Electronium (1959)

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In February 1937 the Raymond Scott Quintette recorded "Powerhouse," and six years later Warner Bros. began mining his tunes for cartoons: over twenty years they were quoted 140 times in 120 pictures with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the Road Runner. Jazz purists called the music "screwy": Scott made the six musicians of his "quintette" memorize long passages he had worked out at the piano, and allowed no improvisation. He had a second life running in parallel. In 1946 he founded Manhattan Research Inc., kept an electronics workshop and a full-time technician in the basement of his house in Manhasset, and in 1949 announced that science would one day transmit a composer's thought straight to the listener, bypassing performers. In 1957 NBC cancelled Your Hit Parade, which he had conducted for eight years, and Scott decided to reinvent himself: from now on he made electronic music.

The music came out strange. In 1960 he showed advertising men a machine his sales manager had nicknamed Karloff: a console with two hundred sound sources, and behind the wall a humming apparatus that a Herald Tribune reporter compared to a DEW-line radar, walking into the room glad to be wearing rubber soles. Karloff scored Vicks cough drops, Vim detergent, Alcoa aluminum and Hamm's beer; within five years IBM, Ford, Twinkies and Nescafé joined the list. Scott complained that the public heard "nuclear war" in electronics, or at best "outer space," while he wanted lightness. In 1963 he released three records of Soothing Sounds for Baby, electronic lullabies for infants aged one to six, six to twelve and twelve to eighteen months, with a booklet from a child-development institute. Almost nobody bought them; the repeating electronic figures on them came ten years before Eno's Discreet Music and twenty before the minimalists. The same year he built a drum machine, Bandito the Bongo Artist; in 1966 an electronic doorbell; in 1967 a music box, a telephone ringer, glowing jewelry and a baby rattle. Jim Henson, before the Muppets, commissioned soundtracks from him for IBM films.

All this time the main machine stood in the workshop. Scott built the first version of the Electronium in 1959 and spent the next ten years perfecting it alone. Robert Moog, who had known him since 1955, recalled that Scott never bought his modules to plug in and use: he built them into his own devices, and the suppliers never knew into what. Scott himself admitted in a 1980 letter that he had been "secretive, perhaps neurotically so," and kept reminding Moog not to copy or reveal his sequencer. His own engineers in Farmingdale were assigned the role of witnesses on patent-disclosure sheets. In May 1970 he announced that a working model existed. It could not be played: the composer pressed a button, the machine suggested a phrase; another button meant faster, slower, a different rhythm, counterpoint; one press every three to five seconds, and an hour yielded an hour-long piece. The details the machine decided itself; Scott called it a duet. On it he composed a ballet, a "futuristic pop-rock opus" and The Wild Piece, "my super Stravinsky." The publisher Lou Levy, reading about it in the paper, proposed sending Scott his old hits so he could do them on the new device. To a Time-Life journalist Scott pointed at the blinking lights on the panel and said the machine was thinking.

In September 1970 Berry Gordy came to Farmingdale. A month later Motown signed a contract for a custom version: twelve "instruments" instead of eight, each with its own vibrato "like people in an orchestra," 240 buttons instead of ninety, ten minutes of automatic play instead of twenty seconds, $23,500, 120 days. In 1971 Scott became Motown's staff director of electronic music research and moved to Van Nuys. In 1977 he left; the label never released a single known recording made on the Electronium. In 1987, after three bypass surgeries, he was composing on a personal computer from his bed: "I can do everything on this I did with my Electronium! I had some good ideas back then, didn't I?" In 1995, a year after his death, Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo bought the Motown Electronium. The machine did not work. The first recordings from it came out in 2017.

Sources

1. Chusid, Irwin; Winner, Jeff (2017). Raymond Scott: Artifacts from the Archives — Basta Music / The Raymond Scott Archives
2. Deutsch, Herbert A. (1993). Electroacoustic Music: The First Century — Belwin Mills / CPP Belwin, Miami
3. Glinsky, Albert (2022). Switched On: Bob Moog and the Synthesizer Revolution — Oxford University Press
4. Holmes, Thom (2020). Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture — Routledge
5. Stubbs, David (2018). Mars by 1980: The Story of Electronic Music — Faber & Faber, London

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