or ask us about that. But it was very infrequent, and I can’t remember actually doing anything for him throughout the early ’60s. Then, in 1964, when I set up shop upstate in Trumansburg, New York, somehow that interested him because that meant I could make special little things for him. We designed and built a lot of small circuits for him. He would call frequently, and it went beyond a business relationship. My wife and I became fairly friendly with him. He used to come up to Trumansburg periodic ally, to give me new assignments and check on how our work was coming. On one of those trips he told us about this wonderful woman he’d met, and on a later trip he brought Mitzi with him and they were married in Trumansburg by Dana Poyer, the local Justice of the Peace. But Scott was always very guarded about his current projects. I don’t believe he ever told me exactly what all the stuff we were designing and building for him was going to be used for. IC: You’re much younger than Raymond. Did you look up to him? Did he seem to you a ﬁgure who was larger than life, or a legendary character? Moog: ‘Legendary’ I wouldn’t give him,

because I think I saw him pretty accurately for what he was. But he was something larger than life. He lived on an economic plane that was several layers removed from what I was used to. IC: Did you respect what he was doing technologically? Did it make sense to you, or did it seem haphazard? Did he seem like an absent-minded genius-professor who couldn’t quite get focused? Moog: No, because I was a little bit like that myself. I remember my father and I were more or less making fun of him—that he had all this stuff and he didn’t have a workbench. Obviously he just liked ‘stuff’. You can’t imagine these rooms of tools, of big expensive milling machines. He had several lathes of the highest quality. We had one that my father picked up for $65, that went back to the turn of the century. And here Scott had all these brand new shiny high-tech tools, one after the other, and

none of them looked liked they’d ever been used. IC: Obviously he was working, because he developed the Clavivox, the Electronium, and the sequencer. Moog: Yeah, I ﬁgured that at some point he went off in the corner and got dirty. But my memory of him was of a guy who liked playing around—big time. IC: …Never spent much time marketing it. Moog: He wasn’t interested in marketing. He said he was, but I never got the feeling that he wanted to do anything more than fool around. IC: He’s a strange sort of fellow—paranoid, very stubborn… Moog: Yep. IC: …had to do it his own way. Moog: Yep.

“He had so much imagination, and so much intuition—this funny intuition that some people have— that he could sort of sh around and get something to work and do exactly what he wanted it to do.” —Robert Moog 37

“The combination of a gliding change in pitch with the vibrato of this invention produces musical effects of an unusual tonal quality.”—Raymond Scott, 1956 (from US Patent #2871745: “the Clavivox”)

2,871,745 KEYBOARD OPERATED ELECTRICAL MUSICAL INSTRUMENT Raymond Scott, Manhasset, N. Y. Application December 20, 1956, Serial No. 629,505 15 Claims. (Cl. 84—1.25) This invention relates to electronic musical instruments and more particularly to such an instrument oper ated by a keyboard of the piano type. The invention provides a keyboard instrument of sim ple and reliable operation where a melody may be pro duced which smoothly and accurately slides in pitch from any note on the keyboard to any other note on the keyboard, whether higher or lower, without having to press any intervening notes. In general, the present musical instrument combines a tunable oscillator device of the type known as a “Theremin,” as disclosed in U.S. patent No. 1,661,058, with a piano keyboard in such a way as to provide positive control of the pitch of the emitted note. The “Theremin” is played by slight variations in capacitance produced by moving one hand of the oper ator toward and away from a control electrode. The other hand may be used for volume control. The “Theremin,” however, is extremely difﬁcult to play. It is particularly difﬁcult to obtain accurate pitch because extremely slight variations in the position of the hand of the operator will cause a particular note to sound off key. In fact, and although the “Theremin” has been known and greatly appreciated for more than 30 years, there are hardly more than about a half-dozen artists in the country who are capable of rendering satisfactory performances on the instrument. With the foregoing in mind, the present invention provides a form of piano keyboard for pitch control of

a “Theremin” instrument which is arranged to effect mechanical variations of predetermined magnitudes, thus avoiding the inaccuracies of pitch which result when the instrument is played by body capacitance effects involving changes in the position of the hand of the artist. A particular advantage of my instrument is that each note is reached by smooth, sliding, predetermined ascents or descents, through predetermined increments of pitch, this action resulting in an extremely pleasing musical effect. Moreover, the gliding change from one note to another may be effected at varying rates at the will of the artist, although the final pitch of the note is always true regardless of any particular technique or expression employed by the artist. Adjustable means are further provided for individually mechanically tuning the particular note produced by each of the keys without affecting the over-all mechani cal action of the instrument. Additionally, means are provided for obtaining a con trollable vibrato effect, which is electro-mechanical, so as to simulate and derive the benefit of manual operation while obtaining the advantages of electrically con trolled precision. The combination of a gliding change in pitch with the vibrato of this invention produces musi cal effects of an unusual tonal quality. […] Referring to Figure 1, there is shown an oscillator 10 of fixed frequency which may be 500 kilocycles, for example. There is also a tunable oscillator 11 which normally emits a frequency of 500 kilocycles, this frequency being reducible by increasing the capacitance between ground and a control terminal 12. The outputs of the oscillators 11 and 12 are connected to a hetero dyne mixer 13. A filter 14 is connected to the output of the mixer 13 and passes frequencies in the audible range, up to 20 kilocycles, for example. The beat frequency between oscillators 10 and 11 which is produced in

Electronic Labyrinth JU LY 1 9 5 9 H I - FI • H A M RA DI O • S W L • TE ST GE A R 35 C EN T S

“The house where Raymond Scott and Dorothy Collins and their two children live is not a home — in any ordinary sense; it is a 32-room electronic labyrinth. A completely self-taught engineer, Raymond has lled many of the rooms with special electronic devices used in his composing and recording chores that have confounded experts in the eld. The exact worth of all the electronic installations is a mystery, even to Raymond, but he estimates that he has a ‘couple hundred thousand dollars’ invested in equipment. In his basement Raymond has all the machinery necessary for building his sound equipment. Most of the units in his sound recording studio were designed and built in this workshop. One complete room in the basement is lled with nothing but cabinets full of spare parts.” Alan D. Haas, “Raymond Scott: Electronics Enthusiast Par Excellence.’ Popular Electronics, July, 1959

“One complete room in the basement is ﬁlled with nothing but cabinets full of spare parts.”

“In his well-equipped machine shop, Scott arranges the tools he uses in his electronics work and do-ityourself projects. Scott’s various electronic devices take up eight whole rooms in the house.” (1957)

Raymond Scott’s legendary “Wall of Dazzle,” mid-1950s

“Dorothy Collins makes test recording in husband’s home recording studio as Scott adjusts equipment settings”

“Scott uses microscope to see that grooves are cut correctly on test record made in his studio”

Photos and captions from POPULAR ELECTRONICS (July, 1959) and POPULAR MECHANICS (September, 1959)

“Wife Dorothy and daughter Debbie listen as Scott explains the intricacy of the equipment which he developed for his own needs”

New Electronic Sounds for Commercials column: Along Madison Avenue With Kaselow by Joseph Kaselow New York Herald Tribune, July 19, 1960

few day s ago we journeyed out to music vcomposer Raymond’s Scott’s mansion in Manhasset on the trail of a device he invented that makes “new sounds” for radio and TV commercials. (You may think you’ve heard all there is, but you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.) Mr. Scott, a slight, soft-spoken, soft-eyed man, greeted us at the door in shorts and open-necked sports shirt, and led us into an enormous sitting room where we sat down. When he spoke he was accompanied by a beepswish sound coming from a room to the right that looked like it might be powering the Defense Department’s DEW radar network. xx“Writing a jingle or any lyric,” he said right off, “is like writing a letter—particularly a love letter.” (His wife is Dorothy Collins who is in Toronto doing “South Paciﬁc.”) “You must say it simply and with feeling. And you might also say I don’t feel that writing jingles is cheapening. We’re proud to be said to be writing jingles. Perhaps if you’re just a jingle writer you might be a little embarrassed by it.” xxAs most people know, Mr. Scott is not just a jingle writer. He started many years ago developing new and distinctive sounds in popular music. If you’re pre-Presley you might recall “Twilight in

Turkey,” “Powerhouse,” “Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals,” “The Toy Trumpet,” and a personal favorite for this section, “Business Man’s Bounce.” One Word Key He went on: “I can say, probably with a lot of bias—no, not with bias, because I believe it—that music develops what I call a satellite, or orbital, effect. It keeps going round and round in your mind and heart. The key to it all is in one word—love. People say, for instance, I love that tune.” The word crops up continually in his conversation. xxAs for the “new sound,” it developed this way. Mr. Scott and his partners in the Jingle Work Shop, at 140 W. 57th St., took to heart that most reiterated requested of ad agency men—“We don’t want just another jingle.” Mr. Scott, a creative electronic genius as well as a composer, considered this a challenge. (He’s got some $100,000 worth of electronics equipment stashed around the house and a full-time man turning his ideas into reality and keeping the stuff in shape.) Out of his imaginings came a device, as yet unnamed. (His sales manager calls it the “Karloff,” which might give you an idea.)

Scott showing “Karloff” (left) and Clavivox (above), c. 1959

ad v ertising age

On Sure Footing Mr. Scott led us into the beep-swish room to show us his brain-child, and we felt a certain sense of security only because we were wearing rubbersoled shoes. 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 and he’ll come up with a reasonable facsimile. Sometimes he’ll tie it 48

in with another invention of his, the Clavivox, which is supposed to approximate the human voice in some of its phases. xxAfter demonstrating the device, Mr. Scott showed us through his electronics and working rooms (about seven or eight of them) downstairs. It may have been our imagination, but as we were leaving we could have sworn the Clavivox, off in the distance, was saying, “Let’s stop spinning the wheels and get into high gear.”

Commercials Go Off the Beaten Sound Track unidentiﬁed magazine article [December, 1960]

• Inventor Raymond Scott produces a new machine for his radio/tv commercials rm, The Jingle Workshop • Innite musical-electronic combinations now give commercials production a brand new audio dimension

or many years Raymond Scott was well-known xas the musical director of Your Hit Parade. But lately Scott has been attracting a good deal of attention as the inventor of electronic equipment for musical effects. One of his machines is capable of startling applications to radio/tv commercial production. xxSince October, commercials using Scott’s electronic and musical effects have gone on the air for Vicks, Lever Bros., Alcoa, and Hamm’s Beer. Commercials for other advertisers are now being devel oped and will be broadcast shortly. xxScott’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. Known affectionately as Karloff, the machine could only have been put together by a musician (such as Scott) who is also a devoted electronic inventor (such as Scott).

xxCarl Bufﬁngton, radio/tv director of Morse International, asked Scott to develop an unusual approach to a spot campaign in the spring of this year. Scott happens to have had a well-equipped electronic and machine shop in his Manhasset home for 12 years. xxThe electronic and musical equipment which Scott assembled became the core of his present machine, a machine that is still growing. That’s not all; Scott is ready to invent other musical-electronic machines or accessories as he needs them. His mechanical and electronic facilities, worth $100,000, are a plant right on the premises of his home which shop and studio operators can envy. xxHad Scott possessed only an electronic and mechanical talent, his invention might have passed unnoticed. But as a celebrated musician with so much experience in broadcasting and advertising, Scott’s achievement as an inventor could not long be kept a secret. To date, representatives of 20 advertising agencies, three ﬁlm producers, and one

station group have journeyed to Manhasset to visit Scott’s musical-electronic laboratory. xxA Canadian visitor, Henry Karplus, radio/tv director of Roynolds-Reynolds and Co., Ltd., of Toronto, described Scott’s achievement as “the commercial of the future.” xxScott is very reluctant to give his machine a name, since it is the musical talent using the machine as a tool, and not the machine itself, that really counts. xxThe machine uses several electronic tone gen erators, and others can be added if needed. A control panel directs pitch, timbre, intensity, tempo, accent, and repetition. It can select from an unlim ited number if sources and make up inﬁnite combinations and permutations. xxThe Manhasset behemoth can do virtually any thing. It can sound like a group of bongo drums. It

can give impressions which suggest common noises. It can create the mood of musical tonepoems. And it can also take the advertiser’s theme music and produce limitless emotional variations on it to suit a variety of musical styles — all, of course, if Scott is at the controls. xxCompared to other musical-electronics effects methods, which reply heavily on playing tape offspeed or backwards, Scott’s approach is far less time-consuming and produces a much wider range of results. Compared to music from conventional sources, it is slower in development but faster in production. It is also slightly cheaper than ordi nary music. xxIf Karloff doesn’t become the accepted name for a process which mixes so many musical and electronic elements together, perhaps someone might suggest that it be called Scott’s Emulsion.

RAYMOND SCOTT’S MUSIC MACHINE (1960) Where the sound comes from: a Clavivox (another Scott invention), an electric organ, and electronic tone generators which are capable of producing any pitch that is selected. What happens to the sound: it is given a basic rhythm continuity by a rotating scanning device in which 200 elements can be combined in innite permutations of pitch, tempo, meter, timbre, or special mood. What the result is like: anything from a set of bongos to a full orchestra, from a whimsical pop and squeak to an evocative emotional background setting the scene. Voices and other instruments which are used blend well in the nal delivered sound track. Who’s using it: Vicks (Morse International), Vim of Lever Bros. (OBM), Alcoa (KM&G), Hamm’s (C-M), and Coronet-Esquire station WQXI, Atlanta.

Rack layout for rhythm machine, Sept. 1960 (See ﬁnished wall on page 60) Right: Shelves for orscillators

Raymond Scott’s ‘Sounds Electronique’ Accents New Emphasis on Audio by Harry W. McMahan Advertising Age – The National Newspaper of Marketing (Feature Section), April 16, 1962

that the average American family is ex xposed to more than 500 commercials a week (yep, that’s the ﬁgure), how do you ever get ’em to look up when yours comes on? xx“Grab ’em by the ears!” is Ray Scott’s answer. xxThe man may have something there. The industry has become more and more conscious of a need for a “new sound” to pique the curiosity of the viewer and give a distinctive mark to the advertiser. xxScott’s new “Sounds Electronique” is a big help in these two directions. Just possibly, it gives an audio edge to a number of commercials lately: Autolite (BBDO), Vim (Ogilvy), Thermo-Fax (EWRR), Parker Pen (Burnett) and Nescafé of Canada (Hayhurst, Toronto), for instance. xxElectronically manipulated sounds are not new, of course. Musically, they go back to the Hammond organ. Magnetic quarter-inch tape came along to add a new tool. Various engineers began tricks of slowing, speeding, re-recordings. Multi-tracking. Filters. Reverse ﬂipping of tape segments. “Woopweeping” with audio oscillators. Up to now, most of the trick tracks (the Maxwell House “Percolator” award-winner, for instance) have come out of these devices. xxScott’s newer approach begins with music, combines the effects, then explores the unending world of the electronics engineer. It’s like putting an IBM ow

computer to work on the potentials of a basic creative idea. xxScott, of course, is best known as a composer (“18th Century Drawing Room”), jingle writer (“Be Happy, Go Lucky” and the RAB award-winning Esso jingle) and conductor (“Hit Parade”). His excursion into engineering began “as a hob by,” now crowds eight rooms of his Long Island home with “something over $100,000” in equipment. Near $150,000, I’d say. xxBetimes, he is a philosopher and a phrase- maker about our business. Over his grand piano is a placque with these words of advice to himself, as a jingle writer: xx“Ideally, the words should make sense.” xxHis term for what he believes an advertiser must have to break through the TV viewers’ apathy is an “audio logo.” He speaks of “new plastic sounds” and “electronic abstractions.” xx(Ed. note: Mr. Scott will be a member of the faculty at the Advertising Age Creative Workshop in Chicago, July 31–Aug. 3—and we trust he uses some of this colorful language then.) xxBut, best of all, we like the avowed aim of his “Sounds Electronique.” Raymond Scott says: “Grab ’em by the ears.” 53

Herb Deutsch Herb Deutsch is Professor of Music at Hofstra University on Long Land, New York, where he directs the school’s electronic music and music business programs. He is the author of ElectroAcoustic Music: Its First Century (CPT/Belwin Music). Deutsch helped Robert Moog develop the rst Moog Synthesizer in 1964. He became friends with Raymond Scott during the mid1960s, and remained on good terms with Scott for years. He was interviewed via phone by Irwin Chusid on May 19, 1993.

IC: Raymond built the Clavivox, the Electronium, and developed the sequencer. How come he wasn’t able to commercially exploit these? Were these devices so one-of-a-kind that they couldn’t be duplicated? Bob Moog seems to feel that Scott was paranoid, was afraid people would steal his ideas, and he was so preoccupied with building and inventing that he never pursued marketing his creations. Deutsch: My memory of Raymond at that time is very similar. Through Bob, I met Raymond, who lived near me on Long Island. I started to work with him as a kind of “go-fer.” I worked with Raymond in the 54

studio with his engineer—whose name I can’t remember. The thing about Raymond, without being negative—I was struck by his strangeness. He was an extremely proud man. He had no ego problems, but he was a little intimidated by the professional musical world. Not the commercial world, but the ‘serious’ music world. He was afraid of bringing out products, because he may have been a little paranoid about things getting ripped off. And I’m not sure how many of those things were really finished products. The Electronium never really got finished, although it was certainly 99 per cent finished. IC: Someone said they thought Raymond had a synthesizer in 1949. I have no documentation of Raymond saying that, although I know he was working with electronic instruments in the fifties. Deutsch: He certainly was working with electronic instruments back in the forties. IC: Raymond said he believed Moog coined the word ‘sequencer’. Deutsch: The term ‘sequencer’ was a concept in the literature of electronic music by 1965. Bob designed his first sequencer—and actually sold this first sequencer—around ’65’66. He built a unit for Raymond. I remem-

ber seeing it at Raymond’s studio. But the thing Bob had built for him was not a typical sequencer; it was a rather strange device. IC: The device that Raymond was using in commercials around ’60 or ’61 is a sequencer, no question. Deutsch: That’s the one with unijunction transistors and a bunch of relays. IC: Was the “Circle Machine” part of this? Deutsch: The Circle Machine was separate, but it was all kind of interrelated. The Circle Machine was a device he made with a circular series of lights in one of these panels, and that was the control area. I was not totally blown away by it, because it seemed to be an obvious extension of the ideas of the sequencer. The way he had designed the sequencer was much more impressive. It worked with hundreds and hundreds of relays, and was a fascinating device. I’ve talked to Bob about that, and he

said, ‘I never built that stuff for Raymond. I sold Raymond a lot of modules.’ IC: I got a good sense from talking to Moog about Raymond’s role in the history of electronic music. Moog feels that Raymond wasn’t that inﬂuential because he didn’t publish, didn’t publicize, never went public. Deutsch: He didn’t work in the circles that were developing electronic music. He worked kind of like his colleague, the Maxwell House Coffee theme guy, Eric Siday. They both were doing a lot of electronic music, but for commercials. They weren’t in academic circles. To Raymond’s credit, he knew what was going on in academic music. He knew enough to call Columbia University and talk to Vladimir Ussachevsky and be familiar with what he was doing, and what Mario Davidowsky was doing—he was at that time a young student. But his own world was a different world, and a world that he was comfortable in. I think some of these academic types put him off. I think

“To Raymond’s credit, he knew what was going on in academic music. But his own world was a different world, and a world that he was comfortable in. I think some of these academic types put him off.” 55

there was some lack of respect, and he was extremely sensitive. IC: This lack of respect—was he exaggerating it in his mind? Deutsch: Yes, I think very much. Raymond liked me because he knew I was a college teacher, but I’m also kind of a down-toearth musician who knew Raymond’s music. I played jazz—trumpet and piano. When I was a little kid, I played “The Toy Trumpet” solo in Junior High. I told Raymond, and he got a big kick out of it. So he didn’t feel paranoid around me. But he talked about it. I don’t know if he even thought it was the area that would get credit for developing electronic music. He was very proud of his own accomplishments. He was an extremely stubborn man, and a complex guy. IC: Probably not a very warm fellow, either. Deutsch: He was not a warm person. I liked him and he liked me. He was brusque, and at times quite standofﬁsh. He could put you at a distance. Although as he became less healthy, he became much friendlier and warmer. IC: Did you ever work on commercial projects with Raymond? 56

Deutsch: I edited some tapes with him, some commercials. But when I was working with him, he was not getting a lot of work anymore. That would have been around ’68. Around the time he moved out to California, I was not in communication with him that much any more.

IC: That was ’72—because of the Electronium, which was a total preoccupation. Deutsch: What I recall about the Electronium is it grew out of the modules that Moog built for him. By the late ’60s, Scott had started to explore ways of making this into a kind of random-sequencing device. He could turn it on and it could generate sequences at random, based on parameters that he could control. That was the stuff that Bob had made. To me, it was certainly not a typical Moog sequencer. In fact, I don’t think it had a keyboard. IC: There were knobs and switches. Deutsch: Yeah, but most of the sounds were Moog modules—at ﬁrst. Then, of course, he went to California and really developed it. That was something different. IC: The irony of random composition is that Raymond spent a lifetime in music trying to control the end product—trying to control the musicians, the microphone, the engin eering, the mix. Deutsch: I remember distinctly what he told me—and he told me a lot of times. He wanted to take the work out of being a musician. That used to get me really upset! I think that may have been at the root of the things that upset a lot of musicians he talked to.

He said, ‘Look, I just want to sit here, and I’d like to turn this machine on, and whenever it does something good, I want to record it at that point.’ He was really one of the most unusual people I ever met. I guess a lot of people have said that. He had an absolutely amazing mind. I was always blown away by his imagination and by his unusual thought processes. Sometimes I was really upset about things he said, like ‘It’s almost insulting to work as a composer. You shouldn’t have to do that. You should be able to sit there and have ideas come to you.’ On the other hand, the ability he had to conceive of things electronically was amazing. IC: This puts a different spin on his work. Because here you think, ‘Oh, he’s just trying to make better music.’ But on the other hand, he’s looking not so much at the end, but more at the means. Deutsch: It was always this kind of metaphysical thing, this almost magical thing about thinking things to the point where they would happen and you’d not have to work at it. He was not a lazy guy—far from it. He worked incredibly hard to take the work out of being a composer.

Block diagram for â&#x20AC;&#x153;Bandito the Bongo artist,â&#x20AC;? 1968 Right: a mid-1960s brochure for Manhattan Research, Inc.

Jim Henson AND RAYMOND SCOTT

by Karen Falk and Irwin Chusid

Karen Falk is an historian in charge of The

Jim Henson Company Archives in New York

Jim Henson’s career, music xwas extremely important to his work. His local Washington show, Sam and Friends (1955–1961), showcased well known artists’ work along with that of obscure composers and singers. Later, The Muppet Show featured an amazing array of music, and scores and songs by highly respected composers enhance all Muppet movies. Henson loved jazz in particular and used jazz tracks for many of his projects, often collaborating with musicians to compose the pieces. He kept up to date on innovations in electronic music and, in the mid1960s, purchased one of the early Moog synthesizers. In this context, a Jim Henson/ Raymond Scott collaboration was not surprising. In 1963, Jim Henson and his family moved from Maryland to New York where he set up an ofﬁce/workshop on East 53rd Street that would serve as Muppet headquarters for ﬁve years. In this magical tworoom space, Henson showed concepts to potential backers, sketched out characters, and stayed up all night with staffers Frank Oz, Jerry Juhl and Jerry Nelson putting the h ro u g h ou t

finishing touches on the project du jour. During those years, while also making hundreds of commercials and performing the Muppets on variety shows, Henson developed numerous concepts for television, short films, and industrial presentations. Jerry Juhl remembers, “Jim and I would sit and think up anything—from hour-long things to five minute sketches for The Ed Sullivan Show.” Some of these projects were completed, but many never got much beyond the idea phase. Henson also loved experimenting with film and camera techniques. Before he developed a regular television series or major motion pictures, he created several short films with his Bolex camera and animation stand. He painted under the camera and moved cut paper to music, meticulously charting the soundtracks frame by frame. Henson and Juhl also wrote various parody scripts, and Henson filmed several philo sophical explorations, all with very exact music specifications. In 1966, Henson began working on a short film project that would take several forms over the next few years. Henson was intrigued by thought processes and the workings of the mind and attempted to visualize these on film. The first incarnations of this project were two combination 61

“THE ORGANIZED MIND”

puppetry and film crea film, and he pretions that aired on The sented it again on Mike Douglas Show in The Tonight Show July 1966. They starred in both 1968 and Limbo, a floating foam in 1974, each time rubber face, manipulausing Scott’s ted with strings to make soundtrack. the mouth move. Limbo xxClearly, Henson was superimposed over a was intrigued by filmed portrayal of the Limbo and eager inner workings of his to translate it to psyche. The first piece, “I other formats. He Know Who I Am,” took a made a Bufferin A “Muppet” representing Limbo’s fear humorous look at the pain-reliever identifying numbers commercial in assigned to people (passport, driver’s 1967, which he titled “Memories.” license, etc.). The second piece, “The Orga It depicted a man’s pleasant thoughts being nized Mind,” was a tour of Limbo’s mind, interrupted by a headache; after taking showing how different thoughts were cateBufferin, of course, the pleasant thoughts gorized: plumbing images represented the return. This commercial also featured an physical workings; snapshots of family electronic score by Scott. were happy thoughts; voluptuous women Two additional Henson films utilizing an represented lust, and fears appeared as electronic score by Scott (and included on monsters. this album) were Ripples and Wheels That Henson and Raymond Scott became Go, both from 1967. According to Jon Stone acquainted around 1965 and began collabo(a collaborator and director/producer of rating on several projects. A 1966 version of Sesame Street), these films were created by “The Organized Mind” presented on The Henson for a short films contest at MontréMike Douglas Show featured a musique al’s “Expo67.” Shot in January, concrète soundtrack by Scott (included on Ripples featured Stone tossing pebbles into this album). Henson continued to revise the water—making ripples. Wheels That Go 62

Bufferin “Memories” JIM HENSON 1967 Jim Henson adapted his Limbo character and his “Organized Mind” concept for this Bufferin pain reliever TV commercial, entitled “Memories.” The narrator (Henson) describes how a headachealmost ruined a family outing.

P hotos b y J im H enson , 1 9 6 7 © T he J im H enson C o .

Henson combined still photographs with live action in “Memories.” Some of the stills, which zoom past the viewer in a fraction of a second, were shot in Scott’s studio (see hightligted example).

Script for The Paperwork Explosion, typed on “Muppets” stationery. Above: Sequence from director’s storyboard (illustrated with images from the ﬁnished ﬁlm).

features Henson’s son Brian playing with things with wheels. Each are about oneminute in length; the 16mm films are owned by The Jim Henson Company. The Scott collection at the Marr Sound Archives holds an audio tape reel of the original recording session for Ripples. That same year, Henson was contracted by IBM to make a film extolling the virtues of their new product, the MT/ST, a primi tive word processor, and exploring how it would help control the overwhelming vol ume of documents that offices were generat ing. The film, titled The Paperwork Explosion and shot in October of 1967, is a quick cut collage of images and words depicting the intensity and pace of modern business. Once again, Henson collaborated with Scott on the electronic soundtrack. Henson wrote a proposal in 1969 for a one-hour program, Inside My Head, for NBC’s Experiment in Television. The show was to explore themes similar to his earlier Limbo efforts, to help the audience “gain new awareness and respect for the mind.” Unable to sell the show to NBC, Henson moved on to other projects. By this stage, he and Scott seem to have parted ways, as Scott became deeply immersed in develop ing his Electronium. In the Henson Archives, undated plans

The Henson/Scott ﬁlm Wheels That Go depicted Henson’s son Brian amusing himself with wheeled toys. (Note misspelling of Scott’s ﬁrst name. This occurred in two Henson/Scott productions; it is unknown whether this was intentional or not.)

were found for a project called The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow, a proposed Thanksgiving Day TV special with music (as Henson’s notes read) “to be written by Raymond Scott.” Unfortunately, this proj ect exists on paper only, and there is no evidence that Henson ever contacted Scott about the idea. Finally, at the Marr Archives, a reel marked “Muppet Master” was discovered. It includes various short musical themes, sound effects, and fragments created by Scott. The original purpose and usage (if any) of this material remains a mystery. 65

Scott in his electronics workshop, Farmingdale, NY Montage by Piet Schreuders / Photos by Jim Henson, 1967 ÂŠ The Jim Henson Co.

The Electronium Corporation of America presents

THE “FASCINATION SERIES” A Group of Electronic “Sound Happening” Devices

• FASCINATION – I an electronic “musical happenings” device – to provide a new, chic kind of background sound . . . ......you’re reading, studying, or talking with company.......instead of an LP, or the FM radio playing quiet background music – something much more exciting is happening in a quiet, background way ......it’s as though there’s a harpist in the room ...... very softly improvising sound patterns.......the notes are always shifting and the interest always changing – as though a very talented musician is performing softly.......beautiful electronic sounds are quietly and slowly forever changing.......the whole room is diffused with beautiful harp-like sound.......shifting and maintaining it’s interest – but very quiet and unobtrusive.......never repeating the same phrase exactly.......it’s like watching a re – where the patterns are shifting and makes you feel something as you stand fascinated before the ames – but here you are fascinated by the everchanging, beautiful sounds.......innitely changing 70

sounds of FASCINATION ONE – the marvelous new electronic “musical sounds happening maker” device that makes possible musical happenings in a very delicate, unobtrusive, and moody way.......

• FASCINATION – II the sound of tuned bongo drums – softly playing, softly swinging . . . ......FASCINATION TWO is like a wonderfully talented phantom bongo drummer who is impro vising in a quiet way – you’re not specically listen ing yet you can feel this beautiful, relaxed, con

• FASCINATION – III a ‘space sound happenings’ device . . .

.......FASCINATION THREE is designed for a more ‘knocked-out’ kind of clientele.......an outerspace addition to the Fascination series....... science ction sounds – strange, weird sounds from other planets that are – quietly, softly, and in a very relaxed way – making sounds that nobody has ever heard before – like people from another planet.......in fact, you might call this ‘background music for people from another planet.’

• FASCINATION – IV puzzlingly beautiful sounds – strangely confusing,

yet lovely harmonies – slowly mixing and emerging from each other . . . ......FASCINATION FOUR is the harmony unit ......a great big beautiful chord softly starts and comes up a little bit in volume.......as it starts to recede, another chord softly emerges from the previous chord.......becomes a little louder....... takes its place.......then, as it recedes, another beautiful chord comes up.......this is a more sophisticated version of the Fascination unit – and again provides an extraordinary kind of background – utterly original and fantastically provocative because of the blending and crossing...... continually dynamic, rising and receding of strange, beautiful harmonies.

• FASCINATION – V nature-like “sound happenings” . . . water . . . birds . . . wind . . . insects . . .

. . . FASCINATION FIVE provides nature-like sound environments.......sounds of the forest . . . the sound of a breeze – the wind in the trees . . . or jungle sounds.......or the surf at the ocean . . . always quiet – always relaxed – always electronic ......a constant array of little drops of water dropping into a brook.......in different patterns....... as though a gurgling brook is present in the room ......very quietly providing a happy, peaceful, ever-changing spectrum of sound.

tex t written b y Ray mond Scott

tinually changing musical sound atmosphere . . . imagine a drummer – a very swinging drummer – who’s playing 18, 24, or 36 tuned bongo drums ......very softly improvising on very rhythmic, quiet bongo drums.......the room is being ooded with marvelously rhythmic, tuned bongo drums that are never playing the same rhythms twice....... provides a new kind of musical happening....... strange, wonderful electronic bongo sounds continue....... while people are going about – while the cocktail party is in progress – when reading the newspaper – writing checks.......the very relaxing, continually fascinating sound is quietly going on in the background.

THE PARTICIPATOR

The PARTICIPATOR series adds interactive abilities to the original FASCINATION devices. With the addition of 26 controls, you can modify the fascinating sounds that are being auto matically created. Hence the name: PARTICIPATOR. And with the selfperforming feature, a person can perform a duet, so to speak, with the sound pattern invention circuitry. 72

The 26 controls for THE PARTICIPATOR arelabeledAthruZ.Thefunctionsofthesecontrolsisas follows:

A – Pitch Separation B – Volume C – AC Power Indicator D – Tone No. 1 E – Tone No. 2 F – Pitch Tessitura G – Decay H – Vibrato I – Glide 1 J – Glide 2 K – Continuous Pulse L – Speed 1 M – Speed 2 N – Attack O – Momentary Pulse P – Pitch Range Q – Power Switch R – Programmed Rhythm S – Pulse 1 T – Pulse 2 U – Random Sequencing Rhythm V – Master Tempo W – Submaster 1 X – Submaster 2 Y – Submaster 3 Z – Submaster 4

Alan Entenman Alan Entenman, an engineer who worked with Raymond Scott on the Electronium, was inter viewed at his home in East Setauket, NY, on Sunday, December 28, 1997, by Irwin Chusid and Gert-Jan Blom

IC: When did you ﬁrst meet Raymond? AE: Around late 1969, or 1970. I had just started an engineering company called Thunderbolt Consultants. I’m not entirely sure how we were introduced. IC: He and Mitzi were both living at 3 Willow Park? AE: They were living in a furnished, rented room in this factory. It was a bedroom, living room—like one giant studio apartment, except in a factory building. I said, ‘Ray, you could buy a house around here.’ And he said, ‘No, people wouldn’t understand.’ I guess if you had lived in a 30-room

mansion, he thought people would think him merely eccentric for living in this factory, because he clearly didn’t have a lot of money at that point. He had talent, but making money was not one of them—like many of us. Anyway, he had this Electronium, which was an evolving concept. Ray recognized that music has repetitions and patterns, and he envisioned a machine that would incorporate those patterns. He thought of an orchestra with a thousand voices. He had plug-in modules, and each module was a synthesizer—of his own design—that was capable of making a wide variety of sounds. Each synthesizer was identical, but the electronic controls for each one were different. It was all solid-state. No tubes. IC: But not digital. AE: It was digital. Well, the oscillators and such were analog, but the controls were digital. When the synthesizer modules were plugged into the Electronium backplane, it was all digital controls coming in, voltages and such—like a computer backplane, but

“He had advisors who managed his money. He’d say they just managed it and managed it, and after they were through, he managed to not have any.” 73

So you want $50,000 to build a sample Electronium? Yes, I want $50,000 because I feel that it will help me and the people associated with me to make millions. A remarkable thing is happening in the music business—a wedding of music and electronics is about to take place —the ceremony hasn’t been performed yet. And I want to perform the ceremony. $50,000 will enable me to build a second generation version of an instrument I call the Electronium. At present it is a gigantic room-full of equipment. I want to build a second generation version that is miniature in size, no larger than a home electronic organ. With $50,000 I can complete a second model, and complete it in a way that would provide us with a close-toproduction version—and so enable us to

get the nancing necessary to really get in—and get out in front of this coming revolution in the eld of musical instruments. My general background and talent is such that I consider myself equipped better than anybody around to lead, in the musical technical area, a business group that could make millions by being rst—rst with the best idea—the Electronium. With a sample Electronium— beautiful to look at—exciting to listen to— private showings to nancial people would get us all the money we will need to start production—and lead the renaissance in the eld of musical instrument design and manufacture. —Raymond Scott, from a typewritten, undated page, c. 1964

specialized for his applications. Ray told me that if you listen to music, it’s repetition. You would repeat notes in a different tone, and put that together. Being a composer, he knew how to construct music from these things. And it really worked. Ray and [his friend] Bruce Haack made some incredible music. All it needed was somebody to arrange it and put it together and make a finished piece. IC: You don’t have a musical background? AE: Virtually none. My parents had a piano and played, but I have no musical talent. IC: Was the Electronium in its cabinetry at the time? AE: He made lovely finished cabinetry— the cockpit. In the big laboratory room where he had this thing set up, he had five or six big speakers. This had to be in 1970, or ’71. IC: He was working on it for years before it had a cabinet. There’s pictures where it

just looks like a wallful of noodles. AE: Gradually, he cleaned things up. He made modules with ﬁnished circuit cards, and he did a lot of experiments. He had a little box he called the ‘Hong Kong Gong.’ It was a doorbell. All that was in it were three little oscillators, and when you hit the button, the oscillators would key on in different attack and decay strokes. The frequencies were roughly harmonically relat ed. It sounded like someone banging on a huge brass gong. It had a wonderful tonal quality. There was a cheap little speaker inside, but he said it was the wood—a very thin piece of wood—and the shape of the box and the position of the speaker in it—a 29-cent Lafayette radio speaker—that made the sound. It sounded monstrous! He had a knack for taking electronic analog parts and making them sound good. Then, once they were under digital control—which I helped him do; although I didn’t know the musical aspect, I knew how to make circuitry work—he’d tell me what he wanted to do, and I’d design a circuit, hook it up with all the right grounds

“The Electronium would never be nished. He was always changing and modifying it. What it did one day was not necessarily what it would do the next.” 75

and bypass caps. Otherwise, he’d meddle for hours, but he’d leave a wire off someplace and never notice. I would immediately know the wire was missing and save him a lot of time. But I can’t really say I contributed to the technology. He knew what he wanted to do. Understand—this machine would never be ﬁnished. He was always changing and modifying it. What it did one day was not necessarily what it would do the next. The thing I contributed was making it consistent. When you pushed a button, it worked. It wasn’t something you had to rattle a certain way. GJB: You probably heard him experiment a lot. AE: Oh, many, many times. One time he had this real sexy, raunchy jazz coming out of this thing. He and Bruce Haack were in heaven. I don’t know if they taped it or not. Another time I came in and it was playing what sounded like a little opera singer in the background. You could swear you were hearing somebody singing, but it wasn’t—it was all electronic. I understand the secret, to some extent. If you look at most electronic things, the waveforms are repetitious. The harmonics are precise mathematical multiples. When 76

something vibrates, there are overtones. The way you blend these overtones, and the amount of offset they have with one another, gives it warmth. That’s what he would do: he would tune these little things and put little resistors and caps and get it to sound rich. He’d couple that with the melodious, rhythmic patterns he built into it, which were basically the same piece played over and over, but at different scales, and maybe he’d pump the tempo a little bit. It’s like patch-panel programming, where he would set up the different cyclical music patterns—where he’ll say, ‘Take a “da-DaDA”,’ and repeat it four times. He would program how it was repeated, and in what key it would be repeated. Then he would have that piece repeated, so it was like gears within gears. IC: Were all parts played simultaneously? Or did he record one track and then another? AE: Oh, no! Everything was played simultaneously. This was his orchestra. He had each thing set up as an instrument, with oddball names for them. He’d have a rhythm section, a brass and a woodwind section. He said, ‘I could have a thousandpiece orchestra.’ Sometimes it would sound just awful. But most of the time, it would

Photo by Jim Henson, 1967 © The Jim Henson Co.

Beginning in the late 1950s, Scott built several, very different versions of his Electronium (“instantaneous composition-performance machine”). In the background of this photograph (see circle) is the 1966-67 incarnation. The lower rack contained modules specially made for Scott by colleague Robert Moog.

The Electronium Mk1 in 1970. Lower left: note digital data storage cassette recorder.

sort of drift into something very pleasing. It had a natural penchant for making rea sonably good music. This machine could make any kind of music you could imagine. It could be very mysterious—I don’t know what you would call it in those days— psychedelic? That’s not really the word for it, though. GJB: When he recorded, was it done directly onto cassette, or reel-to-reel? AE: Reel-to-reel. GJB: There’s pictures of the Electronium with an internal cassette machine. AE: That was not a cassette. That was a digital control. IC: I thought there was a cassette transport in it so you could record? AE: Yeah, but it was all recorded digitally. Maybe he added an analog recorder later on. But what I designed for him was a digital cassette recorder that stored the music he created. IC: Same size and conﬁguration as a regular cassette? AE: A Phillips cassette, but digital quality, so it was a better-made cassette. IC: It wouldn’t play on an analog deck?

AE: It would just sound like buzzing and clicks. It would play, but you wouldn’t hear music. The Electronium also had a keyboard attachment, that he hooked up. IC: Which makes it kind of a MIDI system, right? AE: Yeah—before MIDI. Actually, maybe it was around the same time MIDI was evolving. IC: In the late ’60s? AE: Yeah. When I designed the keyboard attachment to the Electronium, I was used to scanning keys at a certain rate. I ﬁgured 20, 30 times a second was adequate. Bruce Haack tried to play it, and said, ‘This sounds awful, the keys are stuck.’ When I would tap ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb,’ or ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’—that was my speed—the keyboard sounded great. But Bruce would start to play, and say, ‘There’s something wrong with the keys.’ So I jacked it up to a hundred scans a second, but he still complained. So we made it a thousand scans a second, and then he was happy. IC: I’m curious about Bruce Haack, who died in 1988. AE: He was mystical. He would go to sleep 79

IC: When was that? AE: This must have been during the period I was working for him. Ray described lots of things mystically, and he said he had a sense that this was right. Bruce was wild about electronic music. © 1 9 7 0 N Y D aily N ews

IC: Did Haack and Raymond record together? AE: They must have, because they collaborated for a long time, making “I spent 11 years and close to a million dollars developing my Elec music, and Bruce certainly tronium,” stated Raymond Scott in 1970. “From General Electric alone, was taping it. What they I bought more than $200,000 worth of test equipment.” did with it, I don’t know. I thought they had an in a lotus position on a concrete ﬂoor, and arrangement with Columbia. sit there for four hours straight. Then he would get up and start working. He record IC: Did Bruce help develop the Electro ed for Columbia Records. nium? AE: He was more the musician. He would IC: He did the Electric Lucifer album. execute things. He was not an electronics There’s no Electronium of Clavivox on it, is expert, but he knew how to use a keyboard there? and had a musical ear. AE: No. But Ray once described meeting Ray taught Bruce how to mix the music. Bruce. He said they just clicked. He said, Bruce was sitting there with the music ‘You’re the guy!’ It’s like God told them, turned quite loud. Ray mentioned the ‘You two should work together!’ ‘mountain-valley effect.’ He says you turn it 80

way down, make it just a little above audibility—then you balance it. When you turn it up, everything sounds the same. IC: Were you on salary with Ray? AE: No, I was sort of consulting, maybe a little money today, maybe not. It wasn’t the kind of thing you made a living at. It’s just that I truly enjoyed collaborating with Ray. Just being involved was to me a new, inter esting thing. GJB: So you know the inside of the Electronium pretty well? AE: I would say so, yeah. GJB: Would you be able to restore it? AE: If I had it here, sure. GJB: Mitzi Scott sold the instrument to a musician in Hollywood named Mark Moth ersbaugh, from the band Devo. For years, it was in Mitzi’s guest-house. I visited once, and they were doing repairs, putting plaster on the ceiling and walls, and the casing was off, so the machine was open and there was dust and lumps of plaster had fallen in it. It looked terrible. Then she sold it to Mothersbaugh. Now it’s in Hollywood, in a safe place, but it’s uncertain whether it’ll be restored.

AE: I remember the electronic stuff. But I guess it’s like an instrument maker who can’t play. I can ﬁx it, but I couldn’t make it play. It was Ray who made it make music by setting up the different chords and patterns. GJB: We have tapes of him interacting with the machine. Every now and then he grabs the mic and says, ‘I did such and such, and pushed the yellow button,’ and ‘This is number 7 and number 3,’ and he gives the notes one by one and then in sequence. AE: At that time he was using electronic instruments to make advertisements. He made money that way. IC: He did a lot of commercials. This goes back to the ’50s. He was building electronic instruments back then. Did you know about his background, Your Hit Parade and all? AE: Oh yeah. I knew about it, though I was not a television watcher, so I never followed the show. IC: He hated Your Hit Parade. AE: He said that. IC: It was a rent gig. He made a lot of money, but didn’t like being on camera, didn’t like the music, it was just schlock, bloated orchestrations of pop hits of the day. He would take his paycheck, go home and work 81

on his electronics. AE: He was devoted to it. He loved that stuff. Constantly puttered with it. Ray was interested in his music and the Electronium. That was his focus, and there was not a lot of interest in other things. Apparently he had a bunch of advisors and different people that managed his money. He’d say they just managed it and managed it, and after they were through, he managed to not have any. He was very jealous about his ideas.

no choice but to go commercial and got all the credit. Ray stressed that Moog was an honorable man, who didn’t steal his ideas; they were just working on things simultaneously. It was very diplomatically expressed. AE: He wasn’t angry at Moog. But he did feel that Moog had capitalized on some of his ideas. He was jealous of these concepts and I think what made his Electronium successful was his knowledge of composition. He could put these patterns together because he knew what he was doing.

IC: In terms of protecting and being paranoid? AE: Yeah. I introduced a friend to Ray, an engineer who ran his own company making educational equipment. This guy made an educational music synthesizer. It had textbook oscillators—meaning, it’s a real piece of junk. Ray was convinced this fellow had stolen his ideas. I said, ‘Ray, you have no idea. It’s a school project thing. It’s utterly incapable of making any sensible music.’

IC: Moog is not a musician? AE: I’ve never met the man.

IC: He wrote something once in which he said Moog—I’m paraphrasing—capitalized on what he [Raymond] developed, but was forced to do so by the pressures of the marketplace, since so many people had started developing these things, and that Moog had 82

IC: I’ve never known him to compose any thing, or perform. AE: I know the musicians I met were annoyed at Moog [getting credit for the music, instead of the artist] when Switched-On Bach was released. IC: The unions must’ve been outraged. AE: I heard a lot about that. Ray said, ‘I’ll never make that mistake.’ IC: Do you remember when Berry Gordy arrived? AE: Yeah. I wasn’t there, but Ray talked about it. He mentioned Gordy was coming,

Heritage: Father died at 52, heart disease.Brother died at 49, heart disease. Had difculty getting insurance due to heart irregularities, starting in my twenties. Cardiac history: Age 50 (1958)—had many dead spots around my body, cardiac specialist gave me 1 year to live. Fell into daily use of glanular lecithin. My situation reversed itself. Age 59 (1967)—Had severe chest pain. Doctor recommended a 3 month rest in Florida. Returned OK. Age 64 (1972)—Walked around pool 80 times daily for exercise. Would absentmindedly speed up to shorten time spent exercising. Got so fast one night, I developed very severe chest pain. An angiogram was taken. A bypass was decided upon. Operation was postponed for 6 months till I was on Medicare. Age 69 (1977)—Had heart attack. Angiogram showed no signicant additional blockage. Attack was attributed perhaps to stress. Age 71 (1979)—Went to Hospital Emergency Room for chest pain, stayed 4 days, had tests. When released, joined recommended Rehabilitation Exercise Group—took 3 months—therapy worked well. Age 74 (1983)—Have an electronic lab at home—got involved in an exciting project—for 3 months I slept an average of about 50 hours weekly. Felt high and happy throughout this period. Then I folded (about 2/1/83). Symptoms of folding: extreme fatigue, wobbly walking, accumulation of chest pains, zero energy output capability. Doctor called it ‘burnout’. —Raymond Scott, June, 1983 83

and told me not to come that day ’cause they’d be meeting. I came the next day, and he told me all about it. It was quite an entourage. He was very impressed with Gordy, and very excited. He felt Berry Gordy was very talented, and he told him that. And Berry had said to him, ‘I think you are, too.’ IC: And he looked forward to working with him? AE: Yeah, yeah. It continued on, and event ually he went to California. IC: Around this time, was he not getting much attention from the media or the press? People weren’t coming to interview him? AE: No, but he was known, ’cause we’d go to a restaurant and people would walk up and say, ‘Mr. Scott…’ and they’d ask for autographs. IC: You were working with him for hours at a stretch? AE: Oh yeah. I had another job at the time. We were putting together a company called Industrial Technology. In the afternoon I’d stop by with Ray, and we would work. We spent a lot of time together.

IC: Was Ray a chatty kind of guy? AE: Very chatty, very engaging, and I enjoyed working with him because he was brilliant. He would explain what he was doing, and he would explain music, because I was not a music expert, just a listener. Ray would also tell mystical stories, ghost stories. We got on the subject of spirits. There’s a road called Swamp Hollow Road, with an Indian burial ground—right here on Long Island—and he said he was there one night and had some spiritual experience, he saw some kind of an apparition. Another time, he talked about the Astor family. They were very interested in—and often had as company— mystics, spiritualists, whatever. I guess they call them channelers nowadays. Anyway, he said that the Astor house—with all these characters—was haunted. All kinds of horrible things would happen there. He advised me, ‘Don’t get involved with that stuff. It’s very dangerous.’ IC: What was his state of mind? Was he happy? Was he depressed? Was he confused? AE: He was absorbed in what he was doing. He was in his sixties and knew his health was failing in some ways. So he was concerned about his physical and his mental health. But was he depressed? No, I can honestly say he wasn’t.

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3 WILLOW PARK CENTER RTE. 110, FARMINGDALE, L.I., N.Y. (516) 293-8888

Raymond Scott Composes With ‘Electronium’ Long Island Press, 1970

the 1940s and 50s bandleader Raymond Scott xwas a familiar face in American households, performing with his quintet and broadcasting the weekly radio-TV “Hit Parade” show. Now a Long Island resident, he’s hoping to earn a reputation by pressing buttons. xxScott hasn’t abandoned show business. The buttons he presses are part of an electronic instrument he’s been developing for 10 years that can perform and “compose” those increasingly popular collections of unearthly sounds known as electronic music. xxThe instrument is called an electronium, and although it produces music, it looks more like the instrument panel of a space capsule than anything else. Scott ﬂicks switches on rows of buttons as lights ﬂash and the entire panel glows with an orange light. xxHe does all this in a studio in Farmingdale. Scott is an East Meadow resident. xxIt’s unlike any other musical instrument, according to Scott. It can’t be used to play any existing piece of music. “It will perform its own creations only,” he explains. n

*** A MACHINE WITH a built-in ego? That’s not the case, says Scott. His device was built not only to perform but to “compose” music, guided by a human being. The electronium has no keyboard, unlike most electronic musicmakers; it consists of buttons and switches that produce, with the aid of 86

assorted transistors, wires and other electronic components, either a sound or a progression of sounds or a beat. xxThere’s no way to prepare music for the electronium, and know how it will sound so the “musician” familiarizes himself with the effects of each button and presses them in a pattern that produces something resembling a melody. Unless the musician remembers the buttons he’s pushed, he can’t reproduce the music. xx“It’ll never take the place of traditional composing,” admits Scott, but the Electronium does have its advantages. “Instead of spending three months composing a ballet you can do it in two hours,” he claims. A composer can sit down and hear instantly the music he is creating, changing it when he pleases with little effort.” *** SCOTT SAYS THE instrument could be a boon to the movie industry. Scores that take months normally to compose could be done in days, he believes, and the results would be comparable to a traditional score. xxThe music “is not necessarily melodic in a traditional way,” notes Scott. It consists of a melange of simple sounds and beats, electronically super imposed upon each other to create the effect of an orchestra or band performing. xxAfter 10 years of working to develop the device, Scott has begun to concentrate his efforts now on composing electronic music for—and with—it. He

also is in the early stages of planning a commercial model of the device which could be used either professionally, or in a simpler model, as a home instrument. xxThe home model probably would sell for roughly $1,000, or around the price paid for a good home organ. xxScott thinks the electronium will be widely used in rock circles as well.

Scott with his electric musicmaker, the Electronium

Variet 1970 y J ul y

*** DEVELOPING ELECTRONIC equipment and composing music that is partially created by a machine is a departure from Scott’s past. xxIn addition to hosting the Hit Parade show, which achieved immense popularity, he led the Ray Scott Quintet for a number of years during the Big Band era. He composed the score for a 1946 Broadway show, “Lute Song” starring Mary Martin. xxHis ex-wife, singer Dorothy Collins, regularly joined him on the Hit Parade show. xxIn the 30s he and his quintet played the music for, and appeared in, several Hollywood ﬁlms, including Shirley Temple’s “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” and “Ali Baba Goes to Town.” In the late 30s he composed a ballet for the American Ballet Co. xxBut for the past 10 years it’s been nothing but transistors and tape recorders for Scott. xxThe ex-bandleader says that electronic music is going to be something big in the future, and he’s happy to be involved in something he says is “going to ﬁt everywhere” before long.

Thomas Rhea Thomas Rhea, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Music Synthesis Department, at Berklee College of Music in Boston, spent countless hours with Scott in the early 1970s and was head of the Nashville division of Manhattan Research Incor porated, marketing the Clavivox. He later became head of sales for Moog for 18 years. Irwin Chusid interviewed Rhea by telephone on March 27 and 29, 1997. IC: Did you have a trusting relationship with Raymond Scott? Rhea: I originally wanted to interview him. At ﬁrst he did not want me to tape any thing, ’cause he was so concerned—he wanted me to sign a release, a disclosure. Which I did. What was I going to say to anybody? He was almost paranoid. He was so concerned that people were going to rip him off—you know, he recognized that his ideas were way ahead of their time. For these reasons, he might have appeared to people as guarded or secretive, but he really didn’t know how to exploit those ideas, and he wouldn’t take a lot of people into his conﬁdence. He was so secretive, even with me, whom I think he really trusted. He also didn’t 88

want to talk about the past, even though I was an historian, because he was so inter ested in the future. It was very difficult to get details from him about the exact lineage of his equipment. It wasn’t just that he was protective of it—he didn’t want to talk about it. He was all about Berry Gordy, what he was going to do with the new version of the Electronium, and stuff like that. So it was extremely difficult for me to find out a lot of things I would have liked to have found out. IC: How old were you then? Rhea: Late 20s. I was finishing dissertation research for my Ph.D., coming out of graduate school. It was about 1970 or ’71. I had to be about 26 then. And from my historical research, I knew what he had done. By the time I got there, a lot of the “wall of sound” was in disrepair. He wasn’t really using it. He was pretty much stuck on the idea of the Electronium. He thought of that other stuff as vestigial, like, “Well, it’s there, but this is the answer right here.” I watched Raymond demo the Electronium. I know how he interacted with it, and I understand what his ideas were about the collaboration between man and machine— which to me is the most important thing that Raymond did, in terms of electronics

“The idea of collaborating with a machine, and allowing the machine to make certain decisions—not exactly knowing what you were going to get—that was a pretty avant-garde idea.” and music. The Clavivox is not an important instrument. It’s an off-shoot, it’s a minor instrument. It’s novel, but it’s not like it had a big influence or anything. On the other hand, the idea that he anticipated some artificial intelligence concepts and some compositional concepts that other people believe somebody else did, I think is very important. I don’t know how early Raymond had done any of this, because it was difficult to find out. But I do know that the idea of collaborating with a machine, and allowing the machine to make certain decisions and then editing—not exactly knowing what you were going to get—that was a pretty avant-garde idea. And it’s an idea whose time is not completely over. We’ve had latter-day manifestations of that in things like Jam Factory, and M. I really have a very warm spot in my heart for Raymond, since he was one of the characters of my life. I’m trying to get together a history of electronic musical

instruments, and Raymond has a very important spot in it. In essence, the industry that has grown up around electric instruments has done nothing to preserve its own history. We’ve only been making electric instruments, in practical terms, for less than a hundred years. So it’s new, it’s being ignored, and I’m trying to do something about it. But I don’t have an academic viewpoint. I’m interested in the fact that Raymond Scott did silent, mimed playing before John Cage did 4’33”. And I’m afraid the academic canon, they just don’t really care about anything except the personalities they have decided are the pioneers. I mean, I appreciate everything Cage did, and Stockhausen, and I know that music. But there’s a whole tradition here that’s being ignored, and Raymond Scott is one of those people.

“Additionally, means are provided for obtaining a controllable vibrato effect which is electromechanical so as to simulate and derive the benet of manual operation while obtaining the advantages of electrically controlled precision.” —Raymond Scott, 1956 (from his US Patent #2871745: the Clavivox)

A Cockpit of Dreams by Michele Wood Excerpted from: The Swing Era: Vintage Years of Humor, Time-Life Records, 1971 [Raymond] Scott said: “I want the Electronium to be a beautiful instrument, to have a special sort of feeling, like a Steinway. Not to look like a Steinway, of course, but to have that sense of elegance and beauty. And I want it to have the feeling of driving, a steering machine, a cockpit of dreams.” xxThe home of the Electronium is Raymond Scott Enterprises, located in a long, one story cement block building in an industrial park in Farmingdale, Long Island. xxAt the reception desk is Scott’s pert, redheaded third wife Mitzi, a former dancer and pianist. In the next room, girls at long tables thread circuitboards with colored wires, humming to Muzak as they work. xxA second room is a heavy-duty machine shop. In the third room sits the Electronium. xxSmall colored lights blink silently. Scott says the machine is thinking. If you can believe that, you can believe Scott’s assertion that, together with a human operator, the machine composes music which can then be recorded on tape. xx“It’s like inventing the typewriter,” says Scott, “only the typewriter fur 92

nishes the plot and reads the result in its own voice. You specify the form and structure, but the details are the machine’s. If you like what the machine does but want a different key or tempo, you push the appropriate button. For the talented and trained person, the Electronium will give a most comprehensive performance.” xxScott already has an order for a $100,000 version of the machine from a buyer who wishes to remain anonymous. (“Which is a shame,” says Scott, “I was hoping to get some publicity from it.”)* xxEventually he hopes to market $1200 versions for private enjoyment or public performance. He feels it will be excellent for TV and ﬁlm scoring. xxMeanwhile, he and the Electronium (Scott always gives the machine equal billing) have composed numerous pieces including a “classical” Iceberg Theme, The Wild Piece—aka String Piece (“my super Stravinsky”) and Take Me to Your Violin Teacher. xxThis last one is about the arrival on earth of beings from another world where violin playing is the supreme art. xxIt shows, if anything, that the Electronium picks up styles adroitly. * Ed. note: This anonymous buyer was Berry Gordy.

collection mitzi scott

Mitzi and Raymond Scott, 1971 94

Mitzi Scott Mitzi (Mathilde Curtis) Scott was Raymond Scott’s third wife. They met in July, 1966, and were married on January 18, 1967. She currently lives in Santa Clarita, CA. IC: Was Raymond living at Willow Park when you ﬁrst met? Mitzi: Yes. I met him on a Saturday, and Monday morning he took me to the beach. On the way home, we stopped at Willow Park and he showed me the studio. I thought it was fantastic!—something like 6,000 square feet. When you came in, there was an ofﬁce. To the left, half of that side of the building was a machine shop and a woodworking shop, with a music studio in back, and on the right side was this huge living quarters—living room, kitchen and bathroom. At the back was a photography darkroom. There was an upper story

library over part of it. You had to use a ladder to go up. The ceilings were 50 feet high. IC: Was Raymond the only one living in this “industrial park”? Mitzi: Yes. The others were ofﬁces and factories. IC: There was no zoning restriction pre venting him from living there? Mitzi: Well, Raymond wasn’t supposed to be living there. IC: When you met, did he have employees? Mitzi: He had a secretary who had been [Raymond’s brother] Mark [Warnow]’s secretary, Bob Briody. When Mark died [in 1949], Raymond took him on, I think mainly out of kindheartedness so he could keep working. The fellow in charge of the machine shop was Joe Cusato. Alan [Entenman] came when Raymond needed help with engineer ing, and he would spend a day, or four

“He would come in for lunch. I would put his lunch on the table and go back to the kitchen to get mine. By the time I’d get back to the table, he was gone— back in the lab.” 95

hours. But he was never on payroll. Even before we got married, he had me wiring. He taught me soldering [laughs], and to attach the red wire to the blue wire, and the yellow wire to the green wire. I didn’t like doing it, but I got pretty good at it.

Hills, and royalties. At that time his music was still quite well-known. He was getting about $50,000 a year in royalties. Except he was spending it. He paid Briody $7,500 a year, he paid Cusato $7,500, he had to pay taxes, and rent on the building, which was $6,000 a year.

IC: He didn’t have to pay you. Mitzi: That’s right.

IC: And if he needed a spare part or some tools, he would just go out and spend? Mitzi: Oh yes.

IC: You weren’t working at this time? Mitzi: Until we got married, I was a district manager for Avon Cosmetics. I stopped—at his insistence. IC: Was Raymond no longer working with live musicians? Mitzi: The only time was in 1969. He got a job from an advertising agency to write an industrial musical for Kentucky Bourbon. He wrote the music and hired a lyricist. IC: Was Raymond still doing commercial jingles, electronic or otherwise? Mitzi: He didn’t have a lot of work doing jingles, but he would get an occasional job. IC: He wasn’t doing much in the way of paid work? Mitzi: No. I think he was living off proceeds of the sale of the house in North 96

IC: So he was racking up debt and not concentrating on the fact that more was going out than was coming in. Mitzi: No. [laughs] That was my job! When Bob Briody left, I took over the ofﬁce. It was very difﬁcult. In fact, I think the second month we were married, I sold my car so we could pay the rent. IC: Did you try to explain this to him? Mitzi: No. I was very much in awe of him. Don’t forget, he was a famous man, he was older than I was. At that time, I would never have said to him, ‘Look, you can’t spend money like this, there isn’t that much coming in.’ I just couldn’t have done it. Later on—yes. But not then.

“His fun was inventing stuff—and then he would drop it and get involved with something else.” IC: How famous was he at that time? Mitzi: Famous enough that when we went to the airport, people asked him for his autograph. He was still getting letters for autographed pictures in 1988, ’89, ’90.

IC: Did you ever think Raymond was a little crazy when he would talk about the Electronium, this “composing-performance machine”? Mitzi: No. Uh-uh.

IC: What were his work habits? Did he seem obsessed, always in the lab? Mitzi: He would come into the living quarters for lunch. I would put his lunch on the table and go back to the kitchen to get mine. By the time I’d get back to the table, he was gone—back in the lab.

IC: Did you think it was impractical, that ‘This will never make money.’ Or were you thinking this could be the most amazing project of the late 20th century? Mitzi: I thought it was a wonderful instrument! We would be having lunch, with the Electronium on in the next room, and it would play something very pretty. I would say, “Oh my, isn’t that a pretty phrase!” And it would repeat it as though it had heard me and said, ‘Well, if you like it that much, I’ll play it again!’

IC: Did he keep an irregular schedule? Mitzi: Always! If he awoke at 4 in the morning and had a great idea, he would get up. Then he might work until 7 or 8 or 9 in the morning, and then go back to bed. IC: Did you understand what he was doing? Did he take the time to explain things to you? Mitzi: Oh, he explained everything. That didn’t mean I necessarily understood it.

IC: Was he operating it by remote control? Mitzi: No, he would just leave it on. It was a self-working machine. It composed and performed at the same time. It was so outof-this-world. 97

IC: Was it in a cabinet? Mitzi: At first, no. IC: Just circuit boards? Mitzi: Lots of wiring. IC: Do you have any idea when he started working on it, when he first conceived the idea? Mitzi: No. Probably in the early ’60s—maybe even before. IC: Were people other than Berry Gordy coming by, who were interested in the Electronium? Mitzi: No, not really. He was very secretive about what he was doing. It was one of his failings, because if he had been out there promoting himself—well, he did send publicity notices to newspapers. But he would never, say, go to a college and explain what he was doing. IC: When did Berry Gordy first visit? Mitzi: It was the Fall of 1970. He saw an article [about the Electronium] from the Long Island Press which was carried in a Los Angeles paper. He came to New York, called up, and said he would like to see the Electronium. He came out to Farmingdale in three cars—a whole big mess of people. 98

He was very impressed with the Electronium and ordered one. His attorney drew up contracts on how much money was to be paid for parts and labor. But he did not give Raymond a job. He expected to buy an Electronium, and Raymond was to deliver it to California and spend six weeks instructing Gordy’s staff how to use it. The delivery was supposed to be in six months, but it wasn’t delivered until August, 1971. IC: While he was working on it, was there contact with Gordy and his staff? Mitzi: Oh, constantly! I think a lot with Gordy, but not necessarily. I used to worry because Raymond was constantly running over the budget. He would send them a note on how much he’d spent and how much more money he needed, and I would be practically hysterical thinking, “Oh my God—you can’t do that! You made this agreement that you would do it for this amount of money!” And he said, “Don’t worry. This is the way it works. People do this all the time.” Obviously it worked, because Berry Gordy never complained, and whenever Raymond needed more money, they sent it. He had a lot of people working for him at that time, because he had the Motown money to go into production. He had people

that did the wiring, and he had people in the woodworking shop to build the cabinet, which he designed. Alan Entenman was working with him at that time. IC: By now he was focused on the Electronium. Mitzi: Yes. The Clavivox was ﬁnished. He invented a Chinese Gong [1968]—it was electronic, but it had the fullness of sound of a Chinese gong. He had me going out to Chinese restaurants trying to get orders for it. And he invented a doorbell, I think called the Psychedelic Doorbell. It would electronically play whatever tune you wanted. People heard it and said, “Oh, that’s wonderful! I want one!” We had orders for it. But he never got around to making any. His fun was inventing stuff— and then he would drop it and get involved with something else. IC: How did he ship the Electronium to L.A.? Mitzi: [Motown executive ] Guy Costa arranged for movers to ship it out by van line. It was delivered to Berry Gordy’s home.

Motown’s ﬁrst ofﬁcial letter to Scott, written by company attorney Allen Klein, October 7, 1970

IC: And Raymond ﬂew out? Mitzi: I ﬂew too. 99

IC: You went for six weeks—that turned into six months? Mitzi: That’s right. He was coming out alone for six weeks, and I said, ‘No way! You’re going to California, I’m going too, or else I will not be here when you come back.’ It’s a good thing, because he would’ve been out here for six months and I would’ve been stuck [on Long Island] alone. When we got here, Berry Gordy decided he would like to have the Electronium do something it didn’t do, then he thought of something else he would like it to do. He kept wanting changes and additions, and Raymond kept working and working, and then Gordy thought it would be nice to have Raymond in charge of electronic research and development. So he hired him. IC: Was Raymond working out of Gordy’s home? Mitzi: At ﬁrst. IC: Guy Costa said that there was a laboratory of sorts over Gordy’s garage. Mitzi: Yes. He had beautiful estate in Bel Air. I would drive Raymond and drop him off, ’cause we rented a car. We rented a furnished apartment in Westwood. When he was ready to come home, he would call and I would pick him up. 100

IC: Would he work long hours, or 9-to-5? Mitzi: When he was at Gordy’s home, it was pretty much 9-to-5. At night we’d go out to dinner, and then drive around, maybe to the beach, or to Ports of Call. We used to take drives up and down the coast, investigating different areas. Or we’d go to the movies. We ate out every night for weeks, until I ﬁnally got so tired, I said, ‘Please let me cook a meal. I want to eat at home.’ When he got the Motown job in February 1972, we went back to New York for three months to settle things, then we came back to California in June. I went house-hunting, and found a house in Van Nuys in September. We moved in October 1st. On October 2nd, I went back to New York alone to close down Willow Park. It took me ﬁve months. I had to get rid of tons of stuff. I sold the whole music studio, and two-thirds of the books in the library. I sold nearly everything in the machine shop and the woodworking shop. Even with all the stuff I sold, when I shipped the balance to California, we shipped 50,000 pounds. We had an entire moving van. IC: So then Raymond was on salary at Motown. What was he paid? Mitzi: Three hundred dollars a week. Don’t forget this was the early 1970s. Three-hun-

dred dollars was better than it is now. He eventually worked out a deal with Berry Gordy to have the lab in our house. He hired two wiring girls, and he didn’t have to go to Motown. The Electronium was moved to the guesthouse. That became his lab, and he set up a workshop. IC: Would he work seven days a week? Mitzi: Yes. [laughs] Pretty much. I mean, he took a day off here and there. We would go out on trips, or occasionally go away for a weekend. IC: Did Raymond talk much about the job? Mitzi: No. He never discussed it with me. IC: Were you not interested, or did you figure it wasn’t any of your business? Mitzi: Both. [laughs] He would tell me if he was having problems, like, ‘I have to figure out how to do this.’ I did the bookkeeping— I had to keep track of the wiring girls’ hours and send it to Motown so we could pay them. I also did all the [patent] diagrams for the Electronium. If you look at the diagrams, it says: ‘Conceived by Raymond Scott and drawn by Mathilde Scott.’ IC: How did his Motown tenure end after five years?

Mitzi: They retired him. The problem was that he never completed anything they could use. By that time, he had destroyed the Electronium by vandalizing it for parts for other things he was working on. 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. IC: When he got laid off, he kept working on other things? Mitzi: Yeah. Just for himself. Don’t forget—when they retired him in 1977, he was 69, past retirement age. He was able to collect social security. IC: And a Musician’s Union pension? Mitzi: Yeah. But it was nothing. Probably for later musicians it would be more, but when he started getting the Musician’s Union pension, it was $43 a month. [laughs] It went up to maybe $68 a month. IC: And the royalties were going down? Mitzi: From the time we got married, the royalties went down. His music was being played less. He kept getting new ideas. He was going to write a book on how to score music for ﬁlms, so he bought $500 worth of tapes. 101

Wiring diagram for the Pychedelic Door Bell (1969) shows Mathilde (Mitzi) Scott’s drawing and signature

He would videotape old movies at three o’clock in the morning so he could analyze them. Of course he never wrote the book. IC: But he got a lot of old ﬁlms on tape. Mitzi: Yeah. I watch them now. [laughs] 102

IC: Did Raymond continue to play piano? Mitzi: Oh yes! Anytime we went to a party and there was a piano and they asked him to play, he would. But he never played anything he had written. He improvised beautiful new stuff, and I would think, ‘What a shame, because it’s gonna be lost. He’s not

gonna go home and write this down.’ And he never did. He could make up beautiful music I had never heard before—and I knew I was never gonna hear it again, because the next time he’d just make up new stuff. IC: Did he exercise much? Mitzi: He was not a physically active man, no. IC: He would sit and work, and it would never occur to him to lift weights or jog or go swimming? Mitzi: Never. Although he’d go swimming in the summer. IC: He didn’t smoke cigarettes? Mitzi: Never smoked in his life. IC: And never dabbled in any kind of drugs—prescription or otherwise? Mitzi: He took uppers and downers. I guess you could call him “nervous” in public. He had a hard time in a crowd. It was extremely difﬁcult for him to go to a party where there were 15 or 30 people. When he was leading the Hit Parade Orchestra, he had to have somebody stand in back of the cameraman making faces at him, so he could smile for the camera. He hated being

on camera. He was shy. But on a one-to-one basis, he was absolutely wonderful. He was relaxed, he enjoyed talking—particularly if it was about music or engineering, ’cause that’s what he really liked to talk about. IC: When did he have a heart attack? Mitzi: He had a mild heart attack in 1968. And he had single bypass surgery in, I think, ’75 or ’76. And then he had triple bypass surgery in 1983. IC: Did it slow him down? Mitzi: Not really. He kept working. IC: Was Raymond always bringing stuff home—magazines, equipment, records, and… just odds and ends? Mitzi: From where?! He never left home! [laughs] IC: He didn’t go out much? Mitzi: No! We would go out for dinner, and we’d go out to a movie, but he did not go out shopping by himself. In fact, if he wanted to go someplace that sold a lot of electronic stuff, I would always have to go along, and I would be bored out of my skull—you know, standing around while he could spend hours picking through all this little wiring stuff. 103

Additionally,… by Jeff Winner, associate producer

1940s—Among Scott’s inventions during the Atomic Age was his Talking Alarm Clock, which would automatically play back messages at a pre-set time. You simply pressed the “Push to Talk” button, spoke into a built-in microphone, and your message was recorded onto a wire loop housed inside the clock. Scott described some uses in his US patent disclosure (March 8, 1946): “Record information before retiring and have such information reproduced as a reminder upon awakening the next morning. A pre-recorded music may precede or follow. May be used for business purposes where spoken information may be desirable at a certain pre-ﬁxed time such as a reminder.” 1950s—Popular Mechanics magazine reported: “Scott also holds a patent on an 104

P O P U L A R M E C H A N I C S , S E P T E M B E R , 19 5 9

n addition to his “family of completely xoriginal, new sound entertainment devi ces,” Raymond Scott also developed product ideas that would, in his words, “electronic ally update the many sound devices around us—the functional sounds.”

Scott hears nation’s hit tunes with automatic scanning radio that picks up stations around country xxx

automatic scanning radio, which tunes in on stations around the country and changes frequency by itself at any given interval, enabling you to catch most of the nation’s disc-jockey shows in a brief span and ﬁnd out what tunes are being played.” Scott invented electronic versions of telephone ringers, burglar alarms, door bells/chimes, and fire/police/ambulance sirens. In Raymond Scott’s “World of Sound,” there was something for everyone...

1960s—Scott hoped his Electronic Music Box, Flower Vase, and Jewel Case would appeal to the ladies, along with his complete line of Electronic Jewelry—bracelets, earrings, and necklaces embedded with tiny, light emitting diodes (LEDs) instead of diamonds or pearls. Scott asserted: “The attractive sparkling ruby light generated by these diodes will make possible a degree of radiance in jewelry not before available.” For the working man at the ofﬁce, there was the Electronic Desk Set, complete with electronic inkwell, nameplate, and calendar. In the lobby, America’s corporate execs could buy a pack of cigarettes from a Vending Machine with Electronic Music Score. (“The customer deposits change for a pack of cigarettes—above the customary clatter of the machine, a bit of electronic music takes place—intriguing to the customer—serves as an advertising sound for cigarette manufacturer...”) At home, the man of the house could relax with a drink from his Electronic Cocktail Glass, and he could enjoy a smoke from his Electronic Cigarette Case while casually ﬂicking the cinders in his Ash Tray With Accompanying Electronic Music Score. And for junior? Scott explains: “The infant probably couldn’t care less, but proud parents will get a big charge from the Electronic Baby Rattle, since instead of pebbles,

it contains micro-miniature parts just about the size of the pebbles they replace—cute little sounds for baby that change and change as the rattle is handled.” When the kiddies were a little older, they could enjoy the electronic game Raymond called Spin-A-Tune. “Your child spins a top on a shallow dish about 18 inches across. The travel pattern of the top spins out a changing tune. Each time a different tune.” Utilizing his Touch-Controlled Variable Pitch Mechanism, Scott developed another electronic game that was definitely not for babies: “An adult game—a figure of a girl— the sensitive parts of the body—an adult toy. Another variation: One human being holds one contact, and another human being holds the other. When two people touch each other a sound is produced, the sound is varied by the way in which people touch each other, pressure, parts of body, etc.” 1970s—Raymond expected special versions of his Electronium to have wide appeal. Scott noted: “Waiting could be made more pleasant—even exciting—with an Electronium available. Airports, waiting rooms, restaurants, theater lounges, schools, amusement parks, fairs, off-beat night clubs, and other public gathering places would find the Electronium a fascinating attraction.” 105

Electronic Audible Signalling Devices

Another US patent awarded to Raymond Scott (ﬁled June 7, 1968). Scott included variations of its circuitry in several of his inventions, including some versions of the Electronium.

106

Operation of the device is initiated by closing a switch, such as momentary pushbutton 13, connected to trigger monostable switch 14 which applies, for a predetermined period of time (depending on the constraints of the monostable switch), energizing volt age to the system rendering all the other blocks operative for this period of time. When the system has thus been energized, the sequence of operation described below is started. FIG. 1 then operates with a voltage controlled oscillator (10) producing a tone which is applied to keyer 8 over line 9. Pulser 4, rate controlled by a suitable rate control device 5 connect ed over line 6, turns keyer 8 on and off over line 7. Keyer 8 in going on passes tone signals from oscillator 10 over line 16 to audio ampliﬁer 15 and the ampliﬁed tones are applied over line 18 to a suitable transducer such as loudspeaker 17. At the same time, random voltage generator 1 is activated and starts generating a varying voltage such as, for example, a series of ramp voltages. These varying voltages are applied over line 2 to gate 3. Gate 3, when opened by a pulse from trigger 12 over line 17, applies a momentary voltage to sample-andhold 19 over line 24. Trigger 12 is activated by pulses from pulser 4 over line 11. Sample-and-hold 19 receives a voltage from gate 3 which depends on the point in the cycle of random generator 1 at which gate 3 is opened by trigger pulses from trigger 12. This received voltage is held until the next sample is taken through gate 3. This

3 5 8 7 0 9 4

held voltage is applied to voltage driver 21 over line 23, where a corresponding driver voltage is produced suit足able for controlling voltage controlled oscillator 10 over line 20. This voltage applied from driver 21 causes the frequency or tone of oscillator 10 to assume a new value which in turn is emitted over loudspeaker 17. Thus, at each pulse from pulser 4, a new tone is produced and emitted and this new tone is randomly determined by the instantaneous voltage gate by gate

3 from random voltage generator 1. The rate at which the tones are changed and emitted is determined by the pulse rate of pulser 4 which, in turn, is determined by the setting of pulse rate control 5. The number of pulses of tone emitted or the length of time during which they are emitted for each closure of pushbutton switch 13 depends on the time constants of monostable switch 22, since when switch 22 opens, the system stops all activity.

107

T RACK NO TE S : Mining the archives

by Gert-Jan Blom & Jeff Winner

aymond Scott was obsessed with the xsound of everything—song titles; the names of his bands, his companies, and his inventions; his stage name (chosen, he claimed, from the Manhattan phone book because it had “good rhythm”), and—of course—the sound of his music. xxDuring his early years at CBS radio in the 1930s, he spent much time in the control booth rehearsing his ensembles through the “ear” of the microphone, with historic results (as his Quintette recordings prove). Scott sought to master all aspects of sound capture and manipulation. His special interest in the technical aspects of recording, combined with the state-of-theart facilities at his disposal, provided him with enormous hands-on experience as an engineer. xxDuring the 1950s, as Music Director of the Your Hit Parade TV series, Scott pioneered the practice of having the orchestra play along live with a pre-recorded per formance to produce a “thicker” sound emanating from tinny television speakers. His album, The Unexpected, by “Raymond

Scott and the Secret 7” (1960) was another landmark of Scott’s immaculate production skills. xxManhattan Research, Inc., established 1946, was the pinnacle of Scott’s lifelong interest in the fine art of “musical engi neering.” Although these activities were not widely publicized, Scott’s art flourished throughout the 1950s and ’60s, as this compilation indicates. xxWhile researching the archives, we were impressed continually by the sonic fidelity of the tapes—some over 40 years old. They were so well-recorded that almost no audio correction was necessary during the mas tering of this album. Many of the tracks were recorded by Scott binaurally (dis cretely separated left and right channels), and are presented here in such format. xxAlthough much of this material was never intended for commercial release, we felt this legacy was a neglected story that deserved exposure. We hope this collection illustrates Scott’s strategic role in the history and development of 20th century electronic music.

109

CD1 1 MANHATTAN RESEARCH, INC. COPYRIGHT 0:11 c. 1959 “The music you are listening to is complete-

ly electronic, and has been created and produced on equipment designed and manufactured by Manhattan Research, a division of Raymond Scott Enterprises Incorporated.” One of Scott’s slogans for Manhattan Research, In. was “more than a think factory—a dream center where the excitement of tomorrow is made available today.” When Manhattan Research, Inc. sent out demos to potential customers, audio copy right lines like this were used to protect the recording from unauthorized use.

An application can be heard on CD 2, #33.

2 BALTIMORE GAS & ELECTRIC CO. (INSTR., take 4 ) 1:14

c. 1960-’62

Instrumental variation of the BG&E commercial (CD 2, #19), early example of push-button electronic gadgets combined with keyboard accompaniment. 110

3 BENDIX 1: “THE TOMORROW PEOPLE”

1963 1:06

Bendix Aviation Creative Engineering was active in “electron ics, magnetics, electromechanics, aerology, optics, carburetion and hydraulics.” Its products included automotive brakes, carburetors, landing gear, radio, radar, tele vision, and marine controls. The Bendix Corporation was purchased by Allied Signal in the mid-1980s. Raymond Scott produced two commercials for the company.

The other can be found on CD 2, #32.

4 LIGHTWORKS 1:52

c. 1960–’63 vocal by Dorothy Collins

The tape on which we found this song was marked Electronic FX & Lightworks, ca. 1960-’63. Raymond Scott must have been quite fond of the Lightworks jingle. He made several variations and even reused the breezy theme in a spot for Awake Frozen Orange Juice (CD 1, #27). Lightworks was a line of cosmetics that featured blush, eye shadow, and lipstick.

See CD 1, #27 and CD 2, #30.

5 THE BASS-LINE GENERATOR

3:10

c. 1966-’67

A good example of how the Bass-line Generator could build a musical pattern on a simple 10-tone row. It’s easy to see how Motown’s Berry Gordy became interested in such possibilities.

6 “DON’T BEAT YOUR WIFE EVERY NIGHT!” 1:44

c. 1961

Scott believed that the Audio Logo use of electronic music would be its ﬁrst import ant and widely used contribution to radio and TV commercials. He established Electronic Audio Logos, Inc. especially for this purpose [CD 2, #33]. The sounds on this track are not fragments of musical compositions—they are “stings” and accents created in Manhattan Research Inc.’s electronic music studio. Scott explained: “After we put together the tape, we called in an announcer-friend of ours, ‘Bucky’ Coslow. We said: ‘Listen to these electronic effects, we’ll play them one at a time and whatever they make you think of—commercial-style—say it real sponta neous-like. We’ll record them, then later, we’ll have a mix and see what happens.’ We did just that, with one difference: The announce tape was edited but before we’d

got a chance to sync it with the effects tape, it was run purely by accident at random against the effects tape. The effect was startling. Words and phrases that had no business showing up where they did against certain electronical effects took on a wonderfully convincing and attractive quality and seemed to indicate that electronic music for this purpose may turn out to have unusual vitality, conviction and atmosphere plus a rather shocking ﬂexibility.” (from: Lecture on Electronic Music in Radio & Television, Advertising Age Convention, Chicago, July 31, 1962)

7 “B.C. 1675” 3:16 (THE “GILLETTE” CONGA DRUM JINGLE)

1957

A 1959 article in Popular Mechanics report ed, "Among the instruments which Scott has developed is a device that automatically ﬁnds a selection in a particular recording tape and continues to repeat it as long as he wants." [US Pat.#2998939] This track illustrates the wide variety of styles Scott was experimenting with in the late ’50s.

8 VIM

0:59

1960

Scott (from lecture tape, 1962): “Products 111

VIM

(Lever Bros.)

OBM / Newt Mitzman

1960

A scientiﬁc process (with electronic soundtrack by Scott) brings forth a washday miracle

that have an interesting technical back ground to talk about, or are in themselves of a technical nature, are especially suited to electronic scoring. Take, for instance, a project we were engaged in some time ago. We were asked to develop for VIM a laboratory sound to be used as background in a scene depicting the development of their famous tablet detergent. The sound had to reﬂect the atmosphere of their scientiﬁc resources, but most of all had to have the feeling of sparkling white, crystal clear, clean as a whistle. Here are the effects we arrived at during this project.” 112

9 AUTO-LITE: STA-FUL (INSTR.)

0:47

1961

Commercial created for BBDO. One of Scott’s early devices was his “Circle Machine.” Scott explained: “The intensity of each light in this circle is individually adjustable. At the tip of the arm, there is a photo cell. This cell is a part of an electronic sound generating system, so adjusted that the more light the cell sees the higher the pitch of the sound produced. The cell also moves around in a circle at adjustable speed. One of the controls above the circle of lights changes the pitch center of the

12 “WHEELS THAT GO”

0:50

1967

A Jim Henson short ﬁlm with Raymond Scott’s electronic score. The ﬁlm, one of two short pieces Henson created for “Expo67” in Montréal, depicts his son Brian exploring toys with wheels.

The Circle Machine

13 “LIMBO: THE ORGANIZED MIND” July 1, 1966

complete cycle when required.” Here the Circle Machine gives an impression of a dying car battery, ending in a short circuit. To keep the sound generic in this commercial, the Circle Machine was used in a punctuational manner.

See CD 2, #29.

10 SPRITE: “MELONBALL BOUNCE” (INSTR.) 1963 1:01

Scott’s tasteful use of “Sounds Electro nique” in a jingle for a popular beverage.

11 SPRITE: “MELONBALL BOUNCE”

1963

Same jingle—this time with vocals.

0:59

4:33

Narration by Jim Henson

Scott’s Musique Concrète score for a Henson film starring the character Limbo, a foam-rubber face that was manipulated with strings to move the mouth. The film’s narrator guides us around inside his own head, while explaining how he organizes his thoughts, personal memories and fears. This track provides a fine example of Scott’s musical engineering in a professionally produced and original soundtrack.

14 “PORTOFINO” 1

2:13

January 16, 1962

We found three different arrangements of this tune.

An alternate version is on CD 2, #4. 113

Found graphics in The Organized Mind JIM HENSON 1966

Oh where, oh where is my County Fair?

15 COUNTY FAIR

1:01

1962

Popular myth has it that Raymond Scott was a “cartoon composer.” In fact, this is the only animated cartoon for which Scott ever composed music. County Fair Bread was popular in the Washington D.C. area. Thanks to this zany animated spot produced by the advertising ﬁrm Ferro, Mogubgub & Schwartz, the bread’s popularity rapidly spread.

Instrumental parts: CD 2, #11.

16 LADY GAYLORD

1:02

1964

Gaylord and Lady Gaylord were part of

Ideal Toy’s 1963 battery-operated animal series. These mechanical basset hounds walked forward when their leashes were tugged upwards. They were even designed to walk up shallow steps. A small magnet in their mouths allowed them to pick up their bones. The merchandise packaging was designed to resemble a dog house complete with a cut-out side panel. A Consumer Reports “scientist” (note the lab-coat) 115

Gaaaaaaylord!

Gaaaaaaaaylord! — He looks kinda crazy — Moves kinda lazy — See what he'll do!

Gaaaaylord! When you pull his leash he’ll walkity-walkity-walk with you, Arf! Arf!

is not happy with the results on his voltage meter, as he follows the dog down an outdoor path. This photo accompanied Consumer Reports investigation into a reader’s complaint about Gaylord’s rate of battery consumption in which they determine (quoting the 1963 article) “…This mechanical basset is one hungry hound. It eats up a set of four ‘D’ batteries in about two hours. In six months of regular play, we estimate, 116

the cost of batteries will exceed the cost of the toy itself.” This Jingle Workshop production of a swinging, catchy arrangement was scored for a line-up of trumpet, ﬂute, bass clarinet, organ, bass, drums, piano, and Clavivox. Scott’s scoring was reminiscent of his 1960 album The Unexpected (Top Rank RM 335), recorded by a group of eight (sic) anonymous jazz session aces, “The Secret 7.”

17 GOOD AIR (Take 7)

0:38

1953

An early example of a conventional-style recording from The Jingle Workshop. Vocal group and piano, touched up with some electronic “grab ’em by the ears” effects. Introduces the word “Odorosis.”

18 IBM MT/ST: “THE PAPERWORK EXPLOSION” 4:31

October, 1967

This industrial film, produced by Henson Associates, Inc. for IBM Office Products Division with soundtrack by Raymond Scott, sings the praises of one of the world’s first word processors, the IBM MT/ST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter), intro

duced in 1964, “turns rough draft into errorfree copy.” A prestigious project for Manhattan Research, Inc.—a musique concrète and electronics soundtrack. Another good example of Scott’smusical engineering. Of special interest is Jim Henson’s contribution to the announce copy: “Used systematically throughout an ofﬁce, these two pieces of IBM equipment alone have increased people’s productivity by 50%.”

Instrumental parts on CD 2, #21

19 DOMINO

0:33

c. 1960-’63

This instrumental track utilizes a gadget developed

Still frame from The Paperwork Explosion

117

Consider the problems solved by magnetically re-typing whenever changes have to be made. No longer willl the typist have to type complete pages over for just a few corrections. The IBM Magnetic Tape “Selectric” Typewriter will automatically retype all copy but the changes, freeing typist for other duties. © 1964 International Business Machine Corporation, 545 Madison Avenue, New York 10022 118

by Raymond Scott in the 60s: Bandito the Bongo artist, a “device that automatically creates and performs bongo-like drum improvisations, an inﬁnite variety of pitches, rhythms and colors, comparable to, and frequently more exciting than the most brilliant bongo artist anywhere.” (Disclosure, May 15, 1968)

More ‘Bandito’ can be heard on CD 1, #30

20 SUPER CHEER

0:34

c. 1963

Electronic jingle including a fragment of the rhythm track of “Nursery Rhyme” from Soothing Sounds for Baby Volume 1 (1963). In the context of this album it becomes apparent that SSFB must have been a piece of cake for Raymond Scott, compared to other works that emerged from his studio during that period.

21 CHEER: REVISION 3 (NEW BACKGROUNDS)

0:39

September 16, 1963

Interesting combination of keyboard performances and electronic abstractions.

22 “TWILIGHT IN TURKEY”

1:32

Electronium with keyboard, c. 1968-’69

Updated version of Raymond Scott Quin tette hit from 1937.

23 RAYMOND SCOTT QUOTE / VICKS: MEDICATED COUGH DROPS

1:34

1960 - Vocal by Dorothy Collins

In Spring 1960 Raymond Scott was asked by Carl Buffington, radio & TV director for Morse International, to develop an “unusual approach” to a spot campaign for Vicks medicated coughdrops and tablets. Thus, Scott made use of his first electronic music machine, a device affectionately known as “Karloff,” which he had been developing since 1948. Scott described this device as “a control console which selects, modifies and combines sounds produced by the Hammond organ or the Clavivox, by other electronic instruments and by electronic means, has 200 sound sources and is capable of quickly producing infinite and varied musical and electronic effects. A control panel directs pitch, timbre, intensity, tempo, accent and repetition. It can select from an unlimited number of sources and make up infinite combinations and permutations.” Scott was reluctant to give the machine a name, but Charles “Chuck” Barclay, manager of Scott’s music commercials company, The Jingle Workshop, suggested that it be called “The Audimation,” since it did for audio what animation does for pictures. Because of possible confusion with the word automation, the name was rejected 119

Copyright registration for the musical composition “Vicks”, 1960 Left: Advertisement for Vicks Formula 44 cough mixture, 1965

120

Auto-Lite Spark Plugs

and Karloff remained its “ofﬁcial” nick name. During the 1960s this console devel oped into the impressive “wall of dazzle,” which in turn developed into the heart of the Electronium Mk1 by 1969/’70.

24 VICKS: FORMULA 44

0:46

1964

The opening notes of this commercial, produced for the Puerto Rico market, echo Scott’s “Two Young Lads in Saxophone School,” a tune he composed for and recorded with the Raymond Scott Orchestra in 1940.

25 AUTO-LITE: SPARK PLUGS

c. 1961

1:00

A TV commercial soundtrack produced for BBDO. In Scott’s own words: “An example of an electronic swinging background with out the use of any percussion-like instruments, by the way, electronic or otherwise. Electronic effects, but this time with a vocal group. No announce copy at all!”

26 NESCAFÉ

1:06

1960

Produced for Hayhurst, Toronto, Canada. “These are roasted coffee beans. All good coffees are roasted, but today one coffee announces the step beyond roasting. The new Nescafé: now toasted before it’s roasted! Watch: see how Nescafé is toasted to bring out all the tempting aroma, then 121

The instrumental parts represent: • the sound of beans pouring out of a bag; • the sound of dancing ﬂames and a coffeetoasting machine; • the sound of toasting; • the sound of roasting; • and, tying the effects together, an overall blanket of rhythm.

27 AWAKE

roasted to give you all the rich, robust flavor of forty-three choice coffee beans for every satisfying cup… Only a coffee that is toast ed before it is roasted can ever hope to have the tempting aroma and rich, robust flavor of New Nescafé. Get New Nescafé Instant Coffee, now toasted for aroma, roasted for flavor. New Nescafé!” This text is audible in a version used by Scott during a rehearsal for a 1962 lecture. The sound quality of the tape prevented us from using it here, however, and no master tape of the complete version has surfaced. We did find a reel containing the unedited instrumental parts and, with the recording from the lecture as a guide, re-created the instrumental soundtrack. 122

0:35

c. 1960-’63

Commercial for frozen orange juice concentrate; re-uses a theme from Lightworks (CD 1, #4). Assembled from a work tape.

28 “BACKWARDS OVERLOAD”

6:04

c. 1968

In 1962 Raymond Scott concurred with public opinion that electronic music “… sounded like nuclear war and at its tamest like ‘outer space’ music. If that was all you could do with electronic music, I’d say it had no place at all to speak of in TV background scoring.” Scott aimed to create a lighter, more appealing electronic music that would titillate the public’s ear instead of frighten. The various applications and the high quality of his electronic sounds in the commercial jingles on this album illustrate his pioneering achieve ments in the ﬁeld.

However, in the late 1960s and throughout the ’70s when he worked for Motown, Raymond Scott composed longer pieces with the Electronium: Electronium Suite #1, Electronium Movie Score, Iceberg, The Tone Stepper, Cat Concerto, Night on a Calm Sea and several others. Backwards Overload combines the Electronium with a musique concrète tape collage of orchestral fragments and noises. Robert Moog: “Raymond Scott was a very creative guy but an absolute madman. He wasn’t schooled as an engineer, he was a successful musician. He had the idea of a) building all this funny electronic and electro-mechanical stuff, and b) using it to make all kinds of sounds. Raymond Scott got a lot of his stuff into radio and TV commercials, but he went much farther out in experimenting and actually did pieces of music with all this equipment he built.” (A CD package of Scott’s Electronium compositions and experiments on Basta follows this collection)

29 BUFFERIN: “MEMORIES” (original) 0:59

October, 1967 Narration by Jim Henson

Jim Henson translated his “Limbo” character and the concept from his “Organized Mind” projects into this Bufferin pain

reliever TV commercial titled “Memories.” The narrator (Henson) describes how a headache almost ruined his day. Scott’s score contains sonic quotes from “The Organized Mind,” and “The Paper work Explosion,” and the rhythm track from “Sleepy Time” (on Soothing Sounds for Baby Vol. 1).