Wintec News

Russian theremin virtuoso enthrals Hamilton audience

By Wintec journalism student Libby Kissick

Posted On: Wednesday, 31 August 2011

Hamilton music lovers were treated to a virtuoso demonstration on an extraordinary instrument recently.

Russian musician Lydia Kavina played the theremin, an instrument that is not physically touched during performance, to an enthralled Spark Festival audience.

Kavina, the great-niece of Russian electronics pioneer Leon Theremin, flew from Moscow to demonstrate the theremin.

The theremin is an ether-wave instrument/Etherophone/Thereminvox which produces sound by magnetic energy created through movement. Two antennae are attached to the ends of an oblong box and sense the movement of the player.

Similar to a singing voice, very sensitive and not a machine, the theremin can alter its sound with the slightest change of a performer’s breath.

It requires an ear for musical sound but can teach the untrained or unmusical to read tones by ‘freestyling’.

A protégée of inventor Leon Theremin’s teachings from the age of eight, Kavina describes playing as creating melody with the movement of hand and finger.

The eerie sounds have been picked up by composers for science fiction soundtracks, film music and sound effects.

The theremin was used in several movie soundtracks during the 1950s and 1960s when it provided background mood music for such sci-fi classics as The Day the Earth Stood Still and It Came from Outer Space, as well as thriller soundtracks in The Lost Weekend and Spellbound.

Miss Kavina herself has been involved in 1000 theatre, radio, and television performances around the world – working on music scores for Tim Burton’s directed film Ed Wood (1994) and Brad Anderson’s The Machinist (2004).