Scott was best known for his music for animated cartoons, but he also was a bandleader and innovator in electronic music.
Actually, Scott never composed a note for cartoons, but his music was used in Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, The Simpsons, Ren and Stimpy, Animaniacs, and Duckman cartoons. According to his wife, he not only did not compose for cartoons, he did not watch them either. Nonetheless, even in the 1930s, before his cartoon work, his songs had cartoonish titles, such as "Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals," "Celebration on the Planet Mars," and "New Year's Eve in a Haunted House."
Scott's early career was in broadcast music with CBS, but he left the network to start a band, the Raymond Scott Quintette. It was a six-piece group, but the puckish Scott thought quintette (his spelling), sounded "crisper" and told a reporter he feared that "calling it a 'sextet' might get your mind off music". The quintet was an attempt to revitalize swing music through tight, busy arrangements and reduced reliance on improvisation. While popular with the public, jazz audiences disdained it as novelty music.
The quintet performed from 1937 to 1939, but in 1943 the music found a home at Warner Brothers, where music director Carl Stalling was a Scott fan. Warner Brothers bought the band's catalog and used the music extensively in cartoons.
One Scott composition, "Powerhouse", appears in more than 35 Warner Brothers cartoons and has also been used as a theme for the Cartoon Network as well as being used by the rock band Rush in their 1978 song "La Villa Strangiato" on their Hemispheres album.
Scott was an early electronic music pioneer. As well as designing novel instruments such as the Clavivox and Electronium, he produced records of entirely electronic music, such as the oddly-named but ground-breaking Soothing Sounds for Baby.
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