Hand Made Music

Gordon Charlton

"When Theremin provided an instrument with
genuinely new possibilities, thereminists did
their utmost to make the instrument sound like
some old instrument, giving it sickeningly sweet
vibrato and performing on it, with difculty,
masterpieces of the past. Although I would like
to master nding a pitch and series of pitches
on my theremin, I have no desire to become the
world's next Clara Rockmore I am much
more interested in using this experimental
instrument experimentally!
John Cage, The Future Of Music: Credo. 1937

Cage is unfair in his assessment of classical theremin playing, biased by his dislike
of a particular style of music. He missed an important point, that the instrument has
expressive qualities that make it unique amongst electronic instruments, and is in
some ways more akin to a voice or a violin than a synthesiser. This expressiveness
comes from the player, and from their hand movements. For Rockmore, a violinist,
the theremin was reminiscent of a violin, and she developed a technique around
that premise that is the origin of all classical theremin techniques. She gives advice
such as, think of your ngers as delicate buttery wings and the quality of the
sound is all-important, mold it with a beautiful vibrato and beautiful phrasing.

From the perspective of an electronic musician, the theremin is a proto-synthesiser,
a precursor of the modern synth. It is a very simple conguration, an oscillator and
an amplier, the former controlled via the pitch rod, and the latter via the volume
loop. But this too misses an important point. Any description of a theremin circuit is
incomplete unless it includes the player, and in particular the hands, which are most
certainly a part of the theremin circuit. Specically the rod and loop are capacitor
plates (not antennas, although often called that) and each forms, with the
associated hands of the player (which are also capacitor plates) a capacitor. These
capacitors are connected to the rest of the theremin circuit on one side, and to
earth on the other side (the mass of the player acts as a virtual earth.) So, although
there is no physical contact with the instrument, there is a real and direct electrical
connection, making a very sensitive and responsive system.

Fancifully, we could liken this to the human/machine hybrid cyborgs or cybernetic
organisms of science ction and declare it a cybernetic instrument. Or more
prosaically we could note that playing the theremin is utterly dependant on auditory
feedback as there are no other cues as to the disposition of the hands. The science
of feedback loops is cybernetics. Either way, the theremin brings a human aspect to
electronic music like no other.
"Out in nature we hear all kinds of lovely and touching
"free" (non-harmonic) combinations of tones; yet we are
unable to take up these beauties into the art of music
because of our archaic notions of harmony
Percy Grainger, Free Music. 1938

The rst stumbling block for the classical theremin
player is the dependancy of classical music on a
predetermined set of absolute frequencies with little
room for deviation. For the experimentalist, this is a
choice, and less time consuming decision is to allow
the music to be informed by the physics of the instrument.

The theremin is a continuous pitch instrument, permitting microscopic changes in
pitch. In fact, it is impossible to avoid them; even the smallest movement affects the
theremin, resulting in an unstable, wavering pitch. The classical player masks this
by means of vibrato, which also enables them to make corrections to the average
pitch of a note largely unnoticed. The electronic musician can turn this instability to
an advantage, for instance by layering up the sound with a delay or echo pedal,
giving a thickened, enriched sound full of subtle beat frequencies and related
effects such as anging and chorusing.

I am handicapped by the lack of adequate
electrical instruments for which I now conceive my
music.
Edgard Varse, in a letter to Leon Theremin, 1941

Varses letter was not received by Theremin
until 1979, when theremins were still very
uncommon. In 1961 Varse rewrote parts of
Ecuatorial for ondes martenot for want of
theremins. Had he lived to today he would
have found theremins and thereminists more readily available, but perhaps been
surprised by the lack of development in theremin technology compared to the
advances in other areas of electronic music. It has remained a backwater, perhaps,
as Cage suggests, by the mere fact of it being considered an instrument of classical
music, as classical requirements have been the predominant inuence in the
design of modern theremins, but also by the apparent view of many electronic
musicians, that it is the trademark sound of 1950s sci- and horror movies and
nothing more. It is a surprisingly well kept secret that even the simplest of modern
sound processing devices can augment and extend the capabilities of the theremin
without diminishing its primary strength; its expressiveness in skilled hands.

Gordon Charlton performs and records mostly experimental theremin music with effects as Beat Frequency
on the White Label Music label. Beat Frequency recordings are available on iTunes and other popular digital
outlets. He is a participant in the ThereminWorld.com discussion forums, where he is happy to discuss any
aspect of experimental theremin music.