The theremin is the only famous instrument you play without touching.
Two metal antennas sense where your hands are: one controls pitch, the other volume. Invented by a Soviet physicist in 1920, it gave Hollywood its eerie sci-fi sound. And a teenage Robert Moog, building theremin kits in the 1950s, learned the skills that led to the Moog synthesiser.
The theremin grew out of Soviet government research into proximity sensors. The physicist Lev Termen, known in the West as Leon Theremin, invented it in October 1920. Each of its two antennas acts as one half of a capacitor, with the player's hand as the other half. Moving a hand changes the capacitance, which shifts the frequency of an oscillator for pitch on one side and the loudness on the other. Because nothing is touched, the player must, as the virtuoso Clara Rockmore put it, play the rests as well as the notes.
Theremin toured Europe to packed houses, moved to the United States and patented the instrument in 1928, licensing it to RCA. The RCA Thereminvox reached shops just after the 1929 stock market crash and was not a commercial success, but audiences were fascinated. Rockmore toured concert halls playing classical repertoire. Then, in 1938, Theremin left America. Many accounts say Soviet agents took him and put him to work in a prison laboratory; his biographer Albert Glinsky suggests he fled debts and was caught in Stalin's purges. He did not return to the US until 1991.
The instrument's eerie, voice-like glide found its home in film. Miklós Rózsa pioneered it in Hollywood scores such as Spellbound and The Lost Weekend, and it haunted science-fiction classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still. The Beach Boys' 'Good Vibrations', often cited as the great theremin pop song, actually used a similar instrument called the Electro-Theremin.
Its most important legacy may be a student. Robert Moog began building theremins in the 1950s as a high-schooler and sold kits by mail. He credited that experience as leading directly to the Moog synthesiser, which transformed popular music.
Source: Wikipedia — Theremin · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
