Typer Piper types beautiful music

As I learned to type on the hard to press keys of a manual typewriter, I thought the “art” appeared on the paper.

The Typer Piper has changed all that.

An old Remington typewriter hooked up to six wooden flutes, the Typer Piper not only lays down ink on paper it can lay down a pretty tune, too. (See a video of the Typer Piper here)

Could you imagine a newsroom full of them?

Type, toot. Type, toot. Type, type, type, toot.

“For years,” Tony says, “I've had the idea of hooking up a typewriter to play music.”

It is the artist in him, the creativity, the idea that life imitates art.

Or, is it the other way around - as Tony says, Plato coined the phrase “Art imitates life.”

Whatever the perspective, this is art.

And Tony, 55, grew up with an easel in his bedroom and a potter's wheel in the basement. Born in Boston, he attended elementary school in Palo Alto, Calif., while his father, a psychologist, wrote a book on a fellowship to Stanford University. Tony graduated from high school in Washington D.C.

Today, he's an art professor at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, a place he first came to in 1973.

“It seemed very exotic to my east coast friends,” Tony says. “I was out here and I loved it. I felt I'd found something that was missing in my life.”

In 1978, with art degree in hand, he “rambled around a little bit,” did carpentry for five years, earned a master of fine arts degree at the University of Chicago. He returned to Cornell part-time in 1988; earned full-time tenure status in 1997.

“I've found a way to be involved with art every day, pretty much all day,” Tony says with a smile.

That means creating art as well as working with students. His projects range from placing paintings inside wine bottles (a la a “ship in a bottle”) to his exhibit “Yoko And The Window Wall,” centered around Yoko Ono, a renown artist even before she met the Beatles' John Lennon.

Tony also tinkers with everything from his collection of old typewriters to the 1930s house he shares with his wife, Sarah Fitzgerald, an elementary school art teacher, and their two children.

The Typer Piper was born after a student discarded wooden flutes. Tony attached six - D, B, G, A, C, and E - to the typewriter's back side and powers them with air from an old tire and hand-operated pump connected through regulators.

And, as another tribute to Yoko Ono, only the keys Y, O, K, N, space and period power the flutes.