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Electronic Music Comes to NDACIn October of 1940, Paul Robeson (world renowned singer and actor, scholar, football player, lawyer, and linguist) was performing as part of the Lyceum Series. Accompanying him on his tour was Clara Rockmore who played an all-electric musical instrument called the Theremin. I was working as the stage electrician and curtain-puller for the Robeson concert. When I arrived for work, a trim lady in the middle of the stage was in the process of setting up a strange looking box that I had never seen before. When I asked her if she needed help she replied with a rather heavy foreign accent, "Please plug me into the electrical system." With that she tossed me the appliance cord which led into an oblong box supported on some kind of folding leg arrangement. I watched the lady turn on the power switch and wait for the thing to warm up. There were two metal rods sticking out of the box which looked like antennae for broadcast radio. Then she put one hand near one of the rods and her other hand near the second antenna-like structure. Suddenly the loudspeaker in the box began to produce what sounded like a sine wave tone to me. As she wiggled her fingers on her right hand up and down, the tone coming from the speaker went up and down the chromatic scale and a primitive sounding music resulted. When she moved her left hand closer to the other antenna, the sound became louder. The lady, Miss Clara Rockmore, began running up and down the scale by simply wiggling her fingers without touching anything on the antennas or box. "What do you call that instrument?" I asked. "It's a Theremin, and it was invented in Russia by a noted scientist named Leon Theremin." She continued to run up and down the scales, and I continued to watch. As I said, it sounded to me like simple sine wave being generated in the magic box. She stopped her warm up, and offered, with a smile, "It's a very hard instrument to play, you must have perfect pitch to do justice to it. Would you like to try?" "Sure," I said confidently, and stepped up to the box. I tried to do as she had done; however, my whistles were not anywhere near in tune, nor were they musical. They were just random whistles that meant nothing. She was right, it was hard to play. The following day the Fargo Forum headed an anonymous review with this headline, " Robeson Has Packed House." The article follows: "Standing Room Only crowd, packing auditorium, stage, and north wing, gave torrential applause and cheers to Paul Robeson, famed American Negro baritone, in Festival Hall Tuesday evening. Sharing audience applause and a rousing curiosity and speculation was Clara Rockmore with her theremin, all-electric musical instrument. -Bill Snyder, Class of 1942 
Some enchanted evening 
      
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Eric L. Parsons, Site
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