The Theremin Still Pops Up in Pop Music

In 1949, a teenager named Robert Moog was leafing through the pages of Electronics World magazine when he came across the schematic for a musical instrument called the theremin. Instantly recognizable for its ethereal, mournful voice, the theremin features two antennas that generate electromagnetic fields. Placed between the aerials, human hands act as capacitors and cause the interrupted fields to express themselves with variable pitch and volume. In this way, the hands can be moved around to create melodies. Never heard one? Actually, you probably have. The theremin’s creepy whine has appeared everywhere from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Spellbound to Rush’s Clockwork Angels album to The Simpsons. Invented over a century ago, the theremin is still in production at Moog Music, and it has a story as unique as the sounds it makes. In 1920, three years after the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian engineer Léon Theremin was using radio waves to measure the electrical properties of gases when he noticed that his electromagnetic field possessed an odd tonal quality. “It turned out that when the capacity changes at a distance of the moving hand,” the scientist later said, “the pitch of the sound also changes.” Theremin—who also happened to be a cellist—built a playable musical instrument from his discovery. After impressing former Soviet Union Premier Vladimir Lenin with it, the Soviets sent Theremin on an “ether-wave” concert tour across Europe and America (a journey that was more about industrial espionage than music). After securing a patent in 1928, Theremin signed a deal with RCA to produce his now-renamed Thereminvox. “Make music with the wave of a hand!” promised RCA’s advertising in 1929. “So easy, anyone can do it!” Trouble was, nobody could really do it—much less afford it during the Great Depression. The Thereminvox was expensive ($220, or about $3,400 today) and technologically demanding. “The marketing folks at RCA thought: a Theremin in every home,” Moog Music’s vp of engineering Steve Dunnington told Adweek. “In the first round as a commercial product, it was a flop.” And Theremin himself didn’t fare much better. After returning to the Soviet Union, he was arrested during former Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin’s purges and sent to the Gulag. Fortunately, the young Moog would give the Theremin its second chance. Moog’s fledgling company made and sold the instrument starting in 1954. And what Moog learned from building theremins would lead, a decade later, to another instrument that changed music history: the synthesizer. Theremins never did go mainstream, but they’ve continued to pop up in unexpected places, used by artists as varied as The White Stripes and Erykah Badu. “The theremin has passed the critical mass required for it to become a real instrument,” Dunnington said. “It’s not just a novelty.” Catch a wave Among the theremin’s best-known applications, music aficionados will tell you, is The Beach Boys’ 1966 hit Good Vibrations—but that’s only half true. Musical genius though he was, Brian Wilson couldn’t play the theremin. The instrument used in the tune is actually an Electro-Theremin, a variant that uses a pitch knob mounted on a slider, making it much easier to play. The Electro-Theremin was the collaborative work of inventor Bob Whitsell and trombonist Paul Tanner, a session player who did the honors for The Beach Boys on that famous track recorded at L.A.’s Gold Star Studios. Can't touch this Léon Theremin (1) grew proficient enough on his own instrument that a deeply impressed Vladimir Lenin (2) sent him on a world tour with it. Years after its commercial launch flopped, Robert Moog began manufacturing and playing his own version (3). Apollo 11 astronauts took a cassette recording of theremin music to moon with them (4), but the most far-out theremin performance probably belongs to Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page (5), who used it onstage during the instrumental break on Whole Lotta Love.

Perspective

After a Century, the Theremin Still Pops Up in Pop Music

The eerie instrument invented by accident and loved by Lenin still carries a tune

Robert Klara

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Robert Klara