Tomás Mulcahy
Theremin on the web

The Theremin was one of the earliest purely electronic musical instruments, invented in 1929 by the Russian Leon Theremin. With the development of tape, and more particularly instruments like the Moog synthesiser, it fell out of favour in the 1960s as a “serious” musical instrument, and was relegated to the role of generating mysterious sound effects in sci-fi B-movies. A quick search in Google for Theremin returns a large number of hits. In fact, the theremin probably owes its resurrection to the World Wide Web. It helped bring together the few disparate enthusiasts around the world, and manufacturers could see that there was a market for the instrument. As an electronic device, a Theremin is easy to build from scratch. Theremin projects have often featured in electronics magazines down through the years, partly driven by novelty value- it’s the only instrument in the world that is played without touching. It’s easy to make an impressive sound with it because it has a pitch range from 0 to 2000 Hz. The complete range can be spanned with literally a wave of the hand. Playing a tune on it however, requires considerable skill. Most of the theremin sites you’ll find are put up mainly by hobbyists who have built them for fun, but very few have done so for serious music making. Nothing wrong with that, but it became a problem when I decided to narrow my search. As can be seen from the table, the number of hits I got searching for Theremin were overwhelming. So I decided to narrow the search to sites containing information on playing theremin. Compared to other instruments, there is very little information, authoritative or otherwise, on the playing technique.

I am still amazed by the pure skill of theremin players I’ve seen on video. For example, there’s a video clip on radioscience.com of Lydia Kavina, grand-daughter of Leon Theremin performing at a concert. She is standing perfectly still (any movement at all will change the pitch) and rapt with concentration. This level of skill is probably intimidating to most people, requiring as it does many hours of practice and dedication. This would explain the lack of information on technique, compared with better established instruments like the guitar.

Search terms and results:
Google:
Theremin:
94,800
learn to play Theremin:
3,500

Teoma:
Theremin:
31,700
learn to play Theremin:
1,440

Alltheweb:
Theremin:
158,845
Learn to play Theremin:
37,380

Using the complete phrase as a search term was better than using a Boolean term like “theremin+playing+technique” Because only pages with the complete phrase, and not pages merely with all three words, would be returned.

As you can see, it narrowed the results down drastically- Google returned 4 hits, only one of which was relevant. Alltheweb uses an “exact phrase” button instead of inverted commas. It returned 5 results, pretty much the same ones as google. Teoma has a “complete Phrase” button, and returned just one result. This was a link to the bigbriar site for the Instructional video. The other 4 results from teoma and google were to message board postings where people were asking the same questions. No- one had answered them, which is very common in my experience. Links to Message board postings are often useless.

Google and Teoma seem to have the best ranking algorithms. Their top 10 hits were very similar. Alltheweb was not as good, for example, this awful site was at number 4. While it did contain the search phrase, the site details someone’s complete obsession with all things Theremin, and is not very useful. It is a bit scary though...!

Lycos gave very poor results, for example, many of the hits were from message board postings by people wanting to learn to play Theremin. It also took a bit longer than the others to return any results.

Changing the search term to “theremin technique” gave 208 results in google. There were some that referred to printed articles that were not online, but almost all were broken links. Quite frustrating! Similar results were achieved in the other search engines.

Some sites:
The first thing I found was a revised edition of Clara Rockmore’s original text “Method for Theremin”. She was the world’s first Theremin virtuoso. She came to the instrument after a childhood accident that damaged her left hand, destroying her promising career as a violinist. She then applied violin technique to the theremin. She wrote a book, and in her will she stated that she wanted it to be made freely available. The internet came along just at the right time, and this valuable resource is available here.

The main part of this site is about the instrument that was used famously on the Beach Boys “Good Vibrations” in 1966. It wasn’t actually a Theremin, although it generated its tone in the same manner. It was played by moving a contact along a wire, which had a keyboard drawn underneath it. This way, the player could always be sure of the pitch while retaining the glissando characteristic of the Theremin. The site is well researched and extremely interesting. Tanner, the guy who played the instrument and came up with the idea, was also a jazz wind player, and worked on the LA session scene. So as you can imagine he has an interesting story to tell. It even has some useful info on playing Theremin- the keys on the “keyboard” of the electro- theremin are narrower at the top and wider at the end (in terms of pitch), just like a stringed instrument. For a beginner or someone not used to a stringed instrument, this is one of the main difficulties with playing a Theremin. This keyboard gives a good indication of what little movement is required to change the pitch by a semitone. With the dearth of technique info, something as small as this becomes valuable.

Theremin World:
This one comes up tops in most search engines, which means it’s active and lots of people use it. It is quite good, and definitely a good place to start finding out more about the Theremin. There wasn’t a lot of material on playing technique though. The forum had some information, although this is not clear from the front page. It’s not a very active forum, and there are more questions than answers, many of them posted two years ago!



The website of Lydia Kavina, one of the few professional thereminists in the world.

Lydia teaches Theremin and tours with the instrument. She also presents an instructional video, available for purchase from Bigbriar, a company owned by Dr. Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesiser. His new company also sells the Etherwave Theremin. This site promotes Lydia’s activities as a professional musician.


This is an example of how poor some websites can be, even though they are linked to from quite good ones dealing with the same subject. It’s a list of links, but frustratingly they cannot be clicked on, or individually copied and pasted. I had to paste the text into a word processor and copy links from there. It turned out that many of the links were to very poor quality sites, many “under construction” and a lot of links didn’t work at all.

Thereminvox is a huge site, and the best online resource for learning:

Very similar in style to the Theremin world site, except it’s a little more “serious” and doesn’t have as many commercial sponsors.
It also contains an excellent interview with Clara Rockmore.

She makes some very pertinent points about Theremin playing in general. Incidentally, this interview is duplicated on a couple of other sites.

A very good explanation of how the Theremin works:
This is the clearest information I found. There is also a downloadable virtual theremin for your desktop. The science section of the BBC website is aimed at second level education, but it is actually quite valuable to anybody looking for a good grounding in a scientific subject that is new to them. The design is exemplary- the BBC have won numerous awards for there huge website.

Airburst site:
Another good site to start from. Well designed, good info and up to date links. The text is pithy, and if you’re new to Theremin all the information you need is here in an easily digested form. Then you can move on to more comprehensive sites with a good foundation of knowledge. No information about playing technique though.

Digital Theremin:
This details an academic project attempting to make playing the Theremin easier to learn, using digital technology. It’s currently just an overview of the project, with a diary detailing progress. The actual project is not yet available. This might be a useful site to bookmark and use Explorer’s subscribe feature to automatically check for updates.

Art’s Theremin page:
One of the best technical, with articles on how to build many different types of Theremin, from simple pitch only instruments to recreations of Leon Theremin’s original design using valves instead of solid state components. There are two articles on playing a Theremin, but from a designer’s perspective rather than that of a musician. These contain some interesting observations on how a violinist or fretless bass player approaches the instrument, compared to a pianist. Clara Rockmore was originally a violinist. The site does not contain a large quantity of information, and the presentation is very basic. This simplicity means that it loads very quickly, and all the information is of good quality and well written.

Specialised search engines
Two specialist sites that I use for other music technology related research are synthzone.com and harmony-central.com. Synthzone had nothing except for a link to harmony central! The only info there was reviews of the PAiA Theremax, the instrument I own. I recently added an article I wrote for Sound On Sound magazine to my own site www.madtheory.com. It’s a review of the PAiA kit which they never published. PAiA have a link to it from their site, and since they did that the hits have been high on my own. This shows how popular this instrument is among electronics hobbyists rather than musicians.

The William and Gayle Cook Music Library seemed to be quite good.

A search here found this useful site.

There are some excellent articles on playing technique, mostly very long and thoughtful. There is also a comprehensive bibliography including theses, magazine articles from 1930 onwards, books and films. This list would at least save you time in a well-stocked American library! It features is a directory of teachers, but it is USA only. This site does not seem to be updated very often, as there were many broken links. The design is very basic- quite poor text layout and garish colours. But the information is valuable, a good example of “Never judge a book by its cover”.
None of the academic search engines turned up anything relevant, except for two broken links. This is probably symptomatic of the instrument’s status as a theatrical sound effects generator. There were plenty of references to Theremin concerts in various academies, but I found these using normal search engines. I would conclude that the Theremin is considered a serious instrument, mainly because composers like Stravinsky, Varése, R. Strauss and Messaien wrote for it. There doesn’t seem to be any faculty offering instruction in playing it, although I did find a few Phd. projects on it. Again, these were found with google et. al.

Conclusions:
Most directories now include search engines to allow you to search the directory, so the distinction between the two approaches has become blurred. This is comparable to the rising popularity of html support in email programs.

I found that these search engines found all the same web pages, but ranked them differently. All the best pages came up in the first 10. It seems that it’s a waste of time trawling through every hit. What’s needed is a way of narrowing down the results of the initial search. The problem is there’s no easy way to do this on a qualitative basis.

Much of the material on theremin sites is duplicated from others, for example, the November 1977 interview with Clara Rockmore appeared on 3 sites.

Directory based search engines
The problem with these is that their classifications are all different, and you may not find them logical. For example, I followed the following path in Yahoo: entertainment, music, education= Bass, guitar, saxophone. Nothing on the Theremin. Then I tried: Home > Entertainment > Music > Instruments > Electronic. This was more successful, but as you can see, the logic of the classification is questionable. It was a fruitful search, because I found some good sites, and the descriptions are much easier to follow. This is probably because they are written by the Yahoo staff, who are experienced in such things. Unfortunately many web site designers are not very good at selling their site in one sentence in the metatags (which appear as descriptions in search engines like google). I found this site with Yahoo:
I found some sites by following the links from the pages found with search engines. Many of these didn’t appear in the initial web searches, which shows the value of “surfing” the web. For example, the Theremin Enthusiast's club was a link from Art’s Theremin page. And from here I found the radio science orchestra , which had a video of Lydia playing a Theremin. This would be very useful to a learner in Ireland, because she has not (as of yet) performed here. Observing a virtuoso can be very instructive. This site is extremely well done with Flash 3 and Real Audio 4 for the multimedia content. For a Flash enabled page it loaded quite quickly. However, it was short on content. It’s designed to promote the band’s activities, and it seems that they haven’t been very active!

Yahoo does not provide any quality grading of sites. Again, most of the sites it listed were quite poor. For example this site was promisingly described as “Understanding the Theremin - offers history, advice on construction, how to play the instrument, and a bibliography.” The article on playing was a short one detailing the author’s limited experience as a beginner, and the bibliography had no references such as ISBN or URL! So even though the directory is built by humans, it seems they don’t have time to really explore and rate a site.

I would conclude that the web is not a substitute for a teacher (as with any other instrument). However there is sufficient information available to get you started and to guide you in the right direction. It will probably be some time before the Theremin has online tutorials like those available for other instruments. There’s no other way apart from the web to get Clara Rockmore’s book, or even to learn of its existence. Similarly, the Big Briar tuition video is not available in high street shops- it can only be purchased on the web. You could also learn a lot by e-mailing the people who maintain the better sites, as the e-mail lists appear to be much more active than any of the forums.