Customer Reviews

Theremin: ETHER MUSIC AND ESPIONAGE (Music in American Life)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Author Albert Glinsky has molded his meticulous research into a spectacularly detailed, involving, and readable biography of one of the most mysterious figures of the jazz age. But, the book is also a glimpse in rare detail of the dark nightmare of Communist Russia. The supernatural inventor of Steven Martin's entertaining but inaccurate movie biography ("Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey") is thoroughly demystified here.

Theremin is best know for his musical instrument that bears his name and makes spooky sounds in scary movies of the 50s, but he also invented television in the 20s, color television in the 30s, and the notorious a technically dazzling "great seal bug" the Russians used for years to eavesdrop on the American Embassy. He'd even hoped to perfect antigravity bridges and a device to resurrect the dead. Glinsky's book is much more than the biography of a fascinating man, but also offers a cutting edge view of the horrors of Soviet life under Stalin. Theremin was imprisoned under Stalin's draconian, paranoid system for having unpatriotic thoughts, tortured to confession, and sent to Siberia in forced labor to mine gold. He survived miraculously where most prisoners perished, and was given more forced labor as a technician inventing the notorious technologies of Soviet warfare and espionage.

Glinsky uncovers all the facts left uncovered in the movie, in the process overturning the most inaccurate assertion of the film. Soviet agents did NOT kidnap Theremin at gunpoint. He was running from creditors and the IRS, and left the U.S. on his own initiative. His fate upon returning to Russia is one of the strangest to have befallen anyone so faithfully patriotic to his homeland.

For fans of electronic music and scholars of the history of Communist Russia, this book, in my opinion, is a must-read.

_Theremin_ is a beautifully written, engrossing, completely fascinating portrait of an iconic 20th century life. I can't praise too highly Glinsky's magisterial project. He is as fully adept at explaining the electronics and aesthetics of his subject's amazing inventions, as he is at following the tangled trail of Theremin's involvements with Soviet espionage. And he also has a real feel for the campy weirdness of the theremin's reception in American popular culture. Neither a work of hagiography nor denunciation, Glinsky's portrait of Theremin is a subtle, nuanced, and very sensitive look at the moral ambiguities of an inventor of genius. Buy this book!!

After seeing "Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey" for the second time last year I was motivated to seek a more thorough biography of this fascinating life. Luckily Glinsky's book was hot off the press. This book is amazing.

Theremin's life is so interesting, and the narrative is so engrossing, that it reads like a thriller. Only one that covers a nearly hundred year life. The setting covers revolutionary Russia, roaring twenties NY, depression era NY, Stalinist Russia, the Gulag, the cold war, the sixties, and on and on.

The research Glinsky put in is astounding. You get the feeling that there exists no document of this life that he didn't catalog. Yet he writes beautifully and does a wonderful job of bringing the subject to brilliant life. There are so many details I'd love to mention but I wouldn't want to spoil a thing. Anyone who was intrigued by the documentary (which barely scratches the surface) should buy this book and read it. For me, the book has awakened an entire fascination with twentieth century Russia and I'm already reading other non-fiction on the topic.

Mr. Glinsky is to be congratulated on a stunning piece of work.

You have heard the music of the theremin, but you may not have known it at the time. It is an exceedingly pure tone, electronically generated, which has been used in various ways since the instrument was invented. It was used with distinction in the Hitchcock psychoanalysis thriller _Spellbound_ and in Billy Wilder's _Lost Weekend_, but it is best known for being used for an eerie, futuristic sound in science fiction movies like _The Day the Earth Stood Still_. It was in the background of _The Ten Commandments_ and also was that warbling tone in the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations."

The theremin was not invented in Hollywood, however; it was invented in Russia in 1920, and had its real heyday in the succeeding decade. The inventor, Leon Theremin, had a life that was too bizarre for a novelist to make up, and finally in _Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage_ (University of Illinois Press) by Albert Glinsky, Theremin has a big, comprehensive biography that does him justice. And he deserves it, for Leon Theremin was the father of electronic music. The book describes his cozy life in tsarist Russia, his introduction of electronic music to Lenin himself, his being sent out on propaganda tours with his instrument, his decade of performing and inventing in the US, his return to Russia not to acclaim but to imprisonment and disappearance in the Gulag, his gadgetry for Soviet espionage, and his return to acclaim as the grand old man of electronic music. Readable and full of color, _Theremin_ not only brings into focus the astonishing events in the life of its subject, presenting him as an inventive genius, persecuted innovator, and citizen of the world. Its fascinating story is a capsule history of a complicated century.

Mr. Glinsky has done superb research. He writes beautifully. This book is equally important for the cognoscenti as for those who know nothing about Theremin, electronic instruments and the Soviet Union. It is difficult to imagine such a life but it characterizes the 20th century and Glinsky brings it alive in every respect. Theremin was a genius and a private man. Those who knew him in later life (as did I) have no conception of his personality. But Glinsky found those in his early years who make his person come alive. Certainly the best music biography I have ever read......

You don't have to care about Theremin's inventions and achievements to find his life story fascinating but if you do you'll be delighted by this book.

Dr. Glinsky managed to write a complete factual book and yet have all the action and suspense that you would commonly find in an espionage novel!

Glinsky has done a great job of compiling the factual story of Leon Theremin and electronic music, particularly the Theremin instrument through the years.
I have several reservations. First, the writing style is pedestrian and not terribly stylish or interesting. Second, it would have been nice to have a bit more detail on how the instrument actually works. And last but most serious, Glinsky is obsessed with the evils of communism and spends far too much time sneering at Americans fooled by Stalin and on wallowing in the grotesque history of communism in the USSR than is justified given that the book is about Leon Theremin, not Stalin, Lenin, Beria, Kruschev, etc. etc. He gives us several pages on Beria and his fate, for example, when Beria actually had only an indirect link to Theremin. The point seems to be to portray Beria as an evil man. Fine, but this book is about Leon Theremin, right?
My last reservation is that in the end, I still did not feel we ever got to know Theremin. Why he did what he did, what he thought of events in his life, remains a mystery. It may well be that Theremin, a committed communist, was too alien to Glinsky's own imagination for him to be able to write about him with any insight or sympathy. We get, generally, a pretty clinical detachment.
This is a fine book for the facts. I cherish it as a solid resource. But Leon Theremin himself remains unknown to us on a personal level, and so as a biography this book falls short.

Three and one-half stars.

Yes, the author has evidently researched his subject exhaustively, but he doesn't always have the courage to forgo the results of his research when they aren't relevant or, especially, when they're redundant: It isn't necessary to describe in detail each and every single recital on his instrument Theremin gave in the United States, for example; we get the idea.

Because of historical inaccuracies, such as its strong suggestion that Khrushchev directly succeeded Stalin (actually Georgy Malenkov directly succeeded Stalin), and because of its suspect hyperbolic tone, I don't completely trust the book's account.

The prose is generally serviceable, but there are number of annoying solecisms that recur. The author consistently uses the term "enormity" to mean "enormous", for example, whereas in fact an enormity is an atrocity. He uses "hopefully" to mean "I hope", whereas in fact "hopefully" is an adverb meaning "full of hope".

There is almost no insight proffered as to the subject's motivation, which leaves a fairly gaping hole in the work considering the many very odd and fateful choices Leon Theremin makes over the course of his long life.

If you're particularly interested in electronic music or twentieth-century history you should read this--just take it [...] grano salis.