By Danielle Capalbo, News Staff

By the time Leon Theremin disappeared from America in 1938, it seemed everyone had heard him play his namesake instrument.
Radio was just emerging, television wouldn’t arrive for half a decade and Theremin didn’t have access to an oscilloscope. Still, he had imagined, and brought to life, the first great electronic instrument:’ a wooden box with a handful of coils inside and a single, protruding feature ‘- an antenna ‘- which emitted sound based on the proximity of a player’s hands to the instrument’s body.
Ninety years later, the theremin still matters. Point to the avalanche of electronic instruments it has inspired ‘- including the iconic Moog synthesizer ‘- or gesture-based technology like the Nintendo Wii and Guitar Hero. These games seemed groundbreaking when they began to crop up in the past few years, yet their true lineage dates back to 1919.
On Monday, the Coolidge Corner Theatre paid homage to Theremin and his most famous invention as part of its Science on Screen series, showing Steven M. Martin’s 1994 documentary, ‘Theremin:’ An Electric Odyssey.’ There was also a brief lecture beforehand by MIT Professor of Music and Media Tod Machover, and an ethereal theremin performance by Dalit Hadass Warshaw.
The theatre was nearly packed, but still filling up, when the event began at 7 p.m. As audience members hustled in from the bitter cold, they fell immediately silent to better hear Warshaw, who was illuminated by a single spotlight in front of the stage, playing a vintage theremin with a curious pantomime that viewers would learn to decipher by the end of the film.
Her left hand moved up and down the side of the instrument to control volume, while the shape of her right hand, and its distance from the theremin’s antenna, controlled pitch, tone and effects like vibrato.
The sound was utterly ghostly ‘- it’s no coincidence the theremin was revived in the middle of the 20th century to soundtrack horror films from ‘Spellbound’ to ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ ‘- but Warshaw’s simultaneously stunning act drove home a central theme of the film. The theremin, for all its novelty appeal, is more than a novelty item. It was a mechanism for producing fine art, and a sort of creative template for future discoveries.
As Machover would corroborate, the theremin helped set the pace for electronic music innovation, and built a framework for inventors, like himself, to work within and beyond.
Using the idea of gesture-based technology, Machover has pioneered ‘hyperinstruments’ for the likes of Yo-Yo Ma, Prince and Penn and Teller. He has also built devices for people suffering from conditions that would otherwise incapacitate them from making music, like Dan Ellsey, a Tewksbury Hospital patient with cerebral palsy who, thanks to Machover’s inventions, has composed his own pieces and played entire concerts.
Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, the inventors of Guitar Hero, were students of Machover’s at MIT.
These creations, Machover said, employ the same notion that formed the crux of Theremin’s invention:’ the use of human gestures to produce and alter sound.
On screen, Martin’s film took the audience back to the beginning of electronic music, with