Théremin, Leon. (1896-1993)
"Music from the Ether" - 1928 Program
"Music from the Ether / Concert Demonstration...Produced by Free Movement of Hands in Air." An extraordinary rare souvenir program from one of the first US concert demonstrations of the marvelous instrument. From a concert at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, March 1, 1928. 4 pages. With an evocative color illustration by Hudiakoff and including a description of the instrument and a photograph. Light wear to edges, overall in fine condition. 6 x 9 inches (15.3 x 22.9 cm.).Born in St Petersburg as Lev Sergeyevich Termen, Léon Theremin was experimenting with electricity in a home laboratory from the age of 17, and after military service in the Russian civil war, began researching at the Physical Technical Institute in Petrograd. It was there that he accidentally invented the theremin—when he realized that moving his hand close to the electrical device he was working on changed the pitch it generated. By November 1920, he had given his first public performance on the instrument. He named it the "etherphone," but it became known as the Терменвокс (Termenvox) in the Soviet Union, as the Thereminvox in Germany, and later as the theremin in the United States.
In the later 1920's, he began touring internationally with the theremin and settled for a time in New York, performing with the New York Philharmonic in 1928 and conducting the first-ever electronic orchestra in 1932. He abruptly returned to the Soviet Union in 1938, where he was put to work in a sharashka (a secret laboratory in the Gulag camp system.) There he developed some of the earliest bugging devices used in espionage, including his famous "The Thing," a listening device embedded in a replica of the Great Seal of the United States, which was presented to the U.S. Ambassador to the USSR by Soviet schoolchildren and hung in plain sight in the ambassador's office for the first seven years of the Cold War. (21401)
Program, unsigned Classical Music