Electro Feminisms: Clara Rockmore and a Sense of Wonder

The very first comment I received in my introductory post asked if I would be discussing Clara Rockmore, the virtuoso theremin player. I hadn’t planned to, but the more I dug into Rockmore the more interested I became in this early pioneer of electronic music. So thanks to Enon for that comment which inspired this post.

The theremin, for those who don’t know, is a quite extraordinary electronic instrument created in 1919 by Russian inventor Lev Termin (known in the U.S as Leon Theremin). Fairly uniquely, it’s not played by touch, but rather by the movement above the instrument, where the position of the hands in space determines the pitch and volume of the note. The theremin produces an iconic science fiction sound, with its eerie, wavering vibrato, a continual gliding note.

Clara Rockmore (1911-1998) is the most famous theremin player ever, playing with her pianist sister Nadia Reisenberg. Rockmore (nee Reisenberg) had been a virtuoso child violinist trained in St. Petersburg, but switched to the theremin after developing arthritis. She met Lev Termin and soon after he gave her a theremin of her own. A difficult instrument to play, Rockmore’s performances of classic music on the theremin helped establish electronic music as a valid form of art.

Reactions to her early performances were often ecstatic—the Washington Post in 1936 described the theremin as playing

as if by magic.. Towards it advances a young artist, Miss Clara Rockmore. Her right hand reaches towards but stops short of the vertical rod. In so doing, she has penetrated the area of sound, and a beautiful tone results.

There is something quite uncanny about an instrument that’s played simply by moving your hands through air, 90 years later the idea is still remarkably futuristic.

Tara Rodgers in Pink Noises, her book about women in electronic music where I’ve culled the above quote from, argues that Rockmore’s performances inaugurate wonder as a key form of emotional response to the sounds of electronic music. It’s the ability of electronic music to surprise, to make us marvel at a newness of sound or texture, that makes it a valuable form of cultural enterprise.

Hence the key link with science fiction for the theremin, where it’s the backdrop of strangeness, alienness, that is as much a part of the experience as the plot. We marvel at the alien world, the megacity. And so too with Rockmore’s theremin, which takes sound to strange, wondrous places even as she plays some of the classical repertoire.

As an ideal, I think wonder still often motivates those of us who engage with electronic music. Even in a world of retro pastiches, there’s something wondrous about the capacity of electronic instruments to create new, never-heard-before sounds and ways of playing, just as Rockmore did.