Archive has a few episodes of Herb Shriner Time, which is the opposite of other old variety programs. Most have splendid music and crappy comedy. Shriner is a splendid comedian with atrocious “music”.
The “music” was outputted by an entity called the Raymond Scott Quintet.
Example: Powerhouse.
This piece is mechanistic and ugly, in the form of music but relentlessly and intentionally anti-musical. Every chord is wrong and all the sequences are wrong.
I was puzzled by the purpose of this noise. It probably falls into the category of jazz, along with the even more anti-musical squeaks and honks of “progressive jazz”, but it has more of a pattern than “progressive”. I wasn’t curious enough to look it up, until an article about the quintet appeared today at American Radio Library. It’s a biographical account of Raymond Scott by his older brother. Raymond (stage name for Harry Warnow) grew up as a natural engineer, always making machines and electrical gadgets. Later he decided to turn engineering into something resembling music, and CBS, the most “experimental” network, gave him the time and musicians to make it happen.
From the article:
= = = = = START QUOTE:
“That,” Harry said, “was ‘Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals.’ Did you hear that drum effect in the beginning? The idea is to get the effect of distance. You see, in the music, you’re supposed to be approaching this cannibal island. You’re on a ship. You hear the drums first — far away. We wanted it to sound like something looks when you’re looking through the wrong end of a telescope. We put the sea shell on the mike by the drums. It picks up the sound but gives it the same muffled distance sound you get when you put a sea shell to your ear. Take the trumpet effect in the bucket of water. Suppose you blow into the water like that with all the instruments playing. You couldn’t hear it at all. But put the bucket by the mike, amplify the trumpet in proportion to the others — and there’s your effect, your microphone-music.
= = = = = END QUOTE.
Nuff said. It’s not meant to be music at all!
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