Music: Music Writer

Composing music for the piano is a laborious, tedious, inefficient process even for composers with retentive memories. They must jot, erase, return to the keys, pause, jot, ponder, try again. In the heat of creation many a composer has irrevocably lost inspirations which flashed through his mind’s ear and away before he could capture them on paper. Last week came news of an invention to enable affluent pianists to compose at ease, to capture transient beauty before it eludes memory. The device: “Music Writer.” The inventor: Dr. Moritz Stoehr, professor of bacteriology at Mount St. Vincent College, N. Y. The principle: same as the typewriter. Dr. Stoehr has labored on his invention for twelve years, earning at last the praise of no less a maestro than Josef Willem Mengelberg.

In the Stoehr device, striker bars are so fixed to a piano’s keys that when a key is touched a code impression is recorded on a motor-driven music-roll. Thus the most idle vagaries, nuclei for many a major opus, may be preserved. Added feature is a portable keyboard superimposed on the piano keyboard (baby grand or upright) which mechanically and instantaneously transposes music into any desired key. Composing and transposing devices may be used together. A great boon should “Music Writer” be to the cinema industry. Heretofore composition for synchronized cinema has been a labor of weeks. With “Music Writer,” two or three pianists may view a cinema in projection; each record silently (the device is demountable) his improvised score for a film, transpose it to paper in a few hours. Ready for marketing in September, “Music Writer” is beyond the wallets of traditionally impecunious geniuses. Installation on any upright or baby grand piano, with one year’s service, will cost $475. Distributors are J. O. Fisher Co Manhattan.