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[First published 1 September 2023]
September is a month of unusual holidays, including “No Rhyme, No Reason Day,” “Wonderful Weirdos Day,” “Ceiling Fan Day,” and “Punctuation Day” (a personal favourite). To celebrate unusual holidays, this September the Daily Classical Music Post will explore music composed for unusual instruments either in ensembles or featured in a soloist capacity.
I begin my survey with the delightful short work “The Typewriter,” composed in 1950 by the American composer Leroy Anderson (1908–1975).
The typewriter was the go-to piece of office equipment until the advent of the word processor. Each letter key was attached to a typebar that hit a ribbon when the key was struck, printing the letter onto a piece of paper that was fed into the typewriter around a cylinder. The keys made a loud clicking sound when the typebar hit the paper on the cylinder. When the end of the typed row was reached, a little bell made a sound, and the operator pressed on a lever on the left side to return the carriage back to the start and advance the paper up by a row. This made a kind of scratchy sound.
Anderson composed “The Typewriter” for a modified machine: only two keys worked to prevent jamming. The typewriter part is fiendishly difficult (much harder than those typing tests that we used to have to take in typing class and on job interviews). As the typewriter is considered to be a percussion instrument, the soloist is usually a percussionist or drummer.
Alex Burns says, “Opening with a cheeky descending passage led by the violins, muted trumpets lead the way for the typewriter’s entry. The strings play a fast melody line, which is played in unison with the typewriter. At first, the bell is rung on the third beat of every fourth bar, with the slide on the fourth beat, so the next phrase starts on the downbeat of the next bar. Anderson plays around with this until it’s almost a surprise when the bell is rung. The use of syncopation adds to the comedy of the piece, with muted brass interjections playing with the bell at one point.”
Even though typewriters are rarely used any more, “The Typewriter” is still quite a popular piece, performed often by pops orchestra. It was used as the theme music for several television shows in the 1960s (sometimes without the typewriter, weirdly), and famous conductors have performed the typewriter part, including Seiji Ozawa, Arthur Fiedler, and Leonard Slatkin.
My classical music post for today is Leroy Anderson’s “The Typewriter.”
Thanks for this post, Laura. I’ve always been a big fan of the Leroy Anderson. Now, though I am rather old, I still can type probably more than 100 words a minute.