Theremin
Ether Music and Espionage
by Albert Glinsky
Univ. of Illinois Press, 464 pp., $ 34.95
Even after he disappeared from New York in 1938, Leon Theremin remained one of the legendary figures in modern music. I remember asking the great musical lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky in the late 1980s what happened to Theremin. He didn't know, though he reported that Dmitri Shostakovich had told him sometime in the 1970s that Theremin was still alive, but Shostakovich could not reveal where.
In the 1984 edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Slonimsky could write only that his sometime friend was "still active in 1977." Few figures of Theremin's stature in any modern art have so completely and inexplicably vanished.
Of course, part of the question is why Theremin was remembered at all. Born in St. Petersburg in 1896, he had invented at the end of World War I an early electronic sound instrument, eventually named after himself.
The theremin differed from previous instruments in that it was not directly touched. Rather, the performer moved his hands in the air around two thin electrified poles. One antenna, customarily extended vertically, controlled pitch; the other, customarily horizontal, controlled volume. Theremin later invented a rhythm machine and a proto-television. (Typically, the Soviets wanted the last not for consumers but for border security.)
Thanks to supportive entrepreneurs, Theremin went west, first to Berlin and then to New York, where he acquired a patron, who rented him a townhouse at 37 W. 54th St., and new business partners, who formed the Teletouch Corporation. Several composers, awed by the new instrument, wrote pieces for it, while young musicians, most prominently Clara Rockmore, performed on it in live concerts. RCA contracted one of Theremin's companies to manufacture it, but the company failed commercially, simply because the theremin was too hard to use. Just before his disappearance, Theremin married a young African-American dancer, Lavinia Williams, who spoke several languages including Russian.
Why then did he disappear from New York in 1938? Slonimsky suggested that Theremin had two wives and, feeling some heat, returned to his native Russia. But a feature-length documentary film produced in 1993 by Steven Martin, Theremin, repeated Lavinia Williams's claim that her husband had been abducted by the KGB.
Albert Glinsky's new biography Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage disputes both these stories. After more than a decade of research, Glinsky discovered that Theremin had maintained contact in New York with Soviet agents (to whom he gave technical information). Always planning to return to Russia, he never applied for U.S. citizenship, even after marrying an American. His companies were failing badly, his personal debts were mounting, and he simply boarded a Soviet freighter in a New Jersey port and sailed home.
At a time when prominent European artists and intellectuals were desperately trying to move west, Theremin headed east -- eventually, way, way east, for once he returned to Russia he found himself promptly imprisoned and exiled to a Siberian labor camp. He could escape America as a failed capitalist, but he couldn't escape Stalinism. When Soviet chiefs recognized his genius, he was assigned to a prison complex for technicians.
Apparently, he did good work during the war, for he was released in 1947 and given a "secret" Stalin Prize. Once on his own, Theremin decided to work for another secret Soviet agency known as a "mailbox," because its building had no address and its workers were forbidden contact with outsiders, even their relatives. Here he designed miniature security machines (which responded, as his musical instrument did, to changes in the air around them) and eavesdropping devices. One was successfully installed in the American embassy; another, in Stalin's own apartment. No wonder his friends in the West thought him dead (and Shostakovich couldn't say where he was).
Curiously, his instrument survived in America, not only in Clara Rockmore's occasional concerts but in the soundtracks to horror and science-fiction films, where it provided otherworldly sounds with sliding pitches. The pioneering synthesizer manufacturer Robert Moog began his electronic-instrument career by producing in the late 1950s a homemade theremin. In a mid-1960s rock group called Lothar and the Hand People, "Lothar" was not one of the humans but the theremin they featured in their songs. The instrument memorably accompanies a cello in the Beach Boys' 1966 classic "Good Vibrations." Such groups as Led Zeppelin, the Pixies, Portishead, and a duo called the Kurstins have similarly used theremins.
To the surprise of everyone, Leon Theremin reemerged in 1989, now in his nineties, initially to be honored at electronic music festivals. The film-maker Steven Martin brought him to New York for a dazed tour of Times Square and a memorable reunion with Clara Rockmore. (The final scene of the film has them walking arm in arm down 57th Street to the sound of "Good Vibrations.")
What makes Glinsky's Theremin a first-rate biography is his elevating our knowledge of a previously hidden unique figure. This is not a reinterpretation of familiar history but the product of original research, including the definitive interview with Theremin, just before his death.
The biography it most resembles in this respect is Reynold Weidenaar's Magic Music from the Telharmonium (1995), which likewise rescues from obscurity the previously under-understood development at the beginning of this century of the first musical synthesizer, serviced by a private cable network. (Its inventor, Thaddeus Cahill, later joined his brothers in developing night lights for baseball stadiums.) The obstacle that makes both these books special is that first-rank musical technologists are more difficult subjects than composers.
I remember hearing leftist friends speak of Alger Hiss's "wasted life, given what he could have done," implicitly blaming anti-communism; but, of course, more lives were wasted by communism, not only in the sense of being prematurely ended but in being forcibly assigned to a narrow range of tasks.
My hunch is that, had Theremin stayed in America, he would have joined his countryman Vladimir Zworykin in developing television or, at least, become an emigre professor at an institute of technology -- an acoustic analogue to Harold Edgerton, the M.I.T. engineer who invented the strobe light.
What additional inventions could have come from Theremin's mind, had he stayed in New York, are beyond speculation. The cause of his loss was his own choice to return to the Soviet Union after he had lived in the West, but the loss itself is real: Communists ate the lives even of those they didn't kill.
Richard Kostelanetz recently completed his second collection of essays on music, More On Innovative Music(ian)s.