Eerie Sounds, Less Played than Captured in Midair

Making a case for an odd electronic instrument from the 1920s.

Perhaps the same spirit that keeps period instrument orchestras flourishing has granted an unusually long life to the theremin, the spooky-sounding electronic instrument invented by Leon Theremin in the 1920s.  Or perhaps the theremin has proven more useful—or more graceful—than anyone had imagined.

As musical instruments go, it is both odd and ingenious.  Two antennas (one vertical, one horizontal) emerge from a wooden box that contains a pair of tone-producing oscillators.  The player's hands, moving around and above the antennas, control both pitch and volume.  At a good performance the listener hears a shapely musical line, produced by a musician who seems to be merely waving his or her hands through the air.

When Robert Moog's keyboard-based synthesizer became the centerpiece of university electronic music laboratories in the late 1960s, it gave composers a measure of timbral flexibility that the theremin could never match.  Yet as it happened, those 60s behemoths—with their walls of electronic boxes connected by forests of patch cords—are now museum pieces, replaced by their portable, user-friendly descendants, and by computers.

The theremin, though, flourished quietly all along, periodically turning up on film soundtracks and pop records.  And now it appears to be having a renaissance, thanks in part to the 1993 documentary film Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey, about the instrument and its colorful inventor.

Lydia Kavina, a distant relative of Leon Theremin, apparently learned the instrument at his knee and has established what appears to be an active concert career as a theremin soloist.  And she made a reasonably strong case for the instrument on Wednesday evening at the Society for Ethical Culture, when she was joined by the Sospeso ensemble for a surprisingly wide-ranging program.  The concert, which was called Music from the Ether: A Celebration of the Theremin, was part of the Electronic Evoluation series at the Lincoln Center Festival 2000.

Much of what Ms. Kavina did was remarkable.  It is one thing to produce the eerie, sliding sounds that many listeners associate with the theremin.  But Ms. Kavina opened her program with a series of short works from the instrument's infancy, when composers wrote nuanced, chromatic melodies for it.  Percy Grainger's ambitious Free Music No. 1 (1936), Friedrich Wilkens' Debussian Dance in the Moon (1933), and charming, slightly exotic vignettes by Joseph Schillinger and Isidor Achron quickly gave a listener an appreciation for what is involved here:  unlike a piano, which has keys, or a stringed instrument, which has a fingerboard, the theremin demands that the player find the note literally in mid-air.

…There was a great deal of suppleness in her playing, and by the end of the first half of the program she had compensated for the differences between the instrument she knew and the one she played.  In her own Suite for Theremin and Piano (1989), she drew on an expanded palette, with fuzzy-textured bass notes and jagged rhythms offsetting an attractively contrapuntal, neo-Bachian movement.

In Christian Wolff's Exercise 28 (2000), a long and generally arid work for theremin, violin, horn, and bass, Ms. Kavina blended easily into the pointillistic texture.  Bählamms Fest, a suite from a 1999 opera by Olga Neuwirth, was immensely more inviting.  Its instrumentation was so rich and its scoring so exotic that the theremin's timbre seemed almost staid in context.

The program also included pieces derived from two film scores in which the theremin is prominent, Miklos Rozsa's haunting Spellbound Concerto (1945-6) and Howard Shore's entertainingly derivative Ed Wood Suite (2000).  In these, and the Neuwirth, Ms. Kavina was supported by the Ensemble Sospeso's beautifully played performances, conducted by Charles Peltz. 

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