This page gives additional information for participants of the international online Theremin Academy. More general details and registration can be found here:
https://theremin.academy/academies-2021/worldwide-online-2021/
Thierry’s Theremin Ensemble Workshop
Dear participants, here is everything you need for your preparation of the Theremin Ensemble workshop:
General info
I’d really like everybody to partake in this worldwide online theremin ensemble! That’s why I chose a relatively easy piece of music, and thus arranged a Nocturne by Nikolai Nikolayevich Tcherepnin (1873-1945), initially written for a French Horn quartet, for 4 theremin voices.
Learning to play just the notes shouldn’t be too difficult, even for those who aren’t much familiar with reading sheet music. As a helper, you will find practice-along mp3 files for each of the 4 voices of the quartet below.
Preparing the Ensemble workshop
Playing together, and having probably 50+ theremin players on different continents is the first huge challenge. The second challenge is to hit not only the (desired) tones, but to make expressive music with dynamics from almost silent to very loud. That’s why I invite you to use the sheet music and the audio tracks below to learn by reading and by ear beforehand! The piece is slow and short, about 30 bars or 2 minutes, that should be doable over the next 10 days, so that during the workshop, we’ll be able to concentrate on the aforementioned major challenges.
Ideally, you find the time to learn all 4 parts, so that we have some freedom for (re-) attributing the different parts to the participants during the workshop. But if this is too much a burden, better select only 2 of the 4 voices and prepare these well. For the lowest part (Theremin 4), I’m especially counting on these among you who have the ESPE01 module installed.
The sheet music
Please download and print out the following pdf file. During the workshop, you should have the sheet music on a music stand besides your screen, so that you can see the music and your teacher/conductor at the same time.
The piece of music itself
Here is the so-called « Tutti » version with all 4 voices playing together. Listen a few times to it, it will help you to get an idea of what we want to achieve:
The play-along-and-practice tracks
The other 3 voices are always at very low volume, so that you can easily hear the respective part (Theremin 1, 2, 3 or 4) corresponding to the sheet music and have the sound of « the others » at low volume in the background for better orientation, too: