330: Clara Rockmore // Theremin
Theremin Clara Rockmore 1977, Delos (Bandcamp)
100 years since its invention, the theremin remains an oddity. It is in every respect an antiquated piece of technology, and yet like the Tesla coil and the plasma globe it still provokes the primal wonder of science-as-magic. The advancements of a modern synthesizer unit are hidden from the eye—if you presented it to an unthawed person from the 19th century, they would at least be able to infer that the device is controlled using the buttons and keys. But the theremin player creates sound by coaxing an invisible magnetic field with their bare hands, as though they are pulling its warbling voice from the air itself—and indeed, inventor Léon Theremin’s artful original name for his instrument was the ætherphone.
To watch a performance by Clara Rockmore, the instrument’s foremost practitioner, is to see something that resembles a scene from a séance or a German Expressionist film. A petite, dark-haired woman with the eyes of an Orthodox Virgin Mary, she would stand ramrod straight behind the lectern-like theremin, nearly motionless save for the almost palsied-looking convulsions of her knotted hands and the tensing of her eyebrows, the only sign on her otherwise slack features of the intensity of her concentration. She looks as though she is forcing down the song attempting to leap from her throat until it screams through her fingertips like steam from a kettle. As synth pioneer Robert Moog explains in his liner notes to Rockmore’s 1977 LP Theremin, her absolute stillness was not a theatrical device but a requirement of playing the instrument: the theremin’s magnetic field encompasses not only the performers hands but their entire upper body, meaning that even a minor motion of the head will influence the instrument’s pitch. But the austere figure she cut no doubt contributed to her allure, the sense that she was herself as unearthly as the instrument she played.
Rockmore, a violin prodigy since age 5, took to Theremin’s invention sometime in the late 1920s. Her concerts popularized and legitimated the instrument, but it would be nearly a half-century before the Theremin LP, her first, was finally released. Produced by Shirleigh Moog and engineered by her husband Robert, one gets the sense that the Moogs are fans trying to correct an oversight, to record the album as it would’ve sounded if it had been made her during her prime. The results are captivating, even haunting. At times you may be fooled into thinking you’re listening to a recording of a human soprano from some decayed shellac disc; in other moments, you will be moved by how world-weary an electronic tone can sound. Rockmore is accompanied, as she had been since the beginning, by her sister Nadia Reisenberg on piano, and her selections focus on 19th and early 20th century compositions, with a heavy emphasis on the Romantics. A majority of the pieces here come from her fellow Russians, including Tchaikovsky, Glazunov, Rachmaninoff, and Stravinsky. My personal favourite of these is her take on Joseph Achron’s “Hebrew Melody.” Inspired by traditional laments, Rockmore’s theremin evokes the sobbing characteristic (krekhts) of Jewish vocal music, while her sister thunders and pirouettes on her piano in a classically Romantic style.
Theremin stands apart from other electronic classical records like Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach because it never sounds wholly like a novelty despite the theremin’s high camp potential (and, for that matter, Rockmore’s). It is peculiar, and my fascination with it definitely originated in a perverse nostalgia for esoteric junk—but the somber beauty of the sisters’ performance wiped the smirk from my face from virtually the moment I dropped the needle.
330/365
