Intuitive Music

Leon Theremin

Born Lev Segeivitch Terman in Czarist (Russia) 1896, Leon Theremin has a place in the history of electronic music for being the inventor of some of the earliest electronic instruments, including the the theremin.

Leon Theremin was a 21 year old student at the Physico-Technical Institute in Petrograd (St. Petersburg), who also played cello, and was experimententing with the recently invented Vacuum-Tubes while being commited by the Russian government to create alarm devices. While working with gases in vacuum tubes, he noticed that the presence of his body could detune a radio receiver, developing a pitch model from a burglar alarm of his invention called “Ether Phone”. This would soon become the first electronic musical instrument ever invented that was played without being touched. It’s creation opened up the whole field of electronic music that eventually led to the invention of the ondes martenot, electronic organs, and today’s synthesizers after being produced and later developed by Robert Moog in the late 60’s.

The first Theremin model was first shown to the public at the Moscow Industrial Fair in 1920 and was witnessed by Lenin, who commissioned 600 models of the theremin to be built and toured around the Soviet Union. Later he sent Leon Theremin to tour the instrument around the U.S. , involving him in activities of international espionage.

Leon Theremin moved to New York in 1927, where he remained for the next 11 years, setting up a research laboratory and producing a variety of new electronic musical instruments including the theremin Cello, and The Rhtythmicon. He also taught the instrument to a series of musicians, including the virtuoso theremin player Clara Rockmore.

In 1938, Leon Theremin was called back to Russia along with many other Soviet scientists and intellectuals. He spent the years of the Second World War in Soviet prisons and was exiled to a Siberian labor camp, and later officially declared vanished by the KGB for nearly thirty years. Theremin also developed many other non-musical electronic wonders, including one of the earliest televisions and multimedia devices that preceded performance art and virtual reality by decades.

In 1989, Theremin was able to visit again the USA. He died in 1993 in Moscow at the age of 97.