Twilight in Turkey 1937

Dr. Pitt-Payne in London UK - 12 Oct 2002

Composer, bandleader and inventor
Raymond Scott was among the unheralded
pioneers of contemporary experimental
music, a figure whose genius and
influence have seeped almost subliminally
into the mass cultural consciousness.
As a visionary whose name is largely
unknown but whose music is immediately
recognizable, Scott's was a career
stuffed with contradictions:
though his early work anticipated
the breathless invention of bebop,
his obsession with perfectionism
and memorization was the very
antithesis of jazz's improvisational
ethos; though his bestknown compositions
remain at large thanks to their endless
recycling as soundtracks for cartoons,
he never once wrote a note expressly
for animated use; and though his later
experiments with electronic music
pioneered the ambient aesthetic,
the ambient concept itself was not
introduced until a decade after
the release of his original recordings.

Born Harry Warnow in Brooklyn on
September Tenth, Nineteen Hundred
and Eight, he was a musical prodigy,
playing piano by the age of two;
following high school, he planned
to study engineering, but
his older brother Mark; himself a
successful violinist and conductor
had other ideas, buying his sibling a
Steinway Grand and persuading him to
attend the Institute of Musical Art,
later rechristened the Juilliard School.
After graduating in Nineteen ThirtyOne,
Scott, the name supposedly picked at
random out of the Manhattan phone book,
signed on as a staff pianist with the
CBS radio network house band conducted
by his brother; finding the repertoire
dull and uninspired, he began presenting
his own compositions to his bandmates,
and soon bizarre Scott originals like
"Confusion Among a Fleet of Taxicabs
Upon Meeting with a Fare" began creeping
into broadcasts.

He died, aged eightyfive in
Nineteen NinetyFour

Soft karaoke
Words
treble clef 1
treble clef 2
lyric line
bass
*
Twilight In Turkey 1937
by Raymond Scott
copyright MCMXXXVII by Circle Music Publications Inc., N.Y.
sequence by Dr. Pitt-Payne in London UK
in association with Doug Grierson
on Saturday 12 October 2002 at 23.14
*
Alluded to in the score as Raymond Scott's
famous Piano Novelty; the theme of which appears briefly
in two keys and which has been used many thousands
of times since to create a sound picture.
*