Even though few listeners are likely to recognize its name, almost everyone has at one time or another heard an electronic musical instrument known to the cognoscenti as the theremin (pronounced “THAIR-uh-min” in the English-speaking world). The Beach Boys’ 1966 hit song “Good Vibrations” utilized the instrument to happy, loopy effect. Two decades earlier Miklos Rozsa’s soundtrack to the Alfred Hitchcock film Spellbound (1945) had featured the theremin to suggest an undercurrent of paranoia. Since then countless B-grade movies have relied on the theremin’s unearthly sound to establish an atmosphere of alien or supernatural menace.
The theremin takes its name from Russian inventor Leon Theremin (who preferred the Russian pronunciation of his name, “tair-MEN”). Theremin’s genius led him to design and perfect a number of inventions, musical and otherwise, but it would also place him—as a citizen of what became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1917—in an extraordinarily precarious position. The twists and turns of Theremin’s long life mirror the history of the twentieth century, and the details of that life are explored for the first time by composer and music professor Albert Glinsky.
Leon Theremin (or Lev Sergeyevich Termen, as he was known in his mother country) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1896. Young Leon was precocious, reading the encyclopedia at the age of three and repairing watches at seven. He began playing the piano at age five and the cello four years later, realizing even then that “there was a gap between music itself and its mechanical production.” At a slightly older age Theremin began experimenting with magnetism and electricity.
Theremin’s gifts marked him out in school, and as a result he was allowed to attend the lectures mounted by rising physics star Abram Fedorovich Ioffe in defense of his thesis and dissertation. Ioffe was so impressed with Theremin that he took him on as a protégé, a move that probably saved the student’s life. When Theremin was drafted a few years later to fight in the First World War for the Tsar, his status and knowledge kept him out of the front lines, and he was instead assigned to an engineering school.
The first stages of Theremin’s scientific and technical career found him in the forefront of radio and television (“distance vision”) design. One of the most telling sections of Glinsky’s biography describes how Theremin’s inventions were pressed into the service of the new Soviet state for official communication and surveillance, while in the West such developments were marketed to the very proletariat that the Soviets ostensibly championed. For his efforts Theremin was hailed as “the Russian Edison,” but he would eventually pay a high price for the bargain he had made with his masters.
Theremin’s most important invention, and the one for which he is remembered, was the musical instrument eventually named after him. The theremin, which is the only musical instrument played without being touched, operates thanks to several principles of electronics. The first of these is heterodyning, which dictates that any two frequencies will combine to produce a third, lower, frequency equal to the difference between the original two. In the case of the theremin, one oscillator (or radio-frequency generator) produces a set frequency. Another oscillator, attached to an antenna, produces a frequency that varies as the player moves his or her hand in relation to the antenna—in technical terms, adding capacity or capacitance to the oscillator. The two original frequencies being generated lie in the radio spectrum, far beyond the range of human hearing, yet the resulting pitch is audible. A second antenna, mounted to a right angle to the first, allows the player to alter the volume—as conveyed by a loudspeaker—with his or her other hand.
Theremin initially called his invention the “etherphone,” a reference to the medium—ether—that some scientists still believed filled space and conducted electromagnetic waves.
Theremin demonstrated his new invention to Abram Ioffe in October, 1920, and held a small recital of familiar classical tunes in November. Sensing a propaganda tool of enormous potential, the Soviet government pressed Theremin into touring with his impressive instrument, first within the Soviet Union and then, beginning in 1927, abroad. Following him at something of a distance was his wife, Katia, whom he had married in 1924. The toast of several European capitals, Theremin entered the United States in late 1927. Here he would license his invention with RCA, which built and marketed the theremin as a simple instrument that could be mastered in a matter of hours. At the same time, Theremin helped relay critical American technological information back to the Soviet Union under cover of an entity known as the American Trading Organization, or Amtorg. Katia followed Theremin to the United States in 1928, but she and Theremin ended up living apart and eventually divorced in 1934.
As Glinsky makes clear, Theremin was not the only electronic musical instrument designer of his time. The ideas that the Russian inventor employed were in the air, if not necessarily the ether. One Jörg Mager had developed what he called an “Electrophon” about 1921; subsequently refining and renaming it the “Sphärophon,” he demonstrated it in public in 1926. Even earlier, in 1918, French inventor Armand Givelet had developed something he called the “Clavier à Lampe,” demonstrating it in public for the first time in 1927. The following year another Frenchman, Maurice Martenot, introduced a highly sophisticated instrument that would eventually be known as the ondes martenot.
The greatest threat to the theremin came from American Lee De Forest, the self-styled “father of radio.” De Forest was the inventor of the triode (or three-element vacuum tube) that had replaced the two-element tube in radio receivers. He had also, he would later claim, experimented with the heterodyne method of producing sounds in 1915. In any case De Forest’s company successfully sued RCA in 1931 for patent infringement, and production of the theremin ceased.
At this point Theremin was aided by composer and fellow Soviet expatriate Joseph Schillinger and socialite Lucie Bigelow Rosen. The former wrote several compositions for the theremin, championed the inventor, and commissioned him to design several other instruments. The latter provided him with a well-equipped studio when his source of income from RCA dried up. During this time Theremin also met a young woman named Clara Reisenberg, destined (under the name Clara Rockmore) to become the most talented performer the instrument would ever enjoy. Yet the inventor found himself increasingly thwarted. His visionary schemes—which today one would recognize as very early versions of virtual reality and the Internet—far outstripped the existing level of technology necessary to support them. His financial affairs grew ever more complicated, eventually resulting in rifts with friends and supporters. Clara Reisenberg turned down his proposal of marriage. When, in 1938, Theremin instead married Lavinia Williams, a young art student whose ancestry was Irish, Native American and African American, yet more friends deserted him.
Theremin surreptitiously arranged to leave the United States in 1938 aboard a Soviet freighter. Although he was assured that Lavinia would be allowed to follow him shortly, it is hard to know whether he believed the promise. In any case, Theremin told Lavinia nothing of his plans, and to her it appeared that he had been abducted. As it turned out, he might as well have been, for much of his subsequent life in the Soviet Union was bleak. Soon after his return, Theremin was caught up in the mass arrests sweeping the Soviet Union, spending nine months in Siberia. He was rescued in order to work on a series of state projects—first, warplanes, about which he knew nothing; and next, eavesdropping devices, about which, it turned out, he quickly learned quite a bit. For his efforts in successfully bugging the American, British, and French embassies in Moscow, Theremin was awarded—in secrecy—the prestigious Stalin Prize.
In 1991 American filmmaker Steven M. Martin tracked down Theremin in Moscow and brought him back to the United State for the first time in more than half a century. The documentary that Martin directed—Theremin, An Electric Odyssey (1993)—has played to enthusiastic audiences around the world and reintroduced Theremin to yet more generations. The day after the documentary premiered on British television, Theremin died.
Albert Glinsky worked thirteen years on Leon Theremin’s biography, yet frustratingly enough, the life that he chronicles was one of missed opportunities. Many were due to the machinations of the Soviet state, while others were due to Theremin’s own naïveté and occasional duplicity. Others still were simply bad luck. So overwhelming are the events that Theremin was involved in—his chaotic business ventures, the fury of Stalin’s mad purges, the German invasion of the Soviet Union—that he sometimes vanishes from view. At one point Glinsky describes Theremin as being “weary of the whole corporate tangle,” a sentiment that Glinsky’s readers will share.
Perhaps the ultimate irony is that Theremin had little effect on the so-called “serious” or art music that he grew up playing and loving. Most of the original compositions featuring the theremin are forgotten; some were rewritten to incorporate more sophisticated instruments that minimized the troubling glissando, or “slide” between notes, that characterized the theremin. Instead, Theremin became a prime if unintentional force in popular music and other forms of entertainment. The theme of the radio serial The Green Hornet (1936-1952) was a theremin rendition of Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee”—a harbinger of things to come.
Theremin’s ultimate importance lies in his influence on younger generations of inventors and musicians. Although Lee De Forest’s 1931 suit destroyed the theremin commercially, countless electronic hobbyists later built their own versions of the instrument—a relatively simple project—to amaze their friends and neighbors. As Robert Moog explains in his foreword to Glinsky’s biography, he put together his first theremin in 1949 and regards the Russian inventor as his “hero and virtual mentor.” (Moog went on to design and build the musical synthesizers associated with his name today.) When Moog describes meeting the aged Clara Rockmore and helping restore her theremin—which she feared had deteriorated beyond repair—readers will grasp something of the love and enthusiasm that this neglected figure has aroused among his admirers.