Electonic instrument. Usually used for funky sci-fi background music from the 1930s to 1960s, but sometimes still used today. I think it sets up an electo-magnetic field that you can alter by your hand positioning, which translates to notes that play out of the speaker.
Electonic instrument. Usually used for funky sci-fi background music from the 1930s to 1960s, but sometimes still used today. I think it sets up an electo-magnetic field that you can alter by your hand positioning, which translates to notes that play out of the speaker.
Electonic instrument. Usually used for funky sci-fi background music from the 1930s to 1960s, but sometimes still used today. I think it sets up an electo-magnetic field that you can alter by your hand positioning, which translates to notes that play out of the speaker.
As with Adolphe Sax and the saxophone, Lev Termin intended the theremin to be a Serious Concert Instrument, but it mainly ended up being a novelty. But where the sax eventually found its niche in jazz, the theremin was used mainly (as ithekro notes) in science fiction movies, where it provides the stereotypical eerie "wooooOOoOOOoOooo" sounds in, e.g., the score to THe Day the Earth Stood Still. At least one performer (the late Clara Rockmore) did make a name for herself with serious classical performances on the theremin, but it's a very difficult instrument to master, given the complete lack of any operator feedback other than the sound.
As an aside, Lev Termin's life story reads like a Robert Ludlum novel. He was a Soviet physicist, and developed the theremin as a side project while he was working on proximity mines for the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, then moved to the United States in the mid-1920s, where he tried to popularize his invention under the Westernized name "Léon Theremin". He returned to the USSR in 1938, having run into financial difficulties in the States, but would probably have been better off staying to face the music: 1938 was the height of the Great Terror, and so pretty much the absolute worst time for a Soviet scientist with long exposure to the West to return to Russia.
The NKVD promptly grabbed him, leaked the rumor that he had been executed as an enemy of the people, and put him to work in a slave-labor R&D laboratory (a thing so peculiar to the Gulag system that there was a specific Russian word for it, sharashka). While thus enslaved, he developed surveillance devices for the KGB, including one that enabled eavesdropping on the office of the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow for years. He was supposedly released in 1947, but since he had spent much of his time in the sharashka working personally for Beria, that seems unlikely to have been really true. Amazingly, though, he survived working personally for Beria; in fact, he outlived not only Beria but the USSR itself, and died in 1993, aged 97.
Electonic instrument. Usually used for funky sci-fi background music from the 1930s to 1960s, but sometimes still used today. I think it sets up an electo-magnetic field that you can alter by your hand positioning, which translates to notes that play out of the speaker.
No?
I dragged myself all the way to my room under my own steam after what happened.And I've been fast asleep until now....which meansthe person that I met yesterday was......fufu.Well then, that's wonderful.Kaga-san, what's that...?I got a present.A theremin.FIN.
