From the dawn of civilization until the early 1900's C.E. analog was the one and only choice for making music. Then humans harnessed electricity and went about making things behave in ways traditional knowledge says they shouldn't. It was just a hop and skip from lightbulbs to electronic music. Today it's fairly easy for a musician to use an array of equipment to be a one-person orchestra, but the road to modern electronic music is a long, meandering one. All of the constituent pieces of the puzzle fell into place with a combination of laborious research and old-fashioned serendipity. The sounds we associate today with a musical entity all its own grew up alongside pop, rock, avant garde and the cinema. This is the story of that journey, achronological and piecemeal.

Two decades before Robert Moog changed the way people made music forever, a technological prodigy from St. Petersburg, Russia named Lev Sergeyevich Termen invented what may be the very first electronic instrument. We now know him as Leon, sharing his surname with his invention, the Theremin.

Music wasn't Termen's original aim. As a student he basically used the temporarily innovation-obsessed Bolshevik movement to fund his labs where he researched a number of then-experimental applications of electricity. In 1920 the Lenin regime commissioned Termen to develop proximity sensors for security purposes. The resulting invention was the termenvox aetherphone, a potentially-musical instrument that could be played without even touching it.

For the pride of the USSR, Termen was paraded around Europe giving demonstration concerts of his new invention. He eventually wound up in America where he resided for the next decade living the life of a proper capitalist. Termen got a US patent for his machine and sold the production rights to RCA. His timing couldn't have been worse. The RCA Thereminvox hit the shelves just shortly after the stock market crash that resulted in The Great Depression.

The marketing wasn't the Theremin's only problem. While the instrument is fascinating in principle and capable of some amazingly nuanced tones (as demonstrated here by Pamelia Kurstin), it is remarkably difficult to play. The lack of physical contact with the instrument means that tone control isn't simply a matter of being on the correct fret or feeling a dissonant vibration. Every movement, no matter how small, is significant when playing a Theremin. The instrument functions by using two antennae, one controlling volume and the other controlling pitch, and allowing one's body to act as a grounding plate for the electricity coursing through the device.

There are maybe a handful of people alive today who can play the Theremin with performance-level proficiency. Less practiced individuals have used the weird, early-radio sounds of the Theremin to fuel science fiction soundtracks, the most infamous being legendary hack Ed Wood.

These days the Theremin has something of a fan club among strange sound and tinkering enthusiasts. It's also a go-to instrument for indie bands who want to sound mysterious and unusual. Though it was one of the earliest electronic instruments in history, the Theremin hasn't really seen much use in the electronic music scene, mostly because more varied, user-friendly devices popped into the industry by the 1960's. Lev Termen's invention isn't so much about the practice, anyway. If anything, it's a proof of concept for the creation of unique sounds using electronic means.