Making Music With a Typewriter

By Sean Hurley on Friday, October 24, 2008.

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Search around even the most modern office and you're likely to find a typewriter gathering dust in a corner.

Like so many things, its primary function has been usurped by the computer.

But this doesn't mean that people aren't still using typewriters.

In Boston, Massachusetts, for example, there's an ensemble group of musicians - the Boston Typewriter Orchestra - who use the obsolete machines exclusively in their compositions.

NHPR Correspondent Sean Hurley went to a recent performance of the BTO and files this report.

Web resources:

The Boston Typewriter Orchestra's Website

FX: Raucous chaotic typing, as of a typing pool.

In the good old typewriter days, typists would sit together, in rows and columns and transcribe handwritten text to type. To an outsider, these typing rooms must have sounded like madhouses for woebegone secretaries.

But imagine if this nerve-wracking mix all at once coalesced into a form – streamlined into rhythm. Into music...

BTO Song: BTO’s Qwerty Waltz

This is the Boston Typewriter Orchestra. The composition is called “Qwerty Waltz”. The BTO has played clubs, festivals, and private parties - but this night it’s a “literary” gig at the Boston Center for Adult Education. I asked Derrik Albertelli, Executive Typist of the BTO, how the group got its start:

Derrik: A mutual friend of ours was sitting in a bar with his girlfriend at that time and she had recently bought him like a children’s typewriter, a little thing, from Goodwill across the street and he started just kind of pounding away on it, in time with the music and he started to annoy the waitress and she wanted him to stop and he said, “No, no, that’s ok, I’m the conductor of the Boston Typewriter Orchestra...”

In their standard uniform of starchy white shirts and cheap polyester ties, the group creates a 1950’s office atmosphere. They chat informally about their weekends, complain about their work, and worry that the boss will be showing up at any moment. All while typing out-of-sync and out of rhythm. Just like a real office. But then suddenly, the haphazard keystroking finds a groove:

BTO Talk & Song: Members greet each other with repeated calls of “How was your weekend?” before breaking into their song “Cornelius”.

This moment of transition, when the random typewriter noise suddenly hitches into rhythm, is thrilling. It’s also one of the secrets of the BTO’s success.

Alex: You know, usually I say “You know, my band, the Boston Typewriter Orchestra.” And they pause for a moment and they say “The what?” And I say, “The Boston Typewriter Orchestra.” And they say, “So what do you play?” And I say “Smith Corona. Tenor Smith Corona”.

That’s Alex Holman. Of the group, Alex hits the keys hardest and with the greatest interior need:

FX: LOUD TYPING

Alex: Mostly I’m just a big bag of nervous twitches. So this is a nice outlet therapy for it.

He crouches over his Smith Corona, long hair slipping down toward the keys, fingers locked in a kind of battle formation. If there was ever a contest to see who could destroy a typewriter first using just two fingers, I’d bet on Alex:

Alex: I tend to type with some emphasis and so I find I have to retire typewriters when I’ve broken too many of the keys or too many of the components.
Sean: Do you have some letters that you use continually?
Alex: Usually I start out on the home row, cause it’s easy to access, and I start out in the center of the home row because those keys have the most direct path to the paper, they move quicker, they return quicker, they don’t jam as often, but then as they break I move outward on the home row, and then once the home row is pretty much gone, I’ll move to the bottom row.

Derrik Albertelli says that this kind of harsh treatment has resulted in some negative attention:

Derrik: A lot of people are upset with us because of the amount of abuse we put the typewriters through. I mean, we whale on em pretty hard and we break a lot of them. And so there’s a lot of outcry where they’re just like “These people need to stop breaking typewriters...”

Unfortunately, “these people” don’t seem likely to stop breaking typewriters any time soon. Bad news for the antique typewriter collector, good news for music and art lovers.

MUSIC – BTO’s “Monday Morning”

Derrik: In a way I think we’re still trying to evolve what we can do with a typewriter. Because, I mean, day to day we’re still figuring things out about its capabilities and figuring things out about building our own technique.
Alex: We’ve had to find a sound – find a sound and sense of rhythms that play well on a typewriter. It really appeals to me that you have this intricate little machine with all these moving parts inside that’s completely useless these days.

The typewriter is dead – long live the typewriter.

For NHPR News, I’m Sean Hurley