Instruments: Lily’s Machine

Committing the sounds of music to paper is like trying to bottle a moon beam. It is an elusive and often per-plexing art. The mechanics of inscribing notations, for one thing, is such a tedious and time-consuming task that for centuries composers and musicians have been searching for an easier and faster way of writing music. Now Brit ain’s Imperial Typewriter Co. Ltd. is of fering just that — a typewriter that types music.

Scheduled for world distribution some time next fall at a price of about $700, the.Musikriter consists of a stand ard typewriter keyboard of 46 keys plus eight “elevation keys” that allow vertical as well as horizontal typing.

The machine can be mastered in three weeks by an experienced typist, who can then tap out a symphony or a fugue at the rate of about 60 notes a minute.

Imperial Typewriter, which already has orders from 14 countries, hopefully sees the Musikriter as a great boon to composers, music publishers, orchestras, music libraries and schools.

The Musikriter is the brainchild of a short (4 ft. 9 in.), roly-poly, fortyish divorcee named Lily Pavey, who had only a year and a half of formal schooling. A former circus clown who could play 17 different musical instruments, she has spent the past 14 years developing her invention in a cluttered flat in South London. She hit on the idea one day while working as an invoice clerk to support her family. To relieve the boredom of the job, she took to singing while she typed and was suddenly seized by the thought: “How much more interesting it would be to type music than invoices.” She bought a secondhand typewriter from a friend and began years of figuring how to reproduce 8,000 chords with 46 keys. Biggest breakthrough was the idea for vertical typing, in which the basket of type and not the paper shifted up and down eight spaces, or an octave—an inspiration that struck her one day while riding up and down in a creaking elevator in her apartment building. She financed her experiments with winnings from soccer pools, small donations from friends, and a $4,200 grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

Lily has also perfected an electronic extra she calls a “multi-note rotating drum,” a device which audibly sounds the notes as they are struck on the keyboard. “If Beethoven had had this machine,” she enthuses, slightly missing the point, “he could have written a symphony in a week!”