Composer and musicologist gives theremin lesson at Radcliffe
If it’s not calibrated just right, “it can sound so easily horrible,” said Dorit Chrysler while sound-checking the instrument she has played for more than 20 years and never once touched during a performance. Not long after adjusting its levels, she made her theremin sing. The Austrian-born Chrysler, a musicologist, composer, and leading thereminist, sat down with Harvard physicist John Huth at the Radcliffe Institute on Monday for a conversation set to music, “Science Sounds Strange: Ether Waves, Espionage, and the Theremin’s Odyssey.” The event was first in the Radcliffe lecture series Undiscovered Science. A staple of spooky movie soundtracks — recall the sci-fi cult classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still” or Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” — the theremin, one of the first electronic instruments, was created by Russian physicist Léon Theremin in 1919. The device consists of a small, narrow box of wood or metal containing a tone-producing oscillator attached to...