Who is leon theremin

Unlike any other, the theremin is never actually touched when played. Instead, a musician controls volume and pitch using her hands to interfere with electromagnetic fields generated by the device. Used in the soundtrack of the science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still , the theremin's eerie wailings have ever since conjured up images of sinister aliens and creepy monsters.

What few people realize is that the theremin was originally promoted by its Russian creator Leon Theremin as a serious musical instrument. Born in , Theremin's experimentation with electronic instruments led him to the Kremlin where, in , he personally demonstrated his invention to Vladmir Lenin. Captivated by Theremin's work, Lenin granted him permission to travel and present exhibitions, telling Theremin "come to see me if you need help. Theremin's journeys took him to many of the greatest performance halls in the world, including the Grand Opera House in Paris and the Royal Albert Hall in London.

New York's Metropolitan Opera House served as the venue for Theremin's debut in the United States, where he remained for eleven years. Supported by patrons, Theremin enjoyed a life of notoriety, research, and teaching, meeting innumerable luminaries including Albert Einstein, whom he hosted for an extended visit.

In , Theremin's life changed forever when he was forcibly abducted from his Manhattan apartment and disappeared from the world. Decades later a personal history as incongruous as that of the Soviet Union would emerge: time in a labor camp; years working for Soviet intelligence; purported recipient of a highly prestigious Stalin medal; a return to teach music at the Moscow Conservatory of Music; and dismissal from the conservatory while his musical instruments were hacked to pieces with an axe.

A contract was signed on 12 March , making RCA the first mass producer of an electronic instrument. It was also much more difficult to play than the advertising claimed. And just one month later came the Wall Street Crash. So the combination of the fact that only the most skilled people could teach themselves how to play it and the fact that there was a downturn in the economy meant that the instrument really wasn't a commercial success," Glinsky says.

But he stayed in the US for a while working on other projects, and engaging in industrial espionage. Demonstrating the theremin instrument was just a distraction, a Trojan Horse, as it were. Theremin also developed a prototype drum machine and an instrument that responded to a dancer's movements, alarm systems and an electric door opener, but none of his inventions proved a commercial success, and he ended up in debt.

He met and married a young black American ballet dancer, Lavinia Williams, in Lydia Kavina says the relationship further compounded his financial problems. It wasn't a time when such a marriage would be acceptable in American society. Later that year he returned suddenly to the Soviet Union, leaving his wife behind. Some people suggested he'd been kidnapped by Soviet officials, but Glinsky says a combination of debt and homesickness led to Theremin returning voluntarily.

He returned to a Soviet Union in the grip of Stalin's purges. He was arrested and falsely accused of being a counter-revolutionary, for which he received an eight year sentence in Thereminists were popping up in orchestras around the city, and well-known conductor Leopold Stokowski planned to write them into popular pieces of music.

In , Termen and three other thereminists played at Carnegie Hall , performing works by Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Bach, among others.

He also sought news ways of pushing the boundaries of musical instrumentation. Termen introduced a rudimentary drum machine, the rhythmicon, in He also created a kind of full-body theremin, called the terpsitone.

Where a theremin responded to hand movements, his new creation would create music in response to a musician moving their entire body in and around the device. Though he built a prototype, Termen never found much of an audience for the instrument. What he did find, however, was romance. A dancer named Lavinia Williams, from the American Negro Ballet, had been working with him in his studio, and Termen was smitten. They were eventually married — something that may have turned away potential business partners, the BBC reports , due to the fact that Williams was African-American.

Along with a new wife and an expanding social circle, Termen continued inventing. He created an electronic crib alarm in the wake of the Charles Lindbergh baby scandal, and won a contract to produce a metal detector for Alcatraz though it never panned out. But his happiness in America was to be short-lived. In , under mysterious circumstances, Termen returned abruptly to Russia, smuggled aboard a Soviet ship using an assumed identity.

To his friends and colleagues in New York, he seemingly vanished for almost three decades. Williams, his wife, never saw him again. The reasons for his departure remain murky and varied. Later reports suggested that he may simply have been fleeing his creditors in the U. Decades later, Termen insisted that his departure was motivated solely by patriotism. As Russia inched closer to war, he wanted to be there to help.

Whatever the reasons, Termen would soon find himself implicated as a traitor in Russia, perhaps because of his time in America. His time in the Soviet prisons would stretch for decades, stranding him oceans away from the life he had once lived in New York. But it would also be a kind of rebirth for the brilliant inventor — one that would tip his legacy into infamy.

Life in the Soviet gulags was relentlessly brutal. Prisoners did hard labor, often until their bodies wore down and they died. It was hardly a place for a scientist, to say nothing of a man accustomed to the luxuries of the upper crust.

But Termen appears to have made the best of it. Originally assigned to a labor crew, he was soon made supervisor of the workers. And less than a year into his stay, he was brought back to Moscow to join a system of secret laboratories called sharashka, along with other top scientists.

There, he began inventing again. His creations included a system code-named BURAN, which used an infrared beam to pick up the vibrations that sound waves create on a pane of glass. It could be used to listen covertly to conversations inside buildings without risk of being detected.