Élégie / Massenet

This composition recorded March 21, 2024.

Élégie in E minor - Jules Massenet

Moog Etherwave; Keeley Parallax

Piano accompaniment by Héctor Valls via Petrucci Music Library / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0

Albert Glinsky tells us in his wonderful book Theremin: Ether Music & Espionage, that Massenet’s Élégie was one of the very first melodies Leon Theremin experimented with when the circuit he built to measure “the density and dialectric constant of gases under varying conditions of pressure and temperature,” began to show promise as a musical instrument. This bite-sized composition felt like a must-learn for me on my theremin journey. I’ll admit, even with a couple years’ practice on this one, the huge jumps between some notes at its insistent tempo still consistently throw me, but it’s a sound I love and a challenge I welcome in my practice.

Ave Maria / Bach & Gounod

This composition recorded March 21, 2024.

Ave Maria in C major - J.S. Bach & Charles Gounod

Moog Etherwave; Keeley Parallax; Korg NTS-1

Ave Maria was the first piece I really drilled down and figured out on the theremin. Apart from loving the melody, I felt it struck a nice balance between traveling the scale with an optimistic energy and maintaining a tempo I could keep up with at my early skill level. I still play this piece at least once in every practice, though I won’t say my execution has improved that much in the intervening two years!

I built the accompaniment for this recording myself, painstakingly in the dumbest way possible, by driving my Korg NTS-1 with hand-placed notes in my Cakewalk piano roll. I don’t play the keys, so unfortunately that’s how I do. As future theremin performance posts accumulate in this space, the gentle reader may notice I don’t make a whole lot of accompaniments myself.