25 Days of Music: Day 5
Something otherworldly today.
You know the theremin, right? Sure, everybody knows the theremin. That weird-sounding electric instrument that you play by waving your hands around? It was in the soundtracks to a bunch of movies including thrillers like Spellbound, but especially science fiction movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing from Another World, and Rocketship X-M.
Turns out the same guy played the theremin on all those soundtracks: Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, which has got to be the squarest name of any musician not called Engelbert Humperdinck. Hoffman grew up in New York playing violin and had started a small band in his 20s, when he acquired a theremin as payment for a debt. Pretty soon he had incorporated the instrument into the band, playing both on stage.
But the music was only a side job. Hoffman was a podiatrist and moved his practice to Los Angeles in 1941, where he signed up with the local musicians’ union to pick up spare gigs when he wasn’t fixing feet. A few years later the composer who was scoring Spellbound for Hitchcock wanted a theremin in the mix, and Hoffman, it turned out, was the only thereminist in the union who could read music.
He started to get steady work as a thereminist, scoring the movies listed above as well as a bunch of others. He also recorded an album with Les Baxter(!) and Harry Revel called Music Out of the Moon, which is and probably always will be the top-selling theremin record in history.
That’s today’s music. Six songs, 18 minutes:
It’s lush stuff, swoony and beautiful, but always with the weird, buzzy theremin right there in the mix. It’s considered a precursor to “exotica” like Martin Denny, for reasons which are clear when you hear it.
Hoffman recorded two more albums, Perfume Set To Music (sponsored by a perfume company) and Music for Peace of Mind. The music is lovely, but it’s also spacey proto-psychedelica, and it’s hard to imagine what people might have thought upon first hearing it. The great Sun Ra covered Hoffman’s “Possession” on his first album, Jazz by Sun Ra, before going all-in with the Sun Ra Arkestra.
Notes:
If you want to know more about the history of the theremin, there’s a marvelous 1995 documentary called Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey about it. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have made the jump to streaming, but DVD copies are cheap on eBay. Here is the trailer, and here’s Roger Ebert recommending the film in 1996, when he and Gene Siskel named the documentary their video pick of the week.
There are a lot of musicians calling themselves “Dr. Something,” but as far as I know Hoffman is the only actual doctor among them. Dr. Dre, Dr. John, and Dr. Hook are ABD at best. On the flip side, Offspring singer Dexter Holland has a PhD in Molecular Biology, Brian May of Queen has one in Astrophysics, and the current lead singer of Gwar has PhD in Music. None use the title “Dr.” on stage, as far as I know. Wikipedia has (of course) a list of entertainers with advanced degrees. This is my favorite:
Speaking of Engelbert Humperdinck, he was born Arnold Dorsey. At some point his manager suggested he change his stage name to Engelbert Humperdinck (after the German composer) and, for some unfathomable reason, Dorsey said sure, sounds good. One wonders what kind of subtext was going on in this conversation.