PLATTSBURGH — Musician Rob Schwimmer makes his living through touch of the seen and unseen.
His virtuosity on piano, theremin and Haken Continuum transports listeners to intergalactic realms.
The latter two instruments may be unfamiliar to most, but the North Country gets the opportunity to hear him play all three in concert at Sunday’s 3 p.m. Hill and Hollow Music program at the Saranac United Methodist Church.
Hill and Hollow’s theme this season is “Our Expanding Sound Universe,” and Schwimmer’s upcoming performance will undoubtedly fascinate, maybe even levitate … souls.
He says: “What I love about the piano is obvious: it’s an orchestra at your fingertips. The great thing about the theremin is that it gives you expressive phrasing. That means I can hold notes forever (don’t worry; I won’t), bend notes, add vibrato, and think about phrasing more like a singer than the piano allows.
“The Haken Continuum also feels like playing an acoustic instrument because of its incredible response to even the lightest touch; it’s so hi-tech that the “tech” ceases to exist. The Haken Continuum has that expressiveness akin to the theremin but adds polyphony and harmony into the musical equation. It’s a huge step forward in the evolution of electronic instruments.”
FIRST TIME
Schwimmer heard the sonics of the theremin, and thought it was alright. Interesting. But it didn’t capture his mind, until he saw a clip of thereminist great Clara Rockmore on a TV show.
“I could not reconcile because I had no idea of what hand was doing what,” he said.
“None of it made any sense, and it was kind of amazing. She was a great player and not just what you would hear in the sci-fi movies (Spellbound) until then.”
That clicked something else for him. He wanted to impress his love interest, an avant-garde clothing designer.
“I figured, I’m well, I’m really good here, and I should be able to play this thing fairly reasonably and then that girl will really like me because I’m playing this neat instrument. Whatever better reason is there to do anything?”
It took Schwimmer awhile to find the instrument, and it was next to impossible to play.
“It was terrible,” he said.
“I was trying to impress this girl, and it was impossible. and for whatever masochistic reason, I stuck with it and it took me some great time to get decent at it. The physics of it, I’m not a physicist but the basics of it is, have you ever taken a hearing test? Sure you have. You hear an electronic tone in your ear. That is from an oscillator. Around the instrument are two electromagnetic fields. Your body (hand positions) picks up the electromagnetic fields and tunes the oscillator pitch wise in one hand and volume wise with the other hand. So, it’s all about where your hands are.”
‘MIND BLOWING’
The theremin was developed in 1920 and patented in 1928 by Leon Theremin, a Russian engineer and physicist.
“It is a box with an antenna on the right side,” he said.
“As my right hand gets closer to that antenna, the pitch goes up. There’s a metal kind of loop sticking out of the box on the left side. This is the weird part because as you lift away from it, it gets louder. To silence it, you put our hand closer to the thing, which is really counterintuitive. We’re used to gas pedals and volume pedals. Down is always more, but this is the opposite. This thing was invented over 100 years ago. I mean it’s older than electric guitars. It’s crazy now, but imagine what they thought then. It must have been mind blowing.”