Nearly every musical instrument invented in the 20th century uses electricity in its performance. The theremin is the earliest successful electronic instrument. It was invented in 1920 by Soviet inventor Léon Theremin.

Most other electric instruments have something in common with traditional instruments. Learning to play them requires learning where and how to touch them. The theremin remains the only instrument that the performer never touches. Its unique and unmistakable sound seems other-worldly to this day.

Inventor Léon Theremin

Lev Sergeyvich Termen, better known in the West as Léon Theremin, was born in St. Petersburg in 1896.

He showed early aptitude for engineering. Reputedly, he could take watches and other mechanical items apart and put them back together when he was 7. When he was 15, he built an astronomical observatory.

His mother had special interests in music and drawing. Theremin studied both piano and cello in high school. He graduated from conservatory with the title “free artist on the violoncello.” But his chief interest was in physics, his major at university.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, Theremin served in the Soviet military as a radio engineer. I have seen conflicting descriptions of a machine he tried to build. One source says that he wanted to measure properties of gases using radio waves. Another says he wanted to make a motion detector.

In any case, his machine produced odd feedback sounds, which changed pitch depending on the movements of his hand. It turns out that the phenomenon depends on the physics principles of capacitance and heterodyning. The latter term simply means that when two frequencies interact, they produce sum and difference tones.

Invention of the theremin

Other radio engineers of the time had noted the same effect, but none were trained musical performers. Theremin turned his attention to using heterodyning as the basis for an entirely new musical instrument.

He built a prototype in 1919. Once he perfected the instrument, he performed in public for the first time in 1920. At first, it was called the etherphone, thereminophone, or thereminovox

It uses two ultrasonic oscillators, one of fixed pitch and the other variable. The variable frequency oscillator is attached to an antenna. Audible pitch results from the heterodyne interaction of the two oscillators.

That is, what we hear are the beats between two ultrasonic pitches, the difference tones. The frequency of the pitch results from how close or how far away the performers right hand is to the antenna. The performer’s left hand similarly controls the volume by moving in relation to a metal loop on the instrument.

Some 70 years later, he told Olivia Mattis that he wanted to “invent some kind of an instrument that would not operate mechanically . . . , that would create sound without using any mechanical energy, like the conductor of an orchestra. The orchestra plays mechanically, using mechanical energy; the conductor just moves his hands, and his movements have an effect on the music artistry.”

He even thought his invention could make him rich. Unfortunately for that plan, while the theremin is very easy to play, it is very difficult to play it well. It requires relaxed body movements, good spatial perception, an excellent ear, and intense mental focus. After all, the instrument provides no visual or tactile help in finding the notes.

Therefore, with some difficulty and practice, performers can play melodies. They can make weird sound effects much more easily.

The Soviet government backs the theremin

As part of his campaign to introduce his new instrument, he arranged for a demonstration for Lenin.

I brought my apparatus and set it up in his large office in the Kremlin. He was not yet there because he was in a meeting. I waited with Fotiva, his secretary, who was a good pianist, a graduate of the conservatory. She said that a little piano would be brought into the office, and that she would accompany me on the music that I would play.

So we prepared, and about an hour and a half later Vladimir Il’yich Lenin came with those people with whom he had been in conference in the Kremlin. He was very gracious; I was very pleased to meet him, and then I showed him the signaling system of my instrument, which I played by moving my hands in the air, and which was called at that time the thereminvox.

I played a piece. After I played the piece they applauded, including Vladimir Il’yich, who had been watching very attentively during my playing. I played Glinka’s “Skylark”, which he loved very much, and Vladimir Il’yich said, after all this applause, that I should show him, and he would try himself to play it.

He stood up, moved to the instrument, stretched his hands out, left and right: right to the pitch and left to the volume. I took his hands from behind and helped him. He started to play “Skylark”. He had a very good ear, and he felt where to move his hands to get the sound: to lower them or to raise them.

In the middle of this piece I thought that he could himself, independently, move his hands. So I took my hands off of his, and he completed the whole thing independently, by himself, with great success and with great applause following. He was very happy that he could play on this instrument all by himself.

Theremin and the thermin in the US

The Soviet government under Lenin sent Theremin to the US. His public mission was to show off Soviet technology, but he also engaged in industrial espionage.

Theremin arrived in the US in December 1927 and sought an American patent. He received it in 1928. He arranged some important performances. According to a review in the New York Sun, the audience at the Metropolitan Opera was “pleased, entertained, and a bit awed.” RCA bought the rights to mass produce the theremin. It retailed for $175, which is nearly $3,000 in today’s money.

Clara Rockmore, another emigrant from Russia, began performing on the theremin in the 1930s. Her concerts demonstrated its legitimacy as a musical instrument and not just a weird gadget.

Theremin returned to the Soviet Union in 1938. Some sources suggest he fled from a heavy tax burden. Others say the Soviet government forced him to return. In either case, the Stalinist government promptly exiled him to a special prison for scientists. There, his inventions included a bugging device that was hidden in the US embassy for seven years.

The government released him in 1947 but still restricted his movements and his ability to communicate with the outside world. His friends in the West assumed he had died, but he reemerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

After 51 years of state arrest, Theremin could again leave the country. In 1989, Olivia Mattis interviewed him in Bourges, France. She must have been disappointed, because he answered many questions saying that he didn’t remember. He blamed the passage of time, but he may have still been wary of saying anything that could get him in trouble again.

I have seen references to other, later interviews. Theremin died in 1993 at the age of 97.

Musical uses of the theremin

Theremin had intended his instrument to be played in concert halls and in homes. He had also hoped that composers would write new music for it. Edgard Varèse, Bohuslav Martinů, and Percy Grainger did so, but they failed to produce anything popular.

Therefore, most concerts, including one the day before the interview with Mattis, consisted entirely of transcriptions of classical pieces and folk music.

Theremins didn’t sell well for RCA. The Depression put it out of reach for most customers. When Theremin returned to the Soviet Union in 1938, the instrument essentially disappeared until Hollywood put it to use for soundtracks in the 1950s.

The movie industry turned to the theremin whenever it needed weird sounds for horror or science-fiction movies.

Miklós Rózsa’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Bernard Hermann’s for The Day the Earth Stood Still 1951) both rely on the theremin’s spooky sounds. So did many B list films. But the instrument also found a place in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments among many films of other genres. Dmitri Shostakovich had already used it for a snowstorm scene in Odna (1931).

Rock bands, including Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones have incorporated the theremin in some songs.

American inventor Robert Moog built his own theremin when he was 14, based on magazine drawings. That early fascination eventually led to his invention of the first commercial synthesizer in 1964.

Moog and others have altered Theremin’s original design in numerous ways.

The recent centennial of the invention of the theremin has sparked renewed interest in it. It’s possible to buy a low-end theremin now for as little as $160. The most expensive ones cost nowhere near as much in constant dollars as they did in the 1930s.

Sources:

A century ago, this eerie-sounding instrument ushered in electronic music / David Taylor, Smithsonian Magazine. September 16, 2019
An interview with Leon Theremin / Olivia Mattis, Thereminvox.com. June 16, 1989 [Originally in French. Translated to English and published online October 4, 2002]
The Soviet spy who invented the first major electronic instrument / Nora McGreevy, Smithsonian Magazine. December 3, 2020
Theremin: the musical instrument that you never touch to play / Amit Malewar, Tech Explorist. October 31, 2016
The theremin: The strangest instrument ever invented? / Norman Miller, BBC. November 12, 2020