We know it best from the soundtrack to science fiction films, but Leo Termin's Theremin was a sensation of its time and utterly changed its maker's life, writes MICHAEL DERVAN
THE THEREMIN was one of the wonders of its time. Its inventor, the Soviet engineer and musician Lev Termen (known as Leon Theremin in the West), demonstrated it to Lenin in 1922. After the demonstration in the Kremlin, he held both of the Communist leader's hands to guide him through a performance of Glinka's The Skylarkon an instrument which works simply by making movements in the air.
The miracle of making music on an instrument that requires no physical contact created a sensational impact wherever Termen demonstrated it. The greatest musicians bowed in awe. Albert Einstein showed up to sample it in Berlin. Standing room was sold for the first time in the boxes of the Paris Opéra to accommodate demand. The moneyed families of the US vied for the privilege of hosting the celebrated inventor and fees of up to $35,000 were mentioned by a fevered press.
Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog Synthesiser, began his business life as a manufacturer of theremins. Repairing an instrument the Russian had made and hearing it sound again “was the high point of my professional career,” he said. And finally meeting the man himself in 1989 “was the realisation of a lifelong dream – to stand in the same room with the person who, virtually single-handedly, launched the field of electronic music technology.”
The sound of the theremin is something you've probably heard, even if you don't know that you've heard it. Its ethereal tone haunts the dream sequences in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound. It evokes almost any kind of strangeness in any number of horror and science-fiction movies. And a derivative was used to add a swirling and swooning element to the Beach Boys' classic, Good Vibrations.
The life of the instrument’s inventor moved between fairytale and nightmare. He developed an early motion-sensitive burglar alarm (the theremin was actually a by-product), worked on a television system in the 1920s (the Soviet authorities treated these inventions as state secrets), and lived in the US on visitor visas from 1927 to 1938, years in which he experienced the highs and lows of capitalist enterprise. He struck a deal with RCA, who manufactured theremins as a new must-have – “an absolutely new unique musical instrument anyone can play” – and then dropped the project.
Termen, creating business after business and borrowing left, right and centre, found himself disappearing under mountains of debt. He entered the US in a blaze of glory, and left, quietly and suddenly, on false documents on a Soviet freighter.
He had had an additional duty in the US. Part of his mission was to engage in industrial espionage, and he claimed that at his debriefing sessions he was forced to down vodka, so that he would talk more freely. He later amusingly claimed that by eating a pound of butter in advance, he could mitigate the effects of the alcohol. And it was purported espionage – in the opposite direction – that was to prove his undoing.
Back in the USSR he found a world he hardly recognised, a country ravaged by Stalin’s purges, where key contacts had either disappeared or were too fearful to try and help him. It was only a matter of time before he was arrested and interrogated, and finally charged with having “served as a spy for foreign secret services”. He had worked openly on televisions and alarms in the US, thereby betraying his country. He was guilty of “treason to the motherland” and having given “aid to the international bourgeoisie”. He was sentenced to eight years forced labour, and sent to build roads in the Arctic conditions of Kolyma.
He was reprieved in 1940, well, partially. He was kept in prison, but moved to Moscow, and from the exertions of physical labour, he was assigned to a team doing research primarily on aircraft design. After his release in 1947 he was awarded a Stalin Prize, in secret, because of the sensitive nature of his work. This gave him a home, and a financial cushion. But he found his unstructured freedom difficult, and, of his own volition, turned again to his former masters. The eavesdropping bug in a replica of the Great Seal of the United States (presented by Soviet schoolchildren to the US Ambassador in 1946, and which hung in his residence until 1952) is perhaps the most notorious device Termen invented during the 1940s.
After his eventual retirement from the KGB in 1964, he again found himself at a loss, a man to be kept under surveillance (as he had been for decades), who had also been deprived of all evidence of his professional past. He worked briefly in a recording studio, then in the acoustics laboratory of the Moscow Conservatory, and, from 1968 to 1980, at the electronic studio of the Scriabin Museum.
Lydia Kavina studied theremin with him as a young girl. They lived close to each other, and they were family – her grandfather and Termen were cousins. And she was musical, studying the piano and starting to compose, so it was natural that he wanted to give her lessons. “He was a genius,” she recalls, “and you would know it when you met him. Of course, he was very old when I knew him, and many things had happened in his life. He definitely had changed in some way after he had been in the Gulag and done all his secret work. He had a great intelligence, a great love of life, and a young way of looking at life. He was great with his ideas and fantasies, you would call them naive, until you saw him realising them with his hands – he was a great worker with his hands.” In early life, his fantasies had included freezing Lenin for future resurrection, and a straight-faced description of the experience of his own birth.
He was “a young-looking old man” who danced well, who in old age “never used an elevator” – he was 97 when he died in 1993 – and whose “every sentence would have some humour in it.”
He didn’t talk to Kavina about his work as a spy (her mother filled her in on that), but “He would say that he saw his life and the life around him in the Gulag very much from a distance, almost as if in the cinema.
“That allowed him to keep his mind clear and survive such a hard situation. And he told funny stories about it, for some reason.”
Lydia Kavina plays Iraida Yusupova’s Kitezh 19 in the Sounds of the Silk Road concert at St Peter’s Church, Drogheda, tonight, and gives a theremin master class in Barlow House on Saturday morning
How it works
THE THEREMIN exploits the fact that the human body carries an electric charge, and the circuitry in the instrument responds to physical movements in relation to its antennas. Early reports made much of the fact that it was essential in exploiting the kind of sounds that were produced through tuning difficulties with early radios. The free movement of the hands in space was really important for Termen, says Lydia Kavina. “He knew this was the revolution.” Although he developed versions with keys and buttons, it was the straightforward theremin that meant most.
Performing appears to be simple. The closer to the vertical antenna you place your hand, the higher the sound, the further away, the lower. But, says Kavina, “There’s nothing to measure. You can’t say that this note corresponds to this exact place in the air. You have to find it with your ears.” The horizontal antenna controls volume. Closer is softer, further away is louder.
A theremin is so sensitive that if you place your hand on the body of the instrument and keep it in place, the pitch of the sound will change if you take a deep breath. Theremins also respond differently in different physical environments – the distances of the walls and ceiling all come into play. Ear is the only guide. Kavina’s advice to composers is to sing out loud any part they write for theremin.
