Termen, Theremin, Lev Sergeyevich, Leon, *15 (3) August 1896 Petersburg, † 3 November 1993 Moscow, Russian physicist and the inventor of electronic and electromechanical musical instruments. In 1916, he graduated from the Higher Officers’ School of Electrical Engineering in Petrograd (now St Petersburg), and in 1917 from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at the local university. In 1916, he graduated with a degree in cello from the St Petersburg Conservatoire. From 1920, he worked at the State Institute of Radiology and Radiography there, where he invented an electronic warning system. He gained worldwide fame for the Termenvox (Theremin, Eterofon), an electronic musical instrument he invented between 1919 and 1920, in which changes in pitch and volume are achieved by moving the hands closer to or further away from a metal rod and a loop serving as antennas. In the late 1920s, Termen demonstrated the Termenvox at concerts in many European capitals. From 1928 to 1938 he lived in the United States, where the Termenvox began to be mass-produced by RCA, and in the 1950s (the transistor version of the Termenvox) by R.A. Moog Co, a company owned by Robert Moog. Termen also developed various versions of it – the Theremin Cello (Fingerboard Theremin, 1930) and the Terpsiton (1932), which responded to a dancer’s movements. In 1931, he invented the photoelectric instrument known as the Rhythmicon, which allowed for the creation of a variety of rhythmic patterns. During his stay in the United States, he met with, amongst others, E. Varèse, H. Cowell and J. Schillinger; he also carried out intelligence work there on behalf of the USSR. Upon his return to Moscow, he was imprisoned in 1939 and sent to a labour camp in Magadan. From 1940, he worked in the secret laboratories of the NKVD in Moscow, initially as a prisoner, and voluntarily from 1946 to 1966. There, he invented the Buran eavesdropping device, for which he received the Stalin Prize and was released from prison. The device was embedded in a relief of the Great Seal of the United States and presented to the US Embassy in Moscow. From 1963 to 1966, Termen ran an acoustics laboratory at the Moscow Conservatory, working on new electronic musical instruments.
Literature: F.K. Prieberg Musica ex Machina, Berlin 1960; L. Theremin Recollections, “Contemporary Music Review” XVIII, 1999; A. Glinsky Theremin. Ether Music and Espionage, Urbana 2000.
