In a darkened movie theater, a spaceship hovers high on the big screen. Eerie music wafts in like ectoplasm filling a room. It’s strange and foreboding, like the sound of a disembodied voice, a soprano’s ample vibrato – minus the soprano.
That ghostly music is the sound of the theremin, one of the world’s first electronic musical instruments, and one of the world’s strangest musical instruments. It looks like something in a mad scientist’s workshop. And because you play it without physically touching it, the theremin is as strange to see played as its otherworldly sound is to hear.
“It definitely looks like you’re doing some kind of witchy magic, waving your hands in front of two different antennas on either side of a box, and this spooky, ethereal voice is coming out of thin air, seemingly,” said Virginia-based thereminist Caroline Scruggs.
Alien in every sense, the sound of the theremin has a long history of sailing through the soundtracks of sci-fi films. It will sail through central Ohio this weekend when Scruggs performs the world premiere of the Concerto for Theremin and Chamber Orchestra by Linda Kernohan with the Central Ohio Symphony, on Saturday, Nov. 16, at 7:30 p.m., in Ohio Wesleyan University’s Gray Chapel. Central Ohio Symphony Music Director Jaime Morales-Matos will conduct a program that also includes beloved works by Berlioz and Debussy.
Saturday’s performance of Kernohan’s concerto stems from the overwhelming online success of the video of Scruggs’ 2022 performance with the Central Ohio Symphony of a shorter Concertino for Theremin and Chamber Orchestra, which Kernohan composed in 2008 for a different thereminist. That success led the orchestra to commission Kernohan to extend the concertino, which is now the first movement of the full-length Concerto for Theremin and Chamber Orchestra on Saturday’s program.
Viral Theremin
The story of Kernohan’s Theremin Concertino begins far, far away from Ohio, in southern California.
In 2008, the San Diego Chamber Orchestra commissioned Kernohan to compose a work for theremin and orchestra. That commission, Kernohan says, materialized at the suggestion of one of her musical collaborators, an oboist with the orchestra who also had an affinity for playing “novelty” instruments, including the theremin.
Because the theremin is unlike any other musical instrument in the sounds it makes and in the types of physical demands it makes on players, Kernohan had to tackle a steep learning curve to write convincingly for the instrument.
“The main lesson I had to learn was that getting it to play a specific, precise series of pitches is quite difficult,” Kernohan says, “because you are playing the air.”
Kernohan’s concertino was premiered in San Diego but had to wait a decade for its second performance, in 2018, by the Greater Columbus Community Orchestra and theremin soloist Ralph Hickock. The work’s third performance, in Delaware, Ohio, came about when Warren Hyer, at the time executive director of the Central Ohio Symphony Orchestra, had the idea to program on the orchestra’s concert season works by contemporary composers that had been premiered, but had not yet received those often elusive second or third performances.
Hyer reached out to Kernohan, at the time in Columbus to complete a doctorate in music composition at the Ohio State University, and asked her for a work to fit the bill. Kernohan offered her Theremin Concertino for the orchestra to perform. The thereminist who had premiered the work was not available for its Ohio performance, so Kernohan’s husband, Brian McMichael, searched online for thereminists and found Caroline Scruggs.
Kernohan reached out to Scruggs, the Central Ohio Symphony engaged Scruggs to play in the second performance of Kernohan’s Concertino for Theremin and Chamber Orchestra. Scruggs posted a video of that performance on her TikTok and Instagram channels. Within days the video had received more than a million views.
The theremin, the voice of outer space, was now boldly going viral in the strange new world of digital space.
To build on its success with the 2022 performance of Kernohan’s Theremin Concertino, the Central Ohio Symphony commissioned Kernohan to expand her Theremin Concertino to a full-length concerto. A grant from Columbus’ Johnstone Fund for New Music supported Kernohan’s work to expand the piece. The orchestra’s upcoming world premiere, with Scruggs, of Kernohan’s Theremin Concerto will mark the next generation, you might say, of the central Ohio theremin enterprise.
The Second Voice
Scruggs came to play the theremin as unpredictably as Kernohan’s California-born Theremin Concertino made its way to Ohio.
When Scruggs, a classically trained singer, violinist and songwriter, had a chance to play a theremin on a visit to a musical instrument museum in 2017, she says she knew instantly that the instrument was part of herself.
“It felt so much to me like a second voice that just something clicked in me, and I saw it flash before my eyes, like, This is my instrument, I’m in love with it, I need this,” Scruggs said.
She immediately bought a theremin and watched tutorial videos on YouTube to teach herself how to play the instrument.
“That was probably the most frustrating process I’ve ever had to go through. Because the thing about the theremin that people don’t realize is, it’s the most counterintuitive instrument, I think. It just feels so alien. It feels as alien to play as it sounds,” Scruggs said.
Playing the instrument feels alien, Scruggs says, because the player doesn’t physically touch the instrument to make notes sound. Keyboard and wind instrument players can put the right finger on the right key and play the right note. A guitarist can put fingers on particular frets to create chords. A thereminist, however, is playing not a physical sounding body, but instead an electromagnetic field emitted from two antennas on the sides of an electronically wired console. The eyes can see and the fingers can feel a piano key or a guitar fret, but an electromagnetic field can be neither seen nor felt. The thereminist’s fingers have to grope a bit find the invisible electromagnetic field somewhere out there in the air and to manipulate it to create pitches.
In short, the disembodied voice of the theremin is precisely that – a sound created by human interaction with electrical charges outside the instrument itself. But there’s an intimate connection between the world’s most ethereal instrument and the world’s most deeply embodied musical instrument – the human voice. Playing the theremin is about playing the air, while singing is about freeing the breath – air – from the body through the vocal passages. Finding the right notes on a theremin and singing the right notes call on the inner ear to think the pitches, then to trust that the body will somehow be able to find those pitches.
Scruggs says she enlists her professional training as a classical soprano when learning or creating theremin music.
“I call myself self-taught because I’ve never taken a (theremin) lesson,” Scruggs said. “It was really more to me just vocal exercises, like vocalises that I used to use in college to build up my vocal muscles, and then just transferred that to the theremin. So instead of vocal muscles, I’m working on my hand dexterity and working on my ear and working on the place in space where all of these notes are, where all the pitches are. So that’s pretty much the extent of my training. I was luckily able to crossover a lot of my classical training to the theremin.”
At Saturday’s concert audiences will have a chance to see that crossover at work – and to hear both of Scruggs’ musical voices. Kernohan based the second and third movements of her Theremin Concerto on two of Scruggs’ original songs for voice and theremin. And while Scruggs performs on theremin for most of the concerto, she also sings at moments in the work’s second movement.
This weekend lovers of sci-fi films will also be surprised by a visit from an extraterrestrial friend – or at least its voice. And beyond Saturday, Kernohan is playfully anticipating her Theremin Concerto may see a fourth performance, a fifth, a sixth – or beyond.
“I think that we are hoping we will achieve world domination with this concerto,” Kernohan jokes, “as will be evidenced with the very small quotation of (Bernard Herrmann’s music for the 1951 film) The Day the Earth Stood Still that I felt I was sort of obligated to work into the piece.”
The Central Ohio Symphony and theremin soloist Caroline Scruggs will perform the world premiere of Linda Kernohan’s Concerto for Theremin and Chamber Orchestra Saturday, Nov. 16, at 7:30 p.m., in Ohio Wesleyan University’s Gray Chapel, Jaime Morales-Matos conducting.
Jennifer Hambrick is an advisor for the Johnstone Fund for New Music.
Transcript of video
Jennifer Hambrick: I’m speaking with composer Linda Kernohan, whose Theremin Concerto will be given its world premiere by theremin soloist Caroline Scruggs and the Central Ohio Symphony Linda, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation.
Linda Kernohan: Thank you, for having me, Jennifer. It’s great to sort of be back home again.
Jennifer Hambrick: Right, right, Yeah, exactly. Well, first, let’s start by talking about the theremin itself because this is a very unusual instrument. So, what is a theremin?
Linda Kernohan: It’s an early electronic instrument. It was invented in the 1920s by a Russian scientist named Leon or Lev Theremin. I think it was one of those things where he walked past something in the lab, and it made a noise. But basically, the theremin is the only instrument that you play without touching it. It has two antennas, one controls the pitch, and one controls the volume, and you move your hands closer to or farther from those antennas to control those two parameters. So, it gives you a kind of outer space, ghostly kind of sound, but a lot of people who end up playing the theremin started out on violin because it takes that kind of control and the use of vibrato and has that same kind of singing tone that you can get form a sustained-note instrument.
Jennifer Hambrick: But instead of bowing on strings, as you said, you’re not really touching anything – or you’re touching some sort of electrical wave or something along those lines, correct?
Linda Kernohan: Yes, you’re playing the air, in a way. Actually, I’ve seen Caroline describe it as – you know, you move your hands closer to and further away from the antenna to control the pitch, and she describes it as, if you think of having a long, almost an invisible fingerboard going from your body to the antenna, and then you move along it at different points. And I think similar to the muscle memory that you get from playing a bowed string instrument that doesn't have frets, but you still kind of create the memory of where those different pitches are which is quite amazing and mysterious to those of us who can't do it.
Jennifer Hambrick: Sure, absolutely. Well, not every composer writes music for the theremin, and you know, not every composer has the need or maybe the opportunity to write music for theremin. So, how did your theremin concerto come about?
Linda Kernohan: The first movement is actually a piece that I wrote back in 2008. I had been playing in a duo with a multi-instrumentalist. So, I had a good friend, Scott Paulson, in San Diego, who was an oboe player primarily, but he was also a collector of different novelty instruments. And so, he had a harp and a theremin and all different kinds of novelty wind instruments. Toy pianos was another big thing that he collected. So, he asked me to join him in his duo. I would play the toy piano, and he would play everything else. And we toured around to schools and libraries and day care centers and all kinds of different places playing novelty music, although we took it quite seriously, you know? I played one of those baby grand toy pianos that looks like a Schroder-from-Peanuts piano. And we would play the Swan by Saint-Saëns. He would play it on English horn, and I played the accompaniment on toy piano. And people would get tears in their eyes because, you know, it’s a beautiful piece of music, but played on a toy instrument still sounding great. And so, we incorporated the theremin into some of those performances. And he was playing in the San Diego Chamber Orchestra at the time and somehow talked them into commissioning me to write a piece for theremin and chamber orchestra. And that’s how the first movement came about. So, it was really a concertino, about an 8-minute one-movement piece. Well, the Central Ohio Symphony, Warrner Hyer, who is now retired but was the executive director there, he wrote a wonderful grant, which the idea of it was to get second performances of pieces. Because as you know composers get commissioned and they get a premiere, which is great. It’s not always easy to get that second and third and subsequent performance. So, I was lucky enough to be included in this program of getting another performance of the piece. And my husband was the one who found Caroline. He found her online. She has wonderful videos, and she writes her own music for theremin and voice, she’s also a singer. So, he found her, and I contacted her. And she was really excited about the piece, because Scott, my friend who played it the first time, wasn’t able to come out to do it. And the interesting thing is, the Central Ohio Symphony played that first movement back in June of 2022. I could not attend that performance, even though I was still living in Columbus at the time, because I was in the hospital recuperating from back surgery. It went well, it was well received, and that was where the idea came in to write the rest of the concerto, to expand it into a full three-movement piece. So that’s what I’ve been working on since that time, and I’m really excited to hear the whole thing. It was an interesting experience to take a piece that I had written a good 15 years ago and expand on it. At first, I just kind of thought to myself, well, how is this really going to work? Because you can tinker with pieces forever – and maybe you know this as a poet yourself, as well – at some point you just have to say, okay, I’m going to stop and go on to the next project. And so, I thought for a long time about whether this existing part of it – should it be the first movement or the third movement, how the other pieces fit in? And the idea that I came up with was to actually take some inspiration from Caroline’s music. So, I particularly latched onto two of her songs for the second and third movements. The second movement is inspired by a song she wrote called “For the Birds.” And part of it is, of course, she imitates the sound of birds on the theremin, but it’s also kind of a love song to birds. So, I have her sing a brief phrase of the lyrics that she wrote within the piece. And the third movement is inspired by another song of hers called “Altitude Sickness,” which is very groovy and hard driving. So that’s how the piece came about. And like I said, I’m just so excited to hear it, and to finally meet Caroline for the first time in person.
Jennifer Hambrick: So, writing for an instrument so unusual, I’m sure, has to come with its challenges. So even though you and your colleague in California were doing all of that playing, all of that touring around playing novelty music, as you called it, and he was playing every instrument under the sun, including apparently the theremin – I gather that you yourself had not played the theremin. And I’m assuming that maybe, if that’s the case, there was maybe a little bit of a learning curve for you in terms of what you needed to know in order to write for the instrument. So, what was that learning curve like, and did you encounter any wild surprises along the way?
Linda Kernohan: Yeah. You know, I had the chance to kind of put my hands near the theremin and get some sense for how it worked. But the main lesson I had to learn was that getting it to play a specific, precise series of pitches is quite difficult. I compared it a minute ago to the violin, to an instrument that doesn’t have frets. And I think it’s even more difficult than that because you are playing the air, not a tangible object that you can find your way around. So, in the second two movements I leaned into that, just accepting the fact that you’re going to have glissandi. It just is going to glissando between notes a large amount of the time. Now of course there are ways to finesse that. There’s a handful of quite serious, quite good theremin players, in addition to Caroline, who are able to make articulation, you know, make something sound staccato. And that’s done with the volume hand. You basically just put the volume up and down very quickly to create that articulation. But leaning into and celebrating what it does well, that’s how I found my way. So just kind of going with all of those glorious glissando motions that it can do over a very wide range, you know. It has a wider range than the violin does because it can go a lot lower. So just celebrating its unique qualities, I think, has been a wonderful thing about this experience. Another interesting thing about it is, it has to have a certain amount of space around the instrument, so the stage setup is a little bit different. As opposed to having the soloist just right in front of the orchestra, I think they had her in the middle and then and the orchestra divide into two parts on either side, because if you don’t have enough space, the air can’t move around in the way that it needs to create the full range of the instrument. And I think that’s particularly true on the low end. That’s where you have to have larger empty space near the instrument.
Jennifer Hambrick: Hmm. Very, very interesting.
Linda Kernohan: Yeah.
Jennifer Hambrick: Fifteen years after, I guess, your initial work with the theremin you have managed, it sounds like, not necessarily to pick up the same threads, but to weave new threads to extend the piece into this full-length concerto. And as I mentioned at the top of this conversation, the world premiere of your Theremin Concerto will take place here in Central Ohio, actually on Nov. 16, 2024. And after that what are the plans for the piece? Are there other performances lined up?
Linda Kernohan: Not at this point, but I think that we are hoping we will achieve world domination with this concerto, as will be evidenced with the very small quotation of The Day the Earth Stood Still, that I felt I was sort of obligated to work into the piece.
Jennifer Hambrick: Nice, nice. Well, Linda Kernohan thank you so much, it’s been a pleasure. We’ve been speaking, again. about the upcoming world premiere of your Theremin Concerto, Nov. 16, by the Central Ohio Symphony and theremin soloist Caroline Scruggs. It has been a great pleasure hearing about your journey with this instrument and about what brings you back to it, in particular, for this auspicious occasion in the next few weeks. Thank you so much for your time.
Linda Kernohan: Thank you, Jennifer.
