AETHERPHON, global theremin family

Sir OmHoge:

To answer your questions…

>How did your demo "How the #!&@$? Do You Play a Theremin?" go?>

The demo went very well. During the demos, people typically wander 
in and out, so there were as few as three or four people and as many 
as twenty-five or so throughout the forty-five minutes. The purpose 
of the demo, as opposed to just playing music, was to upset the 
applecart a bit – I'm a proponent of dispelling what I perceive to 
be a self-defeating dictate: that the theremin is the most difficult 
instrument in the world to play. I won't get started on a long 
diatribe, but I will say that for thereminists to bemoan the fact 
that the instrument is viewed as a novelty and rarely taken 
seriously while simultaneously adopting an attitude that the 
instrument's challenges keeps us in a sort of exclusive "club" if 
you will – is hardly the way to transcend its novelty status. 
Anyway, my intention was to get people up and playing a 
passable "Mary Had a Little Lamb" or other simple song within ten 
minutes of practice time. Using some very specific techniques I 
shared, it worked pretty darn well. The main thing was that people 
had a good time, laughed, heard some music, and for the most part, 
left wanting more.


> How many of the curious showed up, did you find it supported your 
other performances?>

The hour-long performance was two days later. There was very little 
correlation between the two. Part of that was due to the fact that 
about a third of the folks there on Friday were gone by Sunday. A 
lot of the musicians had other obligations and were unable to stay 
the full three days. Quite a few of us missed one another's 
performances in the course of doing sound checks, or being upstairs 
playing at some of the informal sessions.

I know that you'd expressed interest in what happened in the process 
of performing, given the fact that my entire set-up had to be 
altered in order to accommodate the audio streaming. I will post the 
story of that shortly. Suffice to say for now that a lot has been 
written about thereminists insisting upon their independent setups 
to achieve optimum performance. And, I usually do so without any 
difficulties or offending others – however, every performance for 
the Electro-Music Festival is streamed worldwide as a matter of 
course, and EVERYONE performing adjusted things accordingly. More on 
that in another post.