Richard Harvey was unemployed. He had been the woodwind player and keyboardist for the progressive rock band Gryphon, and their music—with its Medieval influences, album covers of wizards playing chess, and album titles like “Midnight Mushrumps”—was passe. Instead, punk was ascendant, and had destroyed Gryphon like a switchblade through a jester’s hat. Their company had dropped them the same week the Sex Pistols signed with EMI. Out with the ten minute guitar solos, in with the sneering.
Gryphon’s label offered to keep Harvey on as a solo artist after the band fell apart, and Harvey immediately set to work, entering a friend’s studio in West London loaded with close to 50 instruments. After Harvey had recorded 32 minutes of music for the untitled solo album, the company pulled the plug on Harvey yet again. They hadn’t even covered the cost of his studio time.
Peter Cox, head of stock music company KPM, persuaded Harvey to pick up the broken pieces of the unfinished solo album and cut it into a stock record. The result was a stock album called Richard Harvey’s Nifty Digits.
“The title of the LP was entirely Peter’s choice. I hated it, but he and I laugh about it now,” Harvey told me in an interview in 2010.
Little did he know that two tracks from Nifty Digits would become beloved by a generation.
—-
“How Crayons Are Made,” a two-minute segment played occasionally on Sesame Street in the 1980s, is strange for nostalgia fodder. It’s wordless footage of an assembly line—two minutes of lifting, loading, unloading, sorting, and repetitive manual labor. Its odd potency as a nostalgia piece could partly be attributed to its being a behind-the-scenes look at a childhood staple. But it’s also in large part the music. It’s the charming recorder harmony played over the little girl gazing curiously at a crayon; it’s the rapid harpsichord riff; it’s the dense, Medieval melody played on mandolin and piano; and most of all, it’s the blend of synthesizers and studio tricks combined with hand-played acoustic instruments—all striving to sound as precise as clockwork but never quite getting there. The music’s genius lies in how it perfectly complements the images of the factory workers interacting with industry: in their imprecise efforts to keep pace with the factory’s precise rhythms, in the blending of human and machine. Like the best soundtrack artistry, it’s an aural metaphor for the action on-screen.
Now “How Crayons Are Made” has 1.1 million views on YouTube and, particularly among Xennials, is remembered with a profound fondness. Unlike more overt pop culture material from the 80s, “How Crayons Are Made” is a kind of under-the-radar nostalgia. It won’t make a Things We Love About the 80s Buzzfeed listicle, but it’ll make people of a certain age giddy when mentioned at a dinner party.
Because stock musicians send their music into the ether without knowing where it will land, Harvey had no idea that the Nifty Digits tracks “Watercourse” and “Exchange” were associated with Sesame Street until 2008—thirty years after the segment debuted. He had spent the intervening time building up a significant career. His recorder playing floats beautifully above portions of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. His composition “Kyrie for the Magdalene” was the choral theme in The Da Vinci Code. In contrast to the energetic, quirky tone of Nifty Digits, his career consists largely of ambitious classical compositions and soundtracks. He’s won a BAFTA (the British Academy of Film and Theatre Arts—the UK equivalent of an Oscar) and has even won its Thai equivalent. Though he wasn’t in the stock music industry long, “there were people making good money out of library music at that point,” said Harvey. “It took me awhile to become one of them.”
Given that Harvey had no idea his music was used in Sesame Street, I asked if he was worried about what his music might provide the soundtrack for—especially if it was something he found objectionable.
“I’m afraid that we all had to waive our moral rights in the contracts that we signed,” he replied. “I don’t, however, think that Nifty Digits got used on too many weapon sales videos…it was too cheerful!”
Harvey’s unawareness of his own contribution to a fond cultural meme can only exist in a world he helped pioneer, where during the last half century soundtracks have increasingly been not so much created as assembled from independently made parts, with multiple anonymous artists, technicians, and staffers responsible for different layers of the process and components of the final product. Stock music now makes up the majority of soundtracks heard on television, according to Joe Schneider, former Vice President of Catalog at stock industry giant Audiosocket based in Seattle. In all this chaos, “How Crayons Are Made”‘s brilliant matching of music to picture can therefore be attributed largely to random chance, but it may be stock music first lasting artistic—indeed generational—success. What does it mean that it wasn’t meant to be stock music at all?
Dead Electric 