Theremin EN

Andrej Smirnov
Touchless Music

The theremin¹ (also known as etherphone and thereminvox) is one of the earliest electronic musical instruments, the first musical instrument which can be played without being touched as well as the first electronic musical instrument that was manufactured commercially. Although similar signal generators existed elsewhere, this particular invention was the first high-frequency electronic instrument to gain fame and widespread acceptance.

It is almost impossible to give the exact date of the invention, since the Russian inventor Lew Termen himself has mentioned different dates and situations. It seems most likely that Termen first noticed a new possibility to produce pitched sound while he was fixing the radio station in Detskoe Selo (near Petrograd) during the Civil War in Russia. A little while later, just after military service, Termen was hired by the Institute for Physics and Technology in Petrograd. He developed a special tool to measure the dielectric resistance of gases, based on the heterodyning principle, which could produce controllable pitched sounds in the presence of a human body. That was the final point of invention. According to the stories of witnesses the next day, Termen was already performing music with his tool. “Termen is playing a voltmeter,” his colleagues were kidding. In October 1921, Lew Termen played music on his instrument before a fascinated Lenin, who gave him support and the opportunity to travel all over Russia to promote the ideas of the “electrification” of the country.

In 1926 Termen got permission to travel abroad and started his European trip during the fall of 1927 with a series of presentations in Germany in conjunction with the Frankfurter Internationale Ausstellung and with follow-up demonstrations in Berlin, London and Paris. All tickets for his presentation at the Paris Opera were sold out in three days, the crowd attacked the entrance, the police were called to keep order. Although the theremin created a sensation, it was largely ignored by most composers for a long time.

Termen (who in the USA changed his name to Leon Theremin) patented his invention in the Soviet Union, in Germany, and America. In 1929 the American RCA company started to manufacture theremins. Although the RCA theremin, released immediately after the stock-market crash of 1929, was not a commercial success, it fascinated audiences in America and abroad. Clara Rockmore toured with wide acclaim, performing a classical repertoire in concert halls around the United States.

The theremin is usually associated with “alien,” surreal, and eerie-sounding, glissando, tremolo, and vibrato sounds, due to its use in film soundtracks such as Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945), The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951), Ed Wood (Tim Burton, 1994), and Mars Attacks! (Tim Burton, 1996). Numerous composers all over the world – like Lydia Kavina, Olesia Rostovskaya, Olga Neuwirth, Elisabeth Schimana, Barbara Buchholz, and Wilco Botermans – compose music especially for the theremin, developing new playing techniques and ways of live interaction with the instrument, radically extending the classical techniques. The theremin is also played in rock and pop music and was a popular instrument in the German cabarets of the 1950s.

Electronics enthusiast Robert Moog began building theremins in the 1950s, while he was a high-school student. Moog subsequently published a number of articles about building theremins and sold theremin kits, which were intended to be assembled by the customer. He credited what he learned from this experience as leading directly to his groundbreaking synthesizer, the Minimoog. As he noted, his first love was the theremin – and on the way to rediscovering his first love he invented the synthesizer.

Fußnoten:

Links

theremin.ru
ima.or.at


 
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