WEIRDNESS IN A MINT BOX

posted by James Reel

    Altoids, the curiously strong breath-mint company, held a contest inviting people to devise imaginative re-uses of what the Brits, in their quaint variant of our language, call the “tin.” The top winner, Jon R. Lennon, has pulled in $1,000 for his design of an Altoids theremin, in this case an electronic instrument that produces changing pitches depending on the amount of light it senses.
    The “real” theremin is named for its developer, Lev Sergeyevich Termen, who unveiled the first model in 1920. Termen brought his instrument to America in 1927, and RCA put it into production two years later, eventually cranking out 500 of the things. Oddly, it’s one of the few instruments you play without touching it; you change the pitch by moving your right hand in relation to an antenna, and control the volume by moving your left hand in the vicinity of a metal loop. The spooky-sounding instrument—every movement from one pitch to another is accomanied by a spine-tingling glissando—found its way into more than 100 concert works and several film scores, including Spellbound. Leopold Stokowski even used it briefly around 1930 to reinforce the basses of the Philadelphia Orchestra, but that experiment, like his practice of putting the woodwinds in front and the strings in back, was soon abandoned.
    Within a few decades, the theremin was supplanted by the more sophisticated ondes martenot (another oddball electronic instrument named for its inventor), which makes such a distinctive sound in Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony. Indeed, the ondes martenot now almost always replaces the theremin in concert works such as Varese’s Ecuatorial. Surely the theremin can never be replaced, though, in the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.”