Theramin recording reissue

NYT
January 21, 2007
From the Archives, Just for Theremaniacs
By DANIEL J. WAKIN

IN 1927 The New York Times reported from Berlin about an astounding recent invention: a box with a brass rod and ring that, when the inventor moved his hands around them, produced a violinlike sound of “extraordinary beauty and fullness of tone.”

“He created music out of nothing but motions in the air,” the article said.

The inventor was Leon Theremin (born Lev Termen), a young Russian scientist whose fascinating life would later include spying for Soviet intelligence, serving time in a Siberian labor camp and inventing a host of things, including electronic bugs, an early television and an electronic security system at the Sing Sing prison in Ossining, N.Y. But his legacy lives on principally in the device named after him: the theremin, which introduced the age of electronic music.

Though it bombed as an instrument for the masses, partly because it is so difficult to play, Hollywood embraced it. The theremin, with its otherworldly, sliding woo-woo sound, was prominent in science fiction movies like “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and in other films, notably Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” and Billy Wilder’s “Lost Weekend.”

It captivated Robert Moog, who began building theremins before inventing his pioneering synthesizer in 1954. A well-received 1994 documentary, “Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey,” revived interest, and the theremin has since had renewed popularity in pop and rock bands.

But early on, the theremin also had a life in concert halls, thanks mostly to the woman considered its greatest virtuoso, Clara Rockmore, who died in 1998 at 88. Ms. Rockmore, a former violin prodigy, created a whole technique of playing. She performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, played Town Hall, had works written for her, toured with Paul Robeson and gave recitals — many with her sister, the noted pianist and teacher Nadia Reisenberg.

Mr. Moog persuaded Ms. Rockmore to put her artistry on record. A recording session in 1975 led to her first album, “The Art of the Theremin,” released on LP in 1977 and containing 12 numbers. Three decades later 13 previously unheard cuts from that session are available in a new release on the Bridge label, “Clara Rockmore’s Lost Theremin Album.”

The original theremin, first sold by the RCA Corporation, looks like a small wooden lectern with a vertical antenna on one side and a horizontal loop antenna on the left. Hand movements cause changes in the electromagnetic field around the antennae. The right hand moving near the vertical antenna controls pitch; the closer it moves, the higher the tone. The left hand, next to the horizontal loop, controls volume; the closer it moves, the softer the sound. (About half of the original 500 RCA theremins are believed to have survived, according to the Web site thereminworld.com, which has a registry of instruments and fascinating stories about their survival.)

With nothing but air to touch, there is no independent guide for where pitches lie. The body must remain still to avoid disrupting the tones. “You have to play with butterfly wings,” Ms. Rockmore is quoted as saying in the booklet notes. “Playing the theremin is like being a trapeze artist without a net underneath.”

The new CD will captivate theremaniacs (there are plenty out there) and anyone open to a cool musical sound. But it will also appeal to classical-music lovers. Ms. Rockmore’s playing is deeply musical, and she performs with all the expressiveness of a violinist trained in the Romantic school of Mischa Elman and Jascha Heifetz, as she was.

Ms. Rockmore, admitted to the St. Petersburg Conservatory in Russia at 5, was a student of the great violin teacher Leopold Auer, who also taught those future virtuosos. Muscle and joint problems forced her to give up the violin in the mid-1920s. Around then she met Leon Theremin in the United States, studied with him and became his friend and dancing partner. Theremin even proposed, unsuccessfully. In the 1930s Theremin made a special extrasensitive instrument for her, which she plays here. The sound is less electronic than on other theremin recordings, and the human presence is clear.

In Bach’s “Air on the G String,” here called “Celebrated Air,” the portamento, or carrying of tone, is lush but tasteful. At the end of the long first note Ms. Rockmore makes a caressing diminuendo. In Villa-Lobos’s “Bachiana Brasileira” No. 5 the theremin takes the soprano part and sounds hauntingly human. (The eight cellos are overlaid in a remix.) In Dvorak’s “Humoreske” you can almost hear the lilt of a bow. She begins Schubert’s “Ave Maria” with great delicacy, and each note afterward is carefully placed.

The theremin has a number of soloists now, including Pamelia Kurstin, Barbara Buchholz and Lydia Kavina, a relative of the inventor, who recently released a theremin album called “Music From the Ether” on Mode Records.

But Ms. Rockmore towers above them all.

“She converted her musicality, all of her strong Russian background as a musician, into this incredible technique on this new space-age instrument,” Albert Glinsky, Theremin’s biographer, said recently. “It also didn’t hurt that the inventor was in love with her.”