(b St Petersburg, 15 Aug 1896; d Moscow, 3 Nov 1993). Russian inventor of electronic instruments. He graduated from the Petrograd Officers Electro-Technical School as a Military Radio Engineer in the Imperial Russian Army in 1916, and in the same year also graduated as a cellist from the Petrograd Conservatory of Music. He was stationed at the Tsar's Winter Palace at the beginning of the 1917 October Revolution but soon deserted his comrades to join the Bolsheviks and run the Red Army's local radio station. During this period he became fascinated with radio interference and electromagnetic field capacitance, and combined his musical interest and training as a physicist to develop a new electronic musical instrument, which he called initially the ‘Ėtherophon’ (see Theremin). In 1919 he set up a research laboratory in the newly founded Petrograd Physics-Technical Institute, where he continued work on his new instrument, giving its first public demonstration on 5 August 1920. In 1922 he was invited to give a demonstration of the instrument to Lenin at the Kremlin, after which he invited Lenin to try playing Glinka's The Lark with his assistance. Impressed by the proletarian potential for such an instrument, Lenin ordered 600 to be made but unfortunately died before his offer was realized.
With his flair for publicity and his enthusiastic salesmanship, Termen persuaded the Soviet authorities to grant permission for tours to France, Germany and England in 1927. These European concerts were a success with performances being sold out at the Royal Albert Hall, London, and riot police being needed to control the crowds at the Paris Opera. At the end of 1927 Termen travelled to New York, where his American debut recital at the Metropolitan Opera House on 31 January 1928, entitled ‘Music from the Ether’, had an enthusiastic reception. On the 28 February 1928 his instrument was patented under the name ‘thereminvox’, but was later just called ‘theremin’ (his choice of the French spelling for the American market reflected his original French ancestry). Termen's New York company Teletoch manufactured some 2000 electronic instruments of various kinds. Among his other inventions were the Rhythmicon (1931), a complex rhythmic instrument constructed for Henry Cowell with funds provided by Charles Ives, which unfortunately proved too unreliable for concerts, the Terpsitone (1932), an electric dance floor through which the motions of the dancer are transferred directly to changes in pitch allowing synchronization between sound and movement, a colour television system and security systems installed in the Sing Sing and Alcatraz prisons in the 1930s.
Termen's stay in the USA came to an abrupt end in 1938, when he was secretly taken back to the Soviet Union by NKVD agents (forerunners of the KGB) and imprisoned. He was taken to Moscow, where he was held without charges or trial and was sentenced to eight years hard labour in Siberia. In 1939 he was moved first to a labour camp at Omsk and later to a special centre for scientists under arrest in Koochino, near Moscow, where he worked until 1947 inventing radio-controlled aircraft, developing speech recognition research to aid telephone tapping and other surveillance projects as well as inventing the famous Buran, the miniature listening device, for which he received the Stalin Prize First Class. After his release, Termen worked at the Moscow Conservatory, where he was professor of acoustics, until his laboratory was destroyed in 1977, following the discovery that he was continuing with his inventions of electronic instruments. Subsequently he worked at the Moscow Polytechnic Institute, where he undertook research on a system to reverse the aging process while continuing his acoustic research.
S. Montague: ‘Rediscovering Leon Theremin’, Tempo, no.177 (1991), 18–23
O. Mattis and R. Moog: ‘Leon Theremin: Pulling Music Out of Thin Air’, Keyboard, xviii (1992), 46–54
S. Montague: ‘Rediscovering Leon Theremin: an Addendum’, Journal of Electroacoustic Music, viii (1994), 14–21
For further bibliography see Theremin
STEPHEN MONTAGUE