Part I: Room for Improvement - Size Matters
You might, or might not, be surprised to find that the history of the synthesiser - or at least, the electric organ - goes back to the last years of the nineteenth century, when inventor Thaddeus Cahill (1867 - 1934) built what is widely regarded as the world’s first electronic instrument, which he called the telharmonium, or the dynamophone. It was not quite what you would call portable, weighing in at approximately seven tons for the “lite” model, going all the way up to 200 tons for the top of the range, nor was it easily affordable to probably anyone other than the president of the United States, with a price tag of $200,000, which was massive money for then, about $5.5 million today. Yeah. Not the kind of thing you asked Santa to bring you for Christmas!
It will however come as no surprise then that it was less than wildly successful, in fact only three models were ever built, and none sold. The telharmonium used telephone wires in order to transmit its music, and a primitive form of loudspeaker involving paper cones connected to telephone receivers. It was absolutely massive, taking up a whole room, and as vacuum tubes had yet to be invented, it relied on huge electric dynamos (hence its alternate name, one assumes) which consumed masses of power in order to generate the music. In addition, as no real thought seems to have been given to a way to isolate the telharmonium’s signal, its music often merged with the conversation of people on phone lines, making a strange mixture of voices and weird electronic music. No doubt some callers thought their telephones were haunted!
Perhaps it might come as a shock to discover that the telharmonium was a polyphonic instrument, which I personally think is pretty amazing, given that it was the first electronic one too. However it was not to be the trailblazer its inventor had intended it to be, and didn’t even retain interest as a curiosity, Cahill’s younger brother receiving precisely no responses to his ebay advert:
“free to good home, the first telharmonium. Weighs 7 ton, will run on a charge of 671 kilowatts.” Heavy metal, indeed.
Whether the stupendous lack of success the telharmonium had was to blame and scared off other inventors from making forays into this arena, or for some other reason, but the world would have to wait another thirty years before anything even slightly similar came on the market. When two more or less made the same bid for glory at the same time, both inventors had learned lessons from Cahill’s massive white elephant, and their machines were much more manageable. And affordable. I’m not sure which came first, as both seem to have been invented in 1928, so I’ll just go alphabetically.
Maurice Martenot (1898 - 1980)
This time it was a musician who invented the thing. Maurice Martenot was a French cellist, but like Cahill had experience with radio, having been an operator in World War I. I see here that though he invented the
ondes Martnot in 1928 he did not perfect it for another ten years, so that would probably put him behind our next candidate. Still, for now let’s stick with him. His invention, as I just said, was called the
ondes Martenot, and this is it.
As you can see, it’s already far closer to what we would consider an organ, even a piano or harpsichord, than was the behemoth Cahill tried to unleash on the world. Sort of like, I guess, the personal computer following those huge room-filling monsters they had in the forties and fifties, with punched-cards and spinning reels of tape. Yes, much more like it. The name, apparently, means “Martenot waves”, though he did also call it the less grandiose
ondes musicales, “musical waves”. As you can hear in the video below, it doesn’t however sound like any organ you’ve heard, not even the dreaded Bontempi or that crappy Casio you got for your sixth birthday. It makes sounds that recall scary movies and old sixties and seventies incomprehensible science fiction movies shown late on Channel 4, or episodes of
Quatermass or something. Very, well, wibbly.
Oh wait I’m wrong there. Watching the video I see the ondonist, Cynthia Millar was only playing a specific piece, and that the keyboard can in fact reproduce normal instrument sounds. Interestingly, and I’ve never seen this before, it’s the left hand, as she says, that is the heart of the machine, as without its use absolutely nothing works on the keyboard, as you’ll see if you watch it. She demonstrates that by leaving the left untouched and playing with the right, there is no sound at all. So it’s a sort of control box on the left with a wooden pedal that regulates the volume and the pitch of the instrument. She also mentions - quite important I would think - that the
ondes Martenot cannot mimic any other instrument, and is usually expected to act as a backup to the orchestra, so therefore, while a precursor to them, it couldn’t really be considered any real kind of synthesiser in itself.
The actual operation of the instrument is, I feel, a little hard to explain, especially when I’m neither a (real) musician or an engineer, so watching the video is the best thing if you want to learn about it, but basically it seems to use a sort of ribbon strip on the keyboard in conjunction with that keyboard and the left-hand electronic control. And speakers figure into it somewhere as well. Maurice Martenot took it on tour in 1930, so it was certainly known at this stage. I doubt it made the biggest splash though, being mostly as I said, according to Ms. Millar, an instrument that stays in the background. Its lack of popularity may also have been due to the inventor’s disinterest in mass-producing the instrument; he only made them to order, and they were and are known to be extremely delicate and easy to damage, which further discouraged people from buying one.
Not surprisingly, given the time frame, they have been used mostly in the classical music genre, though again given the weird sounds they make the
ondes Martenot also features in such science fiction movies as
Dr. Who and the Daleks (1964) and
Mars Attacks! (1996), and you’ll also here it in the classic
Laurence of Arabia (1962). More contemporary uses include its use on Daft Punk’s
Random Access Memories, Tom Waits’s
The Black Rider and Blur’s Damon Albarn's
Monkey: Journey to the West.
Leon Theremin (1896 - 1993)
Nothing even close to an actual keyboard on the next effort, invented by a brilliant Russian physicist who was also responsible for the first proper television apparatus his home country had ever seen, and was technically one of the first real Russian spies, creating a listening device called “The Thing” in 1945, which was used to spy on American embassies as it was hidden inside a plaque given as a gift. Theremin certainly had an interesting life, being sent to the gulag in 1938, where it seems he worked with other top inventors and engineers, among them Andrei Tupolev, who would become one of the Soviet Union’s most successful aircraft designers, and fighting in both the First World War and the Russian Civil War. He also shocked polite Russian society by marrying outside his race, when he took a black woman as his wife.
Although he was released from the gulag in 1947 he voluntarily continued working for the KGB, and in 1967 he was banned from playing his theremin at the Moscow Conservatory of Music when the director put into words the Soviet Union’s attitude towards electronic music:
"electricity is not good for music; electricity is to be used for electrocution". Lovely. His theremins were thrown out of the place. Theremins? Oh yeah. Those.
There it is. One of them anyway. Odd little thing. No keyboard, no keys. Chances are you may have seen one of these at some point. The idea is to manipulate sound waves by using your hand in a sort of waving, plucking motion, I guess similar to a harpist. Just, you know, without the harp. Interestingly, like many great inventions the theremin (which I suppose can’t really be called a great invention as it was never that popular, but still) came about by accident, when Theremin realised that while adapting the dielectric motion detector he called the “radio watchman” to produce an audio tone, the pitch changed when his hand moved about.
Once he had invented and perfect the theremin, he moved to America where he licensed it to RCA, who marketed it as the Thereminovox, and, with stunning either bad luck or lack of foresight, released it just as the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929 hit. Unsurprisingly, nobody wanted to buy one, or could afford one, or were too busy jumping out of windows to their deaths to buy… well, you get the idea. It wasn’t a good time for frivolous purchases. Or any purchases. When men walked around with signs saying “Will work for food”, nobody was thinking about cool new gadgets to buy. It would in fact be the father of the modern synthesiser, Robert Moog, who we’ll meet later, who would reinvigorate public interest in the theremin, an interest which would lead to his own invention of the world’s first analogue synthesiser.
(Very interesting for us progheads, here’s someone playing Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky” on one).
You could say the theremin is almost worked by magic, if you knew nothing about electronics. There is no human contact with the machine. Two antennae control volume and pitch, and the player stands at a distance from the instrument and waves his or her hands against either, controlling the flow. It’s a bit technical and I’m not the one to explain it properly but if you want to look it up you can do so
here.
Most famously used on the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” (actually a similar instrument called an electro-theremin) the instrument was also employed by Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones and heavy metal band Tesla, as well as in science fiction movies such as
The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing from Another World and
Ed Wood. Oddly enough, and despite popular belief, it was not used on
Forbidden Planet, nor in
Doctor Who.