hello, Maurizio Umberto
This is was also my point in a previous mail. Anyway in this specific case (instrument), as far as I heard the technique is highly developed in the sense of playing traditional music or music that is in fact not very different from traditional music. I never listened to John Zorn playing theremin but since he made several works on cinema, recreating sound tracks for immaginary movies he may have used theremin in a idiomatic manner.
This is specifically true for the original theremin which is an instrument designed to play music of pitches (in fact the theremin is associated to a specific timbre, it's a real traditional instrument). With MIDIfied theremin, that is theremin used as control device (like radio baton etc), this is not true but I think you can use a theremin to exploit something like PD.
When I talk about reaching an instrumental technique on electronic devices, I am not necessarily referring to music written as traditional instrumental music but a music that can possibly exploits the essence of the specific device. In this sense the use of haptic devices "just" for the feeling of an acoustic istrument is not a priority for me (nor it is a tabu).
Maurizio Umberto Puxeddu.
i share your opinions
when i was speaking about the "highly developed" technique of Theremine, i only was thinking on the accuracy of movements. in the past, they produced, indeed, pitches, but it could be possible using all this gestural knowledge to control other less idiomatic musical variables.
to play a Helmut Lachenmann's quartet, performers perhaps have spent a lot of years working on control of pitches and levels in time, despite of the fact that his music has more to do with other qualities of sound...
coming back to Theremine again, even if not using the new MIDI features, the frequency of audio signal could be analyzed by means of fiddle~ and mapped to any other set of sonic dimensions. it is not matter of feeling of acoustic instruments in my case. it is only a need to control the life of sounds in real time with the same level of accuracy that was reached by musical works in the past. not always, but sometimes i need that audience communicates, directly with performers, that it follows them, and this is not possible without a high level of control of sound matter.
perhaps this is a mirage...
jm