Raymond Scott
The figure portrayed in [[Powerhouse]]—the man who would call himself Raymond Scott—was born Harry Warnow in Brooklyn in 1908. In 1936, he and his swing band, the Raymond Scott Quintette, became an overnight sensation with his quirky tunes (accompanied by titles such as “Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals,” “Confusion Amongst a Fleet of Taxi Cabs Upon Encountering a Fare,” and of course, “Powerhouse”). A single-minded perfectionist, Scott often clashed with his talented ensemble as he pushed them to play his music exactly the way he wanted it to be played. Jazz without improvisation was heresy, but Scott insisted that a piece be played the same way at every performance.
In 1943, Scott sold his publishing company, and with it the rights to his songs, to Warner Bros. Carl Stalling, the music director of their cartoon unit, began using Scott’s tunes to underscore chase sequences and assembly line scenes. Scott paid no attention—according to interviews with his wives, he never saw a cartoon in his life.
Scott’s first love was engineering, and over the years he spent more and more time in his laboratory, and less with live musicians. He founded a company called Manhattan Research Incorporated, where he built electronic music instruments, gathered patents on innumerable inventions, and recording innovated, futuristic commercials. His biggest project, and perhaps his crowning achievement, was a device called The Electronium, which was “an automatic composition and performance machine,” which would generate tones and melodies at random, which could be recorded and modified via a complicated control panel.
In 1987, Scott suffered a debilitating stroke that left him unable to work or speak. He died in 1994.
Bio adapted from a longer piece by Irwin Chusid