Music from Thin Air: The Story of the Theremin
A young physicist leans over a laboratory bench in revolutionary Russia, testing a circuit meant to measure the properties of gases. As his hand moves near the apparatus, the whistle coming from the headphones rises and falls. Most scientists would have treated it as interference. Lev Termen, known to the world as Léon Theremin, heard music.
From that accident came one of the strangest instruments ever made: a box with two antennas that the player never touches. Its voice, a gliding, singing tone somewhere between a violin and a human voice, would go on to fill Carnegie Hall, haunt Hollywood thrillers, announce flying saucers and, decades later, enjoy a revival that its inventor barely lived to see.
An Accident in Petrograd
Termen was born in St Petersburg in 1896 and trained in physics and music, including the cello. Around 1919 and 1920 he was working at the Physico-Technical Institute in Petrograd, then directed by Abram Ioffe, on equipment that used radio-frequency oscillators. He noticed that the capacitance of a nearby human body changed the oscillator's frequency, and that by mixing two such oscillators he could produce an audible tone whose pitch followed the movement of his hand.
He added a second circuit so that the other hand could control loudness, and the instrument was essentially complete. It was first called the etherphone and later the termenvox. Termen demonstrated it widely in the early 1920s, including, according to many accounts, to Vladimir Lenin in 1922, who is reported to have been impressed enough to support Termen's further travels and research.
The Toast of New York
In 1927 Termen toured Europe, playing to curious audiences in cities such as Berlin, Paris and London, and at the end of that year he arrived in the United States. New York took to him quickly. He gave concerts in major halls, patented his instrument in the US in 1928, set up a studio in Manhattan and moved in circles that included scientists, musicians and wealthy patrons.
Termen was restless with ideas. Alongside the theremin he developed other inventions, among them the rhythmicon, built with the composer Henry Cowell around 1930, an early electronic rhythm machine. He also experimented with instruments controlled by dancers' movements.
RCA and the First Electronic Instrument for the Home
In 1929 the Radio Corporation of America licensed the design and began selling the RCA Theremin, marketing it as an instrument anyone could play. The reality proved otherwise. Without frets, keys or anything to touch, playing in tune requires a superb ear and great physical control. The Wall Street crash of 1929 did not help either. Only a few hundred were made, and today surviving RCA theremins are prized collectors' items.
Clara Rockmore, the Great Virtuoso
If the theremin had a single champion, it was Clara Rockmore. Born Clara Reisenberg in Vilnius, she was a child prodigy on the violin, but a physical problem with her bow arm ended that career. In New York she met Termen and turned her extraordinary ear to his invention. He built instruments to her specifications, with greater sensitivity and range.
Rockmore treated the theremin as a serious classical instrument. She developed a precise technique, often called aerial fingering, in which small, controlled finger positions jump cleanly between notes, avoiding the sliding wail that most players produced. She performed transcriptions of Rachmaninoff, Saint-Saëns and Tchaikovsky with a purity that astonished listeners. Her album The Art of the Theremin, produced in 1977 with the help of Robert Moog, remains a benchmark for players.
A Sudden Disappearance
In 1938 Termen abruptly left the United States and returned to the Soviet Union. The circumstances are still not fully clear. Back home he was arrested during the Stalin era and sent to work in a closed research facility for imprisoned scientists. There and afterwards he worked on classified projects, including the famous listening device hidden in a carved Great Seal presented to the US ambassador in Moscow, which was discovered in the early 1950s. For years many in the West believed he had died.
Sounds of Suspense and Science Fiction
Meanwhile the theremin found an unexpected career in the cinema. In 1945 Miklós Rózsa used it in his scores for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound and Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend to suggest troubled minds; the parts were played by Samuel Hoffman, who became Hollywood's go-to thereminist. In 1951 Bernard Herrmann wrote two theremins into his score for The Day the Earth Stood Still, and through the 1950s the sound became shorthand for aliens, robots and the uncanny.
Rock and pop borrowed the mood too. The famous high line in the Beach Boys' Good Vibrations (1966) is often described as a theremin, but it was actually played on an Electro-Theremin, a slide-controlled instrument built by Paul Tanner that imitated the sound. Real theremins appeared in live shows by Led Zeppelin and many others.
The Revival
One of the theremin's most important fans was a teenager named Robert Moog, who built theremins in the 1950s and sold kits before he became famous for his synthesizers. Decades later his company released the Etherwave theremin, which helped a new generation get started.
Interest grew further after the 1993 documentary Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey, which brought the elderly Termen back together with Clara Rockmore. Termen had visited the United States again in 1991, and he died in Moscow in 1993 at the age of 97. Since then players such as Lydia Kavina, who studied with Termen as a child, Pamelia Kurstin and Carolina Eyck have shown how expressive the instrument can be, and new concertos and chamber works continue to appear.
Playing the Theremin Today
The theremin is still difficult to master, which is part of its appeal. Players today choose between classic analogue instruments, compact modern designs and digital hybrids, and online communities share technique and repertoire. For a first taste of the idea, you can try an online theremin free in your browser on HarmonyHub, where moving your mouse controls pitch and volume much as hands do near the antennas, or explore other instruments in the electronic category.
A Voice Without a Body
A century after a physicist noticed a whistle change pitch as his hand moved, the theremin still sounds like the future. It was the first electronic instrument many people ever heard, and it paved the way for the synthesizers that followed. Its story is one of scientific curiosity, artistic devotion and political upheaval, all carried on a single, floating line of sound.