The Ethereal Beauty Of The Century-Old Theremin, Embodied

Talking about the "magic of music" is a timeworn cliché that places a patina of mystique upon the fairly straightforward creative process of practicing a lot to get good at something. The theremin, perpetually maligned, misunderstood and overlooked, is one of the only instruments where the relatively quotidian act of creating noise actually looks like magic: a hand hovers near two antennas, manipulating a magnetic field to produce an otherworldly wail that sounds like a field recording of a banshee from 1929.

This early electronic instrument first appeared 100 years ago, when a Russian physicist named Leon Theremin created it, and toured it around Europe as a curiosity, before bringing it to America — after giving Stalin a personal — in search of a wider audience. It didn't catch on like he'd hoped. Maybe it was the instrument's alien sound, or the fact that having perfect pitch would go a long way toward being able to play it correctly, or maybe it was just the general etherealness of the theremin itself — people were not accustomed to "hearing" electricity. To