To put this snippet into context, we have to rewind to 1920, when a scientist named Leon Theremin was working at the Physical-Technical Institute in Petrograd. While working with an electronic device called an oscillator, he stumbled upon an anomaly: when audio circuits were connected a certain way, moving his hands near the device generated an audible tone. He wasn’t just creating sound—he was shaping it out of thin air. A classically trained cellist, Theremin instantly saw its musical possibilities. Soon, he was bringing the world’s first touchless instrument to concert stages, even giving a private demonstration to Lenin and, later, Einstein.
Thus the theremin was born, and with it a reputation for eccentricity. Finding its niche in science fiction films, where its eerie wail would be used to soundtrack a descending alien spacecraft, it skirted the periphery of the symphony orchestra. Composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich and Bohuslav Martinů gave it a look-in, but, for many decades, its champions were few and far between.
In recent years, however, the theremin has had something of a renaissance, thanks significantly to the efforts of one person: the German-Sorbian musician Carolina Eyck. Having developed a revolutionary theremin technique that is now used worldwide, she has done more than any of her predecessors to glamourise her instrument, performing everything from contemporary concertos and classical transcriptions to film scores and electronic music.
I spoke to Carolina Eyck in 2022 about her love of the theremin, but here is one of the juicier offcuts about her motivation for learning the instrument and her early relationship with it.
