Hey, I’m making a movie about typing and I’m looking for some music for it. It takes place in 1962 and is kind of a quirky Tim Burton-y thing. I’d like the music to be something that contained typing in it. So far, I’ve found Leroy Anderson’s piece “The Typewriter” which is really nice. But folks keep on telling me about other songs that they know of where typewriters, adding machines, and the like are used as instruments. Unfortunately, no one can remember any song titles.
So, does anybody know of any music like that besides the piece I already have? Remember the movie is a period piece, so the music should be appropriate.
I think I’ve heard that Popcorn song by Hot Butter with typewriters in the background. It’s a decade late for your movie though.
When I was in 7th grade the music teacher played a “classical piece” with lots of typewriters used as instruments. So I can at least confirm that the music that your looking for has been recorded and is out there somewhere.
On a related note, I remember an early piece of video art that used a typewriter as a percussion instrument of sorts. I forget the artist, but it was one of the famous early “Castelli Collection” video art pieces, produced in B&W on early Sony Portapak units. This piece was loosely in the movement called “the aesthetic of boredom” which would include films like Andy Warhol’s “Sleep” (which was just a lengthy film of someone sleeping) and of course the films were criticised for being boring, which was sorta the whole point.
But anyway, in this video, there was a horizontally split screen. On the top half, a person marched back and forth from the left side of the screen to the right, then back again, against a white background, in rhythm to the typing. In the lower half, a closeup of a typewriter carriage and the paper appeared, you could see the words as they appeared in a regular, rythmic staccato. As the video proceeded, you could hear the footfalls of the marcher, in time to the typing. And the words, the same phrase, typed over and over and over, for about 30 minutes, spelled out in upper case letters:
I WILL NOT MAKE ANY MORE BORING ART.
I WILL NOT MAKE ANY MORE BORING ART.
I WILL NOT MAKE ANY MORE BORING ART.
I WILL NOT MAKE ANY MORE BORING ART…
You could check out Stereo Total’s Dactylo Rock…It has some typewriter action goin’ on…and it’s in german. You can listen to a bit of it on amazon.com, maby even find an mp3.
John Cage may have done stuff w/typewriters in his more precussion based stuff…perhaps Karl-heinz Stockhausen got bored of playing with helicopters…I might be able to scrounge up some links later.
Oh, there’s a song call “Typewriter” by Paul Kotheimer, an artist from Champaign-Urbana. You can find his record label at http://www.handmaderecords.com. It’s only nine bucks with postage, and it’s a really neat album. Anyhow, the typewriter is used as a percussion instrument basically, and the main rhythm of the song follows a Bo Diddley beat. Think “Mona”. The chorus is something like “All I need, all I need is a typewriter.” And the verse has something about “…no more pencil and eraser, I can feel like real twentieth-century writer.”
It’s a cute little tune, and might fit the mood of your film.
“Her Feet Don’t Ever Touch the Ground” off of Hotel Faux Pas’s album, “Flammible Pajamas” is really good and features a typewriter as percussion throughout.
I have a tape of British dance bands, and one number uses typewriter sounds instead of drums, for the beat. But it’s c1930, so wouldn’t be appropriate for your time frame . . . Ditto “You’re Just Too Marvelous” from a 1930s Busby Berkeley musical, I guess?
Can’t believe it took so long for “Money” to be mentioned.
In the musical Merrily We Roll Along, one of the songs is about a songwriting team writing, and phrases are broken up with typewriters used as percussive fills. I’ve forgotten the title of the actual song.
I can’t believe nobody’s mentioned yet the theme music for “Wall Street Week with Louis Ruykeyser” (sp?) on PBS. Yes, it’s a teletype machine, but a teletype is (was?) basically an electric typewriter with the keyboard in one city and the printing mechanism in another.
In Disney’s “Tarzan” there’s a song called (I believe) “Wrecking the Camp.” As part of its rhythm it features a typewriter. Phil Collins did the arrangement.
In the musical “Chess,” there’s a song with the refrain “Who do these foreign chappies think they are?” That could be the title, but I don’t have my CD in front of me at the moment. At any rate, it features a couple of men typing as they fill out the forms for a Soviet citizen who wants to defect. The typing noise is quite evident in that piece.
"Down All the Days" by The Pogues begins with with a typewriter clacking away in the background. The song is about the Irish writer Christy Brown (sp?) (also the subject of the movie My Left Foot) and includes the classic lines:
I can type with me toes
Suck stout through me nose,
But where it’s gonna end
God only knows.
Oh yeah, I like that tune. I remember looking for the name of the song, it’s “Theme for Telex” or something like that. Reminds me of the happy telex sound from many hours spent at an old ASR-33 teletype.