Theremin '75 - videos and pictures!

04 Dec '13

Time to catch up on some old blogs!

First up is Theremin ‘75, a concert of music for Theremin, iPad and computer in October. This concert was held to recreate a performance by noted Australian media artist Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski at the Australia ‘75 festival in Canberra. Larry Sitsky’s 1975 work Legions of Asmodeus was performed on one of Ostoja-Kotkowski’s restored theremins which is part of the ANU Art Collection and three recreations by Alistair Riddell and Stephen Jones.

Here’s some photos from the rehearsals and performance. The ensemble was Christina Hopgood, Yvonne Lam, Jonathan Griffiths and me!

It was a bit tricky getting the four instruments up and running, theremins typically have small aerials while these instruments had quite large pieces of steel! As a result, our bodies were always in the electric field of the theremin so we had to tune the instruments while on stage. Given that the instruments were on display in a gallery we weren’t able to look at each other so we used Decibel’s ScorePlayer iPad app to synchronise a scrolling score to perform the work cohesively. The result was loud, crazy, and a lot of fun! Here’s the video:

Martyn Jolly also wrote about the performance here.