Podcast appearances and mentions of Clara Rockmore

Episode 150 Chapter 11 Electronic Music Performance Instruments (1920– 40). Works Recommended from my book, Electronic and Experimental Music  Welcome to the Archive of Electronic Music. This is Thom Holmes. This podcast is produced as a companion to my book, Electronic and Experimental Music, published by Routledge. Each of these episodes corresponds to a chapter in the text and an associated list of recommended works, also called Listen in the text. They provide listening examples of vintage electronic works featured in the text. The works themselves can be enjoyed without the book and I hope that they stand as a chronological survey of important works in the history of electronic music. Be sure to tune-in to other episodes of the podcast where we explore a wide range of electronic music in many styles and genres, all drawn from my archive of vintage recordings. There is a complete playlist for this episode on the website for the podcast.   Playlist: ELECTRONIC MUSIC PERFORMANCE INSTRUMENTS (1920– 1950)   Time Track Time Start Introduction –Thom Holmes 01:35 00:00 1.     Luigi Russolo, “Serenata” (1924). Mechanical noise-intoners and orchestra. 02:01 01:38 2.     Leon Theremin, “Deep Night” (1930). The inventor playing his own instrument. 01:48 04:16 3.     Orchestra Raymonde, “Romantique” (1934). Song featuring the Electronde, an instrument based on the Theremin made by Martin Taubman. 02:55 06:06 4.     Edgard Varèse, “Ecuatorial” (1934). Scored for chorus, small orchestra, organ, and two Ondes Martenots. Performance under the direction of Pierre Boulez in 1983. 12:11 09:00 5.     Paul Hindemith, “Langsames Stück und Rondo für Trautonium” (1935). Oskar Sala played the Trautonium. 05:29 21:02 6.     Olivier Messaien, “Oraison” (1937) for Ondes Martenot and orchestra. 07:43 26:34 7.     John Cage, “Imaginary Landscape No. 1” (1939). Radios and turntables playing test signals. 08:37 34:14 8.     Slim Galliard Quartet, “Novachord Boogie” (1946). Featured the Hammond Novachord organ/synthesizer. 02:57 42:50 9.     Lucie Bigelow Rosen, “That Old Refrain” (1948) for Theremin and piano. 03:25 45:48 10.   Miklós Rózsa. “Subconscious” from Spellbound (1948). Musical score for the Alfred Hitchcock film featuring Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman on Theremin. 02:07 49:14 11.   Clara Rockmore, “Valse Sentimentale” (Tchaikovsky) (1977) for Theremin. Later performance of the famous Thereminist from the 1930s-1940s. 02:07 51:22   Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. My Books/eBooks: Electronic and Experimental Music, sixth edition, Routledge 2020. Also, Sound Art: Concepts and Practices, first edition, Routledge 2022. See my companion blog that I write for the Bob Moog Foundation. For a transcript, please see my blog, Noise and Notations. Original music by Thom Holmes can be found on iTunes and Bandcamp.

Lords: * Elena * Nathalie * https://alienmelon.itch.io/ [cw:flashing lights] Topics: * Fish-based screensavers * Fire safety * The Aquarium and the Glass Harmonica * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOx7zmO5ppw * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FAc3HmfoSY * I Am Running Into A New Year by Lucille Clifton * https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/738271770264600576 * I went to Japan * https://nerdparadise.com/mspaint/stereogram Microtopics: * Shikiori Ink. * The Computer Museum in Berlin. * Back when you saw fish-based screen savers everywhere. * The Roku app fish screen saver. * A rock in the aquarium that says "Roku" * 11 hours of fish content. * Fish nerds sitting in a small box at the bottom of the ocean getting hype over seeing a small worm. * An animated gif of fish nerds getting hype. * A live jellyfish web cam that is just in principle. * A web cam of the thing that goes donk and everyone cheers when it goes donk. * The fish screen saver where you need to keep buying floppy disks with fish food on it or the fish die. * Don't copy that fish food! * The startup selling digital rabbit food going out of business so all the digital rabbits go into hibernation. * The Life Cycle of Software Objects. * Being unable to open your front door because the smart lock ran out of batteries. * Everybody congratulating you on the infuriating guy you made up to get mad at. * Fire safety anecdotes. * Glass top electric stoves that look just like induction stoves, as a prank. * How fire extinguishers taste. * Looking at fire extinguisher dust and thinking "let's get the blood brain barrier involved." * Leaving the stove on. * Broiling a sandwich and the whole sandwich catches fire. * A five year old doing science experiments with a lit candle. * The UX design of grease fires. * The William Shatner song about the dangers of deep frying a turkey. * Relating to the teens coming into fashion for like a week and then the next week the teens are like "You're still trying to relate? That's cheugy AF." * Self-moistening fingertips. * Soaking your fingertips in water for eight minutes to get them pruny. * The Canon of harmonica virtuoso music. * Ethereal floating tones that fade in and out of existence. * The Flat Bells. * The Mellotron as a slightly more physical sampler. * Clara Rockmore playing "The Swan" on Theremin. * Bit-doers playing "The Swan" on Otamatone. * Letting go of what you said to yourself about yourself when you were 16, 26, even 36. * The assumption that you need to be forgiven for something. * The sun coming up on this episode of Topic Lords. * Working up the courage to climb the mountain you see every day from your back yard. * Really tall hills you can walk up. * What it's like to not hear cars constantly. * Designing a building to sound good – even if it isn't a concert hall. * Car-free cities. * Biking in a bike-centric environment. * Throwing your body into traffic and hoping drivers care about the legal liability of running someone over. * The intersection where you always see the skid marks from kids doing donuts. * Doing watercolors but with ink. * Buying a bunch of art supplies and never using them because you're afraid to waste them. * How do you get your paintbrush to do what you want? * How watercolors behave depending on how wet the painting is and how wet the paintbrush is. * Scraping your knife on the painting and it just looks like a shed. * Is it a bunch of cats or is it the word "gay"? * Images that look like stereograms but aren't. * The blank canvas stereogram. * Crowds staring at the enormous stereograms hanging up in the Mall of America. * Stereogram artists accounting for pupillary distance. * Making a stereogram in MS Paint.

En aquest nou capítol l'Isma Palacios segueix amb el seu monogràfic sobre els instruments electrònics per parlar-nos del Theremin i la Clara Rockmore. Dosha ha punxat música de Coco Bryce, Sylvester Javier, Edmondson, Sote… La Laura ens ha portat ritme i contundencia amb Ploy, re:ni i Atrice. Finalment aquesta setmana en Monqui ens ha punxat música de GENOSIDRA, AceMo, Schoolboy Q, Kali Malone… Streaming i realització en directe com sempre a càrrec dels amics de Streamflow (https://streamflow.barcelona) Nova imatge gràfica gràcies als nostres amics de Saudara Studio. Tracklist 1- Clara Rockmore - Liebesleid 2- Kali Malone - All Life Long (for voice) - Ideologic Organ 3- Sote - Lips Seeking The Forbidden - SVBCVLT 4- Florian T M Zeisig - Angel Désirée - STROOM.tv 5- Edmondson - Willows - all my thoughts 6- Jamie Leather - Thats Enough Now - Craigie Knowes 7- Hamatsuki - Dance And Cry - Apnea 8- Ploy - Vortex (Busy Mix) - Deaf Test 9- re:ni - BURSTTRAP - Timedance 10- Schoolboy Q Ft. Ab-Soul - Foux - Top Dawg Entertainment / Interscope 11- Atrice - 83 Steps - Illian Tape 12- Coco Bryce - Vendetta - Future Retro London 13- AceMo - Galaxy Blue - Sonic Messengers 14- Sylvester Javier - Secret Ceremonies - Vibraphonerecords 15- GENOSIDRA - HARDEMANGALA HARDEMPUJALA - Angels Gun Club

Auch in diesem Jahr sprechen wir zum Internationalen Frauentag über Frauen aus der Popgeschichte, die bislang viel zu wenig Beachtung bekommen haben. Mit dieser Spezialfolge wollen wir das ändern. Zu Gast bei Katharina Heinius ist die ehemalige Lucilectric-Sängerin Luci van Org. Nachdem es im letzten Spezial zum Internationalen Frauentag einen Rundumschlag gab zu Frauen, die in den Geschichtsbüchern zu kurz gekommen sind, wie Blueserfinderin Ma Rainey, Rock'n'Roll-Erfinderin Rosetta Tharpe oder Sylvia Robinson, die den ersten kommerziell erfolgreichen Hip-Hop-Song überhaupt produziert hat ("Rapper's Delight" von der Sugarhill Gang) geht es dieses Mal um die Pionierinnen der elektronischen Musik. Auch in diesem Jahr ist Musikerin, Produzentin, Songwriterin, Autorin und Schauspielerin Luci van Org wieder mit dabei und spricht mit SWR1 Musikredakteurin Katharina Heinius über großartige Frauen der Musikgeschichte. Für Luci van Org gibt es einen ganz besonderen Punkt, der sie an elektronischer Musik fasziniert: "Die Möglichkeit, autark ganze Musikstücke zu kreieren. Das ist gerade für Frauen ganz wichtig gewesen, weil [...] es gab immer Männer, die versucht haben, dir zu sagen, was du zu tun und zu lassen hast und wie du es zu machen hast. Und an so einem Rechner kannst du einfach sitzen und selbst bestimmen, wie etwas klingt [...]." Das ermächtigt die Musikerinnen und auch Musiker natürlich dazu unabhängiger von anderen zu werden. Wer möchte, kann durch diese Technik alle Rollen, die es beim Musikmachen auszuführen gibt, selber ausführen. Egal, ob Komponistin, Produzentin und auch ausführende Künstlerin. Die Anfänge der elektronischen Musik beginnen weitaus früher, als man vielleicht denkt, nämlich schon in den 1920er Jahren mit dem Theremin. Wie dieses obskure Instrument gespielt wird, das erklärt Musikerin Luci van Org, die selbst stolze Theremin-Besitzerin ist, im Meilensteine Podcast. Über das Theremin meint sie "Menschen, die Theremin spielen, wirken immer ein bisschen wie in einer Séance. Die halten die Hände in der Luft und machen seltsame Gesten." Und die erste große Theremin-Virtuosin war, die eigentlich als Violinistin ausgebildete Konzertgeigerin, Clara Rockmore. Die hat eine ganz besondere Technik erfunden, um das Instrument zu beherrschen. Dr. Who ist eine der bekanntesten Fernsehserien aller Zeiten und auch eine der Serien, die es schon am längsten gibt. 1963 startete die Serie und auch heute werden noch neue Folgen produziert. Und im Intro der Science-Fiction-Serie gab es schon 1963 elektronische Musik, gespielt von der Mathematikerin Delia Derbyshire auf Synthesizern. Bis zur "Dr. Who"-Serie war elektronische Musik ganz und gar nicht "in aller Munde", wie man so schön sagt, sondern es wurde immer eher verächtlich darauf geschaut, da elektronische Musik "kein Herz und keine Seele" habe. Heute wird ganz anders auf elektronische Musik geblickt und für diesen Wandel ist auch Delia Derbyshire und ihre Titelmelodie zu "Dr. Who" verantwortlich. Auch deshalb zählt sie für das Musikmagazin "Musikexpress" zu den "100 wichtigsten Frauen im Pop". Eine der ersten elektronischen Kompositionen aus einem Computer kommen von der US-Amerikanerin Laurie Spiegel. Mit Lochkarten, Klaviatur, Joystick und Tasten komponierte sie 1974 ihren Song "Appalachian Grove 1", mit dem sie die Melodien in die vorher avantgardistische, elektronische Musik brachte und dadurch auch mehr Gefühl. Während wir elektronische Musik (theoretisch) heute mit dem Laptop gemütlich von der Couch aus machen können, war der Computer, mit dem Laurie Spiegel Musik gemacht hat, so groß wie ein Wohnzimmer, unglaublich teuer und stand in einer Forschungseinrichtung. Laurie Spiegel komponierte aber nicht nur Musik auf dem Computer, sondern sie hat mit "Music Mouse" auch eines der ersten Computerprogramme zum Musik machen programmiert. __________ Shownotes SWR1 Meilensteine Folge zu "Sports" von Huey Lewis and The News: https://www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/swr1-meilensteine/huey-lewis-and-the-news-sports/swr1/94770170/ Spezialfolge zum Internationalen Frauentag 2023: https://www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/swr1-meilensteine/spezialfolge-zum-internationalen-frauentag-2023/swr1/12436977/ SWR1 Leute mit Luci van Org: https://www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/swr1-leute/mehr-starke-frauen-in-einer-maennerdominierten-welt/swr1/13104787/ Clara Rockmore spielt das Theremin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=pSzTPGlNa5U ARTE-Doku über "verkannte Heldinnen der elektronischen Musik: https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/104017-000-A/sisters-with-transistors-die-verkannten-heldinnen-der-elektronischen-musik/ Demo von Music Mouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-mmEvGOopk SWR Artikel zu Luci van Org: https://www.swr.de/swr1/swr1leute/luci-van-org-lucilectric-cross-media-kunstlerin-100.html Künstlerseite zum Projekt "Luciana Soteira" von Luci van Org: https://www.laetitium.de/artists/lucina-soteira/ __________ Über diese Songs wird im Podcast gesprochen (08:04) – “The Swan” von Clara Rockmore (17:45) – “Dr. Who Titelmelodie” von Delia Derbyshire (33:02) – “Appalachian Grove 1” von Laurie Spiegel (40:40) – “Three Sonic Spaces” von Laurie Spiegel (41:32) – “Offen” von Meystersinger (43:18) – “Tempel” von Lucina Soteira __________ Ihr wollt mehr Podcasts wie diesen? Abonniert die SWR1 Meilensteine! Fragen, Kritik, Anregungen? Meldet euch gerne per WhatsApp-Sprachnachricht an die (06131) 92 93 94 95 oder schreibt uns an meilensteine@swr.de

Mixed By Tamara Palmer aka Teemoney Words from the artist on this mix: I've been DJing and writing about electronic music for half of the six decades that are covered here in this tribute to innovative women, and I've never heard another mix like this. I would like it to inspire you to delve deeper into the discographies of every featured artist and to appreciate the sense of adventure in the songs as well as the lineage of influence that women have had in this realm from the very beginning of digital production. And to make more mixes like this! Five and a half hours of music went into the digital folder used to make this one-hour set with the help of old-school Technics 1200 turntables and new-school Serato Pro DJ software. Artists from all over the world are on it, but I can feel and hear a singularly unifying grace, toughness, proficiency and joy for experimentation. I study the craft of DJing with Babu at the world-famous Beat Junkies Institute of Sound in Glendale, California, and he often observes that I mix based on emotion. That's certainly true with this set, which I hope infuses every listener with even a fraction of the happiness I now feel after recording it live with love in one take! TRACKLIST: Daphne Oram — New Atlantis (1963) Pauline Anna Strom — Mushroom Trip (2017) Nabihah Iqbal — Zone 1 to 6000 (2017) Star Eyes — Lost Girls (2012) Anz — Inna Circle (2021) Beyoncé — All Up in Your Mind (2022) Björk — Hyperballad (1995) Suzanne Ciani — Morning Spring (2021) Mira Calix — danaïdes (2021) Zola Jesus — Vessel (2011) Dawn Richard — New Breed (2019) Neotropic — 15 Levels of Magnification (1996) SOPHIE feat. Bibi Bourelly — Faceshopping (Money Remix) (2018) Emika Elena — No Language (2018) Anne Dudley — Paranoimia (2018) Xyla — Feel (2020) Madame Gandhi — The Future Is Female (2016) Clara Rockmore and Nadia Reisenberg — The Firebird (1977?) Lizwi — Prayer (2023) Pauline Oliveros — Bye Bye Butterfly (1997) Delia Darbyshire — A New View of Politics (1979) Laurie Anderson — O Superman (1982) Tamara Palmer (aka Teemoney) is a professional DJ, journalist and independent publisher from California.

Mención dedicada a la grandiosa Clara Rockmore, la mejor intérprete del theremin que ha existido y una de las precursoras más importantes de la música electrónica.

Episode 88 The Theremin Part 1: From the Beginning to 1970 Playlist Leon Theremin, “Deep Night” (1930 Les Actualités françaises). Soundtrack from a short, early sound film of Leon Theremin playing an RCA production model Theremin. Zinaida Hanenfeldt, Nathaniel Shilkret, Victor Salon Orchestra, “Love (Your Spell is Everywhere)” (1930 Victor). RCA theremin, Zinaida Hanenfeldt; Victor Salon Orchestra conducted by Nathaniel Shilkret. The earliest records made with the Theremin were recorded in 1930 to highlight the release of the RCA Theremin. This was one of the first. This recording session dates from January 17, 1930 and was made in New York at the 28 West 44th St. studio. Billed as a recording of “Orchestra, with theremin soloist,” this was most likely made as a demonstration of the newly introduced RCA Theremin. Seven months later, Lennington Shewell (see next listing) took up making several demonstration records produced by his father, RCA VP G. Dunbar Shewell in the Camden, NJ recording studios. Lennington H. Shewell, “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes” (1930 Victor). Recorced on July 21, 1930, in Camden, NJ Studio 1. Theremin solo, Lennington H. Shewell; piano accompaniment, Edward C. Harsch. Noted as "R.C.A. theremin: Instructions and exercises for playing" and "G. Dunbar Shewell, present." Lennington H. Shewell, “In a Monastery Garden” from “Love Sends A Gift Of Roses” / “In A Monastery Garden” (1935 Victor). Shewell was an American pianist songwriter and Thereminist. He recorded several discs for RCA . Shewell was employed by RCA to travel around the USA demonstrating the Theremin as part of its marketing campaign. His father was George Dunbar Shewell, who was a vice-president of RCA for a time. Clara Rockmore, “The Swan” from Theremin (1977 Delos). Piano, Nadia Reisenberg; Produced by Robert Moog, Shirleigh Moog; Theremin, Clara Rockmore. Rockmore, of course, was the key master of the Theremin back in the 1930s and 40s, having originally learned from Leon Theremin himself. These recordings were later produced by the Moogs in the 1970s and feature some dazzling, virtuoso performances by Rockmore as she interprets many of her favorite classical works. “The Swan” was composed in by Camille Saint-Saëns (1983-1921) that was usually a showcase for a cellist and, with Rockmore's brilliant interpretation, became a much-loved work by Thereminists. Even Samuel Hoffman made a recording of it. Clara Rockmore, “Berceuse” from Theremin (1977 Delos). Piano, Nadia Reisenberg; Produced by Robert Moog, Shirleigh Moog; Theremin, Clara Rockmore. Here Rockmore interprets a piece by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). Lucie Bigelow Rosen, “Concerto in F” b Mortimer Browning (1940, privately recorded practice session). Ms. Rosen recorded this rehearsal in preparation for a live performance. Of great interest is that you can hear her speaking at the beginning and end of the session, and her playing is quite sophisticated. Lucie Bigelow Rosen, “The Old Refrain” by Fritz Kreisler (circa 1940 privately recorded session). Another privately recorded session by Ms. Rosen. Miklós Rózsa, Suite from The Lost Weekend (excerpt) from The Lost Weekend (The Classic Film Score) (1945 privately issued). Conducted, composed by Miklós Rózsa; Theremin, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. “This is a limited-edition recording, produced for the promotional purposes of the composer and is not licensed for public sale. The music was transferred to tape from the original acetate masters.” This was not a score released on a conventional soundtrack. This recording comes from a privately issued disc commissioned by the composer and I date it to around 1970. I wanted to include it because it a notably obscure soundtrack recording Theremin playing by Hoffman from the same era as the more famous and widely distributed Spellbound soundtrack. Harry Revel and Leslie Baxter with Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Lunar Rhapsody” from Music Out Of The Moon: Music Unusual Featuring The Theremin (1947 Capitol). Hoffman, a foot doctor by profession, was one of the best-known Theremin players of his time. Not as persnickety as Rockmore about playing “spooky sounds,” he basically filled a gap in Theremin playing in popular music that Clara Rockmore refused to fill. He played one of the RCA production model Theremins from 1930. His most famous contributions included collaborations with Les Baxter, Miklos Rozsa, Harry Revel, and Bernard Herrmann, and his momentous movie music for Spellbound (1945) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). He was initially a classically trained violinist, and at age 14 he began playing the violin professionally in New York City. By 1936, he had taken up the Theremin and begun featuring it in publicity for his engagements. He quickly gained notoriety using the electronic instrument and he became one of the world's most famous Theremin players. Harry Revel and Leslie Baxter with Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Radar Blues” from Music Out Of The Moon: Music Unusual Featuring The Theremin (1947 Capitol). Harry Revel, Leslie Baxter & Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Fame” from Perfume Set to Music (1948 RCA Victor). Composed by Harry Revel; Orchestra Chorus conducted by Leslie Baxter; Theremin, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. "As interpreted by the British-born composer, Harry Revel, in a musical suite describing six exotic Corday fragrances." Harry Revel, Leslie Baxter & Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Obsession” from Perfume Set to Music (1948 RCA Victor). Composed by Harry Revel; Orchestra Chorus conducted by Leslie Baxter; Theremin, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. "As interpreted by the British-born composer, Harry Revel, in a musical suite describing six exotic Corday fragrances." Elliot Lawrence and His Orchestra, featuring Lucie Bigelow Rosen, “Gigolette” (1949 Columbia). An attempt to bring the Theremin into popular music, this recording by Elliot Lawrence and his Orchestra made at the Columbia 30th Street Studio in Midtown Manhattan features Lucie Bigelow Rosen. Ms. Rosen and her husband Walter were instrumental in providing offices for Leon Theremin to work in New York during the 1930s. The inventor personally made two instruments for her. She was a practiced enthusiast and did much concertizing with the Theremin from about 1935 to 1940. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Remembering Your Lips” from Music for Peace of Mind (1950 Capitol). Orchestra conducted by Billy May; composed by Harry Revel; Theremin, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. “Music for PEACE OF MIND featuring the THEREMIN with orchestra.” Samuel J. Hoffman, “This Room Is My Castle of Quiet” from Music for Peace of Mind (1950 Capitol). Orchestra conducted by Billy May; composed by Harry Revel; Theremin, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. “Music for PEACE OF MIND featuring the THEREMIN with orchestra.” Bernard Herrmann, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Gort,” “The Visor,” “The Telescope” from The Day the Earth Stood Still (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (1951 20th Century Fox). Soundtrack recorded at the Twentieth Century Fox Scoring Stage August 1951, reissued in 1993. Composed by Bernard Herrmann; Conducted by Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, Lionel Newman; Theremin by Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. Hoffmnan played one of the RCA production model Theremins from 1930 but by this time around 1950 had modified it to include an external speaker connection for improved recording of the instrument during studio sessions. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Moonlight Sonata” (Theremin Solo with Piano Accompaniment) (1951 Capitol). Eddie Layton, “Laura”, from Organ Moods in Hi-Fi (1955 Mercury). This song is noted as including the “Ethereal sound of the theremin.” Layton was a popular Hammond organ player, later on in his career he played the organ at old Yankee Stadium for nearly 40 years, earning him membership in the New York Sports Hall of Fame. This is his first album, one many, and is notable for using some early organ electronics. “It must be stated that all of the sounds in this album were created by Eddie Layton solely on the Hammond Organ including the rhythm sounds of the bass and guitar, by means of special imported electronic recording devices and microphones.” With the exception of the Theremin, I would add. An unknown Theremin model, most likely vacuum-tube driven, possibly an original RCA model. Monty Kelly And His Orchestra with Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Blue Mirage” from “Blue Mirage”/ “That Sweetheart of Mine” (1955 Essex). Single release from this Orchestra led by Monty Kelly and featuring Hoffman on Theremin. Unknown Artist, “The Fiend Who Walked the West” lobby recording (1958). Theremin or musical saw? This is from an LP recording I have that was used in movie lobbies to entice people to come and see the horror film, The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958). Could this be a Theremin, or a musical saw? I think the latter. I have no information on who played the instrument, but it makes for some curious listening from days gone by while acknowledging one of the key sources of confusion for those who collect Theremin recordings. Sonny Moon And His Orchestra, “Countdown” from “Rememb'ring”/ “Countdown” (1958 Warner Brothers). A 45-RPM single from this short-lived group od the late 1950s. Includes an uncredited Theremin performance. Milton Grayson and Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman Theremin and Orchestra, “I Paid the Penalty” (1960 Royalty Recording Co.). A 45-RPM single about capital punishment. On one side of the record a San Francisco Attorney speaks about capital punishment. On the other side is this vocal by Grayson that dramatizes the subject. This appears to be some sort of public service announcement, but the disc itself bears no clues. This is the only release on this label. The vocal by Grayson is part sermon, part monolog, part song, with the threatening aura of the Theremin provided by Dr. Hoffman. It is undated, so I'm guessing around 1960 when Grayson was most active. Lew Davies And His Orchestra, “Riders in the Sky” from Strange Interlude (1961 Command). From the early sixties comes this wonderful amalgamation of exotica and space-age instruments. The Theremin is played by none other than Walter Sear, later the manager of the Sear Sound Studio in New York and an influential programmer (and sometimes player) of the Moog Modular Synthesizer. Several members of this band also became associated with the Moog Modular, including Bobby Byrne, Sy Mann, and producer Enoch Light. Bass, Bob Haggart, Jack Lesberg; Cimbalom, Michael Szittai; Drums, George Devens, Phil Kraus; Executive Producer, Enoch Light; French Horn, Paul Faulise, Tony Miranda; Guitar, Tony Mottola; Reeds, Al Klink, Ezelle Watson, Phil Bodner, Stanley Webb; Ondioline, Sy Mann; Theremin, Paul Lippman, Walter Sear; Trombone, Bobby Byrne, Dick Hixon, Urbie Green. Yusef Lateef, “Sound Wave,” from A Flat, G Flat And C (1966 Impulse!). An innovative first from Mr. Lateef who foresaw the possibilities of the Theremin for new jazz. Lateef was known for his multi-instrumental talent on Tenor Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Flute, Oboe and a variety of wooden flutes. Using the Theremin on this one track—I've never heard anything else he recorded with the Theremin—shows how a skilled jazz improviser can use the Theremin for self-expression. I would guess that this Theremin was made by Moog. Theremin, Yusef Lateef; Bass, Reggie Workman; Drums, Roy Brooks; Piano, Hugh Lawson; Produced by Bob Thiele. Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band, “Electricity” from Safe as Milk (1967 Buddah). The Theremin in this case was played by none other than Samuel J. Hoffman using his souped-up RCA Theremin model Theremin. It was perhaps the last appearance on record by Hoffman, who died later in 1967. Apparently, the record company hated the track so much that it led to their being dropped from the label, at which point Frank Zappa came to the rescue. Fifty Foot Hose, “War is Over” (1967) from Ingredients (1997 compilation Del Val). Psychedelic rock group from San Francisco, formed in 1967, disbanded in 1970 and re-formed in 1995. Drums, Gary Duos; Guitar, David Blossom; Theremin, Electronics, Audio Generator, Siren, Cork Marcheschi. Recorded in 1966 in San Francisco. Dorothy Ashby, “Soul Vibrations” from Afro-Harping (1968 Cadet Concept). Unknown Theremin player, although the producers at Cadet/Chess were known to add the instrument to a session, such as those by Rotary Connection. Recorded at Ter Mar Studios, Chicago, February 1968. The song was written by producer Richard Evans, then the go-to producer and de facto label head for Chess Records' jazz imprint Cadet. Perhaps he also played the Theremin, which was probably a Moog Troubadour. The First Theremin Era, “The Barnabas Theme from Dark Shadows" / “Sunset In Siberia” (1969 Epic). "Dark Shadows" was super-popular daytime drama about a vampire on ABC-TV. This record was not an official release of the television show, but an interpretation of the theme that is seldom heard. I thought it's exotic funky treatment was especially worth hearing. The soundtrack for the TV show also included Theremin, possibly played by composer Robert Cobert, but in its more traditional spooky role. This record was produced and arranged by Charlie Calello, a well-known producer who had worked with the Four Seasons (singing group) and later would produce such super stars as Frank Sinatra, Neil Diamond, Bruce Springsteen, Laura Nyro, and Barbra Streisand. Mutantes, “Banho De Lua (Tintarella Di Luna)” from Mutantes (1969 Polydor). Brazilian folk-rock-psychedelic group that featured the Theremin blended with many other instruments, both acoustic and electronic. Arranged by, Mutantes; Drums, Sir Ronaldo I. Du Rancharia; Theremin, electronic Instruments, Claudio Régulus. This innovative pop trio from Brazil also collaborated with other artists such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and were threatened by the military government of Brazil. What Theremin did they use? Several Moog models would have been available, but they also may have built their own. One photo I've seen suggested that they built their own. Lothar and the Hand People, “It Comes on Anyhow” from Machines: Amherst 1969 (2020 Modern Harmonic). Live recording from 1969 featuring the Moog Modular Synthesizer played by Paul Conly and the Moog Theremin played by vocalist John Emelin. On this track, the synthesizer and Theremin sounds are intermingled, making it a fun challenge to distinguish between the two of them. Bass, Rusty Ford; Drums, Tom Flye; Guitar, Kim King; Keyboards, Moog Modular Synthesizer, Paul Conly; Vocals, Moog Troubadour Theremin (“Lothar”), John Emelin. Lothar and the Hand People, “Today Is Only Yesterday's Tomorrow” from Machines: Amherst 1969 (2020 Modern Harmonic). This track was recorded live in 1969. John Emelin starts by introducing the Moog Theremin, called “Lothar.” Bass, Rusty Ford; Drums, Tom Flye; Guitar, Kim King; Keyboards, Moog Modular Synthesizer, Paul Conly; Vocals, Moog Troubadour Theremin (“Lothar”), John Emelin. Opening background tracks: Bernard Herrmann, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Prelude, Outer Space” (excerpt), from The Day the Earth Stood Still (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (1951 20th Century Fox). Soundtrack recorded at the Twentieth Century Fox Scoring Stage August 1951, reissued in 1993. Composed by Bernard Herrmann; Conducted by Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, Lionel Newman; Theremin by Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. Zinaida Hanenfeldt, Nathaniel Shilkret, Victor Salon Orchestra, “(I'm a dreamer) Aren't we all?” (1930 Victor). “Orchestra, with theremin soloist.” Theremin, Zinaida Hanenfeldt. Recorded January 17, 1930 in New York at the 28 West 44th St. studio. Samuel J. Hoffman, “The Swan”( Saint-Saens) from “Moonlight Sonata” / “The Swan” (1951 Capitol). Arranged and performed on the Theremin by “Dr. Hoffman.” Orchestra and Chorus Under the Direction Of Leslie Baxter, Dr. Samuel Hoffman, “Struttin' with Clayton” from “Jet” / “Struttin' With Clayton” (1950 RCA Victor). Theremin, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. Miklós Rózsa, “Dementia” from The Lost Weekend (The Classic Film Score) (1945 privately issued). Conducted, composed by Miklós Rózsa; Theremin, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. This podcast is not intended as a thorough history of the Theremin itself. There are many excellent resources that provide that, including my own book on the history of electronic music, the Bob Moog Foundation website, Albert Glinsky's wonderful book about Leon Theremin, and the entire Theremin World website that is devoted to everything Theremin. I urgently suggest that you consult those resources for more detail on the actual history of the instrument and the people behind it. Opening and closing sequences voiced by Anne Benkovitz. Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. See my companion blog that I write for the Bob Moog Foundation: For additional notes, please see my blog, Noise and Notations.

Au programme ce mercredi : Mes biens chers têtards, futures grenouilles, Aujourd’hui, on écoute des jeunes qui écoutent des jeunes. Des “1900” : des jeunes d’avant les années 2000. Des jeunes d’il y a longtemps. Des jeunes d’il y a un demi-siècle. Enfin des jeunes qui étaient jeunes mais qui sont maintenant vieux. Puis on écoutera des vieux qui écoutent des jeunes.  Je vous propose qu’on inverse la perspective, et que vous essayiez de vous mettre à la place des adultes qui vous observent. Des adultes qui parfois sont contraints de vous surveiller !  Les musiques : People - Glastonbury (Tapis musical) Manon Prigent – Tout fout l’camp épisode 01 : On est toujours le jeune de quelqu’un (Documentaire) Clara Rockmore – The Swan (Musique) Samia el Hadj – Démonstration d’autorité naturelle (Création sonore)

Los sonidos se mueven, se amplifican, se dispersan, se vuelven ondas. Este es un capítulo especial. Lisa Rovner nos lleva al misterioso mundo de la música electrónica creada por mujeres. Sister with Transistors es un documental donde Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Pauline Oliveros entre otras, nos muestran su particulares maneras de hacer música. Una historia que camina al margen de la cultura oficial.

Episode one hundred and forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys, and the history of the theremin. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "You're Gonna Miss Me" by the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources There is no Mixcloud this week, because there were too many Beach Boys songs in the episode. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It's difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-four years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I've checked for specific things. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher.  His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe's Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins' The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. And Philip Lambert's Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson's music from 1962 through 67. I have also referred to Brian Wilson's autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson, and to Mike Love's, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. As a good starting point for the Beach Boys' music in general, I would recommend this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it, including the single version of "Good Vibrations". Oddly, the single version of "Good Vibrations" is not on the The Smile Sessions box set. But an entire CD of outtakes of the track is, and that was the source for the session excerpts here. Information on Lev Termen comes from Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage by Albert Glinsky Transcript In ancient Greece, the god Hermes was a god of many things, as all the Greek gods were. Among those things, he was the god of diplomacy, he was a trickster god, a god of thieves, and he was a messenger god, who conveyed messages between realms. He was also a god of secret knowledge. In short, he was the kind of god who would have made a perfect spy. But he was also an inventor. In particular he was credited in Greek myth as having invented the lyre, an instrument somewhat similar to a guitar, harp, or zither, and as having used it to create beautiful sounds. But while Hermes the trickster god invented the lyre, in Greek myth it was a mortal man, Orpheus, who raised the instrument to perfection. Orpheus was a legendary figure, the greatest poet and musician of pre-Homeric Greece, and all sorts of things were attributed to him, some of which might even have been things that a real man of that name once did. He is credited with the "Orphic tripod" -- the classification of the elements into earth, water, and fire -- and with a collection of poems called the Rhapsodiae. The word Rhapsodiae comes from the Greek words rhaptein, meaning to stitch or sew, and ōidē, meaning song -- the word from which we get our word "ode", and  originally a rhapsōdos was someone who "stitched songs together" -- a reciter of long epic poems composed of several shorter pieces that the rhapsōdos would weave into one continuous piece. It's from that that we get the English word "rhapsody", which in the sixteenth century, when it was introduced into the language, meant a literary work that was a disjointed collection of patchwork bits, stitched together without much thought as to structure, but which now means a piece of music in one movement, but which has several distinct sections. Those sections may seem unrelated, and the piece may have an improvisatory feel, but a closer look will usually reveal relationships between the sections, and the piece as a whole will have a sense of unity. When Orpheus' love, Eurydice, died, he went down into Hades, the underworld where the souls of the dead lived, and played music so beautiful, so profound and moving, that the gods agreed that Orpheus could bring the soul of his love back to the land of the living. But there was one condition -- all he had to do was keep looking forward until they were both back on Earth. If he turned around before both of them were back in the mortal realm, she would disappear forever, never to be recovered. But of course, as you all surely know, and would almost certainly have guessed even if you didn't know because you know how stories work, once Orpheus made it back to our world he turned around and looked, because he lost his nerve and didn't believe he had really achieved his goal. And Eurydice, just a few steps away from her freedom, vanished back into the underworld, this time forever. [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop: "Mr. Theremin's Miserlou"] Lev Sergeyevich Termen was born in St. Petersburg, in what was then the Russian Empire, on the fifteenth of August 1896, by the calendar in use in Russia at that time -- the Russian Empire was still using the Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian calendar used in most of the rest of the world, and in the Western world the same day was the twenty-seventh of August. Young Lev was fascinated both by science and the arts. He was trained as a cellist from an early age, but while he loved music, he found the process of playing the music cumbersome -- or so he would say later. He was always irritated by the fact that the instrument is a barrier between the idea in the musician's head and the sound -- that it requires training to play. As he would say later "I realised there was a gap between music itself and its mechanical production, and I wanted to unite both of them." Music was one of his big loves, but he was also very interested in physics, and was inspired by a lecture he saw from the physicist Abram Ioffe, who for the first time showed him that physics was about real, practical, things, about the movements of atoms and fields that really existed, not just about abstractions and ideals. When Termen went to university, he studied physics -- but he specifically wanted to be an experimental physicist, not a theoretician. He wanted to do stuff involving the real world. Of course, as someone who had the misfortune to be born in the late 1890s, Termen was the right age to be drafted when World War I started, but luckily for him the Russian Army desperately needed people with experience in the new invention that was radio, which was vital for wartime communications, and he spent the war in the Army radio engineering department, erecting radio transmitters and teaching other people how to erect them, rather than on the front lines, and he managed not only to get his degree in physics but also a diploma in music. But he was also becoming more and more of a Marxist sympathiser, even though he came from a relatively affluent background, and after the Russian Revolution he stayed in what was now the Red Army, at least for a time. Once Termen's Army service was over, he started working under Ioffe, working with him on practical applications of the audion, the first amplifying vacuum tube. The first one he found was that the natural capacitance of a human body when standing near a circuit can change the capacity of the circuit. He used that to create an invisible burglar alarm -- there was an antenna sending out radio waves, and if someone came within the transmitting field of the antenna, that would cause a switch to flip and a noise to be sounded. He was then asked to create a device for measuring the density of gases, outputting a different frequency for different densities. Because gas density can have lots of minor fluctuations because of air currents and so forth, he built a circuit that would cut out all the many harmonics from the audions he was using and give just the main frequency as a single pure tone, which he could listen to with headphones. That way,  slight changes in density would show up as a slight change in the tone he heard. But he noticed that again when he moved near the circuit, that changed the capacitance of the circuit and changed the tone he was hearing. He started moving his hand around near the circuit and getting different tones. The closer his hand got to the capacitor, the higher the note sounded. And if he shook his hand a little, he could get a vibrato, just like when he shook his hand while playing the cello. He got Ioffe to come and listen to him, and Ioffe said "That's an electronic Orpheus' lament!" [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop, "Mr. Theremin's Miserlou"] Termen figured out how to play Massenet's "Elegy" and Saint-Saens' "The Swan" using this system. Soon the students were all fascinated, telling each other "Termen plays Gluck on a voltmeter!" He soon figured out various refinements -- by combining two circuits, using the heterodyne principle, he could allow for far finer control. He added a second antenna, for volume control, to be used by the left hand -- the right hand would choose the notes, while the left hand would change the volume, meaning the instrument could be played without touching it at all. He called the instrument the "etherphone",  but other people started calling it the termenvox -- "Termen's voice". Termen's instrument was an immediate sensation, as was his automatic burglar alarm, and he was invited to demonstrate both of them to Lenin. Lenin was very impressed by Termen -- he wrote to Trotsky later talking about Termen's inventions, and how the automatic burglar alarm might reduce the number of guards needed to guard a perimeter. But he was also impressed by Termen's musical invention. Termen held his hands to play through the first half of a melody, before leaving the Russian leader to play the second half by himself -- apparently he made quite a good job of it. Because of Lenin's advocacy for his work, Termen was sent around the Soviet Union on a propaganda tour -- what was known as an "agitprop tour", in the familiar Soviet way of creating portmanteau words. In 1923 the first piece of music written specially for the instrument was performed by Termen himself with the Leningrad Philharmonic, Andrey Paschenko's Symphonic Mystery for Termenvox and Orchestra. The score for that was later lost, but has been reconstructed, and the piece was given a "second premiere" in 2020 [Excerpt: Andrey Paschenko, "Symphonic Mystery for Termenvox and Orchestra" ] But the musical instrument wasn't the only scientific innovation that Termen was working on. He thought he could reverse death itself, and bring the dead back to life.  He was inspired in this by the way that dead organisms could be perfectly preserved in the Siberian permafrost. He thought that if he could only freeze a dead person in the permafrost, he could then revive them later -- basically the same idea as the later idea of cryogenics, although Termen seems to have thought from the accounts I've read that all it would take would be to freeze and then thaw them, and not to have considered the other things that would be necessary to bring them back to life. Termen made two attempts to actually do this, or at least made preliminary moves in that direction. The first came when his assistant, a twenty-year-old woman, died of pneumonia. Termen was heartbroken at the death of someone so young, who he'd liked a great deal, and was convinced that if he could just freeze her body for a while he could soon revive her. He talked with Ioffe about this -- Ioffe was friends with the girl's family -- and Ioffe told him that he thought that he was probably right and probably could revive her. But he also thought that it would be cruel to distress the girl's parents further by discussing it with them, and so Termen didn't get his chance to experiment. He was even keener on trying his technique shortly afterwards, when Lenin died. Termen was a fervent supporter of the Revolution, and thought Lenin was a great man whose leadership was still needed -- and he had contacts within the top echelons of the Kremlin. He got in touch with them as soon as he heard of Lenin's death, in an attempt to get the opportunity to cryopreserve his corpse and revive him. Sadly, by this time it was too late. Lenin's brain had been pickled, and so the opportunity to resurrect him as a zombie Lenin was denied forever. Termen was desperately interested in the idea of bringing people back from the dead, and he wanted to pursue it further with his lab, but he was also being pushed to give demonstrations of his music, as well as doing security work -- Ioffe, it turned out, was also working as a secret agent, making various research trips to Germany that were also intended to foment Communist revolution. For now, Termen was doing more normal security work -- his burglar alarms were being used to guard bank vaults and the like, but this was at the order of the security state. But while Termen was working on his burglar alarms and musical instruments and attempts to revive dead dictators, his main project was his doctoral work, which was on the TV. We've said before in this podcast that there's no first anything, and that goes just as much for inventions as it does for music. Most inventions build on work done by others, which builds on work done by others, and so there were a lot of people building prototype TVs at this point. In Britain we tend to say "the inventor of the TV" was John Logie Baird, but Baird was working at the same time as people like the American Charles Francis Jenkins and the Japanese inventor Kenjiro Takayanagi, all of them building on earlier work by people like Archibald Low. Termen's prototype TV, the first one in Russia, came slightly later than any of those people, but was created more or less independently, and was more advanced in several ways, with a bigger screen and better resolution. Shortly after Lenin's death, Termen was invited to demonstrate his invention to Stalin, who professed himself amazed at the "magic mirror". [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop, "Astronauts in Trouble"] Termen was sent off to tour Europe giving demonstrations of his inventions, particularly his musical instrument. It was on this trip that he started using the Romanisation "Leon Theremin", and this is how Western media invariably referred to him. Rather than transliterate the Cyrillic spelling of his birth name, he used the French spelling his Huguenot ancestors had used before they emigrated to Russia, and called himself Leo or Leon rather than Lev. He was known throughout his life by both names, but said to a journalist in 1928 "First of all, I am not Tair-uh-MEEN. I wrote my name with French letters for French pronunciation. I am Lev Sergeyevich Tair-MEN.". We will continue to call him Termen, partly because he expressed that mild preference (though again, he definitely went by both names through choice) but also to distinguish him from the instrument, because while his invention remained known in Russia as the termenvox, in the rest of the world it became known as the theremin. He performed at the Paris Opera, and the New York Times printed a review saying "Some musicians were extremely pessimistic about the possibilities of the device, because at times M. Theremin played lamentably out of tune. But the finest Stradivarius, in the hands of a tyro, can give forth frightful sounds. The fact that the inventor was able to perform certain pieces with absolute precision proves that there remains to be solved only questions of practice and technique." Termen also came to the UK, where he performed in front of an audience including George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Henry Wood and others. Arnold Bennett was astonished, but Bernard Shaw, who had very strong opinions about music, as anyone who has read his criticism will be aware, compared the sound unfavourably to that of a comb and paper. After performing in Europe, Termen made his way to the US, to continue his work of performance, propagandising for the Soviet Revolution, and trying to license the patents for his inventions, to bring money both to him and to the Soviet state. He entered the US on a six-month visitor's visa, but stayed there for eleven years, renewing the visa every six months. His initial tour was a success, though at least one open-air concert had to be cancelled because, as the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker put it, "the weather on Saturday took such a counter-revolutionary turn". Nicolas Slonimsky, the musicologist we've encountered several times before, and who would become part of Termen's circle in the US, reviewed one of the performances, and described the peculiar audiences that Termen was getting -- "a considerable crop of ladies and gentlemen engaged in earnest exploration of the Great Beyond...the mental processes peculiar to believers in cosmic vibrations imparted a beatific look to some of the listeners. Boston is a seat of scientific religion; before he knows it Professor Theremin may be proclaimed Krishnamurti and sanctified as a new deity". Termen licensed his patents on the invention to RCA, who in 1929 started mass-producing the first ever theremins for general use. Termen also started working with the conductor Leopold Stokowski, including developing a new kind of theremin for Stokowski's orchestra to use, one with a fingerboard played like a cello. Stokowski said "I believe we shall have orchestras of these electric instruments. Thus will begin a new era in music history, just as modern materials and methods of construction have produced a new era of architecture." Possibly of more interest to the wider public, Lennington Sherwell, the son of an RCA salesman, took up the theremin professionally, and joined the band of Rudy Vallee, one of the most popular singers of the period. Vallee was someone who constantly experimented with new sounds, and has for example been named as the first band leader to use an electric banjo, and Vallee liked the sound of the theremin so much he ordered a custom-built left-handed one for himself. Sherwell stayed in Vallee's band for quite a while, and performed with him on the radio and in recording sessions, but it's very difficult to hear him in any of the recordings -- the recording equipment in use in 1930 was very primitive, and Vallee had a very big band with a lot of string and horn players, and his arrangements tended to have lots of instruments playing in unison rather than playing individual lines that are easy to differentiate. On top of that, the fashion at the time when playing the instrument was to try and have it sound as much like other instruments as possible -- to duplicate the sound of a cello or violin or clarinet, rather than to lean in to the instrument's own idiosyncracies. I *think* though that I can hear Sherwell's playing in the instrumental break of Vallee's big hit "You're Driving Me Crazy" -- certainly it was recorded at the time that Sherwell was in the band, and there's an instrument in there with a very pure tone, but quite a lot of vibrato, in the mid range, that seems only to be playing in the break and not the rest of the song. I'm not saying this is *definitely* a theremin solo on one of the biggest hits of 1930, but I'm not saying it's not, either: [Excerpt: Rudy Vallee, "You're Driving Me Crazy" ] Termen also invented a light show to go along with his instrument -- the illumovox, which had a light shining through a strip of gelatin of different colours, which would be rotated depending on the pitch of the theremin, so that lower notes would cause the light to shine a deep red, while the highest notes would make it shine a light blue, with different shades in between. By 1930, though, Termen's fortunes had started to turn slightly. Stokowski kept using theremins in the orchestra for a while, especially the fingerboard models to reinforce the bass, but they caused problems. As Slonimsky said "The infrasonic vibrations were so powerful...that they hit the stomach physically, causing near-nausea in the double-bass section of the orchestra". Fairly soon, the Theremin was overtaken by other instruments, like the ondes martenot, an instrument very similar to the theremin but with more precise control, and with a wider range of available timbres. And in 1931, RCA was sued by another company for patent infringement with regard to the Theremin -- the De Forest Radio Company had patents around the use of vacuum tubes in music, and they claimed damages of six thousand dollars, plus RCA had to stop making theremins. Since at the time, RCA had only made an initial batch of five hundred instruments total, and had sold 485 of them, many of them as promotional loss-leaders for future batches, they had actually made a loss of three hundred dollars even before the six thousand dollar damages, and decided not to renew their option on Termen's patents. But Termen was still working on his musical ideas. Slonimsky also introduced Termen to the avant-garde composer and theosophist Henry Cowell, who was interested in experimental sounds, and used to do things like play the strings inside the piano to get a different tone: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell was part of a circle of composers and musicologists that included Edgard Varese, Charles Ives, and Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford, who Cowell would introduce to each other. Crawford would later marry Seeger, and they would have several children together, including the folk singer Peggy Seeger, and Crawford would also adopt Seeger's son Pete. Cowell and Termen would together invent the rhythmicon, the first ever drum machine, though the rhythmicon could play notes as well as rhythms. Only two rhythmicons were made while Termen was in the US. The first was owned by Cowell. The second, improved, model was bought by Charles Ives, but bought as a gift for Cowell and Slonimsky to use in their compositions. Sadly, both rhythmicons eventually broke down, and no recording of either is known to exist. Termen started to get further and further into debt, especially as the Great Depression started to hit, and he also had a personal loss -- he'd been training a student and had fallen in love with her, although he was married. But when she married herself, he cut off all ties with her, though Clara Rockmore would become one of the few people to use the instrument seriously and become a real virtuoso on it. He moved into other fields, all loosely based around the same basic ideas of detecting someone's distance from an object. He built electronic gun detectors for Alcatraz and Sing-Sing prisons, and he came up with an altimeter for aeroplanes. There was also a "magic mirror" -- glass that appeared like a mirror until it was backlit, at which point it became transparent. This was put into shop windows along with a proximity detector -- every time someone stepped close to look at their reflection, the reflection would disappear and be replaced with the objects behind the mirror. He was also by this point having to spy for the USSR on a more regular basis. Every week he would meet up in a cafe with two diplomats from the Russian embassy, who would order him to drink several shots of vodka -- the idea was that they would loosen his inhibitions enough that he would not be able to hide things from them -- before he related various bits of industrial espionage he'd done for them. Having inventions of his own meant he was able to talk with engineers in the aerospace industry and get all sorts of bits of information that would otherwise not have been available, and he fed this back to Moscow. He eventually divorced his first wife, and remarried -- a Black American dancer many years his junior named Lavinia Williams, who would be the great love of his life. This caused some scandal in his social circle, more because of her race than the age gap. But by 1938 he had to leave the US. He'd been there on a six-month visa, which had been renewed every six months for more than a decade, and he'd also not been paying income tax and was massively in debt. He smuggled himself back to the USSR, but his wife was, at the last minute, not allowed on to the ship with him. He'd had to make the arrangements in secret, and hadn't even told her of the plans, so the first she knew was when he disappeared. He would later claim that the Soviets had told him she would be sent for two weeks later, but she had no knowledge of any of this. For decades, Lavinia would not even know if her husband was dead or alive. [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop, "Astronauts in Trouble"] When Termen got back to the USSR, he found it had changed beyond recognition. Stalin's reign of terror was now well underway, and not only could he not find a job, most of the people who he'd been in contact with at the top of the Kremlin had been purged. Termen was himself arrested and tortured into signing a false confession to counter-revolutionary activities and membership of fascist organisations. He was sentenced to eight years in a forced labour camp, which in reality was a death sentence -- it was expected that workers there would work themselves to death on starvation rations long before their sentences were up -- but relatively quickly he was transferred to a special prison where people with experience of aeronautical design were working. He was still a prisoner, but in conditions not too far removed from normal civilian life, and allowed to do scientific and technical work with some of the greatest experts in the field -- almost all of whom had also been arrested in one purge or another. One of the pieces of work Termen did was at the direct order of Laventy Beria, Stalin's right-hand man and the architect of most of the terrors of the Stalinist regime. In Spring 1945, while the USA and USSR were still supposed to be allies in World War II, Beria wanted to bug the residence of the US ambassador, and got Termen to design a bug that would get past all the normal screenings. The bug that Termen designed was entirely passive and unpowered -- it did nothing unless a microwave beam of a precise frequency was beamed at it, and only then did it start transmitting. It was placed in a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States, presented to the ambassador by a troupe of scouts as a gesture of friendship between the two countries. The wood in the eagle's beak was thin enough to let the sound through. It remained there for seven years, through the tenures of four ambassadors, only being unmasked when a British radio operator accidentally tuned to the frequency it was transmitting on and was horrified to hear secret diplomatic conversations. Upon its discovery, the US couldn't figure out how it worked, and eventually shared the information with MI5, who took eighteen months to reverse-engineer Termen's bug and come up with their own, which remained the standard bug in use for about a decade. The CIA's own attempts to reverse-engineer it failed altogether. It was also Termen who came up with that well-known bit of spycraft -- focussing an infra-red beam on a window pane, to use it to pick up the sound of conversations happening in the room behind it. Beria was so pleased with Termen's inventions that he got Termen to start bugging Stalin himself, so Beria would be able to keep track of Stalin's whims. Termen performed such great services for Beria that Beria actually allowed him to go free not long after his sentence was served. Not only that, but Beria nominated Termen for the Stalin Award, Class II, for his espionage work -- and Stalin, not realising that Termen had been bugging *him* as well as foreign powers, actually upgraded that to a Class I, the highest honour the Soviet state gave. While Termen was free, he found himself at a loose end, and ended up volunteering to work for the organisation he had been working for -- which went by many names but became known as the KGB from the 1950s onwards. He tried to persuade the government to let Lavinia, who he hadn't seen in eight years, come over and join him, but they wouldn't even allow him to contact her, and he eventually remarried. Meanwhile, after Stalin's death, Beria was arrested for his crimes, and charged under the same law that he had had Termen convicted under. Beria wasn't as lucky as Termen, though, and was executed. By 1964, Termen had had enough of the KGB, because they wanted him to investigate obvious pseudoscience -- they wanted him to look into aliens, UFOs, ESP... and telepathy. [Excerpt, The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (early version)" "She's already working on my brain"] He quit and went back to civilian life.  He started working in the acoustics lab in Moscow Conservatory, although he had to start at the bottom because everything he'd been doing for more than a quarter of a century was classified. He also wrote a short book on electronic music. In the late sixties an article on him was published in the US -- the first sign any of his old friends had that he'd not  died nearly thirty years earlier. They started corresponding with him, and he became a minor celebrity again, but this was disapproved of by the Soviet government -- electronic music was still considered bourgeois decadence and not suitable for the Soviet Union, and all his instruments were smashed and he was sacked from the conservatory. He continued working in various technical jobs until the 1980s, and still continued inventing refinements of the theremin, although he never had any official support for his work. In the eighties, a writer tried to get him some sort of official recognition -- the Stalin Prize was secret -- and the university at which he was working sent a reply saying, in part, "L.S. Termen took part in research conducted by the department as an ordinary worker and he did not show enough creative activity, nor does he have any achievements on the basis of which he could be recommended for a Government decoration." By this time he was living in shared accommodation with a bunch of other people, one room to himself and using a shared bathroom, kitchen, and so on. After Glasnost he did some interviews and was asked about this, and said "I never wanted to make demands and don't want to now. I phoned the housing department about three months ago and inquired about my turn to have a new flat. The woman told me that my turn would come in five or six years. Not a very reassuring answer if one is ninety-two years old." In 1989 he was finally allowed out of the USSR again, for the first time in fifty-one years, to attend a UNESCO sponsored symposium on electronic music. Among other things, he was given, forty-eight years late, a letter that his old colleague Edgard Varese had sent about his composition Ecuatorial, which had originally been written for theremin. Varese had wanted to revise the work, and had wanted to get modified theremins that could do what he wanted, and had asked the inventor for help, but the letter had been suppressed by the Soviet government. When he got no reply, Varese had switched to using ondes martenot instead. [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ecuatorial"] In the 1970s, after the death of his third wife, Termen had started an occasional correspondence with his second wife, Lavinia, the one who had not been able to come with him to the USSR and hadn't known if he was alive for so many decades. She was now a prominent activist in Haiti, having established dance schools in many Caribbean countries, and Termen still held out hope that they could be reunited, even writing her a letter in 1988 proposing remarriage. But sadly, less than a month after Termen's first trip outside the USSR, she died -- officially of a heart attack or food poisoning, but there's a strong suspicion that she was murdered by the military dictatorship for her closeness to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the pro-democracy activist who later became President of Haiti. Termen was finally allowed to join the Communist Party in the spring of 1991, just before the USSR finally dissolved -- he'd been forbidden up to that point because of his conviction for counter-revolutionary crimes. He was asked by a Western friend why he'd done that when everyone else was trying to *leave* the Communist Party, and he explained that he'd made a promise to Lenin. In his final years he was researching immortality, going back to the work he had done in his youth, working with biologists, trying to find a way to restore elderly bodies to youthful vigour. But sadly he died in 1993, aged ninety-seven, before he achieved his goal. On one of his last trips outside the USSR, in 1991, he visited the US, and in California he finally got to hear the song that most people associate with his invention, even though it didn't actually feature a theremin: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"] Back in the 1930s, when he was working with Slonimsky and Varese and Ives and the rest, Termen had set up the Theremin Studio, a sort of experimental arts lab, and in 1931 he had invited the musicologist, composer, and theoretician Joseph Schillinger to become a lecturer there. Schillinger had been one of the first composers to be really interested in the theremin, and had composed a very early piece written specifically for the instrument, the First Airphonic Suite: [Excerpt: Joseph Schillinger, "First Airphonic Suite"] But he was most influential as a theoretician. Schillinger believed that all of the arts were susceptible to rigorous mathematical analysis, and that you could use that analysis to generate new art according to mathematical principles, art that would be perfect. Schillinger planned to work with Termen to try to invent a machine that could compose, perform, and transmit music. The idea was that someone would be able to tune in a radio and listen to a piece of music in real time as it was being algorithmically composed and transmitted. The two men never achieved this, but Schillinger became very, very, respected as someone with a rigorous theory of musical structure -- though reading his magnum opus, the Schillinger System of Musical Composition, is frankly like wading through treacle. I'll read a short excerpt just to give an idea of his thinking: "On the receiving end, phasic stimuli produced by instruments encounter a metamorphic auditory integrator. This integrator represents the auditory apparatus as a whole and is a complex interdependent system. It consists of two receivers (ears), transmitters, auditory nerves, and a transformer, the auditory braincenter.  The response to a stimulus is integrated both quantitatively and selectively. The neuronic energy of response becomes the psychonic energy of auditory image. The response to stimuli and the process of integration are functional operations and, as such, can be described in mathematical terms , i.e., as  synchronization, addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc. But these integrative processes alone do not constitute the material of orchestration either.  The auditory image, whether resulting from phasic stimuli of an excitor or from selfstimulation of the auditory brain-center, can be described only in Psychological terms, of loudness, pitch, quality, etc. This leads us to the conclusion that the material of orchestration can be defined only as a group of conditions under which an integrated image results from a sonic stimulus subjected to an auditory response.  This constitutes an interdependent tripartite system, in which the existence of one component necessitates the existence of two others. The composer can imagine an integrated sonic form, yet he cannot transmit it to the auditor (unless telepathicaliy) without sonic stimulus and hearing apparatus." That's Schillinger's way of saying that if a composer wants someone to hear the music they've written, the composer needs a musical instrument and the listener needs ears and a brain. This kind of revolutionary insight made Schillinger immensely sought after in the early 1930s, and among his pupils were the swing bandleaders Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, and the songwriter George Gershwin, who turned to Schillinger for advice when he was writing his opera Porgy and Bess: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, "Here Come De Honey Man"] Another of his pupils was the trombonist and arranger Glenn Miller, who at that time was a session player working in pickup studio bands for people like Red Nichols. Miller spent some time studying with him in the early thirties, and applied those lessons when given the job of putting together arrangements for Ray Noble, his first prominent job. In 1938 Glenn Miller walked into a strip joint to see a nineteen-year-old he'd been told to take a look at. This was another trombonist, Paul Tanner, who was at the time working as a backing musician for the strippers. Miller had recently broken up his first big band, after a complete lack of success, and was looking to put together a new big band, to play arrangements in the style he had worked out while working for Noble. As Tanner later put it "he said, `Well, how soon can you come with me?' I said, `I can come right now.' I told him I was all packed, I had my toothbrush in my pocket and everything. And so I went with him that night, and I stayed with him until he broke the band up in September 1942." The new band spent a few months playing the kind of gigs that an unknown band can get, but they soon had a massive success with a song Miller had originally written as an arranging exercise set for him by Schillinger, a song that started out under the title "Miller's Tune", but soon became known worldwide as "Moonlight Serenade": [Excerpt: Glenn Miller, "Moonlight Serenade"] The Miller band had a lot of lineup changes in the four and a bit years it was together, but other than Miller himself there were only four members who were with that group throughout its career, from the early dates opening for  Freddie Fisher and His Schnickelfritzers right through to its end as the most popular band in America. They were piano player Chummy MacGregor, clarinet player Wilbur Schwartz, tenor sax player Tex Beneke, and Tanner. They played on all of Miller's big hits, like "In the Mood" and "Chattanooga Choo-Choo": [Excerpt: Glenn Miller, "Chattanooga Choo-Choo"] But in September 1942, the band broke up as the members entered the armed forces, and Tanner found himself in the Army while Miller was in the Air Force, so while both played in military bands, they weren't playing together, and Miller disappeared over the Channel, presumed dead, in 1944. Tanner became a session trombonist, based in LA, and in 1958 he found himself on a session for a film soundtrack with Dr. Samuel Hoffman. I haven't been able to discover for sure which film this was for, but the only film on which Hoffman has an IMDB credit for that year is that American International Pictures classic, Earth Vs The Spider: [Excerpt: Earth Vs The Spider trailer] Hoffman was a chiropodist, and that was how he made most of his living, but as a teenager in the 1930s he had been a professional violin player under the name Hal Hope. One of the bands he played in was led by a man named Jolly Coburn, who had seen Rudy Vallee's band with their theremin and decided to take it up himself. Hoffman had then also got a theremin, and started his own all-electronic trio, with a Hammond organ player, and with a cello-style fingerboard theremin played by William Schuman, the future Pulitzer Prize winning composer. By the 1940s, Hoffman was a full-time doctor, but he'd retained his Musicians' Union card just in case the odd gig came along, and then in 1945 he received a call from Miklos Rozsa, who was working on the soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock's new film, Spellbound. Rozsa had tried to get Clara Rockmore, the one true virtuoso on the theremin playing at the time, to play on the soundtrack, but she'd refused -- she didn't do film soundtrack work, because in her experience they only wanted her to play on films about ghosts or aliens, and she thought it damaged the dignity of the instrument. Rozsa turned to the American Federation of Musicians, who as it turned out had precisely one theremin player who could read music and wasn't called Clara Rockmore on their books. So Dr. Samuel Hoffman, chiropodist, suddenly found himself playing on one of the most highly regarded soundtracks of one of the most successful films of the forties: [Excerpt: Miklos Rozsa, "Spellbound"] Rozsa soon asked Hoffman to play on another soundtrack, for the Billy Wilder film The Lost Weekend, another of the great classics of late forties cinema. Both films' soundtracks were nominated for the Oscar, and Spellbound's won, and Hoffman soon found himself in demand as a session player. Hoffman didn't have any of Rockmore's qualms about playing on science fiction and horror films, and anyone with any love of the genre will have heard his playing on genre classics like The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T, The Thing From Another World, It Came From Outer Space, and of course Bernard Hermann's score for The Day The Earth Stood Still: [Excerpt: The Day The Earth Stood Still score] As well as on such less-than-classics as The Devil's Weed, Voodoo Island, The Mad Magician, and of course Billy The Kid Vs Dracula. Hoffman became something of a celebrity, and also recorded several albums of lounge music with a band led by Les Baxter, like the massive hit Music Out Of The Moon, featuring tracks like “Lunar Rhapsody”: [Excerpt: Samuel Hoffman, "Lunar Rhapsody”] [Excerpt: Neil Armstrong] That voice you heard there was Neil Armstrong, on Apollo 11 on its way back from the moon. He took a tape of Hoffman's album with him. But while Hoffman was something of a celebrity in the fifties, the work dried up almost overnight in 1958 when he worked at that session with Paul Tanner. The theremin is a very difficult instrument to play, and while Hoffman was a good player, he wasn't a great one -- he was getting the work because he was the best in a very small pool of players, not because he was objectively the best there could be. Tanner noticed that Hoffman was having quite some difficulty getting the pitching right in the session, and realised that the theremin must be a very difficult instrument to play because it had no markings at all. So he decided to build an instrument that had the same sound, but that was more sensibly controlled than just waving your hands near it. He built his own invention, the electrotheremin, in less than a week, despite never before having had any experience in electrical engineering. He built it using an oscillator, a length of piano wire and a contact switch that could be slid up and down the wire, changing the pitch. Two days after he finished building it, he was in the studio, cutting his own equivalent of Hoffman's forties albums, Music For Heavenly Bodies, including a new exotica version of "Moonlight Serenade", the song that Glenn Miller had written decades earlier as an exercise for Schillinger: [Excerpt: Paul Tanner, "Moonlight Serenade"] Not only could the electrotheremin let the player control the pitch more accurately, but it could also do staccato notes easily -- something that's almost impossible with an actual theremin. And, on top of that, Tanner was cheaper than Hoffman. An instrumentalist hired to play two instruments is paid extra, but not as much extra as paying for another musician to come to the session, and since Tanner was a first-call trombone player who was likely to be at the session *anyway*, you might as well hire him if you want a theremin sound, rather than paying for Hoffman. Tanner was an excellent musician -- he was a professor of music at UCLA as well as being a session player, and he authored one of the standard textbooks on jazz -- and soon he had cornered the market, leaving Hoffman with only the occasional gig. We will actually be seeing Hoffman again, playing on a session for an artist we're going to look at in a couple of months, but in LA in the early sixties, if you wanted a theremin sound, you didn't hire a theremin player, you hired Paul Tanner to play his electrotheremin -- though the instrument was so obscure that many people didn't realise he wasn't actually playing a theremin. Certainly Brian Wilson seems to have thought he was when he hired him for "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times"] We talked briefly about that track back in the episode on "God Only Knows",   but three days after recording that, Tanner was called back into the studio for another session on which Brian Wilson wanted a theremin sound. This was a song titled "Good, Good, Good Vibrations", and it was inspired by a conversation he'd had with his mother as a child. He'd asked her why dogs bark at some people and not at others, and she'd said that dogs could sense vibrations that people sent out, and some people had bad vibrations and some had good ones. It's possible that this came back to mind as he was planning the Pet Sounds album, which of course ends with the sound of his own dogs barking. It's also possible that he was thinking more generally about ideas like telepathy -- he had been starting to experiment with acid by this point, and was hanging around with a crowd of people who were proto-hippies, and reading up on a lot of the mystical ideas that were shared by those people. As we saw in the last episode, there was a huge crossover between people who were being influenced by drugs, people who were interested in Eastern religion, and people who were interested in what we now might think of as pseudo-science but at the time seemed to have a reasonable amount of validity, things like telepathy and remote viewing. Wilson had also had exposure from an early age to people claiming psychic powers. Jo Ann Marks, the Wilson family's neighbour and the mother of former Beach Boy David Marks, later had something of a minor career as a psychic to the stars (at least according to obituaries posted by her son) and she would often talk about being able to sense "vibrations". The record Wilson started out making in February 1966 with the Wrecking Crew was intended as an R&B single, and was also intended to sound *strange*: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-02-18"] At this stage, the song he was working on was a very straightforward verse-chorus structure, and it was going to be an altogether conventional pop song. The verses -- which actually ended up used in the final single, are dominated by organ and Ray Pohlman's bass: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-02-18"] These bear a strong resemblance to the verses of "Here Today", on the Pet Sounds album which the Beach Boys were still in the middle of making: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Here Today (instrumental)"] But the chorus had far more of an R&B feel than anything the Beach Boys had done before: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-02-18"] It did, though, have precedent. The origins of the chorus feel come from "Can I Get a Witness?", a Holland-Dozier-Holland song that had been a hit for Marvin Gaye in 1963: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Can I Get a Witness?"] The Beach Boys had picked up on that, and also on its similarity to the feel of Lonnie Mack's instrumental cover version of Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee", which, retitled "Memphis", had also been a hit in 1963, and in 1964 they recorded an instrumental which they called "Memphis Beach" while they were recording it but later retitled "Carl's Big Chance", which was credited to Brian and Carl Wilson, but was basically just playing the "Can I Get a Witness" riff over twelve-bar blues changes, with Carl doing some surf guitar over the top: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Carl's Big Chance"] The "Can I Get a Witness" feel had quickly become a standard piece of the musical toolkit – you might notice the resemblance between that riff and the “talking 'bout my generation” backing vocals on “My Generation” by the Who, for example. It was also used on "The Boy From New York City", a hit on Red Bird Records by the Ad-Libs: [Excerpt: The Ad-Libs, "The Boy From New York City"] The Beach Boys had definitely been aware of that record -- on their 1965 album Summer Days... And Summer Nights! they recorded an answer song to it, "The Girl From New York City": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "The Girl From New York City"] And you can see how influenced Brian was by the Ad-Libs record by laying the early instrumental takes of the "Good Vibrations" chorus from this February session under the vocal intro of "The Boy From New York City". It's not a perfect match, but you can definitely hear that there's an influence there: [Excerpt: "The Boy From New York City"/"Good Vibrations"] A few days later, Brian had Carl Wilson overdub some extra bass, got a musician in to do a jaw harp overdub, and they also did a guide vocal, which I've sometimes seen credited to Brian and sometimes Carl, and can hear as both of them depending on what I'm listening for. This guide vocal used a set of placeholder lyrics written by Brian's collaborator Tony Asher, which weren't intended to be a final lyric: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (first version)"] Brian then put the track away for a month, while he continued work on the Pet Sounds album. At this point, as best we can gather, he was thinking of it as something of a failed experiment. In the first of the two autobiographies credited to Brian (one whose authenticity is dubious, as it was largely put together by a ghostwriter and Brian later said he'd never even read it) he talks about how he was actually planning to give the song to Wilson Pickett rather than keep it for the Beach Boys, and one can definitely imagine a Wilson Pickett version of the song as it was at this point. But Brian's friend Danny Hutton, at that time still a minor session singer who had not yet gone on to form the group that would become Three Dog Night, asked Brian if *he* could have the song if Brian wasn't going to use it. And this seems to have spurred Brian into rethinking the whole song. And in doing so he was inspired by his very first ever musical memory. Brian has talked a lot about how the first record he remembers hearing was when he was two years old, at his maternal grandmother's house, where he heard the Glenn Miller version of "Rhapsody in Blue", a three-minute cut-down version of Gershwin's masterpiece, on which Paul Tanner had of course coincidentally played: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, "Rhapsody in Blue"] Hearing that music, which Brian's mother also played for him a lot as a child, was one of the most profoundly moving experiences of Brian's young life, and "Rhapsody in Blue" has become one of those touchstone pieces that he returns to again and again. He has recorded studio versions of it twice, in the mid-nineties with Van Dyke Parks: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, "Rhapsody in Blue"] and in 2010 with his solo band, as the intro and outro of an album of Gershwin covers: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson, "Rhapsody in Blue"] You'll also often see clips of him playing "Rhapsody in Blue" when sat at the piano -- it's one of his go-to songs. So he decided he was going to come up with a song that was structured like "Rhapsody in Blue" -- what publicist Derek Taylor would later describe as a "pocket symphony", but "pocket rhapsody" would possibly be a better term for it. It was going to be one continuous song, but in different sections that would have different instrumentation and different feelings to them -- he'd even record them in different studios to get different sounds for them, though he would still often have the musicians run through the whole song in each studio. He would mix and match the sections in the edit. His second attempt to record the whole track, at the start of April, gave a sign of what he was attempting, though he would not end up using any of the material from this session: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-04-09" around 02:34] Nearly a month later, on the fourth of May, he was back in the studio -- this time in Western Studios rather than Gold Star where the previous sessions had been held, with yet another selection of musicians from the Wrecking Crew, plus Tanner, to record another version. This time, part of the session was used for the bridge for the eventual single: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations: Western 1966-05-04 Second Chorus and Fade"] On the twenty-fourth of May the Wrecking Crew, with Carl Wilson on Fender bass (while Lyle Ritz continued to play string bass, and Carol Kaye, who didn't end up on the finished record at all, but who was on many of the unused sessions, played Danelectro), had another attempt at the track, this time in Sunset Studios: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations: Sunset Sound 1966-05-24 (Parts 2&3)"] Three days later, another group of musicians, with Carl now switched to rhythm guitar, were back in Western Studios recording this: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations: Western 1966-05-27 Part C" from 2:52] The fade from that session was used in the final track. A few days later they were in the studio again, a smaller group of people with Carl on guitar and Brian on piano, along with Don Randi on electric harpsichord, Bill Pitman on electric bass, Lyle Ritz on string bass and Hal Blaine on drums. This time there seems to have been another inspiration, though I've never heard it mentioned as an influence. In March, a band called The Association, who were friends with the Beach Boys, had released their single "Along Comes Mary", and by June it had become a big hit: [Excerpt: The Association, "Along Comes Mary"] Now the fuzz bass part they were using on the session on the second of June sounds to my ears very, very, like that intro: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (Inspiration) Western 1966-06-02" from 01:47] That session produced the basic track that was used for the choruses on the final single, onto which the electrotheremin was later overdubbed as Tanner wasn't at that session. Some time around this point, someone suggested to Brian that they should use a cello along with the electrotheremin in the choruses, playing triplets on the low notes. Brian has usually said that this was Carl's idea, while Brian's friend Van Dyke Parks has always said that he gave Brian the idea. Both seem quite certain of this, and neither has any reason to lie, so I suspect what might have happened is that Parks gave Brian the initial idea to have a cello on the track, while Carl in the studio suggested having it specifically play triplets. Either way, a cello part by Jesse Erlich was added to those choruses. There were more sessions in June, but everything from those sessions was scrapped. At some point around this time, Mike Love came up with a bass vocal lyric, which he sang along with the bass in the choruses in a group vocal session. On August the twenty-fourth, two months after what one would think at this point was the final instrumental session, a rough edit of the track was pulled together. By this point the chorus had altered quite a bit. It had originally just been eight bars of G-flat, four bars of B-flat, then four more bars of G-flat. But now Brian had decided to rework an idea he had used in "California Girls". In that song, each repetition of the line "I wish they all could be California" starts a tone lower than the one before. Here, after the bass hook line is repeated, everything moves up a step, repeats the line, and then moves up another step: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: [Alternate Edit] 1966-08-24"] But Brian was dissatisfied with this version of the track. The lyrics obviously still needed rewriting, but more than that, there was a section he thought needed totally rerecording -- this bit: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: [Alternate Edit] 1966-08-24"] So on the first of September, six and a half months after the first instrumental session for the song, the final one took place. This had Dennis Wilson on organ, Tommy Morgan on harmonicas, Lyle Ritz on string bass, and Hal Blaine and Carl Wilson on percussion, and replaced that with a new, gentler, version: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations (Western 1966-09-01) [New Bridge]"] Well, that was almost the final instrumental session -- they called Paul Tanner in to a vocal overdub session to redo some of the electrotheremin parts, but that was basically it. Now all they had to do was do the final vocals. Oh, and they needed some proper lyrics. By this point Brian was no longer working with Tony Asher. He'd started working with Van Dyke Parks on some songs, but Parks wasn't interested in stepping into a track that had already been worked on so long, so Brian eventually turned to Mike Love, who'd already come up with the bass vocal hook, to write the lyrics. Love wrote them in the car, on the way to the studio, dictating them to his wife as he drove, and they're actually some of his best work. The first verse grounds everything in the sensory, in the earthy. He makes a song originally about *extra* -sensory perception into one about sensory perception -- the first verse covers sight, sound, and smell: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"] Carl Wilson was chosen to sing the lead vocal, but you'll notice a slight change in timbre on the line "I hear the sound of a" -- that's Brian stepping into double him on the high notes. Listen again: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"] For the second verse, Love's lyric moves from the sensory grounding of the first verse to the extrasensory perception that the song has always been about, with the protagonist knowing things about the woman who's the object of the song without directly perceiving them. The record is one of those where I wish I was able to play the whole thing for you, because it's a masterpiece of structure, and of editing, and of dynamics. It's also a record that even now is impossible to replicate properly on stage, though both its writers in their live performances come very close. But while someone in the audience for either the current touring Beach Boys led by Mike Love or for Brian Wilson's solo shows might come away thinking "that sounded just like the record", both have radically different interpretations of it even while sticking close to the original arrangement. The touring Beach Boys' version is all throbbing strangeness, almost garage-rock, emphasising the psychedelia of the track: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (live 2014)"] While Brian Wilson's live version is more meditative, emphasising the gentle aspects: [Excerpt Brian Wilson, "Good Vibrations (live at the Roxy)"] But back in 1966, there was definitely no way to reproduce it live with a five-person band. According to Tanner, they actually asked him if he would tour with them, but he refused -- his touring days were over, and also he felt he would look ridiculous, a middle-aged man on stage with a bunch of young rock and roll stars, though apparently they offered to buy him a wig so he wouldn't look so out of place. When he wouldn't tour with them, they asked him where they could get a theremin, and he pointed them in the direction of Robert Moog. Moog -- whose name is spelled M-o-o-g and often mispronounced "moog", had been a teenager in 1949, when he'd seen a schematic for a theremin in an electronic hobbyist magazine, after Samuel Hoffman had brought the instrument back into the limelight. He'd built his own, and started building others to sell to other hobbyists, and had also started branching out into other electronic instruments by the mid-sixties. His small company was the only one still manufacturing actual theremins, but when the Beach Boys came to him and asked him for one, they found it very difficult to control, and asked him if he could do anything simpler. He came up with a ribbon-controlled oscillator, on the same principle as Tanner's electro-theremin, but even simpler to operate, and the Beach Boys bought it and gave it to Mike Love to play on stage. All he had to do was run his finger up and down a metallic ribbon, with the positions of the notes marked on it, and it would come up with a good approximation of the electro-theremin sound. Love played this "woo-woo machine" as he referred to it, on stage for several years: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (live in Hawaii 8/26/67)"] Moog was at the time starting to build his first synthesisers, and having developed that ribbon-control mechanism he decided to include it in the early models as one of several different methods of controlling the Moog synthesiser, the instrument that became synonymous with the synthesiser in the late sixties and early seventies: [Excerpt: Gershon Kingsley and Leonid Hambro, "Rhapsody in Blue" from Switched-On Gershwin] "Good Vibrations" became the Beach Boys' biggest ever hit -- their third US number one, and their first to make number one in the UK. Brian Wilson had managed, with the help of his collaborators, to make something that combined avant-garde psychedelic music and catchy pop hooks, a truly experimental record that was also a genuine pop classic. To this day, it's often cited as the greatest single of all time. But Brian knew he could do better. He could be even more progressive. He could make an entire album using the same techniques as "Good Vibrations", one where themes could recur, where sections could be edited together and songs could be constructed in the edit. Instead of a pocket symphony, he could make a full-blown teenage symphony to God. All he had to do was to keep looking forward, believe he could achieve his goal, and whatever happened, not lose his nerve and turn back. [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Smile Promo" ]

(Audio corregido, ahora se escucha correctamente. Si es necesario, por favor, descarga el episodio de nuevo. Disculpas por las molestias) Hoy ha venido a hablar con nosotros Victor Estrada, eminente compositor, productor, musicólogo, y por supuesto, el mejor thereminista que hay en España -y uno de los mejores del mundo. Junto a él, vamos a descubrir las peculiaridades del primer instrumento electrónico de la historia (que llegó a las masas, para ser precisos). Un instrumento que se toca... sin tocarlo. "Simplemente" moviendo las manos en el aire. Además, podrás escuchar algunas composiciones clásicas interpretadas por Clara Rockmore, la primera y mas importante thereminista de la historia (Vocalise, de Rachmaninov y Valse Sentimental de Tchaikovsky) además de una composición del propio Victor Estrada (Stalingrado). Si quieres saber más, visita el episodio del podcast en www.faq-mac.com

En aquest nou capítol de Viatge Electrònic amb l'Eva Manuel i les seves Dones Electròniques hem parlat de la Clara Rockmore. Amb en Raul Manzano hem seguit la seva aventura per el pop català parlant de b1nO. El nostre home història, l'Isma Palacios, ha seguit amb el seu monogràfic sobre l'electrònica als Estats Units i ens ha parlat de Devo. En Ramón Daví ha continuat amb la seva VInilada setmanal. Finalment l'Adrià Gázkez (Omega dB) ens ha parlat d'un virtuós de la mùsica com es Clark.

在逛博物館時，你有沒有注意到所有的藝術品都能放進博物館，唯獨音樂本身不行，因為音樂是時間的藝術，你沒辦法保留時間，你只能保留時間存在過的痕跡。 [bgm (opening)] Beethoven, Piano Sonata No.14, Op.27 No.2, "Moonlight", mvt III [bgm (clip)] Saint-Saëns, "The Swan (Theremin playes by Clara Rockmore) [bgn] Satie, Gymnopedies No.1, 2, 3 Powered by Firstory Hosting

Šiandien Vilniaus Gabijos gimnazijoje bus rodomas mokyklos jaunimo bendruomenės teatro „Alfonsas prie teatro“ miuziklas pagal Vytauto Kernagio kūrybą „Mažiau girių“. Kas paskatino sukurti tokį miuziklą? Atsakymo ieškome su režisiere Egle Meldaike.NFT yra gana naujas vardas vizualaus meno rinkoje, kasdien pritraukiantis vis didesnį susidomėjusių būrį. Įvairios jo išraiškos stebina savo išradingumu ir pasitelkiamomis technologijoms. Ekspertai prognozuoja, kad ši meno sritis ateityje tik augs. Plačiau apie tai – Aurimo Žukausko pasakojime.Muzika, išsiveržusi už Afrikos ribų. Muzika, šiandien padariusi įtaką ne vienam atlikėjui. O pati dainininkė šiandien sako norėjusi nedaug – kad jos dainas išgirstų afrikiečiai ir būtų žinoma, kad Pietų Afrikos muzika vis dar gyva. Dar ji norėjo grįžti namo – iš tolimųjų Jungtinių Amerikos Valstijų, į kurias teko išvykti dėl gimtojoje šalyje vyriausybės vykdytos rasinės segregacijos politikos. Letta Mbulu džiaugiasi, kad visą laiką darė tai, be ko neįsivaizdavo gyvenimo – dainavo. Plačiau apie Lettos Mbulu gyvenimo ir kūrybos vingius – Igno Gudelevičiaus pasakojime.„Iki šiol nesu girdėjusi nieko, kas tereminu grotų geriau ir gražiau nei Clara Rockmore“, – sako smuikininkė, dainininkė ir teremino atlikėja Katica Illenyi. Rytoj ji Kauno valstybinėje filharmonijoje pasirodys kartu su Kauno pučiamųjų orkestru „Ąžuolynas“, atverdama mums dar mažai pažįstamą Vilniuje gimusios teremino virtuozės Claros Rockmore pasaulį. Apie tai kalbėjomės su pačia Katica Illenyi ir kompozitore, Kauno santakos meno ir kultūros projektų vadove Zita Bružaite.Juvelyrika Giedrės Duoblės gyvenime nebuvo pirmasis pasirinkimas, tačiau jau kurį laiką sėkmingo prekės ženklo „57 Edges“ kūrėja savo kūrybinį potencialą įprasmina šioje srityje. Visai neseniai ji viešėjo unikaliuose Marinos Abramovič instituto rengiamuose kursuose, kuriuos galima pavadinti tikra „išgyvenimo mokykla“ – teko keturias dienas pamiršti apie maistą, mobiliuosius telefonus, atsigręžti į save ir netgi... skaičiuoti ryžius. Apie visą tai – pokalbis „Be kaukių“.Ved. Marius Eidukonis ir Rasa Murauskaitė

Dorit Chrysler has been dubbed a superior wizard of the theremin. An Austrian-born, New York-based composer, producer, and singer Chrysler is the co-founder of the New York Theremin Society and founder of the first school for theremin.  As much as the theremin is a tool in Chrysler's electronic instrument arsenal she's also one of the most visible thereminists spreading the gospel of this mysterious sounding instrument which is basically played by massaging thin air. Her music has been described by Ann Magnuson in Paper Magazin, “Imagine if Marianne Faithfull and Nikola Tesla had a love child with Jane Birkin as the nanny and Bjork as the wayward Girl Scout Leader!”  Arte TV calls Dorit “Theremin Goddess” Wall Street Journal  “A futuristic Lotte Lenya“   DoritChrysler.comhttps://www.facebook.com/doritchryslerofficial/ https://www.instagram.com/doritchrysler/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=WKmMRtuLfCc&list=UU2FnHcTW8yYhKX8WGQcKEsA&index=1 Resources Dorit mentions: New York Theremin Society - https://www.nythereminsociety.org/ Dorit at CERN Hadron Collider for 100th anniversary https://www.moogmusic.com/media/electric-storm-100-years-theremin The Theremin 100 - https://www.nythereminsociety.org/theremin-100-4 THEREMIN GOES BROADWAY I am happy to have contributed theremin for “FallingInLoveWithMr.Dellamort” a “mysterious new audio musical” by Jack Feldstein and Paul Doust with a tony-nominated cast -  released on Broadway Records and making a splash on Playbill https://www.playbill.com/article/falling-in-love-with-mr-dellamort-recording-with-james-monroe-iglehart-courtney-reed-telly-leung-released-july-23?fbclid=IwAR32wprk1L2NDb66_Lr0oz4BcDnhAVpE2Nqlx5-mQkg10AVCx2Hr1wZ0dkA In the podcast I used snippets from The Dark Shadows theme by Bob Cobert, Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys, and Clara Rockmore performing The Swan. ********************* Please fill out a 5-question survey at lizsumner.com/survey. Let me know when you're done and I'll send you a coupon code for my online course, 8 Steps to Launch Your Dream Life. (launchyourdreamlife.com) ********************* Remarks I've been fascinated by the theremin since 1966 when I used to watch Dark Shadows every day after school. Then of course the iconic sound of the instrument in Good Vibrations took the theremin out of the scary movie realm and into popular music. In 1993 we saw Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey in the theater and I learned more about the instrument's origin as the first electronic instrument invented in 1920. That's also where I learned of the amazing Clara Rockmore, Theremin's first virtuoso performer.  The idea of shaping sound in thin air with your hands intrigues me so much. I've never been patient enough to learn an instrument but I'm drawn to weirdness of a theremin.  My guest, Dorit Chrysler, is a virtuoso herself and a teacher. She's been playing for 20 years, and warns us that the theremin is difficult to learn. A lot of people start then give up. In our conversation Dorit describes her teaching approach and how to avoid some of the pitfalls that frustrate people so that they lose interest. I kicked myself a few years when I missed an opportunity to take a class with her locally.. I learned about it too late. I sincerely hope I'll get another chance. Here's the interview. Full transcript available at ialwayswantedto.net

Chapters00:34 - Introduction02:06 - Summary Of The Film02:52 - Why Make The Documentary?04:15 - Not Seeking Popularity 06:08 - Gathering Archive Footage07:22 - Narration by Laurie Anderson08:34 - The Women Tell Their Own Stories 09:32 - Sound Design Instead Of A Score12:21 - Marta Salogni On Her Influences 20:53 - Defining A New Genre Of Music 23:32 - Creating New Sounds And Composing With Tape 28:26 - Sound Design For The Film31:38 - The Challenges Of Composing For Film34:41 - The Importance Of Female Role Models36:29 - EndingThe film features Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne Amacher, Pauline Oliveros, Wendy Carlos, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani and Laurie Spiegel with commentary by Laurie Anderson.https://sisterswithtransistors.com/https://www.modernfilms.com/sisterswithtransistors (UK) https://metrograph.com/live-screenings/sisters-with-transistors/ (USA)Lisa Rovner BiogA French American artist and filmmaker, Lisa Rovner is now based in London with her work presented in art venues and theatres internationally. Her films delve into the archives and work to transform politics and philosophy into cinematic spectacle. Rovner has collaborated with some of the most internationally respected artists and brands including Pierre Huyghe, Liam Gillick, Sebastien Tellier, Maison Martin Margiela and Acne. Sisters With Transistors is her first feature documentary.www.messageisthemedium.comMarta Salogni BiogA record producer, mixer, recording engineer and tape composer, Marta Salogni launched her career in her native Italy, where she spent her early years collaborating with artists and bands across a range of musical styles. As a producer and mixer, Marta Salogni has worked with Björk, M.I.A., Factory Floor, Kelela, Liars, Alex Cameron, Daniel Blumberg, Little Boots, Temples, Insecure Men, The Orielles, HMLTD, and Django Django. Marta is the sound designer for Sisters With Transistors.www.solarmanagement.co.uk/marta-salogniCaro C BiogCaro C is an artist, engineer and teacher specialising in electronic music. Her self-produced fourth album "Electric Mountain" is out now. Described as a "one-woman electronic avalanche" (BBC), Caro started making music thanks to being laid up whilst living in a double decker bus and listening to the likes of Warp Records in the late 1990's. This "sonic enchantress" (BBC Radio 3) has now played in most of the cultural hotspots of her current hometown of Manchester, UK. Caro is also the instigator and project manager of electronic music charity Delia Derbyshire Day.URL: http://carocsound.com/Twitter: @carocsoundInst: @carocsoundFB: https://www.facebook.com/carocsound/Delia Derbyshire Day Charity: https://deliaderbyshireday.com

In 'Come Fly the World', journalist Julia Cooke explores the history and legacy of Pan Am, one of the world’s most iconic airlines. Julia focuses on the adventurous lives and careers of the international jet-age stewardesses of Pan Am – a job which no longer exists - who were expected to fit a specific physical profile, speak multiple languages and demonstrate diplomacy. As the women worked to maintain the glamourous image of Pan Am, they interacted with international politicians and helped to transport American soldiers to and from war zones, during the Vietnam War. The stewardesses witnessed global history and world events, playing a crucial role in major wartime missions including the evacuation of children during the fall of Saigon. Throughout the pandemic, pregnant women have been asked to make their own judgements on the risk of vaccination versus the risks of COVID-19. With very little real-world data available, that decision has been no easy task however two new large scale studies may now help prospective parents feel more confident in balancing the costs and benefits. One study of over 35,000 pregnant women given the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines showed no evidence of them being unsafe. The second study looked at what happens to pregnant women if they do catch COVID-19. Aris Papageorghiou, a Professor of Fetal Medicine at the Oxford Maternal and Perinatal Health Institute, talks to Anita about the results of this global study. He also explains why we should consider allowing pregnant women to be vaccinated sooner, rather than making them wait for their age-related invite to arrive in the post. Hair removal is a rite of passage for a lot of women and apparently some influencers are encouraging shaving your face! Apparently facial hair removal is nothing new - Queen Elizabeth I started the trend by shaving her facial hair, and women even shaved their eyebrows off. So how popular is it with women today? Beauty therapist and make up artist Naveeda discusses. A new film called 'Sisters With Transistors' about the unsung female pioneers of electronic music, is released today. Featuring women like Clara Rockmore, Suzanne Ciani and Delia Derbyshire, of Dr Who theme fame, the film is narrated by Laurie Anderson and celebrates the achievements of women whose male counterparts took centre stage in historical narratives around ground-breaking electronic composition. The director Lisa Rovner joins Anita as does Bishi, the singer, composer and artistic director and co-founder of WITCiH, The Women in Technology Creative Industries Hub, a platform to increase the visibility women at the intersection of music, creative technology and STEM. Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Kirsty Starkey Interviewed Guest: Professor Aris Papageorghiou Interviewed Guest: Naveeda Interviewed Guest: Julia Cooke Interviewed Guest: Lisa Rovner Interviewed Guest: Bishi

Newsletter published Feb 16, 2021 Links: Theremin concert of Clara Rockmore play "The Swan" (Saint-Saëns): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSzTPGlNa5U Find out more about Amy at www.amykuretsky.com

En este nuevo episodio de Nueva Onda, hablamos de la unión de iZotope y Native Instruments, la nueva iniciativa de Google Arts & Culture y los sintetizadores que cambiaron la historia. Además celebramos el MAR10 Day hablando de Koji Kondo y conmemorando el 8M platicamos de 5 grandes pioneras de la Síntesis y la tecnología musical. Clara Rockmore, Bebe Barron, Daphne Oram, Pauline Oliveros y Suzanne Ciani. Terminamos el show con un patch para componer al estilo de Steve Reich .

Brevi Storie Podcast a cura di Johann Merrich Episodio 3: Theremin, il terpsitone e l'American Negro Ballet Company Appunti per una storia della musica elettronica più equa e paritaria: nel terzo episodio delle sue Brevi Storie in forma di podcast, Johann Merrich racconta la collaborazione tra Leon Theremin e l’American Negro Ballet, compagnia di danza fondata ad Harlem nel 1934. Elenco degli ascolti: In apertura e chiusura: Delia Derbyshire, Ziwzih Ziwzih Oo-Oo-Oo Rimskij-Korsakov, Il volo del calabrone. Esecuzione: Carolina Eyck, theremin; Christopher Tarnow, piano. Elliott Lawrence Orchestra & Lucie Bigelow Rosen, Giglolette. Germaine Tailleferre, Valse Lente. Esecuzione: Grégorie Blanc, theremin. Stravinskij, L’Uccello di Fuoco, Suite Finale Esecuzione: Vienna Philharmonic Salzburg condotta da Valery Gregiev Tchaikovsky, Berceuse Esecuzione: Nadia Reisenberg, piano; Clara Rockmore, theremin. La Vie en Rose Esecuzione: Nadia Reisenberg, piano; Clara Rockmore, theremin. —— Fonte principale delle informazioni narrate: Albert Glinsky, Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage, University of Illinois Press, 2000. www.electronicmusic-shorthistory.com

SPOKEN WORD WITH ELECTRONICS #46: The BRUCE HAACK SONGBOOK! (And the 2021 TX Power Failure) Hi, everyone, welcome back to SWWE. We're just now getting through an entirely wild week of weather and bureaucratic power grid failure here in Texas. Texas has been on its own power grid since 1935, or approximately since power grids existed in the United States. This isolationism on Texas' part meant that if we, say, refused to weather-proof our electrical grid (not needed if you aren't regulated!) then, perhaps, close to 4 million people would be without power during the coldest week of weather in decades. And, it's not like TX politicians care about dead bodies, but it would also add to Greg Abbott's death count for 2021, with some very tragic stories. So the first two tracks (introduction and discussion) this week discuss how my wife and I got through a week of blackout, with single digit temperatures outside, no heat – and then, no water. Pretty wild experience! Once water became scarce, people started gathering snow and other fluids (of unusual color) to fill their toilets. Fortunately, we had a filled bathtub, thanks to my wife's good thoughtful preparation. But the week was purgatorial in a way I haven't experienced in a long time. Somehow a power failure is time stopping, even though it's mostly just camping inside your house. But we couldn't do anything and just had to sleep through the cold of it. Wild event. But if you're jumping to this post based on the BRUCE HAACK headline, chances are you're much more interested in the main item: I have a copy of The Bruce Haack Songbook. This was self-published by Bruce Haack in 1975 and if you enjoy electronic music and the pioneers of its artform, Bruce Haack ranks pretty high up there on the list. There's Wendy Carlos, Raymond Scott, Clara Rockmore, Morton Subotnick, and a few others – but for me, Bruce Haack is high genius on a level above them. He started by making children's records in the 1960s and built his own synthesizers to perform the music, including a vocoder. All of his work is amazing. I can recommend this film as a perfect primer if you've never been properly introduced to his work, and I'd just start with the first album, Dance Sing and Listen (1963) and follow the discography in order from there. You'll find so many interesting musical ideas throughout, and weird harmonic experiments, including duets Haack often sings with himself, one voice singing and the other vocoding. I consider him similar to the Velvet Underground in breaking apart Electronic Music into less academically rigid and more wildly awesome performance. And there are fewer examples of this wonderful mind of Haack's more displayed than in the SONGBOOK, itself. This is a 60 page book, saddle stitched and large format, that Haack decorated himself with art and illustration, and even contains lyrics! Most of the tracks are uploaded to Youtube, presently, which you can find links to in the Boing Boing post for this week's show, along with a full song contents list. SO, in terms of scans of this book, I feel like images should be made available. The current scalping on a copy of THE BRUCE HAACK SONGBOOK goes for, roughly $350-$1,000 dollars. So I will be uploading as many images of the book as possible onto http://www.ep.tc/bruce-haack-songbook (check back later if it has no content presently) – I've had my own copy for 20 years and the spirit of sharing that this show hopes to be, I'll be uploading scans later tonight. We end this with the sad mention that Esther Nelson passed away in October of last year. I just heard about this and as a young listener TREASURED her voice, her dance, her laughter, and her kindness – which is on all of the albums she shared with Haack, himself: https://twitter.com/BruceHaack/status/1320865864875347968 We all loved you, Miss Nelson. Enjoy this week's show, all - Thanks Ethan

SPOKEN WORD WITH ELECTRONICS #46: The BRUCE HAACK SONGBOOK! (And the 2021 TX Power Failure) Hi, everyone, welcome back to SWWE. We're just now getting through an entirely wild week of weather and bureaucratic power grid failure here in Texas. Texas has been on its own power grid since 1935, or approximately since power grids existed in the United States. This isolationism on Texas' part meant that if we, say, refused to weather-proof our electrical grid (not needed if you aren't regulated!) then, perhaps, close to 4 million people would be without power during the coldest week of weather in decades. And, it's not like TX politicians care about dead bodies, but it would also add to Greg Abbott's death count for 2021, with some very tragic stories. So the first two tracks (introduction and discussion) this week discuss how my wife and I got through a week of blackout, with single digit temperatures outside, no heat – and then, no water. Pretty wild experience! Once water became scarce, people started gathering snow and other fluids (of unusual color) to fill their toilets. Fortunately, we had a filled bathtub, thanks to my wife's good thoughtful preparation. But the week was purgatorial in a way I haven't experienced in a long time. Somehow a power failure is time stopping, even though it's mostly just camping inside your house. But we couldn't do anything and just had to sleep through the cold of it. Wild event. But if you're jumping to this post based on the BRUCE HAACK headline, chances are you're much more interested in the main item: I have a copy of The Bruce Haack Songbook. This was self-published by Bruce Haack in 1975 and if you enjoy electronic music and the pioneers of its artform, Bruce Haack ranks pretty high up there on the list. There's Wendy Carlos, Raymond Scott, Clara Rockmore, Morton Subotnick, and a few others – but for me, Bruce Haack is high genius on a level above them. He started by making children's records in the 1960s and built his own synthesizers to perform the music, including a vocoder. All of his work is amazing. I can recommend this film as a perfect primer if you've never been properly introduced to his work, and I'd just start with the first album, Dance Sing and Listen (1963) and follow the discography in order from there. You'll find so many interesting musical ideas throughout, and weird harmonic experiments, including duets Haack often sings with himself, one voice singing and the other vocoding. I consider him similar to the Velvet Underground in breaking apart Electronic Music into less academically rigid and more wildly awesome performance. And there are fewer examples of this wonderful mind of Haack's more displayed than in the SONGBOOK, itself. This is a 60 page book, saddle stitched and large format, that Haack decorated himself with art and illustration, and even contains lyrics! Most of the tracks are uploaded to Youtube, presently, which you can find links to in the Boing Boing post for this week's show, along with a full song contents list. SO, in terms of scans of this book, I feel like images should be made available. The current scalping on a copy of THE BRUCE HAACK SONGBOOK goes for, roughly $350-$1,000 dollars. So I will be uploading as many images of the book as possible onto http://www.ep.tc/bruce-haack-songbook (check back later if it has no content presently) – I've had my own copy for 20 years and the spirit of sharing that this show hopes to be, I'll be uploading scans later tonight. We end this with the sad mention that Esther Nelson passed away in October of last year. I just heard about this and as a young listener TREASURED her voice, her dance, her laughter, and her kindness – which is on all of the albums she shared with Haack, himself: https://twitter.com/BruceHaack/status/1320865864875347968 We all loved you, Miss Nelson. Enjoy this week's show, all - Thanks Ethan

Professor Theremin invented the musical instrument the Theremin.. it was early 1900s --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Professor Theremin invented the musical instrument the Theremin This is Santa James original song, Claramina. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

This week on Sonosphere we end 2020 with our 100 years of the Theremin episode. We’ll start with a brief history of the theremin and with Theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore. We then combined our conversations with thereminists and composers Caroline Eyck and Dorit Chrysler to give you the ultimate Theremin filled episode. Sonosphere is now on WYXR 91.7 FM Mondays from 4-5pm CST in Memphis, TN. sonospherepodcast.com

Chapters00:32 - Introduction02:11 - Cyril Lance / The Claravox16:44 - Dorit Chrysler25:26 - Bruce Woolley32:08 - Katia Isakoff 45:40 - EndingMusic credits:Rachmaninov Vocalise - Clara Rockmore, theremin. Nadia Reisenberg, piano.From: “Clara Rockmore – The Art of the Theremin”. Delos Productions CD. Courtesy of The Nadia Reisenberg / Clara Rockmore FoundationSchneeleichen - by Dorit Chrysler - unreleased extract from M - eine stadt sucht einen moerder - with kind permission of Dorit ChryslerBeat Monjune - by Dorit Chrysler - unreleased extract from M - eine stadt sucht einen moerder - with kind permission of Dorit ChryslerTherexotica - by Peg Ming - with kind permission of Dorit Chrysler (a track on the Theremin 100 compilation produced by The NY Theremin Society)Peace Song to Other Worlds (2 extracts) - by Radio Science Orchestra - with kind permission of Bruce WoolleyTheremini solo - by Katia Isakoff - with kind permission of Katia IsakoffClara Rockmore BiogClara (Reisenberg) Rockmore holds a unique place in music history as the star performer of the theremin. Born in Russia, in 1911, at four, she was accepted as the youngest ever violin student at the St. Petersburg Imperial Conservatory. As conditions deteriorated after the Revolution, the Reisenberg family left Russia and travelled across Europe for several years until 1921 when they succeeded in gaining passage on a steamship bound for America. In New York, Clara resumed her studies with Leopold Auer, but shortly before she was to make her American debut (playing the Beethoven Concerto), she developed an arthritic problem with her bow arm, and had to give up the violin.Fortunately, she had met Leon Theremin (an Americanisation of Lev Termen, as he was known in Russia), the inventor of the world's first electronic instrument. “I was fascinated by the aesthetic part of it, the visual beauty, the idea of playing in the air,” Clara recalled, “and I loved the sound. I tried it, and apparently showed some kind of immediate ability to manipulate it. Soon Lev Sergeyevich gave me, for a present, the RCA model theremin.”She convinced Leon Theremin to build her a far more precise and responsive instrument than the RCA model, one with a five-octave range, instead of three. Over the years she performed extensively but it was not until 1977 that she saw the release of her first commercial LP, performances with Nadia Reisenberg (recorded by Robert Moog) titled ‘The Art Of The Theremin'.In 1989, Steve M. Martin, long fascinated by the instrument, embarked upon the documentary Theremin - An Electronic Odyssey, a film including some of Clara's last public performances (videotaped at a 1989 Nadia Reisenberg tribute concert in Merkin Hall), and the New York reunion of Clara and Leon Theremin (then aged 95). Premiered in New York at Alice Tully Hall, the film in large measure revitalised interest in both the theremin itself and Clara Rockmore's unique accomplishments. She died in 1998.Cyril Lance BiogCyril Lance is the Chief Technical Officer at Moog Music and lead designer of the Moog Claravox Centennial Theremin. Cyril first met Bob Moog in January 2005 during an informal visit to Moog factory.  When Bob was diagnosed with cancer in April of 2005, Cyril was asked to come up and take over the engineering effort.  Since then, Cyril has been at the helm of engineering and product development and, along with the dedicated and passionate team at Moog Music, has helped to continue Moog's legacy of designing and producing beautifully crafted electronic instruments aimed at inspiring artists world-wide to explore and expand their personal sonic vocabularies.  Cyril strives daily to continue Bob Moog's legacy and to have a lot of fun along the way.  “It's truly a blessing to have the opportunity to contribute in one small-way to the transformative powers of music to bring joy and connect people on the deepest levels through-out the world”.https://www.moogmusic.com/Dorit Chrysler BiogDorit Chrysler has been dubbed a superior wizard of the theremin. An Austrian-born, New York based composer and performer, Chrysler is the co-founder of the NY Theremin Society and started the first international school for Theremin, KidCoolThereminSchool and L'Ecole Theremine with branches in NY and Paris. She is also one of the most visible Thereminists spreading the gospel of this mysterious sounding instrument. Most recently she finished her analog soundtrack for a remake of “M” by Fritz Lang and was featured on the soundtrack of the HBO documentary “Going Clear”. Chrysler received her master's degree of musicology in Vienna and has notably collaborated with Anders Trentemøller, Cluster, Adult., CERN, Carsten Nicolai, Elliot Sharp and Laurie Spiegel. She has performed with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, had her work commissioned by MoMA and the Venice Biennale, and is the founder of “Dame Electric,” a festival dedicated to female | pioneers in Analog Music. As the director of the NY Theremin Society, Chrysler is promoting the application of theremin in different art disciplines and has produced the THEREMIN100 compilation release, commemorating the 100th birthday of the Theremin in 2020.http://www.doritchrysler.com/toc.htmlhttps://www.nythereminsociety.org/Bruce Woolley BiogIn 1969 Bruce Woolley bought a Futurama electric guitar, formed a school band, and dreamed of being a professional musician. After years of experimentation, and unsuccessful attempts at becoming a famous jazz-rock guitarist, he decided to concentrate on writing pop songs. In 1979 he co-wrote “Video Killed the Radio Star”.  After a stint fronting cult New Wave unit The Camera Club, Woolley moved back into songwriting and production, forming a creative partnership with Grace Jones. In 1994, Woolley discovered Exotica and formed The Radio Science Orchestra, a theremin-led group that defined retrofuturism before people were talking about retrofuturism. A sonic time machine travelling along the whole history of electronic music, the Orchestra has collaborated with the world's leading theremin virtuosi including Lydia Kavina, Carolina Eyck and Charlie Draper. Notable guest artists include Grace Jones, Polly Scattergood, Ken Hollings, Dr. Robert Moog, Steve Dub and Thomas Dolby.http://www.brucewoolleyhq.com/https://www.radioscienceorchestra.com/Katia Isakoff BiogKatia Isakoff is a composer and multi-instrumentalist music producer whose compositions, performances and productions first appeared in the Add N To (X) album Loud Like Nature (Mute Records).  She has since collaborated on numerous albums and projects including John Foxx and Steve D'Agostino's Evidence of Time Travel which was composed and produced at her London studio. Having contributed synths and co-mixed EOTT, she went on to join them for a live concert performance at Electri_City Conference Dusseldorf, adding Moog Theremini and synths to the sonic architecture of this ever evolving and expansive Karborn graphic novel, which premiered with a live performance at the British Film Institute UK and Sonic Acts Festival, Amsterdam.  She has since spent much of her time between London and Berlin working on her forthcoming album She's Not Here.In 2019, Katia launched !N_K o L // B a new and innovative composer producer series bringing together pioneering, established and emerging composer producers to collaborate in various iconic studios and pop-up locations. Each series sees a new guest pioneer and group joining her; together, they embark on the journey of making an album through improvisation and exploration of the studio as an instrument, building a global network through musical collaborations – one album and city at a time.The first IN_KoLAB series was hosted by British Grove Studios. The group spent two days recording and filming what would become an immersive four-movement quadrophonic piece called IN_KoLAB Making Waves with Suzanne Ciani.  The album and accompanying short will be released in 2021 and plans are in motion for the next series.https://www.katiaisakoff.com/ | https://inkolab.orgCaro C BiogCaro C is an artist, engineer and teacher specialising in electronic music. She started making music thanks to being laid up whilst living in a double decker bus and listening to Warp Records in the late 1990's. This "sonic enchantress" (BBC Radio 3) has now played in most of the cultural hotspots of her current hometown of Manchester, UK. Caro is also the instigator and project manager of electronic music charity Delia Derbyshire Day.URL: http://carocsound.com/Twitter: @carocsoundInst: @carocsoundFB: https://www.facebook.com/carocsound/Delia Derbyshire Day Charity: https://deliaderbyshireday.com

Een van de belangrijkste bespelers van de theremin - het instrument dat 100 jaar geleden werd uitgevonden door de Russische wetenschapper Léon (Lev) Theremin. Een kast met twee antennes, zo zou je de theremin kunnen omschrijven. Zet het instrument aan en er onststaan electromagnetische velden rond de antennes, en door de handen op de juiste manier te bewegen vóór die antennes kun je klanken opwekken en een melodie spelen. De verticale antenne wordt gebruikt voor de toonhoogte, de horizontale voor dynamiek en klankkarakteristieken. Dansen met je handen wordt zo op bijna magische wijze omgezet in betoverende klanken. Theremin reisde over de hele wereld om zijn instrument te promoten, waarbij hij onder meer werd geholpen door de destijds beroemde violiste Clara Rockmore, die het instrument leerde bespelen en er bijvoorbeeld de Sonate van César Franck op ten gehore bracht. In de jaren '40 en '50 duikt het instrument op in de filmmuziek, maar een blijvend succes bleek het niet te worden. Theremin werd verbannen naar Siberië op verdenking van anti-communistische activiteiten, en pas na de val van de muur kreeg hij de waardering die hij verdiende. Hij stierf op zeer hoge leeftijd in Moskou. Thorwald Jørgensen bracht op vrijdag 20 november 2020 zijn debuut-cd uit, met pianiste Kamilla Bystrova: Air Électrique, met composities van onder meer Lera Auerbach en Lydia Kavina.

Estéreo360º celebra el centenario del theremin de la mano de su mejor representante español, Javier Díez Ena, quien además firma la nueva sintonía del programa. Presentamos su nuevo trabajo, Therematic, rescatamos a la pionera del instrumento Clara Rockmore (en la imagen) y pulsamos el inmejorable momento actual de sus buenas ondas con Lydia Kavina, Carolina Eyck, Pamelia Kurstin o Vincenzo Vasi. MENÚ SONORO: JAVIER DÍEZ ENA (Madriliandroid) / CLARA ROCKMORE (The Swan) / LYDIA KAVINA: In Green / CAROLINA EYCK (Reja) / DORIT CHRYSLER (Murder Ballad) / BLUEBLUT (Apocalypso) / PAMELIA KURSTIN & PAT MASTELOTTO (Generated Divinity) / HEKLA (Indendaro) / THERMINAL C (Sputnik Crash) / PEG MING (Therexotica) / MODULADOR DE ONDAS (Cefalú) / THE RADIO SCIENCE ORCHESTRA (Atom Age Girl) / HYPERBUBBLE ((I'm Your) Satellite)) / VINCENZO VASI (Halloween) //

British comedy-horror animator David Firth is known universally for his Salad Fingers series, and has been putting up short films on his website fat-pie.com for decades. He has worked with the BBC and the likes of David Mitchell among many others.I think Lynchean – in that David Lynch manner – is the most apt word to describe his subtle blend of the creepy, eerie, nightmarish qualities of his cartoons with a very dark sense of humour. Catch him on Twitter and get yourself a Salad Fingers toy for Halloween.Before I forget – this background music is by the late Clara Rockmore on the Theremin instrument, and it ran through David’s Spoilsbury Toast Boy film, which is creepy as hell. This is like a Desert Island Discs of his stuff, as I play a bunch of clips of his best stuff, while he talks about them - all these clips belong to David Firth and the full versions can be found on fat-pie.com. Thanks David for allowing me to play these clips, and I hope it gives newcomers to his work a sense of what we’re dealing with here! I’ll put links to the full episodes of each of the clips I show in my blog on andrewgoldpodcast.com. Also check out his ambient music on Locust Toybox on Spotify – I’ll be using one of his clips for the outro.But now it’s the podcast - we talk about a lot of stuff, including where David gets his ideas, his dreams, his nightmares and his process as well as things like cancel culture and Pete Townsend. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Dos genios se unen en una serendipia: CLARA ROCKMORE y LEÓN THEREMÍN. Una dolencia en los huesos y un extraño instrumento que no se toca forman un curioso dueto para crear la música más bella jamás escuchada. En las "diosidencias" existen los tiempos precisos porque la naturaleza es sabia. Por eso, la acompañamos con la música de: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPZQi2m7i9Y Clara Rockmore Vocalise- by Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kga4WmDVmrQ Summertime - Clara Rockmore... ¡¡¡Por favor vean este video. Tiene una animación increíblemente bella!! Producción: ¡Tanto qué contar! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/nora-reyes-costilla/message

Kultūros ir meno mėnraščio „Kultūros barai” apžvalga su vyriausiąja redaktore Laima Kanopkiene. Clara Rockmore (1911–1998) – Vilniuje gimusi litvakų smuikininkė-vunderkinė. Penkiametė tapo visų laikų jauniausia Sankt Peterburgo konservatorijos studente. Dešimtmetė su tėvais išvyko į JAV ir ten išgarsėjo kaip pirmoji teremino atlikėja, prisidėjusi prie šio elektroninio instrumento tobulinimo.Profesorei Irenai Veisaitei įteiktas aukščiausias Vokietijos Federacinės Respublikos apdovanojimas – ordino „Už nuopelnus“ Didysis kryžius (Das Große Bundesverdienstkreuz). Ši knyga tai tarsi dvieju Violetų dialogas - ankstyvosios nespalvotos, neretai melancholiškos Violetos ir šiandienės, triukšmingos ir kiek ironiškos Violetos. Taip menininkės kiekviename atskirame atspaude kuriamas individualus performansas apjungiamas į šešiasdešimt devynių dalių trilerį. Apie knygą „Vis–a–vis” su autore Violeta Bubelyte kalbėjosi Indrė Kaminckaitė. Po tarptautinės premjeros Karlovi Varuose režisieriaus Karolio Kaupinio filmui „Nova Lituania” apkeliavus tarptautinius kino festivalius, birželio 26-ąją įvyks nacionalinė filmo premjera – pagaliau duris atversiančiuose kino teatruose „Nova Lituania“ išvys Lietuvos žiūrovai. Literatūros kritikės Elžbietos Banytės naujų knygų apžvalgoje – vieno garsiausių šiuolaikinių britų rašytojų, premijos „Man Booker“ laureato, Grahamo Swifto naujausias romanas „Regimybės” („Baltos lankos”, vertė Rasa Drazdauskienė) ir naujausiąs amerikiečių rašytojos ir poetės Sylvios Plath vienintelio autobiografinio romano „Stiklo gaubtas” vertimas („Sofoklis”, vertė Rasa Akstinienė). Ved. Laima Ragėnienė.

Dediquem la primera part del programa d'aquesta setmana a la thereminista Clara Rockmore, una figura clau en la hist

The March 2020 episode of the Theremin 30 podcast features music from the Netherlands and the USA. Rick Reid's interview guest is Robert Sherman, Clara Rockmore's nephew and co-founder of the Nadia Reisenberg-Clara Rockmore Foundation. For more details and links to all of the artists, visit Theremin30.com. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/theremin30/message

con Luca Damiani

In this episode we chat with Dorit Chrysler director of of the  NY Theramin society, who have a major event coming up at the Ambient Church.    Dorit Chrysler has been dubbed a superior wizard of the theremin. An Austrian-born, New York based composer and performer, Chrysler is the co-founder of the NY Theremin Society and has started the first international school for Theremin, KidCoolThereminSchool and L’Ecole Theremine with branches in NY and Paris. As much as the Theremin is a tool in Chrysler’s electronic instrument arsenal, she is also one of the most visible Thereminists spreading the gospel of this mysterious sounding instrument. Most recently she finished her analog soundtrack for a remake of “M” by Fritz Lang and was featured on the soundtrack of the HBO documentary "Going Clear". Chrysler received her master's degree of musicology in Vienna and has notably collaborated with Anders Trentemøller, Cluster, Adult., CERN, Carsten Nicolai, Elliot Sharp and Laurie Spiegel. She has performed with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, had her work commissioned by MoMA and the Venice Biennale, and is the founder of “Dame Electric,” a festival dedicated to female pioneers in Analog Music. As the director of the NY Theremin Society, Chrysler is promoting the application of theremin in different art disciplines and is produced the THEREMIN100 compilation release, commemorating the 100th birthday of the Theremin in 2020. For Ambient Church, Chrysler will perform original work along with the US premiere of "A Paraphrase." Composed by electronic music pioneer Laurie Spiegel, for Dorit Chrysler, "A Paraphrase" was inspired by a young Clara Rockmore and her professional relationship with Léon Theremin.  Lana Anikin Suran will accompany on piano.     

1915, à Saint Pétersbourg. Dans les journaux, la sensation du jour est une enfant de quatre ans. Clara Reisenberg vient de passer l’audition du prestigieux conservatoire de la ville, debout sur une… See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The theremin is one of the most unique instruments in the world, and the only one that is played without touching it. In today's episode, we'll talk about Russian inventor Leon Theremin, and how he pulled this new sound out of thin air, literally. We'll also talk about the theremin's use in modern music like The Beach Boys and Led Zeppelin, how the instrument works, and Theremin's secret identity. This episode features music by thereminists Clara Rockmore, Carolina Eyck, Peter Pringle, and Gregoire Blanc.

The people of the late 1930's saw some fun music made by some remarkable women. Lily May Ledford and her band from Pinchem Tight Holler, KY (YEOW!!) play for President Roosevelt, First Lady Eleanor and the King and Queen of England. She almost hugs the queen. Clara Rockmore almost gives up music entirely until she meets Leon Theremin and literally writes the book on a new instrument. Featuring the voices of Julia Purcell, Mick Sullivan and sounds by Todd Hildreth.

This week, Josh discusses Clara Rockmore's 1977 album, The Art of the Theremin!

hour one: "blues to bechet" john coltrane "the earth is blue" guess what "hourrah! yuri" guess what "water boy" clara rockmore "rainbow thunderclap" the hysterical injury "otpisani 18" milovoje mica markovic jazz band "vostok tango" guess what untitled tune (live on-air) l'oeillere "no gravity" guess what "railing from seize of molten beaves" chris scroger "melody" lydia kavina "10th floor ghost girl" cibo matto "candy gun" melt-banana "mise a feu" guess what untitled tune (live on-air) l'oeillere hour two: "lord jupiter" guess what "point your pistols to the sigh" liars "night walk" dirty beaches "dead cowboy dance (live to ghettoblaster)" allegheny white fish (tobacco) "clock with no hands" (live) sonic's rendezvous band "felon with a gun" bucky pope + ez company "kedr" guess what "kitab surat al-ard" guess what "narcissues" dagger moth "nothing is sacred" mark stewart "automatic" gg allin & the jabbers "buzzkill carol" white night "xanadu" the ghost of a saber tooth tiger "titoli di testa" guess what hour three: "meteor belt 1000" guess what "tommy dawsey" socrates that practices music "super powered" doop moe fez "lift off" stoma "parachute" guess what "out of range" guess what "shop drop" king champion sounds "village in ruin" tsigoti "no gravity for yuri" guess what "plane crash" guess what "another lost heartache" gregg turner "wop may" the extract "completing the square" guess what

hour one: "I just dropped by to say hello" john coltrane + johnny hartman "making believe" the haden triplets "memories of mom and dad" the haden triplets "kaddish" clara rockmore "empty pool" cibo matto "otpisani 19" milovoje mica markovic jazz band "slowly I'm falling" the haden triplets "billie bee" the haden triplets transcription of "butt song" from hieronymonus bosch's 'garden of earthly delights' "fell so hard" thalia zedek "magic" saito koji "lonesome night" the haden triplets hour two: "tiny broken heart" the haden triplets "synthesize me" the space lady "voice from on high" the haden triplets "here's to john wesley hardin" moondog "my missing link" melt-banana "clutching at clouds" bucky pope + ez company "raining" the haden triplets - brother matt's spin cycle - hour three: "my baby's gone" the haden triplets "10 ce" tsigoti "romsdalen" polkabjorn & kleine heine "oh take me back" the haden triplets "how thick you think" the ex "detonation" thurston moore "single girl, married girl" the haden triplets "when I stop dreaming" the haden triplets "in whims of the wind" lydia kavina "drrty looks, drrty thoughts" (demo) dead broad "set it right" automatic sam "lantern" the extract "will you miss me, when I'm gone" the haden triplets

The Musicorium becomes a Hauntitorium! Paul F. Tompkins takes a terrifying drive through the promo zone (and gets an unexpected package)! Casper dares to scare! A little incantaion, a little Caligari and Clara Rockmore's ghost? Jackie Harris! Ron Lynch! Kris McGaha! Daamen Krall! The Section Quartet! Crissy Guerrero & Tracy DeNisi! it's enough to give you the Spooky Wookies!

Bridge Records was founded in 1981 by the classical guitarist David Starobin, and his wife, the violinist, Becky Starobin. The company celebrates its 30th anniversary with a catalog of more than 400 CD and DVDs, as well as a music publishing arm and an artist management division. Both of the Starobin's children, Robert Starobin and Allegra Starobin, work for the company, as well as a staff of engineers, designers and allied personnel. Bridge now issues between 35 to 40 discs per year, across a broad spectrum of classical music, contemporary music and jazz. The Washington Post wrote that "Bridge is a company with a highly selectiveand consistently excellent catalog". It is this selectivity that has led to 25 Grammy nominations and numerous awards from the international critical press. New Orford String Quartet "String Quartet No. 15 in G Major, D. 887, Op. 161: I. Allegro molto moderato" (mp3) from "New Orford String Quartet performs Schubert and Beethoven" (Bridge Records, Inc.) Buy at Amazon MP3 More On This AlbumThe New Orford Quartet is a brilliant all-star group from Canada. The quartet includes the concertmasters of the Montreal and Toronto Symphonies. This is the debut recording of the New Orford- a recording which has been receiving rave reviews in the critical press. Susanna Phillips, Myra Huang "Poemes Pour Mi: VII. Les Deux guerriers" (mp3) from "Susanna Phillips: Paysages" (Bridge Records, Inc.) Buy at Amazon MP3 More On This AlbumSusanna Phillips is a spectacular young mezzo-soprano. Ms. Phillips is the winner of the Metropolitan Opera's 2010 Beverly Sills Award. Her solo debut recording on Bridge is called Paysages (Landscapes) and includes French songs by Messiaen, Debussy and Fauré. Here we listen to a track from Olivier Messiaen's magical song cycle Poemes pour Mi.The Budapest String Quartet "String Quartet No. 3 in D Major, Op. 18, No. 3: IV. Presto" (mp3) from "Beethoven: The Early Quartets" (Bridge Records, Inc.) More On This AlbumOne of the special parts of the Bridge catalog is the company's historical recordings, many released by Bridge for the first time ever. These include 25 volumes of concerts played at the Library of Congress, between 1940 and the present day. Famous names on the Bridge series include George Szell, Leopold Stowkowski, Leontyne Price, Samuel Barber and the Budapest String Quartet. Here the Budapest String Quartet performs from a 1944 concert. Garrick Ohlsson "Sonata in B Minor, S. 178: IV. Allegro energico" (mp3) from "Garrick Ohlsson: Liszt Recital" (Bridge Records, Inc.) More On This AlbumBridge has a long history of recording many of today's leading soloists. Among pianists in the Bridge catalog you'll find names like Rudolf Serkin, Richard Goode, Peter Serkin and Garrick Ohlsson. Here we listen to Garrick Ohlsson's recent Liszt recording, which celebrates the 200th anniversary of Liszt's birth.BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sir Andrew David "Concerto In Pieces - Purcell Variations: I. Theme and Variation I, Vivace Maestoso" (mp3) from "Concertos of Melinda Wagner and Poul Ruders" (Bridge Records, Inc.) Buy at Amazon MP3 More On This AlbumBBC Symphony Orchestra, Sir Andrew David "Concerto In Pieces - Purcell Variations: II. Variation II, Vivace Scherzando" (mp3) from "Concertos of Melinda Wagner and Poul Ruders" (Bridge Records, Inc.) Buy at Amazon MP3 More On This AlbumAmong the strengths of the Bridge catalog is a strong commitment to finding the leading composers of our own time, and recording large portions of their catalog. The Danish composer Poul Ruders has become known for his operas and orchestral music, much of which has been recorded on Bridge. Here we listen to his "Concerto in Pieces", played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Andrew Davis.Joseph Alessi, Susan Narucki, George Crumb, Paul Cesarczyk, Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra "Star-Child: IV. Musica Apocalyptica" (mp3) from "George Crumb Edition, Vol. 3" (Bridge Records, Inc.) Buy at Amazon MP3 More On This AlbumThe composer George Crumb celebrated his 80th birthday last year. Bridge has a particularly close relationship with Crumb, and is involved in recording the great American composer's complete output. Here we listen to the "Dies Irae" from Crumb's massive orchestral work, "Star-Child." This recording was a Grammy winner!Clara Rockmore, Nadia Reisenberg "Requiebros" (mp3) from "Clara Rockmore's Lost Theremin Album" (Bridge Records, Inc.) Buy at Amazon MP3 More On This AlbumEclectic titles are also a part of the Bridge catalog, and what could be more eclectic than a recording of classical masterpieces on the Theremin! Here we listen to the superb performer Clara Rockmore with an eerily beautiful rendition of Requiebros by Gaspar Cassado, accompanied by pianist Nadia Reisenberg.

At the suggestion of listener John Toolan, we thought it would be a good idea to explore the wooooo-like sound world of the theremin and some of the other instruments in this musical family. So on this week’s show you’ll … Continue reading →

Great news for radiophonic enthusiasts in the next week or so as next weekend (2-3 April 2011) the Cube Cinema in Bristol will be hosting A Radiophonic Weekend featuring former members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Then on Thursday 7 … Continue reading →

The Tank Team probes the life and inventions of Leon Theremin. While most noted for the electronic musical instrument named after him, we further discuss his life of intrigue, his other inventions and his impact on other inventors. From stunning stage performances to high tech spying involving the KGB and Stalin, Theremin lived a life scripted for Hollywood. We synthesize his influence on Robert Moog and music. Additionally, we look at Theremin artists Clara Rockmore and Lydia Kavina. All this, viewer mail, and more!