by Roni Sarig
Socrate (1918).
Musique d’ameublement (Furniture Music) (1920).
Relâche (1924).
Cinéma Entr’acte symphonique (1924).
RAYMOND SCOTT
Don Byron, jazz clarinetist [from his notes to Bug Music (Nonesuch, 1996)]:
Jazz historians have chosen to understate the importance of [Scott’s band] in their histories of American music. The reasons for this rejection have much to do with [the band’s] overt interest in classical music. This music lives in a zone somewhere between jazz and classical music. [Scott’s group] accomplished this in a time when such a mix of influences was considered even more unusual than it is today.
Whether or not we realize it, we’ve all heard Raymond Scott’s music; his manic, colorful vignettes appeared in over one hundred Looney Tunes cartoons (accompanying Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the rest). His primary influence lies in the way his music has reached young television watchers and shaped the way that generations have perceived the relationship between music and motion.
Scott’s music is quintessentially modern. He was interested in mechanical sounds, even when made by humans. In his works, he took on the role of writer, arranger, player, conductor, engineer, and inventor, thus blurring the lines between composer, performer, and technician and creating a new paradigm for the roles a modern recording artist could assume.
By unapologetically injecting classical elements into pop and jazz, his music did much to relieve art music’s burden of seriousness and break down the lines between high and low. His greatest contribution to 20th-century music was, ironically, also the reason for his relative obscurity. Deemed too classical (or else too goofy) for jazz and not sober enough for classical, Scott fell through the cracks of music history.
The son of Russian immigrants, Raymond Scott was born Harry Warnow in 1908 in Brooklyn. At school he studied to be an engineer, until his older brother Mark – conductor of the CBS Radio Orchestra – convinced him to pursue music. After attending Julliard, Harry became pianist in his brother’s band and changed his name to Raymond Scott (which he picked from a phone book) to avoid charges of nepotism. Scott soon craved further artistic control and recruited five orchestra members to form his Raymond Scott Quintette. Though the group was actually a sextet – with saxophonist, clarinetist, trumpeter, bassist, drummer Johnny Williams (father of Star Wars composer/conductor John Williams), and Scott on piano – Scott preferred the sound of the word quintet. (In 1994, Stereolab – also a sextet – would name their record Mars Audiac Quintet in tribute to Scott).
Between 1937 and 1939, the Quintette’s music appeared both on radio and in films. Songs like Powerhouse and The Toy Trumpet were fast and intricate, full of instantly gratifying melodies and caricaturesque instrumentation that makes them clear precursors to the hi-fi lounge sounds of Esquivel and Martin Denny. Evocative titles like Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals and Boy Scout in Switzerland complemented the whimsical, bizarre tunes. Though the music sounded closest to swing jazz, it borrowed classical melodies and was far too fast and disjointed for dancing. It became popular as novelty music, but was reviled by critics as fake jazz.
Tom Maxwell, Squirrel Nut Zippers:
What Raymond Scott did was completely off the wall, very fucked up tonally. He brought in this weird, machine-like feel to music that’s generally very loose and emotive. He was a nut out of left field who made sounds nobody else was making. Powerhouse kicks my ass; I love the changed times, the bizarre key, the weird drum breaks, the strange intervals, and it’s really fun. I definitely took a page from his book [when] I wrote this orchestral song called The Kracken.” It’s strange, angular jazz – but not bop – some other sort of 20th-century sounding thing.
A perfectionist, Scott showed each musician exactly what to play and forbade any improvisation. In the studio, he pioneered the kind of creative techniques later used by Beatles’ producer George Martin and the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. An early adherent of overdubs and tape editing, Scott was also known to try things like dipping trumpets in water, or placing sea shells behind microphones, to get the sound he wanted.
In the early ‘40s, once the Quintette had expanded into the Raymond Scott Orchestra, Warner Bros, in-house composer Carl Stalling licensed a good deal of Scott’s work. Over the next two decades, bits and pieces of Scott’s tunes showed up in Stalling’s Looney Tunes scores. The playful, exaggerated themes proved a perfect match for the cartoon world (decades later, they would appear on The Ron and Skimpy Show as well), and this music would prove Scott’s most enduring legacy.
Mark De Gli Antoni, Soul Coughing:
I loved cartoon music, but it wasn’t until Soul Coughing put together “Bus to Beelzebub” – when we found this great cartoon that we had to [sample] – that I became aware Carl Stalling had taken stuff from Raymond Scott. [Soul Coughing’s] “Disseminated” is consciously a Raymond Scott tribute: a short piece, a wacky little phrase from The Penguin, completely built on his loop. And on “Zoom Zip,” the trumpet part is taken from Raymond Scott’s The Toy Trumpet, but slowed down and edited.
Scott, meanwhile, succeeded his brother as CBS bandleader and composed music for Broadway and commercials. All the while, his sense of humor continued to shine. In 1949, Scott’s orchestra performed Silent Music, a music-less, pantomimed swing tune, a full three years before John Cage offered his own silent work, 4’33”. This wasn’t the first – nor would it be the last – time Raymond Scott was ahead of those considered ahead of their time.
By the 1950s, as his music fell out of fashion, Scott focused more on electronics, an interest since his engineering days. He invented instruments such as the Electronium, which he described as “an instantaneous composition-performance machine,” as well as an early synthesizer. Over the next two decades he would play a role in the development of both the sampler and sequencer, the basic tools of nearly all modern dance music. Scott’s recording was sporadic, but typically ahead of its time. His 1963 synthesizer work, Soothing Sounds for Baby, featured keyboard patterns that predated similar work by minimalists such as Philip Glass and Terry Riley by decades (see also the 1996 album, Music for Babies, by U2 collaborator Howie B.).
DJ Spooky:
Soothing Sounds for Babies is fucking brilliant. It’s repetitive, with a beat pulse. I look to him as one of the originators of a techno aesthetic, in the way that techno comes out of the detritus of the industrial revolution.
Scott continued composing and inventing until a stroke left him debilitated in 1987. By then, the influence of his avant-garde cartoon music could be heard in the quirky new wave of groups like Oingo Boingo (whose Danny Elfman has composed very Scott-like material for The Simpsons) and They Might Be Giants. Recent tributes from both the jazz (Don Byron’s Bug Music) and classical (Kronos Quartet’s rendition of Dinner Music) worlds indicates that today’s musicians are finally walking across the bridges Scott built.
DISCOGRAPHY
Powerhouse: The Raymond Scott Project, Vol. 1 (Stash, 1991).
Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights: The Music of Raymond Scott (Columbia, 1992).
JOHN CAGE
David Grubbs, solo / Gastr del Sol:
John Cage’s influence has been so widespread for nearly anybody working in a certain type of music, it becomes part of what it means to make music in the 1990s or beyond. His influence comes from a few gestures: The idea that any sound is permitted. Something as simple as that, put to such terrific use in his works, just becomes a general fact of working with sounds.
To many familiar with concert music, John Cage is no secret at all. In fact, he’s arguably the dominant personality in 20th-century experimental music. Studied in universities and performed by classical musicians all over the world, his work has shaped the course of modern music. Although Cage had no direct dealings in the world of rock music, his influence was so great that his presence – and that of his many disciples – is pervasive. So closely is Cage identified with the avant-garde as a whole, h
is name – as it shows up in R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” or in Stereolab’s “John Cage Bubblegum” – has come to signify an entire musical movement.
Like his hero, Erik Satie, Cage was colorful and good-humored, and often branded a charlatan by the classical orthodoxy. As perhaps he would have admitted, his work often seems more like a stunt than an actual composition; the ideas always stood out more than the music. Conceptually, though, Cage represents a complete break with the Western classical tradition, a total liberation of sound. His fundamental philosophy that “any sound is musical” would forever change the way we hear music.
Though nearly all Cage’s work reinforces an “anything goes” ethic, his explorations took a number of distinct paths. As a young man in the early 1930s, he studied with two major composers, Arnold Schönberg and Henry Cowell. Schönberg, who sparked a revolution in classical composition with his use of 12-tone music (using all available notes rather than only those in a particular key), influenced Cage’s earliest work. Cowell, however, would have a more lasting influence. Cowell was among the first to bring rhythm – which had long played a large role in Eastern music – to higher prominence in the West. Asian musical forms and Buddhist philosophies would play a central role in Cage’s work. As much as any American artist, Cage presaged the flirtation of future generations – beatniks, hippies, and rock musicians – with Eastern culture.
Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth:
He was omnipresent as an influence on everybody in the arts, more as a theorist and teacher – his Eastern, Buddhist concepts – than for his actual pieces. Later I did go directly to his books and works, though. His inspiration is ready sublime in a way, you can’t minimize his influence, even on people who don’t know it.
In 1937, Cage brought rhythm to the forefront by founding one of the country’s first all-percussion ensembles. The physicality and tonal complexity of percussion attracted him; he believed that drumming was closer to natural human actions (hitting, tapping), and therefore a more direct musical expression, than other kinds of playing. He also recognized that percussion comes closer to the unintended sounds we hear in the world around us, otherwise known as noise. The eventual acceptance of noise elements into art music would have a significant impact on both modern jazz and rock.
Many of Cage’s earliest works utilize percussion, most notably his First Construction (1939), which may be the first “industrial” song in its use of exclusively metal instruments (gongs, bells, metal sheets). From the beginning, Cage’s rhythmic percussion works were closely tied to dance; in the ‘40s he began a lifelong collaboration with influential modern dance choreographer Merce Cunningham.
In search of a more economical way to present the varied sounds of a percussion ensemble, Cage began experimenting with the manipulation of piano strings. By attaching various small objects – bolts, nails, rubber bands – that distorted the notes and made them more percussive, Cage invented the “prepared piano,” an instrument with a variety of exotic timbres. Cage’s major prepared piano work, the trancelike Sonatas and Interludes, is perhaps his most beautiful and well-known piece. But the true significance of the prepared piano was, again, philosophical. The idea that not only was any sound permissible, but so was any instrument – or any use of an instrument – would inspire countless musicians, from Frank Zappa to Sonic Youth, to alter their instruments as well.
Mark De Gli Antoni, Soul Coughing:
The psychological influence of “every sound around you is potentially a musical sound” was exactly the kind of thinking I needed for getting into the sampler. Take a song like [Soul Coughing’s] “Is Chicago?”: There was a building with great door squeaks, so I recorded them. And the question was: How do I take what I think are really musical sounds and fit them in a piece of music so they become not just random noise, but a real melodic, important element?
By the 1950s, Cage had embarked on a new exploration that further employed Eastern and Buddhist ideas: aleatory, or chance, music. Instead of composing, Cage set up situations where chance determined the sounds created. The score of one well-known orchestral piece, Atlas Eclipticalis, is created by transposing astrological charts onto a musical staff.
One of Cage’s greatest creations – and certainly his most notorious “composition” – combines elements of chance with nontraditional musical sounds. Cage’s 4’33” calls for a performer to sit at his instrument for 4 minutes and 33 seconds without playing. The silence enables the audience to focus on the “chance music” around them: the hum of the lights, the car horns on the street, the squeaking of chairs. The piece also illustrates as concisely as possible Cage’s contention that, more than sound or structure, the only true determining element in music is time.
While Cage’s chance operations have had little impact on popular music, the environment in which they were performed has. By the early ‘50s, Cage began to organize “intermedia events,” where he held some of his more outrageous chance operations. Theatre Piece, for example, included a nude cellist smoking a cigar, balloons that were released and popped, and a man slung upside down with a watermelon. Events like these became the inspiration for the Fluxus art movement of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, which included experimental composers LaMonte Young and Yoko Ono, and artist Al Hansen (a student of Cage, who is also the grandfather of pop star Beck). Cage’s intermedia events were also precursors to “happenings” such as the Velvet Underground’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and later, ‘80s performance art.
Joe Henry:
John Cage taught everybody a new way to look at art. And he was a big influence on John Lennon and David Bowie, people like that. He’s still this tremendous figure. I wrote on my shaving mirror, in my wife’s mascara, a quote from Cage: “Everything we come across is to the point.” Cage talked constantly about getting your vanity out of the way. His idea of looking outward, I’ve tried so hard to work that way. For me, writing songs has less to do with self-expression than discovery. And I know a lot of my sensibility is informed by Cage.
A last element of Cage’s exploration with new sounds is his electronic and tape music. As early as 1939, his Imaginary Landscape No. 1 used two turntables (today’s basic DJ tools). Later, with Cartridge Music, Cage amplified various materials (wire, pipe cleaners, feathers) by attaching them to a phonograph cartridge and running them across a variety of surfaces. The piece, recognized as the first electronic work designed for live performance, illustrated the potential for generating sound from even the most ordinary objects.
DJ Spooky:
Pieces like Imaginary Landscape are supremely transitional moments in music. The piece uses radio signals, and if you think about it, radio acts as a network of frequencies just as instruments access a range of frequencies or tones. Playing with both of those he created this weird social piece. He was really advanced conceptually. For me, sampling acts as a theater of memory, and memory is its own network of frequencies – certain things trigger different memories. By putting them together in different bits and pieces you can build new memories, or imaginary memories. Which is like Imaginary Landscape, where the psychology of human memory becomes its own landscape. That’s what music is at its core.
Though Cage was not the first to create musique concrète (or tape music, which like sampling, uses prerecorded sounds), pieces such as his Imaginary Landscape No. 5 and Fontana Mix are innovative in their use of collage, which would play a large role in later pieces such as Roaratorio (1979) and his five Europeras (1988-1991). By the time he died, in 1992 at age 80, Cage’s position as the preeminent representative of 20th-century musical experimentation was secure.
WORKS
Imaginary Landscape No. 1, for Two Turntables, Frequency Recordings, Piano and Cymbal (1939).
Three Constructions, for Percussion (1939-41).
Bacchanale, for Prepared Piano (1940).
Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1946-48).
Imaginary Landscape No. 4, for 12 Radio
s (1951).
Music of Changes (1951).
4’33”, for Any Instruments (1951).
Williams Mix, for Tapes (1952).
Fontana Mix, for Tapes (1958).
Indeterminancy (1958).
Cartridge Music, for Amplified “Small Sounds” (1960).
Music for Amplified Toy Pianos (1960).
Atlas Eclipticalis (1961).
HPSCHD, for Amplified Harpsichord and 51 Tapes (1967-68).
Roaratorio, an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1979).
Europeras 1-5 (1988-91).
TRIBUTE: Various Artists, A Chance Operation: The John Cage Tribute (Koch, 1993); an interesting collection – featuring Frank Zappa, Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, and other avant-garde figures – broken up into small fragments that, when played on a CD player’s “random” mode, itself becomes a chance operation.
TRIBUTE: Various Artists, Caged / Uncaged (Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1993); produced by John Cale, the collection features Cage works interpreted by David Byrne, Lou Reed, Joey Ramone, Blondie, and Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys.
THEATER OF ETERNAL MUSIC
(THE DREAM SYNDICATE):
LaMONTE YOUNG, TONY CONRAD, JOHN CALE
Tony Conrad:
The idea in my head was that the music had become so advanced that we didn’t need composers at all. We were dismantling, destroying the Western tradition of composers by sitting in the middle of the music and just playing it.