Raymond Scott (born Harry Warnow; September 10, 1908 – February 8, 1994) was an American composer, bandleader, pianist, record producer, audio engineer, and inventor. In his lifetime he was primarily recognized as a composer of production music and the leader of the Raymond Scott Quintette, but he has since become better known as a pioneer of popular electronic music.
Though Scott was never contracted to compose for animation, Carl W. Stalling adapted his music for more than 120 Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies films produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons. His compositions may also be heard in The Ren and Stimpy Show (which uses Scott's recordings in twelve episodes), The Simpsons, Duckman, Animaniacs, The Oblongs, Batfink, Puppetoons, and SpongeBob SquarePants. The only time he specifically composed to accompany animation was for three 20-second commercial jingles for County Fair Bread in 1962.
Scott was born Harry Warnow in Brooklyn on September 10, 1908, to Russian Jewish immigrants Joseph and Sarah Warnow. His older brother, Mark Warnow, was a conductor, violinist, and musical director for the CBS radio program Your Hit Parade and encouraged his musical career.
A 1931 graduate of the Juilliard School, where he studied piano, music theory, and composition, Harry began his professional career as a pianist for the CBS Radio house band, conducted by Mark. He adopted the name "Raymond Scott" to spare Mark charges of nepotism when the orchestra began performing his compositions. In 1935, he married Pearl Zimney.
In late 1936, Scott assembled a band from among his CBS colleagues, naming it the Raymond Scott Quintette. It was a six-piece group, but he thought "Quintette" sounded "crisper"; he also told a reporter that he feared "calling it a 'sextet' might get your mind off music." His sidemen were Pete Pumiglio (clarinet); Bunny Berigan (trumpet, later replaced by Dave Wade); Louis Shoobe (double bass); Dave Harris (tenor saxophone); and Johnny Williams (drums). They made their first recordings in New York on February 20, 1937, for Master Records, owned by publisher and lyricist Irving Mills.
The Quintette represented Scott's attempt to revitalize swing music through tight, busy arrangements that de-emphasized improvisation. He termed this style "descriptive jazz" and gave his works unusual titles like "New Year's Eve in a Haunted House", "Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals" (recorded by the Kronos Quartet in 1993), and "Bumpy Weather Over Newark". Although his songs were popular with the public, jazz critics disdained them as novelty music. Besides being prominent in recording studios and on radio and concert stages, Scott wrote and was interviewed for the music magazines DownBeat, Metronome, and Billboard.
Scott believed in composing and playing by ear. He composed not on paper but "on his band"—by humming phrases to his sidemen or by demonstrating riffs and rhythms on the keyboard and instructing players to interpret his cues. Scott recorded the band's rehearsals on discs and used the recordings as references to develop his compositions. He reworked, re-sequenced, and deleted passages, and added themes from other discs to construct finished works. During the developmental process, he let his players improvise, but once complete, he regarded a piece as relatively fixed and permitted little further improvisation. Scott controlled the band's repertoire and style, but he rarely took piano solos, preferring to direct the band from the keyboard and leave solos and leads to his sidemen. He also had a penchant for adapting classical motifs in his compositions.
The Quintette existed from 1937 to 1939 and recorded bestselling discs such as "Twilight in Turkey", "Minuet in Jazz", "War Dance For Wooden Indians", "Reckless Night on Board an Ocean Liner", "Powerhouse", and "The Penguin". One of Scott's popular compositions is "The Toy Trumpet", a cheerful popular music piece that is recognizable instantly to many people who cannot name the title or composer. For the 1938 movie Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Shirley Temple sings a version of the song. Trumpeter Al Hirt's 1964 rendition with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops performed a version. "In an Eighteenth-Century Drawing Room" is a pop adaptation of the beginning theme from Mozart's Piano Sonata in C, K. 545.
In 1939, Scott made his Quintette into a big band. When he was named music director by CBS radio three years later, he organized the first racially integrated radio band. During the next two years, he hired saxophonist Ben Webster, trumpeter Charlie Shavers, bassist Billy Taylor, trumpeter Emmett Berry, trombonist Benny Morton, and drummer Cozy Cole. In 1942, Scott relinquished his keyboard duties so he could concentrate on hiring, composing, arranging, and conducting. He resumed playing keyboard with some of his bands.
In 1941, he directed a 13-piece orchestra to produce what he termed "silent music" in New York, making a great show of performing with very little sound. This was one of the earliest performances of the silent or near-silent music canon.
After serving as music director for programs Broadway Bandbox from 1942 to 1944, Scott quit the network. He composed and arranged music (with lyrics by Bernie Hanighen) for the 1946 Broadway musical Lute Song starring Mary Martin and Yul Brynner.
During the late 1940s, contemporaneous with guitarist Les Paul's studio work with Mary Ford, Scott began recording pop songs using the layered multi-tracked vocals of his second wife, singer Dorothy Collins. A number of these were released commercially, but the technique failed to earn him the chart success of Les Paul and Mary Ford.
In 1948, Scott formed a six-man "quintet" which served for several months as house band for the CBS radio program Herb Shriner Time. The group made studio recordings, some of which were released with Scott's short-lived Master Records label. This was not the Irving Mills-owned brand of the same name; Scott allegedly named his brandname in tribute to the defunct Mills enterprise.
When his brother Mark Warnow died in 1949, Scott succeeded him as orchestra director for the CBS Radio show Your Hit Parade . During the next year, the show moved to NBC Television, and Scott continued to director the orchestra until 1957. Collins was a featured singer on Your Hit Parade. The job paid well, but Scott considered it strictly a "rent gig" and used his salary to finance his electronic music research more privately.
In 1950, Scott composed his first—and only known—classical work, entitled Suite for Violin and Piano. The five-movement suite was performed at Carnegie Hall on February 7, 1950, by violinist Arnold Eidus and pianist Carlo Bussotti, who recorded the work.)
In 1958, while serving as an A&R director for Everest, Scott produced singer Gloria Lynne's album Miss Gloria Lynne. The sidemen included many of the same session players (e.g., Milt Hinton, Sam Taylor, George Duvivier, Harry "Sweets" Edison, Eddie Costa, Kenny Burrell, Wild Bill Davis) who participated in Scott's 1959 Secret 7 recording project.
Scott, who attended Brooklyn Technical High School, was an electronic music pioneer and adventurous audio engineer. During the 1930s and 1940s, many of his band's recording sessions found the bandleader in the control room, monitoring and adjusting the acoustics, often by novel means. As Gert-Jan Blom and Jeff Winner wrote, "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-the-art facilities at his disposal, provided him with enormous hands-on experience as an engineer."
In 1946, Scott established Manhattan Research Incorporated. As well as designing electronic audio devices for personal use, over the years Scott sold and supported a number of related projects, including components such as ring modulators, wave, tone, and envelope shapers, modulators, and filters. Of interest were the "keyboard theremin", "chromatic electronic drum generators", and "circle generators". Scott described Manhattan Research as "More than a think factory—a dream center where the excitement of tomorrow is made available today." Robert Moog met Scott in the 1950s, designed circuits for him in the 1960s, and considered him an important influence.