Seven years later, Louis and Bebe Barron, a husband-and-wife team of tape-twisters and oscillator-botherers, generated the world’s first all-electronic film score for Forbidden Planet (1958) – so ear-troublingly modernist that the studio billed them not as musicians, but creators of “electronic tonalities”. (Their creator, by this point, had fallen from the Kremlin’s favour and was developing bugging devices in a laboratory in the Gulag.) Ming the Merciless administered his empire from the planet Mongo, but he also stood for despots down here on the earth.īernard Herrmann pioneered an early form of multi-track recording on The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), laying down the sound of two Hammond organs, a vibraphone, an electrically-amplified violin and a pair of Theremins. The Theremin suited the lab and the rocketship because it sounded like the music of the future - but it also carried a note of dangerous exoticism.
#Space age music serial
Universal liked the music so much that they recycled it in the science-fiction serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940). The Russian physicist Lev Termen (known as Léon Theremin in the West) invented the device in 1919, and took it to the States in 1927, just in time for the invention of the talkies.įranz Waxman let one shriek through The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) – where it was quite at home among the spark-generators and lightning conductors of Colin Clive’s laboratory.
#Space age music tv
The aliens, as they watch crackly TV broadcasts of 20th-century science fiction films, are probably wondering why, for decades, their arrival was always heralded by the wail of the Theremin – that odd electric instrument that’s played by doing jazz hands at a pair of metal antennae. Leon Theremin teaches a young Lydia Kavina, who went on to become the world's leading Theremin performer
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