On Sat, 2003-04-19 at 02:48, jose manuel berenguer wrote:
hello
I think Kiilo meant to compare the relative stability of the traditional instruments to the way we are still working today with electronic devices. Theremin may be still in use and have influenced many other interfaces to electronic devices but sure it is not a well established instrument.
it is not really a well established instrument, it is true. anyway, there is a list of more than 400 bands and musicians using the Theremine
http://www.thereminworld.com/bands.asp
among them, Jarre (Oxigene 10, 1997) and Spencer, as has been said, but also John Zorn and many other well known musicians.
Moog is selling one and it is MIDIfied...
http://www.moogmusic.com/cgi-local/SoftCart.100.exe/products_t.html?L+scstor...
an interesting thing about Theremine that I don't know if it has been transferred to other newer electronic devices is its highly developed technique of playing...
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.