About the theremin
Aetherphone, thereminvox, theremin -- the instrument is perhaps more obscure than it needs to be. Its invention opened the door to electronic music. Its tone set people's hair on end when they heard it, music from another realm. Upon its introduction to America in 1928, it enjoyed a decade in the limelight. RCA manufactured 500 of them in 1929, but then the expensive and frightfully difficult instrument became nearly forgotten until it was revived for film scores in the late '40s and '50s. It was forgotten yet again until the 1990's, when a new generation of adventurous musicians rediscovered it. And in the new millenium there are virtuosos anew.
It was invented around 1920 by Lev Termen (Leon Theremin, pronounced "TAIR-a-min"), a Russian radio engineer. It is unique in the music world in that it is never touched. Its method of control is similar to the effect you may have seen when you have a crappy television with an antenna, and the picture clears up as your hand gets closer to it. The pitch is controlled by the tall rod on the right. The loop on the left controls volume. The knobs do various fine tuning but aren't used during play. It is considered a microtonal instrument -- since it has no keys or other points of reference, it plays every tone between two notes you might want. Minimizing the slide (portamento) betwen notes is a desirable skill among thereminists. For aspiring thereminists, the entry level model of choice is the Moog Etherwave (older ones are branded Big Briar instead of Moog...long story), a modestly outfitted theremin which retails for about $450. Professional performing theremins can range into the thousands of dollars, and vintage RCA theremins now sell for many times that.
The all-time greatest virtuoso of the theremin was Clara Rockmore, a Russian violinist who gave up her violin because malnutrition during the formation of the Soviet Union compromised her hands. By all accounts, Theremin had a hopeless crush on her. Rockmore performed classical music exclusively. In spite of very lucrative contracts offered to her by Hollywood studios in the 1950's, she refused to lower herself to doing "special effects". That ended up falling to Dr. Samuel Hoffmann, a podiatrist and violinist who literally fell into the role Hollywood wanted by listing the theremin as a secondary instrument on his union card -- he turned out to be the only one on California! He made his debut on Miklos Rosza's score for Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound, but his greatest work was on Bernard Herrmann's score for The Day the Earth Stood Still. He performed and recorded widely until his death in 1968, appearing on hundreds of movie soundtracks and easy listening recordings. Ironically, in comparison, Clara Rockmore recorded only one album in her entire life, that being in 1977.
Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page used one from time to time, and the Beach Boys permanently enshrined the sound with an electro-theremin (a related instrument that has a pitch reference chart printed on it) appearance in the hit single "Good Vibrations". Today, theremins are showing up everywhere -- in classical and avant garde as you would expect, but also in jazz, rock, and pop. In fact, there may be more highly skilled thereminists now than in the first 70 years of the instrument's history combined.
About the show
Your host for Spellbound is David Vesel. David began in 1988 as a radio host, and eventually became station manager, for WRBU-FM at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, hosting electronic music shows. He left WRBU in 1992.
He returned to radio in February 2002 with Escape From Noise. David bought a Big Briar Etherwave theremin in early 2004 and became quite taken with it. He began seeking out thereminists on the net, and started featuring one song per week on Escape From Noise as "the Theremin Song of the Week". It proved so popular that he established a new show for it. The show Spellbound, a brief program of music for theremin, began in January 2005 as a brand new, one-hour, ground-up-designed show featuring music performed on the theremin, history's first electronic instrument. The show expanded to two hours in January 2006.
David hosts both radio shows from his music studio in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He is also an electropop musician, and "by day" (it's actually an evening job) he teaches web technologies at ITT Technical Institute. David can't play his theremin yet -- he can barely play a scale on it -- and he doesn't even know which scale. But he keeps trying. His goal is to someday play "Ave Maria" by Gounod.
