Us Conductors by Sean Michaels
Pages: 464
Publisher: Tin House Books
Released: 2014
Reviewed by Bronwyn Mauldin
The music was
beautiful, though, not cheap sci-fi schlock. Something classical, performed
with both aural and physical grace. Then I noticed I was standing next to a
real life copy of the same very instrument: a box on a table with two looped
antennae sticking out of it at right angles. I reached over to touch it and
discovered this theremin was on. I moved my hands back and forth over
the antennae, trying to mimic what the musician was doing on screen. The noise
I made wasn’t particularly lovely, but I was making music, of a sort.
Sean Michaels’ novel,
Us Conductors, is a
fictionalized account of the adult life of Soviet physicist Lev Sergeyevich Termen who invented the
theremin in 1920. After grand successes touring with his instrument in the USSR
and Europe, Termen was sent to America where his name was westernized as Léon
Theremin. RCA bought rights to produce and sell the eponymous instrument. RCA
had visions of “a theremin in every home,” but their timing was terrible as
they began sales in 1929. The stock market crash ruined any chance of
commercial success.
Michaels’ book begins
with Termen/Theremin locked up on a ship where he is being returned to the USSR
against his will. We learn of his life in the US as an inventor, teacher and
artist, and about his unrequited love for Clara Reisenberg (later to become
Rockmore), a young Lithuanian refugee and violin prodigy who, under Theremin’s
tutelage, became a famous theremin
virtuoso.
The theremin is one
of the first electronic musical instruments ever invented. It is also, perhaps,
the only musical instrument that is played by not touching it. This is a
perfect metaphor for the inventor’s doomed love for Clara.
Theremin and Clara
dance their way through speakeasies across New York City in this inventive novel.
He is managed by a mysterious man named Pash who negotiates contracts Theremin
signs without reading. Michaels’ Theremin practices kung fu, and he cooks
spaghetti with Tommy Dorsey and George Gershwin. He plays Camille Saint-Saëns’
“The Swan” when he demonstrates his instrument to both Charlie Chaplin and
Vladimir Lenin.
Even as he knows his
love for her to be a lost cause, he builds Clara the most beautiful theremin
yet and he uses his engineering magic to give it more voices than any theremin
has ever had. At a grand concert she plays in Philadelphia he discovers she has
painted his beautiful instrument black and only uses one of its many voices.
Whisked out of the
country in the middle of the night, Theremin (once again Termen) is delivered
into the Siberian gulag, then to a special prison for scientists where he works
under the direction of the reviled Lavrentiy Beria himself. Throughout it all,
Termen is haunted by his love for Clara. He sees her around every corner, and
in every recording he makes.
With this novel
Michaels solves the mystery of what happened to the inventor of this strange
instrument whose sound you know but have probably never seen before. He solves
it, as he admits, primarily with inventions of his own. Michaels’
Termen/Theremin is a living paradox, a man who experiences the world with the
hands of an engineer and the heart of an artist.
“If you are like me,
you dream your life according to perfect conditions. You look at the lines of a
proof, the clear symbols of a formula, and you understand the world,” his
Theremin says. “This is dream, not knowledge. Life is not a laboratory;
twenty-four imperfect hours make up a day. There is interference, distortion,
accident, will. There is also hope. Hope will ruin a thing, or fulfill it.”
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