Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

Yes, the Elseness is what brings audiences to their feet. It is what inspires composers like Schillinger and Varèse. But there is no escaping the other part, too: like the pallor of an electric light bulb, like the heat of an electric stove, the theremin’s sound is a stranger to the Earth.

I have escorted this stranger across the globe. For all the assembled multitudes, for Rockefeller, Gershwin, Shostakovich, cranky George Bernard Shaw, for wives and friends, enemies and lovers, lost hopes, and for empty rooms, I conducted the ether. In a hundred halls, Saint-Saëns’s “Swan” floated like a ghost. The voice that was not a voice neither paused nor took a breath.

LATER, IN AMERICA, one of the RCA salesmen, Len Shewell, told me the story of selling a theremin to Charlie Chaplin. Len had been invited to Chaplin’s vast mansion, a place done up in marble and ebony, as black and white as Chaplin’s moving pictures. Len dragged his suitcase after the butler, through corridors with sharp corners, to a wide parlour where the Little Tramp reclined on a chaise longue. A vase of roses posed on every table, Len said, and the fireplace was roaring even on that August afternoon. Chaplin asked him to begin his demonstration and Len launched into his routine, but when the sounds started, DZEEEEOOOoo , Len’s hand wavering by the pitch antenna, Chaplin gasped so loudly that Len turned off the machine.

“Is everything all right?” Len asked.

Chaplin was as pale as chalk. “No, yes, continue,” he said.

The actor was plainly terrified. The best-known phantom in the world, a man who had made his fortune as an illusion projected onto silver screens — he was scared of this box of ghosts. Listening to Len’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” his face leapt from horror to ardour and back. His eyebrows rose and fell as if they were on pulleys. He trembled. When Len was finished, Chaplin jumped to his feet, crossed the room, shook the salesman’s hand. “I’ll take one,” he said, and with one finger he reached forward to touch the theremin’s cabinet — as if it were a jaguar, a panther, a man-eating lion.

The sound of the theremin is simply pure electric current. It is the hymn of lightning as it hides in its cloud. The song never strains or falters; it persists, stays, keeps, lasts, lingers. It will never abandon you.

In that regard, it is better than any of us.

BEFORE I CAME TO AMERICA, I toured my own country. It started fitfully — a week in Moscow, a few days in Smolensk, an excursion to Kazan. I huddled with researchers, smoothing schematics with my hands. I played the theremin for halls full of students. I visited the Kremlin one shining spring afternoon, to show my machine to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (may his memory be illuminated). Then my mission changed: these discoveries aren’t just for the academy, Lenin told me. They are for the people.

I went out by train. Men towed my equipment through what was then Nikolayevsky Station, past puzzled workers, into huge railway cars. I followed them in my best but shabby suit, Lenin’s name on a card in my pocket. Demonstrations were arranged in tiny Russian towns, hamlets whose one electric light glowed wanly in the night. I slurped shchi with the leaders of local worker councils, farmers with weary faces, explaining why fires need oxygen, why lightning strikes. Tarussky’s top cattle breeder wanted to learn why silver tarnishes. A woman in Shuya asked if radiators could cause freckles. I connected a theremin to a sputtering gas engine and as my instrument shrilled, the people rose to their feet, astonished, hands held over their hearts.

Back in Leningrad I was beginning to feel like a star. I spent weekdays at the institute, improving my devices, advancing my theories, feeling the satisfaction of the inventor who knows his inventions will be seen, will be wondered at, in open air. Sasha didn’t want to hear any of my crowing. He became grumpy when I hung around his office doorway, unspooling anecdotes. “You can have your shepherds and milkmaids,” he said. “I’ll take the committee chairs and Nobel laureates.”

One night, he stood me up. I had tickets to the ballet, but Sasha wasn’t at home when I arrived to collect him. Instead, a pretty girl answered the door. She had dark eyelashes, an upward tilting chin, a soft assurance to her face. I imagined she was the type of person who writes down her dreams in the morning. Her arms were crowded with screwdrivers, pliers, a tin full of nails. She seemed vexed.

“Pardon me,” I said. “I’ve come for Sasha.”

“He’s out.”

I was surprised. “Out?”

“Yes, out. At the lab.”

“I see,” I said.

She examined me. “Are you Termen?”

“Yes. Lev Sergeyvich.”

“He said to say sorry, he wanted to finish something.”

“Ah,” I said. I looked at the shined toes of my shoes.

“I’m Katia,” she said. “His sister.”

It was as if I saw her for the second time then. “Are those your tools?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “Sasha left his mess for me to tidy up.”

“How rude of him,” I said. “Would you like to go to the ballet?”

THE NEXT THREE YEARS were a time of self-creation. I was in a rush to be established — the sturdiness of my life, I thought, should match the heavy type that newspapers were using to print my name. There were so many elements to put in place: published papers; professional endorsements; applications for a new apartment, for a new laboratory; a wife. Eventually I quit the Physico-Technical Institute to work under my own supervision, in a shared lab overlooking the Neva. I moved into a new home. I invented better theremins. I made abrupt, titanic promises.

My parents disapproved of all these metamorphoses. The Revolution was fresh in their minds and they advocated steady advancement, sober restraint. They wanted me to be more like my sister, Helena, who was studying botany, obscurely cultivating a career. “We always taught you to keep your voice down,” my father said, perched on a chair in my kitchen. “Whose attention are you in such a hurry to receive?”

Worse than my parents’ disapproval was how little they cared about my accomplishments. Father could not be persuaded to flip through my write-ups in scientific bulletins, let alone to assist at a demonstration of the theremin. He sipped from a cup of strong tea and issued advice about how to start a family. “Patience, Lev. The main thing is patience.” When I tried to show him the distance-vision prototype I was working on, it was only a few minutes before he became distracted by a squirrel scritching on the windowsill. He shouted through the glass, “Hello my friend! Hello!”

Finally I directed the explanation to my mother. “Good work, Lev,” she murmured, without lifting her eyes from her knitting, without waiting for me to turn it on.

I had more and more reasons to stay at home and I found more and more reasons to go away. Sometimes Katia and I would have arguments by letter — underlined words and no signatures. I attended a conference in Nizhny Novgorod. I made a presentation to generals in Moscow. I came back from a visit to Kiev and found that my country had new ideas for me. They wanted to send me into western Europe. “Impress them with your machines,” said a man from a dark corner of the interior ministry. “Our operative will do the rest.” I faced Katia across our small table, ham on plates like little moons.

My new mission began with an appearance in Berlin. It was my first visit. I arrived in the mid-morning — weary, excited, dishevelled from the sleeper car. The streets were smeared with red and gold leaves. Lines snaked from the door of every bakery — it was some sort of national holiday. I was met by the eminent Dr Beirne, and we toured the National Academy. I demonstrated the theremin and the radio watchman to a classroom of physicists. They stroked their short silver beards. We took a carriage across town, to the Deutsche Oper, where the rest of my equipment was being stored. I went down into the basement. I met the man I call Pash.