A crucial part of all electronic devices is the component that allows for the electrical signal to be amplified. The discovery of the vacuum tube in 1904, which grew out of Edison’s incandescent light bulb technology, provided the first usable amplifier of electrical signals and was crucial to the development of radio, TV and the birth of electrical music recording and production that took place between 1920 and 1960. The sound of vacuum tubes remains so desirable that the technology remains in guitar amplifiers and digital emulations of the ‘warm’ sound of what is known as ‘analog’. As is often the case, the development of vacuum tubes in electrical technology was accelerated by war, in this case World War I (1914 – 1918) where radio was widely used for the first time. By the end of the war, the music industry as we know it was about to be born and with it, the first instruments based on creating sound with these vacuum tubes.

THE THEREMIN (1920)

The invention that launched the new age of electronic music and from which most of our modern synthesizers trace their descent was created by the Russian inventor and engineer Lev Sergeivitch Terman (known in English as Leon Theremin) around 1920, but possibly before that. Terman, born in 1896, became fascinated with Tesla coils, circuits and magnetic fields but was called up as a soldier in the Russian army during World War I while a university student in St. Petersburg and became a military radio-engineer overseeing a military radio station and then joined the Red Army during the Russian Civil War (1918 – 1923).

Terman’s first intention for the technology that was to become his instrument was to create something useful for the military. His idea was to create a ‘radio watchman’ in which movement within an electromagnetic field would trigger an oscillator which would produce a tone. He discovered that if he set two oscillators, one at a fixed radio frequency (well above human hearing) and another with a variable frequency (also above human hearing) and a human body entered the field, the mix of the three would produce a third signal within the range of human hearing, as the body acted as a capacitor, storing and discharging electrical charge.

Terman created a second antennae which allowed control of the amplitude or volume of the signal and the Theremin was born. He demonstrated this new invention to the Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin in 1922 and the new Soviet government, wishing to showcase its new vacuum tube technology as a product of the revolutionary society it was created, ordered 600 of them built. In 1927, Terman was sent abroad to tour Europe and the United States to demonstrate the instrument, as well as conduct industrial espionage, and he arrived in New York City.

The Theremin became a sensation in late 1920’s and it made appearances at Carnegie Hall, the New York Philharmonic and other major venues around the U.S. He met and began a collaboration with Clara Rockmore, who was a fellow Russian emigre. Rockmore was a classically-trained violinist who had been the youngest student ever to enroll in the St. Petersburg Conservatory before immigrating to Philadelphia to study at the Curtis Institute in 1921.

In the 1930’s, the RCA Corporation bought the patent to the Theremin and began selling Theremins and DIY kits. They envisioned that the Theremin would become a massively popular household instrument, but it sold very few units and after it was discontinued by the RCA Corporation, it largely faded into obscurity although it was used in movie soundtracks in the 1940’s and 50’s including in Miklos Rozsa’s score for Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound. Terman himself vanished in 1938 and years later it came out that he had been ordered back to the Soviet Union. He was placed in Josef Stalin’s Gulag where he was put to work designing listening devices for the KGB including a famous bug known as ‘The Thing” which was covertly placed inside the U.S. embassy in Moscow and for 6 years transmitted top secret conversations of the American ambassador to Soviet intelligence. In 1949, Robert Moog, then 14, saw an article on the Theremin in the magazine Electronics World and at the age of 19, while a student at Cornell University, he and his father launched the Moog Corporation to sell Theremin kits. Moog, always credited the Theremin with being the basis of his revolutionary creations in the 1960’s and he remained a lifelong fan of his and finally got to meet his hero in 1991 when Terman returned to the United States at the age of 95.

THE ONDES MARTENOT (1928)

The Ondes Martenot was another early electronic instrument that was invented by Maurice Martenot, another World War I veteran and cellist who had also been a radio operator during the war. Martenot brought his cello sensibility to the instrument it is characterized by a metal ring that is worn on the right index finger that is slid along a metal wire, producing Theremin-like tones generated by oscillator circuits using vacuum tubes. In the 1930’s a keyboard was added that produced a vibrato when the keys were moved from side to side. The left hand was used to modify articulation, dynamics and tone. Martenot even produced four specialized speakers for his instrument which he called diffuseurs. Unlike Terman, Martenot did not sell his patent and maintained control over the invention. It was adopted by classical composers in the 1930’s, most notably Olivier Messiaen, but also Edgard Varese and Arthur Honegger and appeared on film soundtracks like Lawrence of Arabia, Lost In Space and Ghostbusters. Like the Theremin, it lives on in contemporary pop/electronic music, particularly in the music of Radiohead whose guitarist, Jonny Greenwood has used it extensively live and on their albums. It also made an appearance on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories in 2013.

THE TRAUTONIMUM (1930)

The Trautonium was invented in Berlin by Friedrich Trautwein, who like Terman and Martenot, was a military radio operator during the First World War. The instrument was similar to the Theremin and Ondes Martenot in that, like a string instrument, the performer was not restricted to the well-tempered scale of a keyboard. The Trautonium had a fingerboard with a metallic wire stretched over a rail and when the player touched the wire, a circuit was completed at that point, generating a tone. By pressing harder on the wire, the player could increase the volume and by moving a finger from side to side, the instrument would produce vibrato effects.

The Trautonium generated sound from a single vacuum tube oscillator that produced a simple sawtooth waveform but when the wave was passed through a series of resonant filters, the instrument would create richer timbres. This ‘subtractive synthesis’ would become the basis of Robert Moog’s inventions thirty five years later and the dominant form of the synthesis that was used in late 20th century pop music.

Like the Theremin, Trautwein’s instrument was a commercial failure. The German company Telefunken manufactured the instrument in 1932, but it only sold 13 units due to its high cost and steep learning curve. Several composers, including Paul Hindemith and Oskar Sala wrote music for the the Trautonium and Sala became a virtuoso at the instrument and produced multiple new versions of it until his passing in 2002. Recently, the Trautonium has experienced a resurgence of interest through the work of the artist LudoWic.

THE HAMMOND NOVACHORD (1939)

The Hammond Organ Company was the dominant American synthesizer manufacturer of the mid-20th century. Laurens Hammond founded the company in 1934 to sell his instruments which were based on the additive synthesis tonewheel oscillators of Thaddeus Cahill’s Telharmonium. Hammond gathered around him in Chicago a very forward-thinking team of designers led by John Hanert and C.N. Williams and in 1939, they created the first polyphonic synthesizer based on vacuum tube oscillators rather than the tonewheels used in Hammond Organs. The Novachord weighed hundreds of pounds and contained 169 vacuum tubes and miles of wiring. It had 72 voice polyphony that was produced by a 72 note keyboard that controlled a series of 12 oscillators tuned to a chromatic scale. Each of these was capable of a six octave range based on dividing the frequency of the note in half. This would produce a note and octave below and this ‘divide down’ technology is still used in synthesis today. The designers also used several formant filters (filters which use bandpass filters to bring out the resonant frequencies that are associated with the sound of the human voice) to shape the sound of the oscillator, thus making it a subtractive synthesis instrument as well. The controls of the filters on the front of the instrument made it the first controllable filters on a synthesizer. The Hammond Novachord also contained the first presets in synth history, a ‘perucssion’ and ‘singing’ preset that used a vacuum tube-based volume envelope to control the attack and decay of the note. The original version of the Novachord even had a touch-sensitive keyboard like a piano that controlled the volume of each note, but this was replaced by a standard organ volume pedal due to the production costs of the keyboard. The instrument even had two vibrato circuits that acted like an LFO and affected the pitch of the notes.

The Novachord made its debut at the World’s Fair in New York City in 1939 which was a massive exhibition of cutting-edge technology. A Novachord orchestra was created to entertain guests at the event and that year it also appeared in film scores. Unfortunately, due to the large number of oscillators, its weight and learning curve, the instrument was discontinued by Hammond soon after the outbreak of World War II in late 1941.

World War II led to a revolution in electrical technology, as we’ll see in Part II of this article and the days of vacuum electronics would come to an end within two decades after the war as a new era of lighter and more stable circuitry dawned.

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MUSIC PLAYLIST: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6V7rAfld6gwE5Hix5nuqFL?si=71522a92b37c424d

THEREMIN READINGS:

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