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Journals: Léon Theremin
It was on Wednesday, April 26, 1967 that Harold Schonberg, The New York Times’ senior music writer, broke his world exclusive: Soviet inventor, musician and physicist Léon Theremin is alive and well. Almost thirty years had passed since he was last seen in New York, just before he was reportedly whisked away by KGB agents to a secret Siberian location. The world gawped in wonder.
The architect of the greatest musical invention of its time – the Theremin – had fascinated people when he took his instrument on a world tour and arrived in the US in 1928. His sudden abduction, just before the outbreak of the Second World War, had only tickled their imagination further.
The instrument, one that was not to be touched but to be felt, was a revolution. It comprised of a long and thin vertical rod on the right-hand side and a horizontal metal loop on the left. The player’s hand would control the pitch by closing in or withdrawing from the rod. The closer it would get, the higher the whistle tone would become. Moving the hand up and down over the wire loop on the side would modulate the volume. The sound is created when the player’s natural electrical charge pierces the magnetic fields of the antennae. When Theremin first heard the eerie whistling tone while experimenting in his laboratory, he was aghast at the electron’s voice, for he had never heard anything so beautiful.
The Theremin, when it was patented in October 1920, was a major boost for a Russia still reeling from the First World War atrocities and the bloody October Revolution that followed. Luckily for Theremin, he was the sort of scientist the new Motherland needed. His deep, searching sound offered a curious moment of peace and calm in an otherwise unstable world. When the thin and mustachioed man lifted his hands towards the machine, otherworldly sounds would flow seemingly from the ether.
Continue ReadingVladimir Lenin heard the news and sent for Theremin.“What magic have you brought me?” he had asked as he sat waiting for his demonstration in early March 1922. Theremin’s response was to play the Bolshevik leader Camille Saint-Säens’ ‘The Swan’, the first piece of music he had played on his invention and one he knew by heart from playing cello in his youth. He then moved on to Mikhail Glinka’s ‘Skylark’, carefully studying Lenin’s face for a reaction. Was he impressed or preoccupied with other thoughts? Halfway through, he got his answer. Lenin quickly got up from his seat and walked over to Léon. “Let me try,” he said eagerly. The pair started playing together, Theremin standing behind Lenin to aid his performance. After a short while, he let go and Lenin finished nearly all of ‘Skylark’ himself. Everyone in the room applauded. Even Léon was impressed – not many could pick up the technique so quickly.
After his re-entry into Western consciousness in 1967, Theremin’s fascinating story was once again told to the world through Schonberg, who described him as a man “who looks and acts like the prototype of the absent-minded professor”. When he had returned to the Soviet Union in 1938, Theremin had been put to work producing spy equipment in a Siberian gulag. He spent years developing ‘The Thing’, a listening device in the shape of the Great Seal of the United States. Soviet school children presented it to the US Ambassador in Moscow in 1945, and it had hung in his office until it was discovered by accident in 1952.
But music will always be what Léon Theremin will be remembered for. His genius has lived on far beyond the Cold War and his greatest invention still resonates today. From the 1950s onwards it has been used to add that extraterrestrial sound to Sci-Fi movies, and even featured in the theme song to the original Star Trek series. Legendary bands that have made the instrument part of pop culture include The Beach Boys and Led Zeppelin, whose 1969 anthem ‘Whole Lotta Love’ featured a Theremin solo from Jimmy Page. Even eclectic modern-day artists like Goldfrapp and Portishead are still using it to this day. Léon Theremin’s legacy, it seems, is very much alive.
Led Zeppelin – Jimmy Page playing the Theremin – Whole Lotta Love
Theremin Community:
www.myspace.com/leontheremin
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01 March 2010
New World Order: Bat For Lashes
Lycanthropy, shape-shifting, the power of the moon, the tidal flow of blood. These are mythologies embedded deep in the female psyche, mysteries of flesh and soul connecting even the most modern woman to her darkest, primal self. Angela Carter knew this, creating feminist transfigurations of traditional fairy tales in her volume, The Bloody Chamber, later adapted into Neil Jordan’s film The Company of Wolves. Natasha Khan knows it too. As Bat for Lashes, she weaves this dark imagery of transformation and possession into music.