Hey everyone,
As many of you know, the history of our instrument is filled with incredible stories, from Lenin to the KGB. But I've recently been digging into a lesser-known chapter that I think this community will find absolutely fascinating: the connection between Léon Theremin and Albert Einstein.
Yes, *that* Einstein.
While it's sometimes mentioned as a footnote that they met in 1920s New York, it turns out their interaction was much more than just a celebrity meet-and-greet. There was a real, substantive intellectual cooperation happening in Theremin's studio that I believe speaks directly to how we understand and play the instrument today.
Here’s what I’ve gathered from various sources, using Google's Gemini as AI tool:
* **The Setup:** When Theremin established his lab on West 54th Street in the late 1920s, it became a hub for the avant-garde. Einstein, who was a passionate amateur violinist, became a frequent visitor.
* **The Conflict of Ideas:** At the time, Theremin was deeply experimenting with "visual music," developing instruments like the **Illumovox** (and later the Terpsitone), which linked specific pitches to specific colors of light. According to historical accounts, Einstein wasn't buying it. He found the "sound = color" idea too subjective and limited.
* **The "Geometric" Theory:** As a physicist and violinist, Einstein was obsessed with the structure of things. He reportedly steered the conversation toward **geometry**. He believed that musical intervals—the stable relationships between notes that we navigate by feel—must have an objective, spatial, and geometric reality in the electromagnetic field.
* **The Experiments:** This is the coolest part. Theremin recalled that Einstein would sit in the darkened studio while the instruments were played, not watching the light show, but sketching **geometric figures**—triangles, hexagons, etc.—in a notebook. He was literally trying to map the invisible mathematical structure of the music he was hearing.
**Why this matters to us as players:**
If you play a linear-field theremin using the "air fingering" or hand-shape technique (like the Rockmore and Carolina Eyck methods), you are essentially playing the "invisible geometry" that Einstein was trying to visualize. When you open your hand to hit a perfect fifth, you are creating a fixed spatial vector in the ether—a geometric line that Einstein perhaps was trying to draw.
Their collaboration was a moment where the analytical mind of a physicist and the inventive mind of our instrument's creator were perfectly aligned, trying to solve the puzzle of how we navigate an invisible fingerboard.
It seems this connection isn't widely known, even among us enthusiasts, so I wanted to share.
Has anyone else here come across more details about this?
**Relevant Links for Further Reading and viewing:**
* 120 Years of Electronic Music - The Superpiano:* This site details Emerich Spielmann's Superpiano, which Einstein later endorsed, showing his continued interest in optical-electronic instruments for music. [https://120years.net/the-superpiano-emerich-spielmann-austria-1927/]
* Theremin.info - Other inventions:* [https://theremin.info/-/viewpub/tid/9/pid/8/]
* Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia: *
[https://techpeterburg.wixsite.com/mysite/post/experiments-in-sound-and-electronic-music-in-early-20th-century-russia]
* YouTube - Leon Theremin: Inventor Or Spy? * This documentary covers Theremin's time in New York and the development of his various instruments, providing context for Einstein's visits.
* YouTube - Lev Theremin The Man Who Played the Air pt 2
Best,
Dread