Speaker 1: Pushkin The Last Archive, A History of Truth.
Speaker 2: About thirty years ago, a man named Irwin choose It
Speaker 2: encountered one of the strangest machines almost nobody had ever
Speaker 2: heard of.
Speaker 3: I was forty, I was broke. It's kind of a
Speaker 3: professional failure.
Speaker 2: Choose It was a DJ for a small community radio
Speaker 2: station in New Jersey. A friend of his had put
Speaker 2: him on to a musician named Raymond Scott, one of
Speaker 2: the most famous musicians of the early twentieth century, who
Speaker 2: had somehow been completely lost to history.
Speaker 3: These were records that were twenty five cents of pop
Speaker 3: and used record stores back then, and you didn't They
Speaker 3: didn't even have him in a bin.
Speaker 2: They had him under the bins JUSI loved Scott's music,
Speaker 2: and he began to get drawn into the mystery of
Speaker 2: it all. Who was this guy? He was obsessed, but
Speaker 2: his research kept dead ending.
Speaker 3: I went to a library and went looking through music
Speaker 3: history books, and there's almost no mention of Raymond Scott.
Speaker 3: He wasn't in the jazz books, he wasn't in the
Speaker 3: classical books, he wasn't in the pop books. I was
Speaker 3: kind of mystify he was kind of a mystery man.
Speaker 2: He was stuck until his friend found Scott in a
Speaker 2: phone book. He was still alive, living in California, Jews.
Speaker 2: It made a phone call and then he got on
Speaker 2: a plane and flew across the country. By then Scott
Speaker 2: was in his eighties. He'd had a few strokes and
Speaker 2: he couldn't speak. He would rest in the back of
Speaker 2: a dingy old ranch house with the heat turned all
Speaker 2: the way up and a humidifier on full blast, so
Speaker 2: there was a kind of heavy fog all around. His
Speaker 2: wife was taking care of him, but she also kept
Speaker 2: a lot of stray animals. There was a dog with
Speaker 2: paralyzed hind legs dragging itself for a and a lifetime's
Speaker 2: worth of stuff piled everywhere.
Speaker 3: They were old rusted tape decks. There were wires, They
Speaker 3: were reels of tape. There were seventy eight r PM discs,
Speaker 3: many of them broken, some of them on shelves old
Speaker 3: magazines of electronic industry publications parts catalogs. This is some
Speaker 3: of them, dating back to the nineteen forties and fifties.
Speaker 2: I should say this story spooky as it is, it's
Speaker 2: kind of my dream. I'm been out of Haffrey and
Speaker 2: I've produced this podcast for the last few years, and
Speaker 2: I'm hosting a season of six episodes now, which more
Speaker 2: on that later. All my life, I've written about history
Speaker 2: and made music. To find a secret, hidden archive full
Speaker 2: of strange musical electronics. I can imagine almost nothing better
Speaker 2: to know through artifacts what someone else once knew, something
Speaker 2: lost because the records and papers and magazines that Choose
Speaker 2: had found told a story. Scott had been one of
Speaker 2: the most famous musicians of the twentieth century. He'd been
Speaker 2: on TV every week for a long time, in all
Speaker 2: the big magazines and films with the movie stars, but
Speaker 2: almost nobody remembered him now.
Speaker 3: And I saw Raymond's entire life's work spread out between
Speaker 3: a leaky guest shed, a garage, some outbuildings on the
Speaker 3: property in Van NY's.
Speaker 2: How could somebody so famous be so forgotten? But something
Speaker 2: else didn't make sense either. There are all these old
Speaker 2: machines and tools strewn about with the rusty edges, And
Speaker 2: in the corner of the guest shed covered in dust,
Speaker 2: Choose It saw a huge hunk of metal and cased
Speaker 2: in wood.
Speaker 3: Large dusty piece of furniture, a bit like a wooden console.
Speaker 2: But it wasn't furniture. It was a heavy machine with
Speaker 2: wires spilling out, hundreds of switches on a black metal front,
Speaker 2: and wood paneling all around. It looked like the cockpit
Speaker 2: of an airplane, except that some of the switches and
Speaker 2: buttons said things like record and power, and others said
Speaker 2: things like do wa.
Speaker 3: I didn't know what it was.
Speaker 2: Later on, someone helping to sort through Scott's files found
Speaker 2: a contract. It was between Raymond Scott and Motown Records,
Speaker 2: and it detailed a binding, confidential agreement to build that
Speaker 2: machine that choose. It was staring at a machine that
Speaker 2: was meant to write songs, the Electronium Choose. It had
Speaker 2: come out to California because of these twenty five cent
Speaker 2: records he'd gotten obsessed with. It was honestly pretty random,
Speaker 2: but somehow he'd stumbled on one of the strangest stories
Speaker 2: in the history of technology.
Speaker 4: How did it work?
Speaker 2: That's the voice of Brian Keihu, one time keyboardist for
Speaker 2: The Who, Fiona Apple, producer, Beatles historian, and one of
Speaker 2: the people for whom this machine has become now a
Speaker 2: kind of holy grail because it makes no sense. Raymond
Speaker 2: Scott began building this thing in the nineteen fifties, and
Speaker 2: it was a kind of mechanical early artificial intelligence that
Speaker 2: actually worked. We're freaked out about chat GPT now. This
Speaker 2: thing was built in secret at a major studio in
Speaker 2: the nineteen seventies. Michael Jackson used to watch it work,
Speaker 2: and nobody now can figure out how to get it
Speaker 2: to work again. In the years between chooses stumbling upon
Speaker 2: the electronium in that Rundown ranch house, and today a
Speaker 2: lot of people have gotten involved in preserving the machine.
Speaker 2: We're bringing it back to life in some fashion. Brian Keyhu,
Speaker 2: but also Mark Mothersbaugh, the lead singer of Devo gat
Speaker 2: Ye the pop star, and teams of engineers and programmers
Speaker 2: and musicians from all around the world because it turns
Speaker 2: out that the man behind it knew how to make
Speaker 2: music like no one else, and they want to hear
Speaker 2: it again. Welcome to Season four of The Last Archive,
Speaker 2: the show about how we know what we know, how
Speaker 2: we used to know things, and why it seems sometimes
Speaker 2: lately is if we don't know anything at all. This
Speaker 2: episode is about that machine and its inventor, Raymond Scott,
Speaker 2: not just because Scott is the most famous composer of
Speaker 2: the twentieth century that most people have never heard of,
Speaker 2: But because I think his life traces one of the
Speaker 2: biggest stories about truth in our world today, the attempt
Speaker 2: to define the difference between man and machine.
Speaker 5: Remarks before Harrison's down, he is now setting down.
Speaker 2: There's another reason I want to spend some time with Scott.
Speaker 5: He is making himself comfortable.
Speaker 2: He recorded his whole life and begin there he goes,
Speaker 2: which made for some fun research.
Speaker 5: At all.
Speaker 2: Raymond Scott was born in Brooklyn in nineteen oh eight.
Speaker 2: His parents named him Harry Warno. His father had sailed
Speaker 2: from Russia to New York two years earlier on a
Speaker 2: ship called America. Sometime after Scott was born, his parents
Speaker 2: bought a music store in Brooklyn in Brownsville, a small
Speaker 2: Jewish neighborhood. They lived in the two floor apartment above
Speaker 2: their shop, surrounded by music and sound machines. Scott especially
Speaker 2: loved the phone. Sometimes he'd make prank calls.
Speaker 5: Please don't forget.
Speaker 2: Scott was growing up in an in between time, a
Speaker 2: mismatch of the world we know now. In the world
Speaker 2: of the nineteenth century, the electrified subway was brand new
Speaker 2: then the year Scott was born. It had made its
Speaker 2: way out to Brooklyn, but the gas street lamps in
Speaker 2: Brownsville were still lit every night by a lamplighter. There
Speaker 2: were chickens in the street, the smell of the sea
Speaker 2: out over Canarsi, candy shops and tenements, hot spiced corn,
Speaker 2: beef in the Delis Briany, half sour pickles in the
Speaker 2: Jewish market, farms in Saltwater. It felt like the old country.
Speaker 2: It felt like the ends of the earth.
Speaker 6: It was a lack a little village. It was a neighborhood.
Speaker 2: Pearls Imni Winters one of the girls from the neighborhood.
Speaker 2: Later on she and Scott got married, and she's all
Speaker 2: over Scott's recordings. Jus It, who never got over his
Speaker 2: obsession with Raymond Scott, interviewed her with a colleague just
Speaker 2: a little before she died.
Speaker 6: I used to go into the music store, you know,
Speaker 6: to buy music when I was a kid.
Speaker 2: That music shop is where I think the dream of
Speaker 2: the songwriting machine began. It was a snapshot of everything
Speaker 2: that was changing in music in the early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: For centuries. If you wanted to hear music in your house,
Speaker 2: someone in your family needed to know how to play.
Speaker 2: For a while, buying a song meant buying sheet music
Speaker 2: bound together in little pamphlets. But later in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 2: technologies that could capture in he produced sound were invented,
Speaker 2: and by the start of the twentieth century, mechanical music
Speaker 2: was taking off. Suddenly you didn't need to know somebody
Speaker 2: who could play to listen to music. You could listen
Speaker 2: on records, wax cylinders, the radio. Scott was obsessed with
Speaker 2: these machines and the music that came out of them.
Speaker 2: He even started an amateur home radio station so he
Speaker 2: could make broadcasts from his bedroom to the living room.
Speaker 6: You need to tell me that's recording now, Oh my god,
Speaker 6: what the fuck that?
Speaker 2: Even as a kid, he was always working on something.
Speaker 2: He'd dangled microphones out the window to record conversations on
Speaker 2: the street or the neighbor. Practicing piano, he would hang
Speaker 2: around the music shop with his dad, tinkering and watching
Speaker 2: not just how music was made, but how it was sold,
Speaker 2: what sold, and how it got reproduced. And there was
Speaker 2: one machine in particular that he became fascinated by.
Speaker 6: He told me that he taught himself to play the piano.
Speaker 6: With the play a piano and I guess that's as
Speaker 6: he first started.
Speaker 2: The player piano. You've probably seen one before in a
Speaker 2: saloon in an old Western, you know, when someone gets shot,
Speaker 2: falls on the piano and it starts playing itself. That's
Speaker 2: the player piano, a piano that plays as if there
Speaker 2: were a ghost of the keyboard. Songs were sold as
Speaker 2: scrolls of paper with little holes punched out for each note,
Speaker 2: a set of mechanical instructions for the piano. The result
Speaker 2: you could hear nearly any song in your home, even
Speaker 2: if you had no idea how to play it yourself.
Speaker 2: Scott loved the piano in the shop. He'd take a
Speaker 2: role and probably play it as slowly as possible, fitting
Speaker 2: his little fingers to the keys as they press themselves down,
Speaker 2: learning by machine. Most people these days think of the
Speaker 2: player piano as a novelty or a gimmick. But I
Speaker 2: want to spend a minute with it here because it's
Speaker 2: a big part not just of music history, but of
Speaker 2: automation history. We tend to think of automation as man
Speaker 2: versus robot factory lines and coal mines, but the player
Speaker 2: piano was a kind of robot two one We often
Speaker 2: forget about but an early, massively influential one that foreshadowed
Speaker 2: so much of what was to come. When Scott was
Speaker 2: a kid, people thought the player piano would be the
Speaker 2: future of music. There were hundreds of thousands of them
Speaker 2: sold each year in millions of song roles. By nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 2: when Scott was eleven, there were more player pianos being
Speaker 2: sold than regular pianos. It wasn't just sales, though. Copyright
Speaker 2: laws in the United States were built around the player
Speaker 2: piano and the record player an equal part. You can
Speaker 2: draw a straight line from player piano roles to punch
Speaker 2: cards and the first computer programs, and people made all
Speaker 2: kinds of player pianos. What you're listening to now is
Speaker 2: a special kind of player piano role that could capture
Speaker 2: all the subtleties of a human performance. This one was
Speaker 2: recorded by the composer WC and reproduced decades after or
Speaker 2: his death. By machine, That's what Scott was learning in
Speaker 2: his family's music shop, role by role, not just to
Speaker 2: play like a machine, but to wonder at all the
Speaker 2: magical things machines suddenly could do. When I was trying
Speaker 2: to understand how Scott grew up, I read up on
Speaker 2: his neighborhood, and in one memoir I found a particular
Speaker 2: detail that snapped it all into view. The drug store
Speaker 2: just down the street from Scott had a poster in
Speaker 2: the window. It was titled the Human Factory, and it
Speaker 2: imagined a person as if they were a kind of
Speaker 2: complex machine, with all these little engineers inside. Scott must
Speaker 2: have passed that poster plenty of times. He had dreams
Speaker 2: of becoming like a machine himself, attaching motors to his
Speaker 2: hands so he could play the piano faster, the kind
Speaker 2: of way only a player piano could. Everywhere that line
Speaker 2: between man and machine was beginning to blur, but there
Speaker 2: was one place where the difference was unmistakable. A machine
Speaker 2: never made mistakes. The song sounded the same every single time,
Speaker 2: and to Scott, that was the ideal.
Speaker 6: The struggle between being a musician and an engineer was
Speaker 6: very real for him. He just loved equipment. Mock was
Speaker 6: the one insisted that he go to Julia. I don't
Speaker 6: think he wanted to.
Speaker 2: That choice, music or engineering. It set the chorus for
Speaker 2: Scott's entire life. Because Scott never could give up on engineering.
Speaker 2: But his brother, who was a rising star in music,
Speaker 2: saw that he had a gift for composing that almost
Speaker 2: no one else did. He got Scott a job as
Speaker 2: the pianist for the CBS Radio Orchestra, and immediately Scott
Speaker 2: began to get noticed. He was anxious that people would
Speaker 2: think he only had the job because of his brother,
Speaker 2: So Harry Warno flipped through the phone book until he
Speaker 2: found a name he liked, Raymond Scott, a name he
Speaker 2: also chose because it sounded less Jewish and he was
Speaker 2: always anxious about that. He played his piano, he wrote
Speaker 2: his songs, and he kept his engineering passion more as
Speaker 2: a hobby. CBS was a good situation except for one thing.
Speaker 2: He was always playing standards songs that people knew they
Speaker 2: liked and had heard a million times already.
Speaker 3: He said that he wanted to write music that people
Speaker 3: would like the first time they heard it. He asked
Speaker 3: his brother Mark if he could put together a band.
Speaker 3: He wanted to put together a six piece band with
Speaker 3: himself in it.
Speaker 2: Mark said yes. Scott started hunting for five musicians who
Speaker 2: could do exactly what he wanted. What he wanted was
Speaker 2: music with a spark that could form a connection with
Speaker 2: a listener immediately out of nowhere. He had a couple
Speaker 2: songs ready, so he found his guys rehearsed, and then
Speaker 2: he got an audience together in CBS's Studio B. They
Speaker 2: dimmed the lights all the way and they began to play.
Speaker 2: A journalist wrote about it a year later.
Speaker 4: Nobody who attended that premiere eighteen months ago was likely
Speaker 4: to forget it.
Speaker 7: Out of the darkness, there came.
Speaker 2: A thin wailing note, barely masking a slow, suggestive thumping
Speaker 2: on the drums.
Speaker 7: When it was over, the audience rose.
Speaker 3: To its feet and cheered.
Speaker 7: Fan Mail poured in, Who was this man, Scott?
Speaker 6: Where was he from?
Speaker 7: Where had he been all these years?
Speaker 3: They created such a generated such an amazing listener reaction
Speaker 3: that they immediately got a recording contract with the Master label,
Speaker 3: which was owned by Irving Mills, who was Duke Ellington's manager.
Speaker 2: The response was unprecedented, and admitted.
Speaker 8: I'm going to take you right on in, but we're
Speaker 8: going to have a very entertaining visit with one of
Speaker 8: the years.
Speaker 9: Then faith no music or good doing to get in there.
Speaker 2: Scott was trying to sell a perfect musical package. He
Speaker 2: said he went out to clubs to track which tempos
Speaker 2: made people get up and dance. He had a whole
Speaker 2: thing about names. He called his band of six people
Speaker 2: a quintet, not a sextet. He even renamed his saxophone player.
Speaker 5: And hears the youngest of all group.
Speaker 9: His name was originally Dave Harris, but now it's Eric
Speaker 9: Hoek Eric Kwak.
Speaker 10: Then it's an interesting name.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's Raymond's idea of a name.
Speaker 2: He wouldn't write his music down. He'd just play it
Speaker 2: at the piano for his quintet and then have them
Speaker 2: play their parts back till they could do it right,
Speaker 2: note for note.
Speaker 5: And they called the fellows that marvelous fears and memories.
Speaker 5: And they never to get a composition to Wednesday signed it.
Speaker 2: Once they had it down, it rarely changed. And that
Speaker 2: was just how Scott wanted it. If he could have
Speaker 2: replaced each of his musicians' minds with the scroll of music,
Speaker 2: he probably would have.
Speaker 6: He didn't know how to handle human relationships too well.
Speaker 3: They called him a bully, they called him a bastard,
Speaker 3: they called him all kinds of names because he was
Speaker 3: trying to make them play better. One of his musicians
Speaker 3: once nobody worked with Raymond. Everybody worked under Raymond. Johnny Williams,
Speaker 3: the drummer, said, we were We hated every minute of
Speaker 3: it because we were being told what to play exaid.
Speaker 3: At the same time that we hated it, we were
Speaker 3: making more money than anybody in town.
Speaker 2: The music was like jazz, but without the improvisation or
Speaker 2: the looseness. Tightly manage the price of mechanical perfection.
Speaker 3: Well, he rehearsed, I want to cut that, and he rehearsed.
Speaker 9: Keepon cutting way the anper the cut.
Speaker 3: He rehearsed keepers from.
Speaker 9: Getting accocated by saying, temple do it that way without
Speaker 9: talking about it.
Speaker 3: And he was driving his musicians crazy because they would say,
Speaker 3: nobody needs to rehearse this much.
Speaker 2: Scott held his musicians to an impossible standard. He wanted
Speaker 2: them to play like machines. But it's hard to argue
Speaker 2: with the results. His rise was stratospheric. Stravinsky, Cab Calloway,
Speaker 2: Duke Ellington, they were all Raymond Scott fans. In the
Speaker 2: nineteen forties, he had his own radio show, The Raymond
Speaker 2: Scott Show. He became the music director of CBS Radio,
Speaker 2: where he led a racially integrated radio orchestra. This, I
Speaker 2: think not because he was especially progressive but because all
Speaker 2: he cared about was the music.
Speaker 3: This, in so many ways explains why he was working
Speaker 3: with machines late in life.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, his best friend.
Speaker 2: The machines were his best friends.
Speaker 10: To me.
Speaker 2: When I heard this story, I kept thinking about Scott
Speaker 2: as a kid at the player piano. When that machine
Speaker 2: was invented, it scared people. Two years before Raymond Scott
Speaker 2: was born, John Phillips Sussa, the famous composer, wrote an
Speaker 2: essay called the Menace of Mechanical Music. The whole course
Speaker 2: of music has been the expression of soul, states he wrote.
Speaker 2: And now in this twentieth century come these talking and
Speaker 2: playing machines to reduce the expression to a mathematical system
Speaker 2: of megaphones, wheels, cogs, discs, cylinders, in all manner of
Speaker 2: revolving things. The player piano became a dark sny of
Speaker 2: modern life. When Kurt Vonnegut wrote his first novel about
Speaker 2: a dystopian America run by engineers in their automatic machinery,
Speaker 2: he called it player piano. By the time Raymond Scott
Speaker 2: was getting famous, those fears about mechanical music were everywhere.
Speaker 9: Same story everywhere, new machine, high speed production, fewer jobs.
Speaker 11: And ten men for every job it.
Speaker 10: Can be had.
Speaker 2: Scott was fighting a classic battle, mechanical perfection against human error.
Speaker 2: What was at stake were free will agency the human soul.
Speaker 2: That conflict was one of the main rhythms of twentieth
Speaker 2: century history, and Scott was like a leading melody and
Speaker 2: then he hit a wrong note. That story. After the
Speaker 2: break in the nineteen forties, Raymond Scott was properly famous.
Speaker 2: He and his wife Pearl packed up their kids and
Speaker 2: his equipment and moved to a big house out in Tuckaho,
Speaker 2: New York.
Speaker 6: He had a wonderful apartment and said he fully moved
Speaker 6: from there. Of course, he was a Ham radio operator.
Speaker 6: He wanted to be where he'd have good reception.
Speaker 2: I kind of love that he finally had enough money
Speaker 2: to buy a big house. But actually the only reason
Speaker 2: he was moving out of the city was so that
Speaker 2: he could have better Ham radio reception. He was tinkering
Speaker 2: with his machines again, not just microphones in high fi equipment,
Speaker 2: but new sorts of instruments. The problem was, electronics was
Speaker 2: not a casual hobby. In the late nineteen thirties and
Speaker 2: early forties.
Speaker 12: He saw an electronic parts catalog and he wanted to
Speaker 12: order every part in the catalog.
Speaker 2: Stan Warno is Raymond Scott and pearls Imni Winter's son.
Speaker 2: He made a great documentary about his father called Deconstructing Dad.
Speaker 2: I visited him last winter.
Speaker 12: And he thought, the only way he's going to make
Speaker 12: enough money to do that is to form a big band.
Speaker 12: And so he did form a big band and went
Speaker 12: out on the road.
Speaker 8: It's more thirty in New York and time for CBS
Speaker 8: to present The Raymond Scott Show across the continent and
Speaker 8: later to the whole world by shortwave come song Hits
Speaker 8: of the Day, starring America's number one composer with a band.
Speaker 8: Here he is Raymond Scott.
Speaker 2: In the nineteen thirties, Scott's hits seem to have been
Speaker 2: about the music first, but in the forties his focus
Speaker 2: seems to have shifted from writing great songs to making
Speaker 2: as much money from his music as possible so he
Speaker 2: could fuel his mechanical hobby. It was like his own
Speaker 2: version of his dad's music shop. Music sold any way
Speaker 2: you like, but a big band needed a singer. He
Speaker 2: was always churning through them, always on the lookout for
Speaker 2: someone perfect. And that's how he met Marjorie Chandler.
Speaker 6: We were in Chicago and we took an apartment there.
Speaker 2: Scott heard through one of the band's managers that there
Speaker 2: was a young girl from Canada he should meet. She'd
Speaker 2: sung in a big radio contest in one first place.
Speaker 2: She was about thirteen years old, and her voice was amazing.
Speaker 2: Scott decided to take her on as a student full time.
Speaker 12: He thought she had real potential, and so she came
Speaker 12: to live with us.
Speaker 2: Marjorie's family sent her to live at the house in Tuckahoe.
Speaker 2: According to Pearl, she and Scott were like surrogate parents,
Speaker 2: except Scott and Marjorie spent endless hours practicing. It was
Speaker 2: like with his quintete, except Chandler was a kid away
Speaker 2: from her parents. This tape is likely from later on,
Speaker 2: but even then you can hear how exacting he is.
Speaker 6: This guys.
Speaker 5: Even very much.
Speaker 6: You think.
Speaker 2: Scott gave her a new name, Dorothy Collins. She'd go
Speaker 2: to school, she'd wander around the big house and write
Speaker 2: her name Marjorie over and over again. Then she'd go
Speaker 2: back to practicing love. It was a backbreaking regimen, but
Speaker 2: she was an incredible.
Speaker 12: Talent, and as she got older and better, he began
Speaker 12: featuring her and his band.
Speaker 2: She grew up with the family. When she was a
Speaker 2: bit older, she sang with the band for the first
Speaker 2: time on the air. After Scott started hosting The Lucky
Speaker 2: Strike Hit Parade, a popular TV show, she became the
Speaker 2: featured singer. She was twenty four, and at some point
Speaker 2: along the way they got romantically involved.
Speaker 12: And then I have seen some letters where my mother
Speaker 12: was writing to him saying it's really I'm not really
Speaker 12: comfortable with her, and who knows what was going on,
Speaker 12: because again that they eventually got involved with each other
Speaker 12: and he'd have wasted my mom and married her.
Speaker 2: Scott and Marjorie now Dorothy Collins were married when she
Speaker 2: was twenty five. I don't want to dramatize this or
Speaker 2: speculate on how and when they got together, because no
Speaker 2: matter what, it's a dark turn. She had been like
Speaker 2: an adopted daughter to them, away from her own parents.
Speaker 2: It was the culmination, I think of the most dangerous
Speaker 2: strain in Scott's thinking about musicians and people. What he
Speaker 2: must have seen in Marjorie Chandler in the beginning was
Speaker 2: Dorothy Collins the chance to make his own musician, his
Speaker 2: own person as if he were building a machine. Every
Speaker 2: week they appeared on TV together. Collins became a kind
Speaker 2: of American darling, achieving a level of celebrity even Scott
Speaker 2: had never had a star. The money came pouring in.
Speaker 2: They moved into a mansion on Long Island.
Speaker 7: It had thirty two rooms and four stories.
Speaker 2: That's deb Studebaker, Raymond Scott and Dorothy Collins's daughter. She's
Speaker 2: a teacher and a poet, which you can hear by
Speaker 2: the way she describes her childhood home.
Speaker 7: The house was at the end of a long gravel driveway.
Speaker 7: It had had a forest behind. It was very grand.
Speaker 7: There was a library with a secret door you pull
Speaker 7: it out. There was a bathroom behind it. We would
Speaker 7: go on these explorations in the forest. There was wisteria
Speaker 7: hanging over an archway that was always filled with bees.
Speaker 2: Inside the house, Scott had begun to amass all the
Speaker 2: electronic parts he wanted. He was at once secretive and
Speaker 2: proud to show it off.
Speaker 9: Let me take it down stairs. I'm sure you these
Speaker 9: technical facilities, and I take it. We're supposed to have, oh,
Speaker 9: maybe a half a million separate items or so an
Speaker 9: electronic music studio wants to grow and grow, and grow
Speaker 9: and grow.
Speaker 2: The room was full of gear, switches, meters, welders, a furnace.
Speaker 9: But now I'd like to take upstairs to show you
Speaker 9: what we've been building with all this equipment.
Speaker 2: Upstairs was a thirty foot wall of obscure electronic musical machinery.
Speaker 2: Alongside his other musical work, Scott had begun writing and
Speaker 2: recording music for commercials. I have for several months now
Speaker 2: been unable to get this jingle for Sprite out of
Speaker 2: my head. Over the course of the nineteen fifties, Scott
Speaker 2: wrote jingles for a lot of big companies schlitzpier Rca, Victor,
Speaker 2: vix Ford, Chrysler, and a lot of the time it
Speaker 2: was Dorothy Collins singing them. He had a plaque over
Speaker 2: his piano that read, ideally the words should make sense.
Speaker 5: What Nicks and Now about dance a melon balladunce a
Speaker 5: melon bad dance?
Speaker 3: What Nicks and Nolan bout dance?
Speaker 2: The ice art.
Speaker 3: Taste of sprint.
Speaker 2: These companies were selling the future, and they needed a
Speaker 2: sound to match it. In the nineteen fifties, Americans were
Speaker 2: drunk on the post war promise of consumer technology. It
Speaker 2: was the age of automatic, of being able to buy
Speaker 2: all sorts of machines that would make your life easier, to.
Speaker 9: Make reality of imagination.
Speaker 7: This is Bendix the Tomorrow People.
Speaker 2: Scott and Collins seemed at the time to have a
Speaker 2: happy life together as the Tomorrow people, throwing parties at
Speaker 2: their mansion, making music in the machine rooms and listening
Speaker 2: to it in the listening room. They were, in many
Speaker 2: ways the sound of that post war dream world. They
Speaker 2: made music meant to push the button that sent consumers
Speaker 2: marching off to make a purchase. During those years, Scott
Speaker 2: was creating the kinds of machines. His music helped to
Speaker 2: sell whirling spinning devices that seemed as if they came
Speaker 2: from the future. Just keep in mind how different what
Speaker 2: you're hearing is from popular music in the fifties. I mean,
Speaker 2: this was the top song of nineteen fifty nine.
Speaker 3: I Come Send the prettiest taper comedy. There wasn't as
Speaker 3: many as there was. Obamical refired on Scower and they
Speaker 3: began to run it down to Mississippi, to the Gulf
Speaker 3: of Mexico.
Speaker 2: Music like Scott's just didn't exist in the mainstream but
Speaker 2: he was sneaking it in there through commercials. He saw
Speaker 2: his machines as a way to push the envelope and
Speaker 2: thought that because the sounds they made were new, they'd
Speaker 2: catch the ear and away jingles made with old instruments couldn't.
Speaker 2: Scott seems to have created one of the first, if
Speaker 2: not the first, musical sequencer, a device that is the
Speaker 2: foundation for much of modern pop. In a weird historical twist,
Speaker 2: one of the ways he had financed all this experimentation
Speaker 2: was by selling his early hits to Warner Brothers, where
Speaker 2: they became a lot of the music soundtracking the Looney Tunes. Literally,
Speaker 2: this man put the tunes in Looney Tunes. But then
Speaker 2: he started to get sick. His brother and his father
Speaker 2: had died of heart disease, and Scott had his first
Speaker 2: heart attack in nineteen fifty eight. I don't think it's
Speaker 2: a coincidence that within a year he began to work
Speaker 2: on the first version of the Electronium, his songwriting machine.
Speaker 12: I remember him telling me, you know about this machine.
Speaker 12: I'm working on a machine that's going to compose and
Speaker 12: perform at the same time.
Speaker 2: This was the stuff of science fiction, a dream. A
Speaker 2: few people had had, but nobody went for it quite
Speaker 2: like Scott. A machine not just for playing music, but
Speaker 2: for composing it. Scott began to work harder and harder
Speaker 2: on the machine, and at the same time his marriage
Speaker 2: to Dorothy Collins unraveled.
Speaker 7: She discovered that she loved acting in the theater, and
Speaker 7: my dad didn't travel with her or us. He was
Speaker 7: always working on his own stuff. But I think there
Speaker 7: was a certain lightness. I think that she probably found
Speaker 7: being respected now, you know, for something new that was hers.
Speaker 7: Acting was hers. He had nothing to to do with that.
Speaker 2: Collins left and then they were divorced. She testified in
Speaker 2: court that he was such a perfectionist, so intensely critical,
Speaker 2: that he gave her asthma and she couldn't sing when
Speaker 2: he was around.
Speaker 7: So my mother used to say it was like Frankenstein's Monster,
Speaker 7: and the monster kind of woke up and decided, you know,
Speaker 7: that she could be her own person.
Speaker 12: But Scott was bereft, and he took a bunch of
Speaker 12: sleeping pills, thinking he was going to kill himself, but
Speaker 12: he just went to sleep for a long time.
Speaker 2: He moved out of the house into an industrial space
Speaker 2: in a big office park, on Long Island. His TV
Speaker 2: show was off the air, he didn't have a hit
Speaker 2: band anymore, and he was alone, but he had one
Speaker 2: thing left, the electronium.
Speaker 12: I have very clear memories of being out there and
Speaker 12: the electronium was in the very next room, iterating away,
Speaker 12: which is what it did. You had to kind of
Speaker 12: set it up, and then it would go through these
Speaker 12: iterations and we would be listening to it, and he
Speaker 12: would hear something he really liked and he'd jump up
Speaker 12: and go in there and record it on the cassette.
Speaker 2: In the nineteen sixties, Raymond Scott was living in a long, low,
Speaker 2: white cement warehouse surrounded by machines.
Speaker 11: He had to seriously downgrade his life.
Speaker 2: Jeff Winner, he works with Choose It, that radio DJ
Speaker 2: who went out to visit Scott, and together with Scott's family,
Speaker 2: they're preserving, managing and sharing his archives.
Speaker 13: He went from a massive mansion of his own design
Speaker 13: to living on Long Island in a warehouse that wasn't
Speaker 13: even zoned for resident dential, that didn't have a kitchen.
Speaker 11: He was not supposed to be living there.
Speaker 2: He'd gotten married for the third time to a woman
Speaker 2: named Mitzi Curtis and this time it stuck. But money
Speaker 2: was tight, popular music was moving on. He was still
Speaker 2: composing the occasional jingle, but now really it was all
Speaker 2: machines and not just in his warehouse. The concern over
Speaker 2: automation was reaching a fever pitch in the United States.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty John F. Kennedy even ran for president
Speaker 2: against the machine threat.
Speaker 8: Because the problem that West Virginia is facing is the
Speaker 8: problem that all America is going to face. That is
Speaker 8: the problem of what happens to man when machines take
Speaker 8: their place.
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, Raymond Scott seems to have been trying to replace
Speaker 2: as much of himself as possible with the machine.
Speaker 13: Everything he had ever done up until that point, in
Speaker 13: one way or another, would become part of Electronium, even
Speaker 13: if he hadn't even declared to himself that that was
Speaker 13: his goal.
Speaker 11: Yet it's like everything's under that one roof.
Speaker 2: His baseline generator, his drum pattern generator, the melody sequencer,
Speaker 2: all of it tied together with thick wires hidden behind
Speaker 2: the concrete walls of the factory.
Speaker 10: And when Raymond came to the door, the first thing
Speaker 10: I encountered was, well, I want you to sign this
Speaker 10: disclosure agreement.
Speaker 2: Tom Ray he used to work at Mogue, probably the
Speaker 2: most famous synthesizer company of all time. He's taught electronic
Speaker 2: music history at the Berkeley College of Music, where he
Speaker 2: was a professor. But at the time he met Scott
Speaker 2: in the summer of nineteen seventy, he was a graduate
Speaker 2: student working on his dissertation for a PhD in music.
Speaker 10: I mean, I'm not an industrial spy. I'm a graduate student.
Speaker 2: Ray had heard that Scott was touched with genius, and
Speaker 2: he wanted to see what he'd been inventing.
Speaker 10: What did I see? I saw everything. Oh my gosh,
Speaker 10: you know, what is this thing over here? And I said,
Speaker 10: doesn't seem to have a keyboard or any kind of
Speaker 10: an interface. He said, well, it does. It had one
Speaker 10: little micro switch, and so he goes over and he
Speaker 10: flips some of these many many knobs and switches and
Speaker 10: things on the panel of the thing and said, I'm
Speaker 10: going to have it suggest a theme, and it gives
Speaker 10: out with a little melody, and then he says, uh,
Speaker 10: I think I will ask it to make the intervals,
Speaker 10: the music musical intervals wider, and he flips a couple
Speaker 10: of switches and they're wider, you know, And he put together,
Speaker 10: as I sat there, a rather lush uh composition with
Speaker 10: not only accompaniment but counterpoint, and you know, the whole thing.
Speaker 2: Scott was inventing madly during those years. The electronium combined
Speaker 2: a lot of different gizmos he'd created, and it was
Speaker 2: a constantly changing set of modules. You controlled the music
Speaker 2: the machine made by means of switches he called the
Speaker 2: composer guidance control. One of the major X factors of
Speaker 2: the electronium is that it seems to have had some
Speaker 2: way of generating randomness within the preset patterns. They would
Speaker 2: change on their own over time. But it's not clear
Speaker 2: to anyone how This was a crazy idea. But you
Speaker 2: can get a clue to why Scott was after it
Speaker 2: from an ad he made around then with Jim Henson,
Speaker 2: the Muppets guy for IBM. They were pitching a new
Speaker 2: word processor. But the ad is all about modern life.
Speaker 2: It's a kind of crazy montage of vacant looking people,
Speaker 2: machines and explosions.
Speaker 1: There always seemed to be enough time to do the paperwork.
Speaker 7: What today there is today?
Speaker 1: There isn't enough time.
Speaker 9: Today, There aren't enough people machines should do the work,
Speaker 9: that's what their best bet.
Speaker 10: People should do the thinking, that's what their best at.
Speaker 2: But what about a machine that did the work and
Speaker 2: the thinking. When Scott was born, machines were being created
Speaker 2: mostly to help people do wrote physical labor. In the
Speaker 2: first half of the twentieth century, they began to do
Speaker 2: those things automatically at the push of a button, and
Speaker 2: by the age of the electronium, machines began automatically to
Speaker 2: do things that looked a lot like intellectual labor.
Speaker 4: This rolebot manipulator can be easily taught because of its
Speaker 4: electronic brains.
Speaker 13: Can this type of control be applied to other types
Speaker 13: of machines?
Speaker 2: Certainly in that light, Scott was reaching for the brass ring,
Speaker 2: a machine capable of making art, of helping people make
Speaker 2: art that expressed a human soul and stirred human emotions.
Speaker 2: But he needed money to do it, so he started
Speaker 2: doing a little press, small articles here and there. It's
Speaker 2: like inventing the typewriter, he told a journalist. Only the
Speaker 2: typewriter furnishes the plot and reads the result.
Speaker 10: I've always told people that I consider Raymonds Scott one
Speaker 10: of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and music.
Speaker 2: But if you wanted to buy an electronium from Raymond Scott,
Speaker 2: it was going to cost you an arm and a leg.
Speaker 2: And it was a crazy idea. So it was by
Speaker 2: a stroke of luck that the head of Motown Records,
Speaker 2: Barry Gordy, heard about it.
Speaker 5: It was not a one man organization or two man organization,
Speaker 5: but it is an organization of teamwork, you know.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's an unseeing hero, so to speak.
Speaker 2: Barry Gordy founded Motown in nineteen fifty nine in Detroit.
Speaker 2: Before founding the company, he had worked at a car
Speaker 2: factory during the years when there was lots of hubbub
Speaker 2: over plants that had achieved near full automation. It was
Speaker 2: on the assembly line that Gordy started to think about
Speaker 2: doing music differently. In his autobiography, he wrote that the
Speaker 2: plant the cars started out as just a frame pulled
Speaker 2: along on conveyor belts until they emerged at the end
Speaker 2: of the line. I wanted the same concept for my company,
Speaker 2: only with artists and songs and records.
Speaker 5: It would it gone any year without can wreck as
Speaker 5: we've been out of business.
Speaker 2: Motown was a black owned business selling music by black
Speaker 2: artists to everyone in America, like everything in the music business,
Speaker 2: who was precarious economically because hit records deal in matters
Speaker 2: of taste, and taste is subject to bias, sees and whims. Gordy,
Speaker 2: with his assembly line passed, wasn't having that. He wanted
Speaker 2: to systematize as much as possible. They'd ab test songs
Speaker 2: with different artists until something stuck. Like R and D.
Speaker 2: They had a house band, the Funk Brothers, providing ironclad
Speaker 2: rhythm section arrangements across Motown songs as if they were
Speaker 2: the engine department. The only thing missing was the automation.
Speaker 2: And that's why it makes sense to me that one
Speaker 2: day in the early nineteen seventies, Barry Gordy pulled up
Speaker 2: to Raymond Scott's warehouse with a string of limos to
Speaker 2: see the automatic songwriting machine for himself.
Speaker 13: And by the way, Barry Gordy knew who Raymond Scott was.
Speaker 13: Like anybody of his generation, Raymond Scott was a famous person,
Speaker 13: so Gordy also knew he was getting that in the deal,
Speaker 13: someone who is a musical mind who has already written hits.
Speaker 2: Scott showed Gordy and his crew the warehouse, and then
Speaker 2: he fired up the electronium, just like he did with Ray.
Speaker 2: He must have shown Gordy how you flip the switches
Speaker 2: to set a pattern. Then watch does the machine iterated,
Speaker 2: changing notes, repeating phrases, rifling through ideas semi randomly, and.
Speaker 5: During the last couple of minutes of Patta Generator was
Speaker 5: four or five.
Speaker 2: Scott was selling an idea at that point, the potential
Speaker 2: of a songwriting machine that could hit on, an idea
Speaker 2: that a person alone never would if it came up
Speaker 2: with a hook that sparked in the way a hit
Speaker 2: does you know it when you heard it, and you
Speaker 2: could bottle it up and sell it to millions of people.
Speaker 2: This idea, I think came straight from Scott's quintetes finding
Speaker 2: that sound that you liked the first time you hear it.
Speaker 2: It's a tricky balancing act because it has to be
Speaker 2: new enough that it catches your attention. But a hit
Speaker 2: also has to sound familiar enough that you kind of
Speaker 2: know what you're going to get as soon as you
Speaker 2: hear it. It's like an elevator pitch to the listener,
Speaker 2: and Gordy was uncompromising about it. Here's Smokey Robinson in
Speaker 2: a twenty nineteen documentary remembering that process.
Speaker 7: He used to say that all time we got to
Speaker 7: get him in first ten seconds.
Speaker 6: We has to grab company's fabulous intros.
Speaker 7: You know, something that would get your digit immediately.
Speaker 2: So in that light, the electronium makes perfect sense to me.
Speaker 2: What if you could take a machine that had baked
Speaker 2: into it all of the patterns, an intuitive musical sense
Speaker 2: of a proven hit maker like Scott, but then this
Speaker 2: crazy X factor of proto artificially intelligent randomness. That dream
Speaker 2: was Scott's life's work. He needed it to work. Everything
Speaker 2: was writing on it.
Speaker 13: So Gordy was so impressed that you wrote a check
Speaker 13: on the spot for ten thousand dollars to get started,
Speaker 13: and that was a lot of money back then.
Speaker 2: It was a huge windfall. Scott was overjoyed. Gordy wanted
Speaker 2: the instrument remade to suit Motown's needs, so Scott began
Speaker 2: work immediately. The machine would be a culmination of everything
Speaker 2: he'd worked on up to that point, including the player
Speaker 2: piano from his childhood. Here's a call from a couple
Speaker 2: of years earlier between Scott and Bob Mogue. The synthesizer
Speaker 2: legend who'd worked with him. And this knocked me out
Speaker 2: when I first heard it in the archives. But he
Speaker 2: was still thinking about the player piano. You can hear
Speaker 2: the ideas just bursting out of him.
Speaker 5: I have some things that I think would lest we
Speaker 5: slip you, and this is holy secret stuff. But well,
Speaker 5: I'll have to explain with you when I see when
Speaker 5: I see. Okay, but you know, the programming is inevitable.
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, the computing machine to programming things
Speaker 5: was programming things and all the what a major tools
Speaker 5: of program thinks. Yeah, and so the programming, it's going
Speaker 5: to be the way it's done.
Speaker 2: A player piano for the space age. Scott, of course,
Speaker 2: quickly blew through the Motown down payment and ran out
Speaker 2: of time, but Gordy didn't seem to mind. Scott moved
Speaker 2: out to Motown's offices in Los Angeles to work on
Speaker 2: the electronium in a room above Barry Gordy's garage. He
Speaker 2: became the director of Electronic Music Research and Development. Eventually
Speaker 2: he started to work on the machine in the Motown studios.
Speaker 7: People were in awe of him. I'm thinking of a
Speaker 7: couple different engineers who were up there who would just
Speaker 7: come out and be like shaking their heads, kind of
Speaker 7: like like you know what is going on kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Scott's daughter deb stud to Baker again. According to a
Speaker 2: former engineer at Motown, Michael Jackson would come by Scott's studio,
Speaker 2: a small room on the second floor, and watched the
Speaker 2: electronium work. It made music unlike anything they'd heard. The
Speaker 2: idea wasn't that the machine would write a complete song
Speaker 2: structure versus chorus bridge, but that it would iterate on
Speaker 2: combinations of rhythm, chord and melody in search of that spark.
Speaker 2: It was a way of automating the part of songwriting.
Speaker 2: Scot excelled at the thing that caught your ear and
Speaker 2: made you like something the first time you heard it.
Speaker 2: It was meant as a collaboration between man and machine,
Speaker 2: one that took the hard work out of the most
Speaker 2: crucial part of the songwriting process, the inspiration. But over
Speaker 2: time the extreme cost weighed the project down. Also the
Speaker 2: fact that Scott was never satisfied, refused to be finished.
Speaker 2: The electronium worked, it just was always opened up, being redesigned, refined, changed.
Speaker 2: At one point that same engineer tried to get Motown's
Speaker 2: famous session musicians to play along with the machine as
Speaker 2: part of a drive to use the instrument on a recording.
Speaker 2: But they revolted.
Speaker 11: They didn't like it.
Speaker 13: They didn't like the idea of it, they didn't like
Speaker 13: the concept, they didn't like what it theoretically presented. And
Speaker 13: these guys were great musicians. They didn't want to be
Speaker 13: replaced by a machine.
Speaker 2: It's not known whether the electronium ever suggested an idea
Speaker 2: that made it into a motown song, but I think
Speaker 2: it's unlikely. Gordy let Scott take the electronium home with
Speaker 2: him eventually to tinker with it around the house. He'd
Speaker 2: stay up all night and work on it all day
Speaker 2: in his pajamas, building new bits and pieces, taking it apart,
Speaker 2: and building it again. Then his health got worse, the
Speaker 2: music industry moved on, started to forget about him. He
Speaker 2: had several strokes, and the electronium sat in the guests
Speaker 2: shed out back, gathering dust, waiting to be found.
Speaker 4: Well, it's doctor Frankenstein's monster.
Speaker 11: Isn't it.
Speaker 2: Brian Keihew again synthesizer wizard, former keyboardist for The Who,
Speaker 2: Fiona Apple, producer and the second person this episode to
Speaker 2: bring up Frankenstein's monster more happily, in this case about
Speaker 2: a machine rather than a person. He's working now to
Speaker 2: bring the electronium back to life. We spoke last winter.
Speaker 4: And so electronium might be literally just a piece of inspiration.
Speaker 4: If I play piano or if I play guitar and
Speaker 4: write songs, my fingers are even limiting because I tend
Speaker 4: to play a certain chord shape where I'm jazzier and
Speaker 4: he's more country. But if the electronium was not confined
Speaker 4: by those things, it might come up with ideas that
Speaker 4: are beautiful hybrids. Maybe little jazzy, but little polka, and
Speaker 4: who knows what it would come up with. But that's
Speaker 4: an idea to say that the human creativity is limited.
Speaker 4: It's a beautiful thing when it works, but as we know,
Speaker 4: you can't just write great music all day, otherwise everybody would.
Speaker 2: I guess part of the problem is, like in a
Speaker 2: creative line of work, your business, especially when you're a motown,
Speaker 2: which is an empire. At that point, it's totally dependent
Speaker 2: on this fundamentally unknowable, unreliable thing which is human creativity.
Speaker 2: Like you never really know when the music is going
Speaker 2: to strike, and so especially with the kind of assembly
Speaker 2: line motown idea. If you could just make that predictable
Speaker 2: and automate it the aha moment, then that would take
Speaker 2: a lot of the uncertainty out of the business.
Speaker 4: I think you pointed out something that most people don't
Speaker 4: want to ever mention, which is that creativity is unreliable.
Speaker 4: You might be Paul McCartney and able to write some
Speaker 4: of the world's greatest songs. But if I brought him
Speaker 4: in the room right now and gave him an hour,
Speaker 4: said write me a great song, it doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2: It doesn't work that way. But you can understand why
Speaker 2: someone who devoted his whole life to making perfect music,
Speaker 2: I wish that it did. It was.
Speaker 6: A body.
Speaker 2: Raymond Scott died in nineteen ninety four in obscurity and
Speaker 2: relative poverty in a nursing home near that faded house,
Speaker 2: and Van Nuys Jus a winner. A slew of fellow
Speaker 2: enthusiasts and the Scott family started to comb through his
Speaker 2: archives to piece the whole crazy story together. They shipped
Speaker 2: boxes and boxes of tapes and records and papers to
Speaker 2: the mar Sound Archives at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
Speaker 2: Then they released his music and compilations. Scott had always
Speaker 2: kept his machines mostly secret in case anyone wanted to
Speaker 2: steal them, but when they finally released Scott's electronic music
Speaker 2: in the early two thousands, he suddenly had a new
Speaker 2: set of posthumous hits. You probably don't even realize you've
Speaker 2: heard a Raymond Scott's song before, but he's been sampled
Speaker 2: all over the place. Gorillas, Jay Dilla, Lizzo, they've all
Speaker 2: sampled Scott. His music is in the Simpsons, ren and
Speaker 2: Stimpy HBO shows. The song you're hearing now is called Portofino,
Speaker 2: and it was unreleased in his lifetime, but there are
Speaker 2: all these recordings of it, each trying it a different way,
Speaker 2: all electronics, with vocals, with saxophone. When the archivists found it,
Speaker 2: choose it, thought the melody was so classic it must
Speaker 2: have been a cover.
Speaker 3: And I went into various databases looking for a Portafino.
Speaker 3: There's like eighty or one hundred things called Portafino, and
Speaker 3: I would go through iTunes listen to every goddamn one
Speaker 3: of them, and not one of them was Raymond's melody.
Speaker 3: But to this date, I mean, that thing's been out
Speaker 3: for twenty one years, no one has come to us
Speaker 3: and said, h that's cover version, or someone else wrote that,
Speaker 3: or if it's a traditional melody.
Speaker 2: A true original. Meanwhile, Mark Mothersbaugh, the lead singer of Devo,
Speaker 2: bought the electronium and dragged it from the shed to
Speaker 2: his studios. Brian key Hugh is trying now to assemble
Speaker 2: a team of engineers to bring it back online in
Speaker 2: digital or physical form. Even with all the schematics, they're
Speaker 2: still mystified.
Speaker 4: You know, somebody said it's still a black box, and
Speaker 4: that's true. Two we still don't know what it did.
Speaker 4: And I feel like we're looking through a keyhole at
Speaker 4: a room and we can barely see it until we
Speaker 4: get through the door a bit more.
Speaker 2: There are Scott cover bands and Scott festivals. Somehow his
Speaker 2: music still resonates. Whatever spark he caught is still catching.
Speaker 2: What I think is strange as most of the musicians
Speaker 2: who knew Scott earlier in his life seemed to have
Speaker 2: hated him, but the engineers who knew him at the
Speaker 2: end of his life loved him. A lot of his
Speaker 2: early jazz hits were aggressive, frantic firecrackers of song, but
Speaker 2: the electronic stuff is often sweet, guileless, innocent. Some of
Speaker 2: that stuff was written in partnership with the electronium. His melody,
Speaker 2: its patterns, and it sounds like a songwriter at peace
Speaker 2: with himself.
Speaker 4: At one point he'd resisted human control of it, but
Speaker 4: then he took one of the voice cards and adapted
Speaker 4: it to a keyboard input. As he found before when
Speaker 4: he would put a Hammond organ or mostly an ondiolane
Speaker 4: on top of the electronium, it really needed somebody doing
Speaker 4: a nice melody in order to sell the package.
Speaker 2: There is I think a lesson in Scott's life, one
Speaker 2: that's kind of a morality tale for our own AI
Speaker 2: adult chat GPT world. He walked from automatic pianos to
Speaker 2: the first computers. He sought perfection, he sought industrial scale creativity,
Speaker 2: but the trade offs he made were the relationships around him,
Speaker 2: the failure to see the humanity of the people he
Speaker 2: was trying to control. People would sometimes talk about Scott
Speaker 2: as if hero a machine, But I think there's something
Speaker 2: in his music that testifies to a soul, that ghost
Speaker 2: at the keys of the player piano, those recorded phone
Speaker 2: calls to his family, that early string of hits, all
Speaker 2: the musical machines What they have in common is the
Speaker 2: goal of each song to connect people through sound. Scott
Speaker 2: prized perfection in that end above everything else, and it
Speaker 2: ruined him. Someday soon someone might be able to bring
Speaker 2: the Electronium back to life. And here again the inside
Speaker 2: of Scott's mind. But still I think he must have
Speaker 2: known the Electronium could never write a Raymond Scott song.
Speaker 2: For that you needed Raymond Scott.
Speaker 9: Or Shall we go On?
Speaker 2: The Last Archive? Is written and hosted by me Ben Nataphaffrey.
Speaker 2: It's produced by me and Lucy Sullivan and edited by
Speaker 2: Sophie Crane. Jake Gorsky is our engineer. Fact checking on
Speaker 2: this episode by Arthur Gomperts and Lucy Sullivan. Sound design
Speaker 2: by Jake Gorsky and Lucy Sullivan. Our executive producers are
Speaker 2: Sophie Crane and Jill Lapour. Thanks also to Julia Barton
Speaker 2: Pushkin's executive editor. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John
Speaker 2: Evans of stell Wagon Symphonet. Additional music by Qorantooth. Our
Speaker 2: foolproof player is Becca A.
Speaker 1: Lewis.
Speaker 2: Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior
Speaker 2: in the Star Ganette Foundation. Special thanks on this episode
Speaker 2: to Alan w and Tenman, Jack Hurtz, Carl Miller and
Speaker 2: the Piurian Recording Society, and Byron Werner. For a bibliography,
Speaker 2: further reading, and a transcript and teaching guide to this episode,
Speaker 2: head to the Last Archive dot com. The Last Archive
Speaker 2: is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show,
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Speaker 2: wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ben Nattafhaffrey.