[GreenKeys] tty trivia from the 1960s (Kinda off topic - but, what the hell)

[jhhaynes at earthlink.net]

I was talking to the University of Arkansas band director a few
years ago, and somehow the subject of Teletype came up, and he
told me he was working with a vocal group to make some music
that sounded like a Teletype.  I don't know what ever came of
it.  I invited them to come by my place and hear a real Teletype,
but they never did.

At a symphony  concert a few years ago the guest pianist played
an encore that reminded me of the final test area at the Teletype
factory, with all those machines banging away on the quick brown
fox at once.  Believe he said it was the finale of Prokofiev's
7th piano sonata.  Prokofiev at the time was into a genre they
called "machine age music".  It was a time when artists and
composers were enamored of machinery of all kinds.  There was
Honegger's "Pacific 231" celebrating a locomotive; and then
I've read that Gershwin sketched out parts of "Rhapsody in
Blue" while riding a train.  Think of the New York World's Fair
of 1938-39 and its celebration of the future and of technology.

Last year I heard a performance of Shostakovich's 2nd Symphony,
which is an early-Soviet piece celebrating the glorious revolution
and featuring a factory whistle as part of the music, as well
as setting a turgid communist poem to music.  The factory whistle
used in the performance was built by a high school physics class.
(And it should be noted that Shostakovich was said to be already
getting cynical about the glories of the Soviet system.)