by Per Vilez

Harry Dawes will be performing with his Theremin at the Modular 2002 event. The Theremin is often ignorantly relegated to a mere curiosity.

Harry's theremin experiences during his trip to Moscow show another side to the culture of electronic musical instruments and in particular demonstrate an amazing insight into one of the most mysterious modular synthesisers ever made, the ANS

When did you first encounter the Theremin?

Although I'd known of it's existence for a long time I first realised this was an instrument I could use in 1996, when I was working with my colleague Ray Lee in a theatre company called Lee and Dawes. Like many people we saw Steve Martin's film on Theremin and it made many connections for us. We were very interested in using obsolete instruments as a metaphor for our ideas on the consequences of the increased rate of technological change, exploring technology in a way there often isn't time to because the next shiny thing is already in the shops. We had formed The World Stylophone Quartet for a previous show and were keen to develop our ideas in this area. We had a couple of theremins designed and built for us and they became pivotal in our next show which was called In The Ether.

I suppose that like acoustic and electro-mechanical instruments each specimen has a sound of it's own?

In my experience this is true, although being built of electronic circuits the sound can be easily altered. Certainly Dave Bishop who designed and built the circuits for our instruments spent a long time refining the wave forms and they do have a particularly full and sweet sound. What's more noticeable in different theremins though is the action of the left hand controlling the volume aerial. The response of this aerial has a pronounced effect on the way you are able to play.

How do the newer instruments compare to the older with regards to playability and behaviour?

I've only played one original theremin and it had a very solid feel to it. It's always difficult to explain these things in words but it felt a bit like the difference between the way valve amplifiers and transistor amplifiers sound, if you see what I mean. The original theremin used valves, whereas mine uses transistors, and somehow everything about it seemed fatter and more substantial. The early theremins also had several thousand volts running through the volume aerial which Ray claimed to be able to detect when he was playing it, although I couldn't.

As I understand, there are two different types of instrument. Where they both invented by Thermin?

I'm a bit reluctant to name names because I'll probably get it wrong but as I recall there was a development of the instrument by a man who I think was called Kovolev. This developed into a different school of playing. We saw these theremins in Moscow and the two main differences were that they had a scale on the top of the instrument which showed you the pitch of the note being played and also they had a pedal for the volume control (as I believe Theremin's first instruments also had). All the ones I saw were played sat down and I remember thinking it seemed to defeat the bject of the instrument to know the exact pitch. Also I felt they were a lot less interesting to watch because the erformer had their eyes glued to the readout the whole time and the left hand wasn't rising and falling. I'm sure here are many other variations, one man in Moscow had a theremin that operated using infra-red which he felt gave an improved response. All these developments confirmed our thoughts really, which were that we weren't too concerned about the particular technology but were more interested in developing a musical vocabulary specifically for the instrument.

You were invited to Moscow along with non other than Bob Moog to the Lev Thermin Centinary. What was that all about?

We were performing In The Ether at The Royal Court in London and to our initial horror Lydia Kavina came to see it. Lydia is the grand niece of Theremin and widely acknowledged to be the greatest living exponent of the instrument. She was very sweet about our attempts to play the things, which we'd only actually had for about three weeks at that time, and kindly gave us some lessons which while excruciating at the time did help us massively in developing our technique. She liked the performance however and invited us to Moscow in 1997 to perform at the centenery of Lev Theremin's birth. We were in Moscow for ten days and attended many seminars with people from all over the former USSR as well as Robert Moog.

Did you find any interesting historic developments while you were there?

The Theremin Centre where the seminars took place was in the Tchaichovsky Institute and in one corner behind a screen there was another piece of Theremin's equipment. Basically it was a board with a number of dials on it, each of which controlled the pitch of an oscillator circuit.

The thing I remember most was that no one seemed to know what it was for or why he'd built it. We also saw a terpsitone which was kept under a tarpaulin on the verandah of Lydias' parent's flat. This was a device Theremin built for dancer's where the movement of the whole body on a platform produced sounds. In the sixties a lot of Theremin's instruments were smashed up and I'm not sure how many other terpsitones, if any, still exist.

We also saw the ANS synthesiser which is kept in the basement of the university. This was named after Alexandr Scriabin and is the only treacle based instrument I know of although of course there may be others. The machine was about the size of a Ford Fiesta and seemed to be cast out of iron. It looked more like a printing press than a synthesizer. My memory of how it worked is a little hazy and probably better documented elsewhere but essentially it worked by using modulated light.

The ANS machine had three sections. At the back of the central panel there were five or six plastic discs, about the size of CDs. Each of these had a number of waveforms etched in to them corresponding to pitches one sixth of a semitone apart. When the machine was switched on the discs started spinning and light was shone through them. The now modulated light was picked up by a vertical bank of photoreceptors (720 of them as I recall) each of which was connected to an amplifier. When it actually was switched on, there was this bright light and a wall of noise appeared as all the receptors were simultaneously activated. The man who was operating it then started cranking a handle and a sheet of glass on the left hand side of the machine started to move to the left. This glass was covered in some kind of bitumen into which he had scratched some marks. As the plate passed in front of the photoreceptors the mastik stopped the passage of the light and there was immediate silence. As the plate passed across further some light passed through the scratch marks, reached the receptors and produced a sound. It was essentially a machine to play graphic scores, an amazing and spectacular device. Also on the right hand side was a dummy keyboard and a system of wires with beads on getting closer together. These beads marked the positions of the harmonics, so you could move the bottom bead to the desired note and then then control the timbre by marking in the desired harmonics. It was an amazing experience seeing this synthesiser in action, such a monstrous thing capable of producing the most delicate of sounds if required. We were told all the music for Tarkovsky's film The Mirror was produced on the ANS as well as part of the score for Solaris.

In your trip to Moscow, did you find any evidence of a Theremin culture?

There were two definite schools as I mentioned earlier, one devotees of Theremin's instrument the other utilising Kovalev's development. Both seemed to have developed a very rigorous approach to learning the instrument, almost classical in fact.

Is the musical language of the instrument predominantly based on the traditional tonality or does it have it's own established musical framework?

I think when the theremin was first invented it was pretty much at the beginning of electronic music and I'm not sure anyone really knew what to do with it. Certainly it was promoted as a parlour instrument presumably developing a repertoire along the lines of the violin. In fact it's quite a sophisticated instrument with particular characteristics particularly in the use of glissandi and microtonal intervals. It's big plus for me however is the way you play it. I also play the trombone and the use of the spatial positioning of the arms gives a physical aspect to the theremin very different to keyboard based instruments. It sounds strange to say about an instrument you don't touch but there is a physicality to playing the theremin that encourages a very musical response. This has certainly affected my own approach to developing techniques and devising a vocabulary for the instrument.

Will you be using any other electronic instruments or processors on your performance?

I have a number of other devices I sometimes use including a Stylophone, a variable pitch oscillator circuit, a radio and a dictaphone, but I think for this performance I'm going to concentrate primarily on the theremin. I have two delay units, the Akai Headrush and a newly acquired Line 6 box, which I'll use primarily as looping devices.