Raymond Scott started out as a jazz quintet band leader and then
got into making music for radio and television ads, and cartoons.
While
he was making commercial music, he was using the money he earned
to create electronic machines for making music. He started a company
called
Manhattan Research, Inc. to build his ever larger and more elaborate
creations. Though he continued to make commercial music, he also
made a
lot of experimental music as well, and was able to use much of this
experimental music in ads and cartoons.
This song was created on the Electronium. The Electronium was an
electronic instrument that allowed the composer to not only generate
the sounds, but also to sequence them in novel ways. "An 'instantaneous
composing machine,' the Electronium generated original music via random
sequences of tones, rhythms, and timbres; Scott himself denied it was a
prototype synthesizer -- it had no keyboard -- but as one of the first
machines to create music by means of artificial intelligence, its
importance in pointing the way towards the electonic compositions of the
future is undeniable." [source]
I have know about Raymond Scott for a little while now, but I just
recently discovered this song. I was immediately stuck by how much
it sounded like the electronic music of the 70s, 15-20 years after this
song was created. Plus its amazing how he was not only composing new
music and building his own electronic instruments, he was also inventing
new paradigms for structuring music, for example, the various sequencers
he made.
