Theremin, Leon

views updated Jun 08 2018

Leon Theremin

Inventor

Instrument Rediscovered, Inventor Disappeared

Russian scientist Leon Theremin is considered the founder of electronic music. In 1918, using newly discovered vacuum-tube technology, he designed and built the first musical instrument that relied on electronic oscillation to produce its sound; furthermore, his invention remains the only instrument that is played without actual human contact. The Russian and the instrument that bore his name became renowned in classical music circles, and Theremin lived as somewhat of a celebrity in New York City during the 1930s before he was kidnapped by Soviet agents and returned home. Later, Soviet authorities reported him dead, but he was actually incarcerated in a Siberian prison camp. Theremin went on to use his expertise in electronics to create bugging devices for the Soviet secret police. In the early 1990s, an American filmmaker discovered Theremin in Moscow, then well into his nineties, and brought him to New York City for a visit in conjunction with a documentary film that celebrated the man and the invention: Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey.

Theremin was born Lev Termen in 1896 in St. Petersburg, Russia, during the tsarist era. According to one report, his family had emigrated to Russia in the sixteenth century as a result of religious repression in France. Theremin exhibited a keen interest in science from his childhood on, and eventually studied physics and astronomy at the University of St. Petersburg; he also completed training in electrical engineering. His entry into adulthood roughly coincided with the era of World War I and the fall of the Russian monarchy. The Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 and ushered in the world’s first communist state, which brought with it radical new thinking in science and the arts. By 1920, Theremin was head of the experimental electronic oscillation laboratory at Petrograd’s Institute of Physical Engineering. Through his attempts to devise a new kind of radio, one particular configuration of vacuum tubes and antennae evolved into the Theremin. At first, he called his invention the “aetherphon.”

Lenin Owned One

The instrument caused a sensation at the time. “The musician moves his or her hands above the device to disrupt an electromagnetic field and thus coax eerie, piercing notes out of the ether,” explained a modern-day article by J. Hoberman in Premiere. Its very invention reflected new thinking and progressive ideals of the time—Theremin told a New York audience in 1991 that with his invention he strove to “force modern industrial technologies into the idealized realm of the arts,” according to Timothy White in Billboards The perfected theremin evolved into a podium-like device with two antennae. The

For the Record…

Born Lev Sergeivitch Termen, 1896, in St. Peters burg, Russia; emigrated to the United States, 1927; returned to the Soviet Union, 1938; died November 3, 1993, in Moscow, Russia. Married Lavina Williams (a dancer); twin daughters. Education: Studied physics and astronomy at the University of St. Petersburg; graduated from the Higher Officers Training School of Electrical Engineering; also studied cello at the St. Petersburg conservatory of music.

Conducted scientific experiments with Ivan Pavlov at the Pulkovo Observatory; headed experimental electronic oscillation laboratory at the Institute of Physical Engineering, c. 1920-27.

Awards: Received the Stalin Prize for his electronic listening devices; Centennial Medal, Stanford University, 1991, for contributions to electronic music.

horizontal antenna controls volume, while the vertical antenna modulates the pitch. Steven M. Martin, the documentary filmmaker who honored Theremin’s achievements, told White: “The theremin has produced some of the most haunting and penetrating sounds ever recorded. Imagine what it’s like to act as a human capicitator, interrupting an electromagnetic field to create music!”

In 1922 Theremin himself demonstrated his invention for Soviet leader Vladimir I. Lenin, and supposedly Lenin was given a theremin built by its inventor’s hand. That same year the first public performance of the theremin was given in the Soviet Union. The device caused a sensation in the world of classical music; the Leningrad Philharmonic performed an original work entitled “A Symphonic Mystery” in 1924 using the instrument. Theremin gained fame and was called the “Soviet Edison.” He also conducted experiments that played a role in the development of television technology. In 1926 he gave a demonstration at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute that heralded the first transmission of non-static images onto a screen. “Although all parts of the device were known long before Theremin, he was the first to assemble them in a sequence that allowed the transmission of moving objects,” declared Soviet Life.

Toast of Gotham

Meanwhile, Theremin’s musical invention was inciting interest among classical musicians elsewhere. He made a tour of Europe in the 1920s with it; on subsequent travels he found himself the toast of New York City in 1927 and decided to stay. The instrument’s first public performance in the United States came in February 1928 at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. Manhattan’s progressive crowd feted Theremin, and the emigre soon became romantically involved with a violinist-also of Russian heritage-named Clara Rockmore. Through their collaboration Rockmore became the best-known virtuoso of the instrument. (She also played an integral role in Steven Martin’s decision to make a film about Theremin and his life.) For several years Theremin ran an informal school in New York City to train enthusiasts on his instrument, which was notoriously difficult to master. Through the Soviet trade commission, Theremin obtained a patent for it, then in 1929 licensed it to RCA for mass production. The company made a thousand of them, but only a quarter of them were sold after the American economy nosedived as a result of the stock market crash in October of that same year.

During his years in New York, Theremin also made the acquaintance of luminaries such as Albert Einstein and Dwight D. Eisenhower; Einstein even played the violin at recitals at Theremin’s apartment on West 54th Street. He also created the world’s first electronic security system, based partly on technical knowledge gained through perfecting the theremin; he installed the first system of its kind at New York’s Sing Sing Prison. Unfortunately such prominence and regard did little but earn him enmity back home, and one day in 1938 Theremin mysteriously disappeared. It was later learned that he had been kidnapped by KGB agents and spirited back to the Soviet Union. He was reported dead, but was actually in a Siberian gulag, where many prominent intellectuals and Russians with contacts in the West were “rehabilitated” in an era of totalitarianist repression in the 1930s.

Instrument Rediscovered, Inventor Disappeared

Theremin was released when the exploitation of his talents became vital to Soviet military authorities. He invented numerous listening devices for the KGB, and was even awarded the Stalin Prize for this efforts. It was during thisera that some American musicians working in the film industry began using the theremin to create a spooky, ethereal sound. The instrument hadfirst been used on the soundtrack to the 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein, but made its appearance in two acclaimed films a decade later: The Lost Weekend, the story of a man’s bleak descent into alcoholism, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, which won an Academy Award for its music. In the latter film, thetheremin’s sounds were used to foreshadow a coming psychotic attack in the lead, Gregory Peck. Over the next decade, its unique tones became familiar to younger audiences in such science-fiction thrillers as The Day the Earth Stood Still and It Came from Outer Space, both dating from the early 1950s. A few odd recordings were made, such as RCA Victor’s Perfume Setto Music, and the late 1940s albums Music Out of the Moon and Music for Peace of Mind.

The theremin’s use in horror films awakened a new generation to the possibilities of the instrument. Musical pioneer Robert Moog, the inventor of the first synthesizer, or electronic keyboard, constructed a theremin from a magazine diagram when he was still in high school. For years, Moog sold do-it-yourself theremin kits by mail. Brian Wilson, songwriter of the Beach Boys, was moved by his initial experience hearing the theremin, and incorporated its sounds most famously in the 1966 hit “Good Vibrations.” Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page mastered it for “Whole Lotta Love.” Another rock act of the era, Lothar and the Hand People, made the theremin sound the centerpiece of entire albums. The Delos record label released a title called The Art of the Theremin in the late 1980s that featured Clara Rockmore’s earlier performances. It was the aging Rockmore who told filmmaker Steven Martin that Theremin was still alive and well in Moscow. According to a 1988 article on him in Soviet Life, at the age of 92 he was still conducting experiments at Moscow University and walked to work each morning. Martin sought him out and brought him to New York City, where he was again feted.

Theremin’s experiences in New York, a neon-lit urban landscape and a far different world than the one he left in 1938, were recorded on film for Theremin:An Electronic Odyssey. He was also able to spend time with Rockmore once again. The film was the work of Martin, Moog, and producer Hal Willner and was released in 1995, two years after Theremin’s death in Moscow at the age of 97. “Since my childhood, the theremin has seemed like a window to another, less pessimistic era when people still believed progress meant a better, more visionary life,” Martin told White in Billboards “Leon Theremin pioneered the concept of the artist as scientist. I just want to see the creative journey of a great man come full circle.” Village Voice writer Amy Taubin called Martin’s film tribute “a graceful, evocative documentary about how historical events of great moment disrupt individual lives.” By the mid-1990s several alternative bands had discovered the theremin’s sound and were using it both onstage and in recordings; the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion is perhaps the best-known example of this resurgence. There is even a Theremin Enthusiasts’ Club International.

Sources

Billboard, June 6, 1992, p. 5; November 20, 1993, p. 13.

New Yorker, September 17, 1990, pp. 34-36.

Premiere, February 1995, pp. 44-45.

Soviet Life, May 1988, p. 34.

Village Voice, September 12, 1995, p. 59.

—Carol Brennan

Contemporary Musicians Brennan, Carol

Theremin, Leon

views updated Jun 08 2018

Leon Theremin

Russian scientist Leon Theremin (1896–1993) was the once-forgotten inventor who created the world's first electronic musical instrument. The device that bears his name "produced a strange, undulating, alternately threatening and soothing sound that didn't exist in nature," noted a New York Times writer, and when it was first used in classical music compositions during the 1920s, it was hailed as the harbinger of the electronic orchestra of the future.

Russia's Revolutionary Era

Theremin was born Lev Sergeivitch Termen in 1896, in St. Petersburg, Russia. His ancestors may have come to Imperial Russia because of religious persecution in sixteenth-century France. He was fascinated with science as a youngster and took music lessons on the cello as well. Theremin's early life was disrupted by international and domestic political upheavals. Russia was involved in World War I, and in the third year of the conflict, a group of Communists and Socialists seized power, ousted the tsar, and installed the world's first communist state. The events of 1917 ushered in a genuinely revolutionary era in the newly "Soviet" cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and its proponents and supporters were determined to rouse Russia from centuries of anti-progressive thought and create the first modern, egalitarian society. Science and rational thinking were heralded as the way to progress, and experiments in all fields, including the arts, were encouraged.

Theremin studied physics and astronomy at the university in St. Petersburg and served in the army during the war years, when he taught electrical engineering at a military school in the city and also continued his cello studies at the St. Petersburg conservatory. By 1920 he was heading the experimental electronic oscillation laboratory at the Institute of Physical Engineering in St. Petersburg. He was particularly interested in the possibilities of vacuum or electron-tube technology, a recent development. He first worked on a government project for an alarm that, using radio technology, went off when a person approached, and from those experiments he created the first "theremin." Its sine-wave tones came from a set of oscillators, which worked on the principle of heterodyning. Heterodyning referred to an audio state in which two sets of electronic oscillations are in phase; the device had an electromagnetic field that emitted sounds when a person stepped into it. Thus Theremin found that with a set of horizontal and vertical antennae on the box, he could control a wide range of sounds by simple hand movements, with a degree of sensitivity that was unlike that of any other musical instrument ever created.

Demonstrated for Lenin, Einstein

Theremin originally called his invention the "aetherphon," since it seemed to produce sounds from the air. He gave a performance of it for Soviet premier Vladimir I. Lenin at the Kremlin in Moscow in 1922 and reportedly gave one of the early ones he had built to Lenin as a gift. The device caused a minor sensation in Soviet Russia, still in its heady post-revolutionary modernization fever, and in 1924 it debuted with the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) Philharmonic in the instrument's first public performance. Theremin was hailed as the "Soviet Edison," and further research was encouraged. For a time, he worked on advanced vacuum-tube technology that was instrumental in the development of television, and he took part in a 1926 demonstration at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute of the first transmission of non-static images onto a screen.

Lenin was eager to show the world the advances that Soviet scientists had made, and Theremin was invited to participate in an international publicity tour. He arrived in western Europe with his theremin in the summer of 1927, giving lectures and demonstrations in Berlin, Paris and London. It caused a sensation everywhere. In Berlin, Albert Einstein was in the audience, and "said it was an experience as significant as that when primitive man for the first time produced sound from a bowstring," according to a New York Times report from the era. After a lecture and demonstration at Albert Hall in London, the fascinated Times of London critic wrote enthusiastically of Theremin's apparatus. "Particularly striking was one experiment, in which an echo of a series of notes was made to sound as if it had came from the farther side of the hall," the Times correspondent noted. After that, the lights in Albert Hall were dimmed, and "the inventor showed by electric lamps that it was possible to change the colour of light with the change in pitch of notes," the Times writer testified. "The colour of the electric flame graduated from a deep red through the various colours of the spectrum to bright blue as the notes ascended in the scale."

Celebrity Inventor

Theremin arrived in New York City just before Christmas in 1927. Journalists came aboard his ship before its passengers disembarked in order to interview him. He was described as "a modest and almost diffident physicist and not a world-famous inventor," a New York Times journalist reported. "Of course, I hope the apparatus will be manufactured in quantities in the United States," Theremin told the newspaper. "But I am not old enough to worry about the money I may obtain. I am more interested at present in demonstrating my musical discovery, and I hope to test the musical preferences of the American people."

The first American public performance of the theremin took place in the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in late January 1928. This audience included world-famous conductor Arturo Toscanini and Theremin's fellow Russian, pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, who expressed a desire to try the instrument. "As it stands now, the instrument is the raw material of music," violinist Joseph Szigeti told the New York Times that evening. "What can be done with it remains to be seen. The question is whether it will inspire men of genius. Its future depends on what men of genius do with it." Another New York Times article from that week discussed Theremin and his invention at length, with an accompanying illustration and the caption, "The Symphony Orchestra of the Future Will Play Concealed Instruments by the Waving of Hands." "In rapidity and delicacy of response, Theremin's instrument far excels a piano or a violin or any other known musical instrument," the paper's music writer, Waldemar Kaempffert, enthused. "In directness of effect it can be compared only with singing or whistling.… Never can the pianist or violinist hope to attain the spontaneity of either the songbird or the opera prima donna. Theremin achieves precisely the same spontaneity by freeing the artist from the necessity of physically touching or grasping. What can be freer than the movement of hands in empty space to produce beautiful sounds?"

Economic Crisis Ended Venture

Thrilled with the reception his apparatus received, Theremin decided to stay in America. He soon met Clara Rockmore, a Russian émigré and renowned violinist, and taught her how to play the challenging instrument, which was proving a bit more difficult for others to master. Rockmore gained fame with her public performances, as did an American, Lucie Bigelow Rosen. In 1929 Theremin was granted a patent for his invention and licensed it to RCA for mass production. The company's advertising campaign touted that the theremin was "Not a radio, not a phonograph! Not like anything you have ever heard or seen!" A thousand were produced by RCA, and a few hundred sold, but then the stock market crashed in October 1929, and the market for any sort of luxury item dwindled significantly.

Theremin, however, was still at work. In 1932, he demonstrated the Terpsitone, a platform on which a dancer's movements produced sounds, at a Carnegie Hall event. There was also the short-lived Theremin Electronic Symphony Orchestra, and at his West 54th Street apartment visitors—who included Einstein with his violin—were stunned to find an array of new musical instruments as well as doors that opened automatically and even a color television. For Sing Sing Prison in nearby Ossining, New York, Theremin also created the world's first electronic security system. But in 1936, when Theremin wed a noted African American ballet dancer named Lavina Williams, he was ostracized by many in his social set. The couple had twin daughters, and one night in 1938, according to Williams, Soviet agents came to their apartment and took Theremin away.

Vanished into Soviet Russia

Back in the Soviet Union, it was later learned, Theremin endured a show trial on charges that included fomenting "anti-Soviet propaganda" and spent time in a notorious Magadan labor camp in Siberia. A German newspaper reported that he had died—life expectancy at Magadan was about a year—and the reports were circulated elsewhere. But Theremin survived by suggesting improvements in the food delivery system in the camp and eventually was removed to Lubyanka, the famed KGB headquarters in Moscow, to work on the world's first "bug," or miniature listening device, for espionage activities during World War II. He was released in 1947 and awarded the Stalin Prize for his work but never again achieved the level of fame and honor he had once enjoyed. He served as a professor of acoustics at the Moscow Conservatory of Music for a time, but was ejected for his work on electronic musical instruments. He was told, according to the New York Times, that "electricity is for executing traitors, not making music."

In the West, meanwhile, the theremin slowly fell from favor as well. Lucie Rosen gave a 1950 London performance of Bohuslav Martinu's Phantasy for theremin, string quartet, oboe and piano. The evening was reviewed by a Times critic who declared that the theremin "sounds like a viola constitutionally and chronically out of tune." It began to be used in film scores, however—after making its sound-track debut in the 1935 horror classic The Bride of Frankenstein—and was most notably deployed in two films from 1945: The Lost Weekend, which earned an Academy Award for Ray Milland for his portrayal of an alcoholic as well as the Oscar for best picture, and Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, in which Gregory Peck's character suffers psychotic episodes, and the theremin sound foreshadows their onset. Hitchcock's music composer for the film, Miklós Róza, won the Academy Award for best music score.

Rock Musicians Revived Interest

In the 1950s, the theremin was used in horror and science-fiction movies, including The Day the Earth Stood Still and It Came from Outer Space. Youngsters who were fans of the genre grew into the rock music innovators of the 1960s and 1970s, and the inventor of the first synthesizer, Robert Moog, had built his own theremin as a teenager from a how-to kit he bought out of a magazine. The most universally familiar theremin sound, however, remains the introduction to the 1966 Beach Boys hit, "Good Vibrations."

In 1988, the Delos record label released some of Rockmore's concert performances as The Art of the Theremin, which led American filmmaker Steven M. Martin to her. Interested in making a documentary about the instrument and its long-lost inventor, Martin was stunned to learn from Rockmore that Theremin was still alive. Martin went to meet him in Moscow in 1990 and brought him back to New Yorl a year later. In Martin's film Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey, there are touching images of the elderly Russian awed by the electronically blinking Manhattan cityscape in a city he had not seen since 1938.

Theremin died on November 3, 1993, in Moscow. Despite significant advances in electronic music, his "aetherphon" remains the only musical device that can be played without actual physical contact.