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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 20 th