The Austrian composer and sound artist Dorit Chrysler was at a marketplace years ago, in the Serbian town of Gornji Milanovac, when an Orthodox priest shoved a cross in her direction. She had been playing the theremin and “he thought it was the work of the devil,” Chrysler recently recalled.
His reaction wasn’t exactly unusual. Since its invention in the 1920s, the theremin, an electronic instrument that emits a beguiling, oscillating sound, has often been perceived by people as weird and uncanny. It was used extensively in the scores of 1940s and ’50s science fiction and horror films, for one thing. And thereminists appear to carve sound out of thin air, using their hands to prompt a distinct whir from its wooden, lectern-like body by manipulating the electromagnetic fields around its two antennae. (No touching is required.)
But according to Chrysler, who is a co-founder of the New York Theremin Society, a nonprofit that promotes the visibility and application of the instrument, the “distinct, scary vibrato” often heard in old Hollywood movies is only one of its “many sides.” The society is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and Chrysler is determined to prove that the theremin — which appears in music by Karen O, Aldous Harding and Erykah Badu — is as deserving of a place in the pantheon of “established musical instruments” as violins, keyboards and synthesizers.
“The main idea was to build community and to assemble people that practice the theremin but also to inform,” Chrysler said of the society, which she started with the avant-garde impresario Suzanne Fiol in 2005. “Because my main realization once I started working with the instrument was that it is surprisingly versatile and notoriously underestimated.”
The theremin is also extremely hard to master. Changing its pitch requires one’s body, which makes playing the instrument a corporeal endeavor, not unlike dancing. And while eliciting sound from a theremin can be easy, finding a melody is a difficult exercise. “It’s physical control, but you’re also embracing this gray zone by not touching anything,” Chrysler explained.
She extended her hand outward to touch, nip and squeeze the air, almost as though she were playing a game of cat’s cradle with a piece of invisible string. “It’s like being a trapeze artist without a net,” said Chrysler, who was dressed in a navy romper and wearing bright red lipstick.
Chrysler, who was born in Graz, Austria, studied piano and voice before moving to New York and “rebelling” against her classical training (at the time, this meant playing in a new wave band). She came across the theremin while visiting the sound artist Lary Seven’s home in the early 2000s. She was drawn to it immediately, and sensed its unconventional nature might offer her the possibility of freedom.
Many have expressed similar sentiments over the years: Clara Rockmore, originally a violinist, rose to fame starting in the 1930s as the first theremin virtuoso, playing with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. Around the same time, the thereminist and arts patron Lucie Bigelow Rosen, who co-founded the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, was advocating its use.
“It really isn’t as spooky as you imagine,” Rosen, the first person to tour with the instrument, said in a 1938 interview. “Most people think the theremin is black magic. It’s simply a new voice in the music world.”
It’s also no coincidence, according to Chrysler, that a number of 20th-century electronic music pioneers were women: “They felt liberated in this uncharted territory.”
Utopian visions of liberation have been entwined in the theremin’s history for as long as it has existed. The inventor of the instrument, the Russian-born engineer Leon Theremin, told The New York Times in 1927 that his “apparatus,” which he believed could produce an unprecedented range of tonal colors and sounds, “frees the composer from the despotism of the 12-note tempered piano scale, to which even violinists must adapt themselves.”
Theremin, a physicist and amateur cellist, would go on to serve time in a Siberian labor camp, spy for the Soviet government and invent an electronic security system used at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, N.Y. But first, he created his musical apparatus by accident. He was developing an electronic device for measuring the density of gases when he realized that the sounds it emitted changed when he moved his hands.
In the late 1920s, RCA began to manufacture and sell the theremin, making it the first mass-produced electronic instrument. Today, perhaps 140 original models remain. “At the time that it came out, it was promoted as being easily playable,” Chrysler said, standing in front of an original RCA theremin housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s music gallery, “which of course wasn’t true.”
A few weeks later, on a stormy Sunday in November, attendees of a Theremin Society workshop proved the point. Fifteen or so people stood in a circle at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, making lines in the air with their hands as dissonant sounds filled the room. Some looked amused, others seemed vexed.
Appreciation for the theremin draws in people from all walks of life. Mike Buffington, a designer and engineer, runs a comprehensive registry of vintage RCA theremins and often communicates with theremin aficionados around the globe.
“The intent of the website was to create the resources that we ourselves would have loved to have found 10 years prior, when we were first getting into the theremin,” he said, perched on a windowsill at Pioneer Works. “How do you make it work? How do you tune it? What do I need to know about it? How do I fix it?” So far, he and Andrew Baron (his RCATheremin.com co-creator) have worked on restoring around 40 vintage theremins, a “labor of love and passion” and “sometimes a curse.”
Some members have attended the society’s events for more than a decade. “In 2014, I had a theremin but wasn’t doing much with it,” said Rafael Carrasquillo. When he met Chrysler at Moogfest, a music and technology festival in North Carolina, and found out about her work, something clicked. (Robert Moog, the inventor of the first widely used synthesizer, has said he became interested in electronic music after hearing the theremin.) That summer, Carrasquillo attended a Theremin Society workshop in New York, and met Sarah Chandler and Lorenz Fish. It wasn’t long before the three of them started their own theremin band, the Thereminoes.
The trio have played gigs and often practice together. They do all the theremin classics. “Things like ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ or ‘The Swan,’” Chandler said, as well as more recent material, by Radiohead and Brian Eno. Fish’s Amazon parrot, FlutterMarie, tends to join in. They often perform outside a cheese shop.
Rachael Guma, an experimental filmmaker and sound artist, goes to schools around the city introducing children to the instrument. (Many are already familiar because of YouTube videos showing cats playing theremins, she said.)
According to Chrysler, the theremin is a “great tool for electronic music education,” because children feel very “free and creative with it,” and while truly mastering it can be difficult, there also isn’t one correct way to play. “The beauty is, if you have ears and a sound source, there’s no right or wrong,” she said.
For adults, it is also an equalizer of sorts, “because the rules are completely different,” Chrysler said. “Instead of applying pressure and dynamics and motion to make things louder, with the theremin, it’s the complete opposite and you have to move your hand away.”
In some cases, hands need not be involved at all. A few years ago, Chrysler worked with conservators and art handlers at the Museum of Modern Art to place theremins around two Alexander Calder mobile structures — “Snow Flurry, I,” on view on the third floor at the time, and “Man-Eater with Pennants,” in the sculpture garden — capturing the effect in a piece called “Calder Plays Theremin.”
It was also at MoMA’s sculpture garden that Moog presented his synthesizer to the public for the first time in 1969. Chrysler felt connected to his story and remembered reflecting on the theremin’s potential. “Perhaps,” she thought to herself, “we will get the answer of what the future will sound like.”
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