Theres an instrument you can play without touching anything. Its called the Theremin, and it is named after the Westernized name of its Russian inventor, Léon Theremin, who patented the device in 1928.
The instrument's controlling section usually consists of two metal antennas that sense the relative position of the thereminist's hands and control oscillators for frequency with one hand, and amplitude (volume) with the other. The electric signals from the theremin are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker. Basically, you play it by moving your hands in the air, through the antennas’ invisible electromagnetic fields (one hand controls pitch, the other controls the volume). It sounds quite like an Opera Singer.
The above is for those that dont like reading . This is for more serious people.
One night almost 10 years ago, I heard an impossible voice on the radio. I was back in my hometown, driving my parents’ car; out of the darkness came the sound of a gorgeous soprano, a singing unlike anything I had ever heard. High and yearning, incredibly fragile, this delicate voice also conveyed a steady, girded force.
I soon learned that the singer was not, in fact, a human being. At the end of the segment, the avuncular presenter declared that the music we had just heard was the work of an instrumentalist manipulating an elaborate electric contraption. A thereminist and his theremin – an almost century-old musical instrument, a box with two antennas. You play it by moving your hands in the air, through the antennas’ invisible electromagnetic fields.
In my experience, there are two kinds of people: those who are beguiled by the theremin and those who just haven’t heard of it yet. Because of the way it’s played – gestures, space – it fascinates instantly. Like the regal glass harmonica or the lowly nose flute, it’s as much about the how as the what. Accordingly, the theremin is most often a novelty – a prop for Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, a gag for The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper, a flying-saucer sound-effect in countless B-movie soundtracks.
In the hands of an amateur, the theremin yowls and screeches. But hearing it on the radio that night, played by a virtuoso, I was struck by the instrument’s overlooked capacity for beauty. I was struck by the thought that this trembling music was the sound of a man holding his hands in empty air, conducting music out of nothingness.
Most musical instruments require their players to strum, push or blow into something. They require that sticks strike skins or horsehair strokes strings. Only the theremin seems to rely on nothing more than its player’s presence or absence. Only the theremin appears to run on hope.
The instrument’s British debut took place on 10 December 1927. Its inventor, the Russian physicist Lev Sergeyevich Termen, known as Léon Theremin in the west, had travelled from Leningrad to London to demonstrate his creation to a public that included George Bernard Shaw, Julian Huxley, Arnold Bennett and, two days later, thousands more at the Albert Hall. After tuning it up with a procedure the Daily Telegraph compared to “a man testing the heat of a boiler with his naked hand”, the dapper 31-year-old scientist performed pieces by Schubert and Glinka. “The human voice, the violin, viola, cello, bass and double-bass, the cornet, horn, trombone, saxophone, organ, and almost every instrument you can think of, are all beaten at their own game by this one simple little apparatus,” announced the Musical Standard.
“People will learn to play it without too much difficulty,” Termen predicted. One day, he said, there would be a theremin in every home. “I think it could be sold and produced at the price of a three-valve radio set.”
Less than 24 hours later, he gathered up his electric marvel and boarded a transatlantic steamer. Arriving in Manhattan, the fêted inventor set up residence in the penthouse of the Plaza Hotel. He would remain in New York for almost 11 years.
From a contemporary vantage point, the theremin’s story sounds familiar. Like the Segway or Google Glass, it was an impressive invention that caught, and eventually fumbled, the public imagination. Despite international headlines, celebrity sponsors, and a major investment by RCA, the theremin never really took off. Enthusiasts could blame the great depression, just as RCA’s mass-market theremin went on sale. The company could blame a patent dispute between Termen and a New Jersey-based radio company, but mostly it should have blamed the flaws of the technology itself: Termen’s namesake was much fiddlier, and harder to play, than the Russian let on.
Yet the tale of the theremin is not quite as simple as other stories of fad, failure and recession. To begin with, there’s all the espionage. According to Albert Glinsky, Termen’s biographer, the inventor’s journey into the west was not just a propaganda tour for the “Soviet Edison”. The Kremlin also used Termen’s activities to expand their nascent spy network. Profits from theremin contracts got siphoned back to spooks, and Termen himself was allegedly “on assignment [the whole] time”, plundering whatever industrial secrets he could.
Was Termen more scientist than spy, or more spy than scientist? As the 1930s wore on, he built early drum machines, sensing instruments for US aircraft, touchless effects for sales windows?? and the first weapon detectors at Alcatraz prison.
He had married Lavinia Williams, a member of the American Negro Ballet. On 15 September 1938, Termen disappeared. He left home in a huddle of Soviet agents, telling Williams not to try to follow him. He had already packed up all his things; they were loaded on to the Stary Bolshevik. In the ship manifest, Termen was listed as “captain’s assistant”.
Williams never saw him again. Advertisement
There was also the matter of Clara.
A few years after I first heard the theremin on the radio, I began to research its inventor. I have always been interested in stories that seem as if they have been made up. Here was one of them: a scientist turned spy, a hero or betrayer, an instrument that runs on hope. When Termen arrived back in the USSR, his life took yet another turn: instead of being greeted like a prodigal son, he was caught up in Stalin’s political purges. The former paragon was banished to Siberia; later, in a special prison for scientists, he was ordered by secret police to help them eavesdrop on Stalin himself. (Termen also helped the NKVD to develop the most notorious bug of the entire cold war, known as “the Thing”.)
But there was another story that teased my imagination even more. Anyone who studies the theremin will become familiar with Clara Rockmore, the greatest thereminist of all time, whose performance of Saint-Saëns’s “Swan” is the finest example of what the instrument can do. Termen met Rockmore when she was a young and gifted violinist. They went dancing; they fell in love; she learned to play the machine he had invented. She mastered it as no one ever had.
He asked her to marry him.
She married someone else.
Every time I went back to Rockmore’s “Swan,” I felt as if I was back in my parents’ car, hearing that beautiful theremin for the first time. It is a recording filled with such complicated longing.
I resolved to write that longing out.
Sometimes the work of writing historical fiction is to try to concoct the most plausible past. You are a detective searching for clues, filling in gaps. Approaching the tale of Lev and Clara I decided to attempt something very different. I imagined a novel that expressed the story of the theremin’s sound – that uncanny electric music, true and lying at the same time. From the details of their lives I’d trace a silhouette of what reached me through the air that night, like a dream.
The principle behind the theremin is that the human body conducts electric current. This is true for every one of us: for Termen and Rockmore, Stalin and Page, writers and readers with our own private songs. Forces flow through everyone. Before a theremin, our arms uplifted, all of us would find one of life’s familiar riddles: am I conducting this music? Or am I conducted by it?
. This is for more serious people.