From Electronica From the 1920′s, Ready for Sampling:
Not two weeks before the fateful stock market crash of 1929, Joseph Schillinger, newly arrived on these shores from Russia, put the finishing touches on a short concerto with the outré title ‘First Airphonic Suite.’ A month later, as the country reeled in the wake of Black Thursday, the work caused a sensation at its New York premiere.The buzz came not from the piece itself — which, perhaps mirroring the composer’s migration, begins à la Borodin and ends up like “Rhapsody in Blue” — but from its electrified soloist, Lev Theremin, the inventor and namesake of the featured instrument.
The reviewer for The New York Times, Olin Downes, described the contraption as “a sort of a box on a tripod, with antennae,” and so it is today. Theremin, Downes wrote, “moved his hands and fingers in mystic passes in the air, and a tone like a purified and magnified saxophone soared through the atmosphere and through the very loudest fortissimo.”
Theramin lived a fascinating life:
Theremin had one of the 20th century’s most astonishing careers, wonderfully documented in Albert Glinsky’s book “Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage.” A kind of phosphorescent Zelig, he demonstrated his instrument for everyone from Lenin (who adored it) to George Bernard Shaw (who said he had heard better noises on a comb covered with tissue paper).Theremin worked as a Soviet spy in New York while hobnobbing with the upper classes, was imprisoned in the Siberian gulag and later designed ingenious bugs for the KGB. (One was placed in the beak of the eagle in the Great Seal at the United States Embassy in Moscow.) He emerged 15 years ago in his 90′s as the grand old man of electronic music to claim awards and honors. This last bit of his career is beautifully recorded in Steven M. Martin’s film “Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey.” He died at 97 in 1993.
(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)