Where:
Porter Square Books
25 White Street
Cambridge, MA 02140
Admission:
FREE
Categories:
Art, Date Idea, Lectures & Conferences, Meetup, Music, Performing Arts
Event website:
http://www.portersquarebooks.com/event/sean-michaels-us-conductors-theremin-player-jon-bernhardt
Sean Michaels will be reading from his book Us Conductors (Random House Canada; http://usconductors.byseanmichaels.com/). He’ll be joined by Jon Bernhardt on the theremin.
[Sean Michaels is a writer and music critic. A two-time National Magazine Award winner, his work has been published by the Guardian, McSweeney's, the Walrus, Brick, Pitchfork, The Believer, and many other outlets. In 2003, he founded the music-blog Said the Gramophone. He lives in Montreal.]
[Jon Bernhardt has been playing theremin since 1996 in such bands as The Lothars, The Pee Wee Fist, and UV Protection. As a solo performer, he specializes in theremin versions of songs that are completely inappropriate for that instrument (mostly punk and new wave classics). Although he's been known to throw in a few standards, to keep the audience on their toes. When not playing the theremin, he works as an actuary at a major metropolitan insurance company and DJs an indie-rock radio show at WMBR-FM, M.I.T.'s community radio station. He lives in Somerville with his wife and son.]
Book description:
In a finely woven series of flashbacks and correspondence, Us Conductors takes us from the glitz and glam of New York in the 1930s to the gulags and scientific camps of the Soviet Union.
Lev Termen is imprisoned on a ship steaming its way from New York City to the Soviet Union. He is writing a letter to his “one true love,” Clara Rockmore, the finest theremin player in the world. From there we learn Termen’s story: his early days as a scientist in Leningrad, and the acclaim he received as the inventor of the theremin, eventually coming to New York under the aegis of the Russian state. There he stays, teaching eager music students, making his name, and swiftly falling in love with Clara. But it isn’t long until he has fallen in with Russian spooks, slipping through the shadows of a budding Cold War, with cold-blooded results. The novel builds to a crescendo as Termen returns to Russia, where he is imprisoned in a Siberian gulag and later brought to Moscow, tasked with eavesdropping on Stalin himself.
Us Conductors is a book of longing and electricity. Like Termen’s own life, it is steeped in beauty, wonder and looping heartbreak. How strong is unrequited love? What does it mean when it is the only thing keeping you alive? This sublime debut inhabits the idea of invention on every level, no more so than in its depiction of Termen’s endless feelings for Clara – against every realistic odd. For what else is love but the greatest invention of all?