Imaginary Worlds - Embracing the Spooky Spooky

Episode Date: February 4, 2021

In the 1950s and ‘60s, the vibrating sound of the Theremin instrument was synonymous with sci-fi movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still or horror shows like Dark Shadows to the point where the Theremin became a genre cliché. But a new generation of experimental pop musicians like Dorit Chrysler and Miles Brown (of the band Night Terrors) are using the Theremin to create otherworldly sonic landscapes. Also I talk with Albert Glinsky, biographer of Leon Theremin, about how the inventor of the Theremin lived a life that was more like a Kafkaesque science fiction tale. Check out Albert Glinsky’s book “Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage.” Today's episode is brought to you by Serial Box and BetterHelp. Want to advertise/sponsor our show? We have partnered with AdvertiseCast to handle our advertising/sponsorship requests. They’re great to work with and will help you advertise on our show. Please email [e-mail] or click the link below to get started. Imaginary Worlds AdvertiseCast Listing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So what's it like to buy your first cryptocurrency on Kraken? Well, let's say I'm at a food truck I've never tried before. Am I going to go all in on the loaded taco? No, sir. I'm keeping it simple. Starting small. That's trading on Kraken. Pick from over 190 assets and start with the 10 bucks in your pocket. Easy. Go to Kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Non-investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss.

See Kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body. Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body Deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle.

We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. The 1951 film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, has so many iconic things about it. Like the scene where the flying saucer lands in Washington, D.C., and the robot Gort walks down the ramp and he disintegrates the military's weapons with his I-beam. and he disintegrates the military's weapons with his I-beam. And there's the famous speech by the alien character Klaatu,

where he says that we earthlings are playing with technology beyond our control and putting the universe in danger, which in the 1950s meant atomic bombs. Your choice is simple. Join us and live in peace or pursue your present course and face obliteration. It's classic Cold War sci-fi. But what makes this movie really of its time is the use of the theremin, that weird vibrating sound which is part of the musical score. weird vibrating sound, which is part of the musical score. The theremin was the first electronic instrument, and even today it looks like a prop from a sci-fi movie. The base is a rectangular box with two metal poles.

One pole sticks up straight like an antenna, actually is an antenna. The other pole juts out to the side and curves around like a hook. Musicians move their fingers in the space between the poles, and it looks like they're plucking invisible strings, but they're actually manipulating the energy inside an electromagnetic field. It is mesmerizing to watch anyone play it. And as I delve deeper into the history of this instrument, I learned that there's an unusual connection

between playing the theremin and using your imagination. The theremin is most often associated with science fiction and horror, but it was originally used in classical settings. Back in the 1930s, the most famous theremin player was a musician named Clara Rockmore, and this is what she sounded like playing a Tchaikovsky piece. In the 1940s, the theremin started showing up in the soundtracks to two Hollywood films,

The Lost Weekend, which was about alcoholism, and the Hitchcock film Spellbound, which was about psychiatry. Hitchcock actually used the theremin in a very famous dream sequence that was designed by Salvador Dali. And then I saw the proprietor, the man in the mask. He was hiding behind a tall chimney and he had a small wheel in his hand. Albert Galinsky wrote a book about the theremin and he says the studios wanted Clara Rockmore, the famous classical thereminist, to play on some of these soundtracks. But Clara Rockmore was not interested in doing Hollywood scores because, as she always put it, she wasn't interested in the spooky, spooky. You know, that wasn't her

idea of what it should be used for. She thought of it as a serious musical instrument, and she felt that using it for effect was making a kind of a mockery out of it and using it for its lowest possible traits. And she was right to some extent. The movie that made the theremin synonymous with sci-fi was The Day the Earth Stood Still. And that was not a B movie. The movie that made the theremin synonymous with sci-fi was The Day the Earth Stood Still. And that was not a B-movie. The soundtrack to that film was written by the legendary composer Bernard Herrmann. But the theremin got overused so quickly that by 1956, just five years after The Day the Earth Stood Still, the composers Louis and B.B. Barron were asked by their studio employers to play a theremin

on the soundtrack to the classic sci-fi film Forbidden Planet, and they refused because they said the theremin had already become a cliché. The main manufacturer of theremins is a company called Moog, which is the same company that perfected the synthesizer. But a synthesizer is easy to play. The theremin takes years of training. That's why in the late 1950s, a musician named Paul Tanner invented a knockoff version, an electrotheramin, which is built like a keyboard. And that got used even more, from pop songs to TV shows like Lost in Space, Dark Shadows, and the sitcom My Favorite Martian.

My Favorite Martian, when Ray Walston, when his antennas would sprout from his head, you would hear it at Paul Tanner's Electro Theramins. The original theme songs to Doctor Who and Star Trek used sounds that were so similar to Electro Theramins. To this day day people often mistakenly think they did use theremins. Of course Danny Elfman used a theremin in the soundtrack to the Tim Burton film Mars

Attacks. And to cement the theremin's pop culture status, The Simpsons has used a real theremin or a synthesized theremin in most of their Treehouse of Horror episodes. To this day, professional thereminists are still working hard to justify the instrument as something more than a spooky sound effect. And for a long time there were not many musicians who played the theremin, the real theremin, where you create sounds by moving your hands inside an electromagnetic field.

But in the last 20 years, the theremin has made a surprising comeback, and it's found a new home in experimental pop music. Miles Brown is a musician based in Melbourne. Over here in Australia, there's no other theremin players unless I teach them. And people give up, it's too hard. But now we're all connected via the internet and everyone's getting better and everyone's competing. And suddenly we have a normal improvement rate like

you would with any other instrument. Miles says that learning the theremin was incredibly challenging. He flew to Oxford to work with a master thereminist named Lydia Kavina. And while he was there, he kept thinking about the fact that the Harry Potter movies were filmed at Oxford. You know, when you learn how to play a theremin properly, it is so similar to what you see in those movies about someone learning to do magic with a wand. Like it's literally, if you move your hand the wrong way it doesn't work and and that's that that's still my fascination with the theremin it's magic you can understand how it works but it is that one of those things in life where if i'm i mean one of the things lydia said to me when i

went to play for her for the first time was like yeah you're okay but you need to stop drinking you need to stop partying you basically i can hear that you're not fit and I can hear you can't concentrate. That's so wild that the theremin reveals yourself so blatantly, so nakedly in a weird way. Yeah. And when I started teaching people, it became quite obvious as well. Like, you can get people to play the theremin really well if you teach them how to think about it. And a lot of it is in your head. Like people can be playing something on the theremin and not getting it right. And then you can say to them, okay, this time, don't worry about what you're doing with your hands. Just pretend that you can do it. Let's just do a take where you pretend you know how to do it. It forces you to meld with an

interface that you didn't even know that your body melds with. So it's kind of very much magical for me. Today, most thereminists follow the lead of Clara Rockmore in trying to show that the instrument should be taken seriously in a classical setting, which I completely understand. But personally, I love the spooky spooky, as Clara Rockmore called it, because it's something that the instrument does so well. And so I was intrigued to discover musicians like Miles Brown because he leans into the theatricality of the instrument with his band the Night Terrors. The point of the Night Terrors is it's not a normal band. We don't have the rules that other bands have. There's no guitar player. The theremin is the singer and therefore we can do whatever we want.

In the names of their songs, Seance Fiction, Otherworld, Laser for Eyes or The Dream Eater, they sound like the titles of short stories in a pulp horror magazine. And I've really enjoyed watching videos of their live performances because they have the whole goth angle going. Rather than trying to resist that connotation, I sort of use that as a Trojan horse in a way. My real aspirations with the theremin are the same as everybody else's. I want to make beautiful music with it and introduce it to a much bigger audience than it traditionally receives. And interestingly enough, the theremin community are yeah sort of interested but not really i think they think that you know that's not really what they're interested in in terms of the

goals for the theremin so you know i'm not trying to say please take this instrument seriously i'm like saying this instrument is already awesome and what else can we do with it there is another modern day thereministminist whose work I love, an Austrian musician named Dorit Kreisler. She uses the theremin in her new wave electronica pop songs. In her live performances, Dorit also leans into the theatricality of the instrument with very abrupt hand gestures, as if she's magically making these sounds appear

with the flick of her wrist or her fingers. I do find that everyone playing the theremin has a very natural and unique way of how they play it. And I certainly did not study or scheme in front of a mirror of what kind of drama the actual playing could entail. I'm so occupied just trying to chase the pitch. And she filmed a music video at the Large Hadron Collider, the giant atom-smashing particle

accelerator in Switzerland, which already looks like the set of a sci-fi movie. Oh, I love the camp. I love all those theremin, cliche, stylistic sounds. I think there's nothing wrong with it, as long as it's not limited to that. I personally, you know, I enjoy writing soundtracks or painting soundscapes. So it taps into a bigger picture. I embrace all those different styles. It's just that with the theremin, you sometimes have to prove a point before you can take off and fly in whatever playful directions you would like to explore. whatever playful directions you would like to explore. Yeah, it's funny when you said that about creating these sort of landscapes,

because I was saying when I listened to your music, I start imagining, I start creating these fantastical landscapes in my mind. Do you feel like the theremin is sort of an inherently cinematic kind of instrument? Absolutely. I personally think the theremin is incredibly cinematic and I want to use it and see it also

more present to to be applied in that genre why could that be that it's so suited for cinema for movie soundtracks well it has a wide bandwidth and it really is capable of tremendously big drama, big emotion. I mean, there's a reason why it was used as the voice of madness in the 40s and 50s in Hollywood. And Dorit herself has been using the theremin to score soundtracks, like on the German TV show M, which was a remake of the classic Fritz Lang movie. remake of the classic Fritz Lang movie.

All the scenes, the mood of all these parts were completely grey and bleak, and I didn't realize, but the theremin definitely can be so melancholic and dark that it really was a perfect fit, almost partly unbearably sad. In fact, the theremin is so evocative, when Dorit would go on tour,

some people thought she was channeling demonic energy. I played in a tiny town square in a town in Serbia some years ago, and there was an Orthodox priest who held the cross against the instrument and said it's a tool of the devil. Miles Brown had a similar experience with his band, The Night Terrors. I've had people try and stop me coming into music venues sprinkling holy water at me. And you know, I look like Nosferatu. I wear a big gown on stage.

It's a funny thing. It's like, you know, I'm six foot eight. I look like this. I play the theremin and all those things add up to some kind of otherworldly combination of things. And if you lean into that a little bit, then the audiences seem to really like it. Dorit says even the positive reactions can be a little unsettling. In Paris, it happened to me more than once that they just jump on stage and want to try it themselves, regardless of the fact that you're in the middle of a performance.

Because it is so new when you see it for the first time that there can be sometimes very dramatic emotional reactions of all kinds. I think one of the reasons why the theremin feels so evocative and brings out such strong emotions in people might have something to do with the man who invented the theremin over 100 years ago because his life story was like a Kafkaesque science fiction tale in itself. We'll learn about him after the break. Introducing Tim's new Infuser Energy Beverages made with natural caffeine.

They come in two refreshing flavours, blackberry yuzu and mango starfruit. Try them today, only at Tim's. At participating Tim's restaurants in Canada for a limited time. It's time for Tim's. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odour protection, free of aluminium, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH-balancing minerals and crafted with skin-conditioning oils.

So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. Find secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. Friday, and WNYC Studios. In each episode, the host, Johanna Mayer, picks one word and tells the story and the science behind that word. Like the word meme originally had nothing to do with the internet, it was coined in the 1970s by a famous and controversial evolutionary biologist. And the word mesmerize came from a real person named Dr. Mesmer, who did some very weird medicine in Paris in the 18th century. If you like your etymology with a side of science, check out Science Diction wherever you get your podcasts. Not surprisingly, the man who invented the theremin was named Theremin. Leon Theremin.

Leon Theremin was a Russian scientist. In 1920, just after the birth of the Soviet Union, he was working on a device to measure the density of gases. He was playing around with a whistling mechanism when he realized that he could manipulate the sound with his hands. So he added antennas and suddenly it was a musical instrument. Albert Glinsky wrote a book about theremin, and he says the idea that a gas meter could be used to play music

didn't come out of the blue. He had studied the cello at St. Petersburg Conservatory while he was also getting a physics and astronomy degree. And so he was able to kind of use his cello chops, I guess you could say, with his hand to sort of play these melodies. He also realized if you place the antennas at different ends of a room, the theremin could be used as a burglar alarm. And if somebody broke into a storage place or something like that, they would move past the antennas,

set off the alarm the way you would have set off the tone of the musical instrument, except the difference is that the alarm is many blocks away. That was the same principle. And he had a lot of these things during his life that he invented that were these touchless capacitance devices where just your natural body electricity interacted with the circuits in the device.

The fact that the theremin could be used for creativity or surveillance foreshadowed a major conflict that would define his life. In 1921, theremin played the instrument in public for the first time. People were amazed. Word spread fast, and soon he had an audience with Vladimir Lenin. Lenin was a little more interested in the burglar alarm than the instrument, but he saw a bigger opportunity with Leon Theremin. Lenin sent Theremin and his instrument on a European tour to promote the brand new Soviet Union and show the world how modern they were.

But the Soviets had other motives. They trained Theremin to be a spy. And while he was in Europe, he was busy going through patent offices and doing a certain amount of industrial espionage, while at the same time he was giving these performances that sort of distracted people. The European tour was such a hit, they sent Theremin to New York with the same mission. He sold out huge halls like the Metropolitan Opera House

with his instruments, standing room only, and just dazzled people with this instrument. But there was a lot of espionage, and he stayed in America for 11 years based on six-month extensions of a visitor's visa from the Department of Labor. And they were not twisting his arm to be a spy, at least not at this point in his life. Leon Thurman had every reason to be a proud Soviet. In the 1930s, he saw some very ugly aspects of America during the Depression, and he was not in the USSR when Stalin took over, so he did not know how dictatorial his government had become.

Although living in New York did change him, Theremin was married when he got here, but he and his wife split up up and he fell in love with a young musician named Clara Rockmore. Clara Rockmore was also a Russian who had come over, although she was a true emigre and she was living in America. And she was a prodigy violinist who had had some difficulty and injury with her arm and couldn't play the violin anymore and transferred her whole technique over to the theremin and became the greatest exponent of the theremin ever. She was really incredible and he fell in love with her, but she married somebody else. It was a tremendous heartbreak for him.

Eventually in 1937, theremin married an American, a black dancer and choreographer named Lavinia Williams, who was a groundbreaking artist in her own right. And the way they met was like a meet-cute scene from a sci-fi rom-com. He was working on a version of the Theremin which extended across a dance floor. Where the dancer moves their whole body in the electromagnetic field and creates a melody of sorts. And that's how he met his second wife, Lavinia Williams, because she was a dancer who was trying out his etherwave dance platform. Thurman's interracial marriage was controversial among his white patrons, but he stood his ground, and it seemed like he was putting down roots in America. So it was a shock when he suddenly went back to the Soviet Union

a year after he had gotten married. Lavinia Williams and her friends were so blindsided, they thought that Theremin had been kidnapped by the Soviet government. And that was the story that most people knew for years. Absolutely untrue. 100% I would stake my life on it. I can tell you that right now. There was no kidnapping, okay? It simply wasn't.

I have all the documents he prepared for leaving. We know the ship he left on. He escaped on a Soviet freighter at night, and he brought a lot of his equipment with him. Nobody who kidnapped is going to take all her equipment with them. Everything was very, very well planned out ahead of time. So why did he leave?

The FBI was onto him because he was still doing espionage, and he owed a lot of people money. It was a very calculated move, but he did have Lavinia Williams in mind. He was even promised that she could be brought over later to Russia to join him, but that never happened. In fact, his return to Russia was not what he expected. He was not given a hero's welcome.

Stalin was purging the country of anybody that he saw as a potential threat. And Thurman? He had touched Americans. You know, he had sort of been around Americans and capitalism and that sort of thing. So he would have been more suspect. So Thurman was sent to a gulag in Siberia. When World War II broke out, he was moved to a high-class prison

where they kept all the scientists. Thurman was forced to work on all sorts of projects, like an infamous bugging device, which was installed inside the seal of the bald eagle at the US embassy in Moscow. And it's a brilliant, brilliant device because it has no batteries, no electricity, no external power. It was brought in by Soviet Boy Scouts in 1945 on the 4th of July as a gift, supposedly, to the American people from the Russian people.

And it was put on the wall and they put it through all sorts of sweepers and things and couldn't find anything wrong with it. It wasn't discovered for seven years. Now, in these circumstances, Thurman tried to make a life for himself. He told his overseers that he wanted to get married again, and they told him he had to choose from among the female scientists in that prison. So that's what he did. In the 1950s, he transitioned to sort of a halfway house, where he was forced to work at the

KGB. But by the 60s, he was able to get a job at Moscow University, where he could focus on his first love, music. And that's when an American reporter discovered Thurman and interviewed him for the New York Times. It sort of revealed to the world that Thurman was alive and well, because after he went back in 1938, a lot of people thought, most people in the West thought that he was dead, or no one had any idea of his whereabouts, whatever happened to him. Thurman was very cautious in talking to this American reporter, but his Soviet handlers were furious that he even did the interview.

So they threw him out of the conservatory, and they broke up his instruments and put them out in the dumpster and all of that. It was just terribly sad, and that was a very low point in his life. So, of course, he was always very terrified. He didn't even leave the Soviet Union for the first time until 1989. He went to a festival in France, a music festival, and it was 51 years after he came back to the Soviet Union he finally could leave. And he had KGB people with him at the time guarding him in 1989,

so he had to be very careful what he said. I wonder if that's why he loved music so much. The theremin instrument already sounds mournful, and it could express how he felt without words. By the way, around this time, theremin reconnected with his second wife, Lavinia Williams, who had no idea what happened to him after he left New York. They wrote letters, and he even proposed remarriage because his third wife had died by that point, but given the circumstances, that was not really possible. Thurman died in 1993. His life was tragic, but there is something inspiring about it because despite all of his bad luck and bad choices, he had an undying belief

that his ingenuity and his creativity could get him out of the different prisons that he found himself in, even if it was just in his mind. And when you think of some of the ideas that he had that were never realized, one of the ones that was really strange was he thought of creating a bridge across a river or body of water that was just purely electromagnetic fields. So it'd be an invisible bridge. So you could drive across it, but you'd basically just be looking down at water. I don't think that many people would want to do that, but that was one of his ideas. He had so many notions and toward the end of his life, he was trying to explore things that would extend life. Or bring someone back from the dead.

It was a woman who was, I think, one of his lab partners, and she died, and he felt that she could be revived. I don't think he succeeded particularly, but this was something he was looking into. His imagination itself, in a sense, was kind of born of science fiction, I guess you could say. I want to end with a story that brings everything back full circle. In the year 2000, a group of theremin fans in Russia wanted to create the first theremin concert for extraterrestrials. And this was not a high-concept art project. They really thought the theremin could create a signal that would, quote,

be easily detectable across interstellar distances. At first, their proposal was rejected, not because it was costly or improbable. It was rejected over the danger of advertising our planet to advanced civilizations. Eventually they did get the funding to beam the music into the cosmos, hoping that whoever hears it will come in peace. In other words, they wanted to use the theremin to recreate the day the earth stood still in the real world.

The life of Leon Theremin was defined by his boundless creativity in the face of many obstacles. And I love the fact that his instrument still inspires people to believe that it could be used to create something out of thin air or make something otherworldly happen with the flick of a wrist and the power of our imagination. with the flick of a wrist and the power of our imagination. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Albert Glinsky, Dorit Kreisler, and Miles Brown. Talking with you made me realize how much I miss seeing live music.

By the way, I posted videos of their performances and Clara Rockmore on the imaginary world's website and social media pages. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at E. Malinsky and imagine worlds pod. If you like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or do a shout out on social media.

That always helps people discover imaginary worlds. The best way to support the show is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you get either a free imaginary world sticker, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has a full length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can learn more at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.