Intuitive Music

Leon Theremin appears on the history records for being the man who invented the father of all synthesizers, the Theremin, but what many people don’t know is that he was a spy who worked for the Russian KGB. He toured the U.S. to show the Theremin, and got involved in international espionage.

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.

Theremin was also creator of one of the most shocking discoveries in the history of espionage, a listening device that was found in the early 50’s in the American embassy in Moscow, which was a cylindrical metal object that had been hidden inside the wooden carving of the Great Seal of the United States. The seal had been presented to him by the Soviets and was on the wall over the ambassador’s desk during more than 20 years. You can find more information and pictures of Theremin’s espionage device on this web site

In 1927, Leon Theremin moved to New York, where he remained for the next 11 years and set up a research laboratory where he produced 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.