FEATURED MUSIC*
- "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" - The Hissy Kits (Milwaukee, WI, USA)
- "Introjection" - Gary P. Hayes (Mount Victoria, NSW, Australia)
- "Loretta's Sinfonia" (excerpt) - About Aphrodite (Dortmund, Germany)
*The full-length recordings featured in this show were used with the knowledge and permission of the artists and composers. Please support the artists by visiting their websites, purchasing their recordings, and attending their performances.
ADDITIONAL MUSIC
- "Opera Glasses" - Phlogiston Theory & Ron Allen (Evanston, IL / Seattle, WA, USA)
- Excerpts from demo recordings of Madame Theremin by George M. Kopp and Kennedy Verrett
INTERVIEW GUEST
- Librettist George M. Kopp and composer Kennedy Verrett, creators of the Madame Theremin opera. The "Madame Theremin" opera workshop will be presented at the Ann Getty Center inside the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on July 11 at 2:30pm. Tickets are free, but a suggested donation is encouraged.
Attendees are encouraged to email cablalock@gmail.com to reserve a spot, or visit the Madame Theremin Opera site or Adopt an Opera Singer page for more information and to donate.
CALENDAR OF THEREMIN EVENTS
- Visit the Theremin 30 Calendar of Theremin Events
MEDIA & NEWS LINKS
- The Theremin 30 Playlist on YouTube includes music videos and concert performances of songs featured in this podcast series.
- Gary P. Hayes has donated 20 free download codes for his new album, TheremIntuition. Codes are listed below. Redeem them here: https://garyphayes.bandcamp.com/yum. Try one and if doesn't work it has already been used, so try another one. Free until they are gone.
- 6ur3-clb8
- kwmw-xesn
- kp8q-jbce
- n9nf-yw43
- mydv-bx5s
- bkj8-hq2d
- wng2-58wh
- cakw-72l5
- s7ye-vhqr
- pwu9-gegd
- rs5z-3urh
- vlj7-cu63
- 6e9d-cpz4
- ur2s-xrym
- lmle-edn6
- qgpg-3d5k
- gufn-chb8
- ylal-x5sn
- yp9j-j3ce
- 263r-gs43
SUPPORT THIS PODCAST
CONTACT
- Write to the show: theremin30podcast@gmail.com
CREDITS
- Producer/Writer/Host: Rick Reid
- Opening and closing announcer: David Brower
Copyright 2026 Rick Reid
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00:00:05 David Brower
This is Theremin 30, thirty minutes of theremin music, news, events, and interviews, with a new episode about every 30 days. Now here's your host, Rick Reid.
00:00:18 Rick Reid
Hey there, welcome to the July 2026 edition of the Theremin 30 podcast. Coming up, I've got new theremin music from Germany, Australia, and right here in the USA. And my special guests are George M. Copp and Kennedy Berrett, the librettist and composer of Madame Theremin, a new opera about the life of Lavinia Williams. Since this month is kind of a big deal here in the USA with our 250th anniversary celebration, we'll begin with a patriotic number from Milwaukee's finest felines, the Hissy Kits, with I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy. After that, I've got a new track from Australian recording artist Gary P. Hayes. I'll give you the details about both tracks on the other side.
00:08:07 Rick Reid
We got this show started with the Hissy Kits and their cover of the George M. Cohan show tune, I'm A Yankee Doodle Dandy. It's a song originally written for a Broadway musical about an American jockey who enters a British horse race. You can find the track on the new 17-song album, America 250. It's available on Bandcamp as a compact disc, or you can name your own price to download the MP3 files. After that I played a track called Introjection by Gary P. Hayes from his new album TheremIntuition, a collection of instrumental tunes that explore the feminine side of music. If you'd like a free download of the full album, Gary has generously provided me with 20 download codes. I'll post them in this episode's show notes at theremin30.com. It's time now for the Theremin 30 calendar of Theremin events. On July 11th, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music will host a workshop performance of the new opera, Madame Theremin. I'll have more details later in this episode. On July 13th through the 18th, Lilli-Eline Bakken Skomsøy will present a series of recitals at the Ringve Musikkmuseum in Trondheim, Norway. And on July 28th, Yoko Onishi takes part in a theremin and Koto duet recital in Kyoto City, Japan. For details about these events and more, check out the calendar page at theremin30.com. In the May 2026 episode, I played new music from German recording artists Honey Bizarre. The core members of that band, Gilda Razani and Hanzo Wanning, also record and perform in another project called About Aphrodite. That project just released a new album called Songs Without Words. It features guest percussionist Fethi Ak. The song I'm going to play for you is a bit too long for the constraints of this half-hour show, so with the artists' permission, here is an edited version of a track called Loretta's Sinfonia.
00:15:07 Rick Reid
That was a portion of Loretta's Sinfonia by About Aphrodite. It's from their brand new album called Songs Without Words, available now on Bandcamp. Click on the artists' name in this month's show notes to listen to the full recording. And to learn more about the musical duo behind About Aphrodite and Honey Bizarre, check out my interview with them in the December 2023 episode of the Theremin 30 podcast. If you've read a book or seen a documentary about Leon Theremin, you probably know about Lavinia Williams, the professional dancer who performed in the American Negro Ballet and was married to Professor Theremin during part of his time in New York in the 1930s. Ms. Williams' fascinating and often dramatic life is the inspiration for a new opera called Madam Theremin. It will get its first full workshop performance on July 11th in San Francisco. I recently spoke with the opera's librettist George M. Kopp and its composer Kennedy Verrett. Kennedy and George, welcome to the Theremin 30 podcast.
00:16:13 Kennedy Verrett
Thank you so much. I appreciate you.
00:16:15 George M. Kopp
Great to be here.
00:16:16 Rick Reid
You have a really cool project called Madame Theremin. Tell me, what is it and how did the idea for it get going?
00:16:24 George M. Kopp
Okay, this is George. I'll answer because it was kind of my idea. Now, your audience is familiar with the theremin. Many people that we talk to don't know what it is. They don't know who Leon Theremin was, all of these things. So I can skip a whole lot of introductory stuff, and I'm sure that your audience knows that he was married to Lavinia Williams for a short time in the 1930s. And I was fascinated by this fact. I read Glinsky's biography many, many years ago, and it stuck with me, you know, and I thought that there was an opera there.
00:17:17 George M. Kopp
But I tried to write it, but it never took off. And then thinking about it, I thought, wait, the story of Lavinia, what's her story? And so I concentrated on that. And we got into Haiti and vodou and the Harlem Renaissance and all of these very interesting things, events, and history. That's where the opera came from. And then I looked for a composer and a mutual friend of ours hooked me up with Kennedy.
00:17:51 Rick Reid
So Kennedy, how did you respond when you heard about this idea? Have you done an opera before? And what was it about this one that appealed to you?
00:17:59 Kennedy Verrett
I've not done an opera before. And I wasn't planning to do an opera. However, when you read a libretto like Madame Theremin, it's kind of like, how could you not be involved with it, right? Because at the time, I knew who Leon Theremin was. I knew about the theremin, of course, but I wasn't quite familiar with who Lavinia Williams was. And once I started to dig into her story and I read the libretto and I saw all these beautiful Easter eggs of knowledge and history and how everything tied together, I was like, this is something I feel like I can be really creative and explore the world of opera in a way that's not so traditional. And to also tell this beautiful story of Lavinia Williams and her journey with, along with Leon. And it was pretty compelling, that draft that I read. So I was like, okay, cool, let's do it.
00:19:07 Rick Reid
The attitudes of the time, the culture of New York City, how does that all fit together when you're telling this story to a modern audience?
00:19:15 George M. Kopp
Very difficult. It's a real challenge. I use a lot of cultural references from the 1930s because I tried to get into their lives and what they were thinking. For example, in one scene, she's talking about the Flash Gordon movies, and she mentions Buster Crabbe, who played Flash Gordon. He was a blonde Olympic athlete, a swimmer, and, you know, like several white Olympians, he got into the movies. The black Olympians, not so much. But there's a character, Noble Washington, who's kind of based on Paul Robeson, and Lavinia tells him, "We need a black Flash Gordon. be Captain Obsidian, the Black Flash Gordon." And then he starts dragging on Buster Crabbe, you know, because Robeson was a tremendous athlete. Then I thought, well, you know, that's going to be difficult because people haven't heard of Buster Crabbe. Even Paul Robeson, a lot of people haven't heard of him, but I just plowed ahead. I mean, what are you going to do? This is history, and, especially with someone like Robeson, he should be known, obviously, even though we don't call him Paul Robeson in the opera. We call him Noble Washington, because I thought that Robeson is too big a character to play a supporting role. He needs his own opera.
00:20:39 Rick Reid
When I listened to the samples of the recordings you guys sent me, I heard a little bit of 1930s jazz in there, I think. What are some of the influences from the story and from the history of Lavinia Williams that influence the way you write your music?
00:20:54 Kennedy Verrett
Okay, word. So in my brain, when I was thinking about this, I was thinking of it in a futuristic setting as in almost one of those situations where you're in a futuristic museum. and they have the holograms of these people, right? And you get then are submersed in the sound and immediately taken into that space.
00:20:54 Kennedy Verrett
But for me, like we have this, the opera exists between three worlds, right? The real, the unreal, and the surreal. And so when I'm setting the music, I was like, in the '30s, right? We have a very specific style and type of early jazz that's emanating. So pay homage to that. You don't find a lot of that in traditional opera. So I was like, okay, we got to make sure we honor that. This is when Lavinia was alive. This is when she would have run into Leon Theremin. Let's take him into that world. As we get further into the opera, there's also elements of music from Haitian vodou and West African rhythms. Even into some electronic music that we get when we think about Afrofuturism, we think about Sun Ra, we think about the Fluxus movement and Benjamin Patterson. It's all in there. And so when I was creating the palette and trying to figure out what sounds need to be, those were the places that I drew inspiration. And I just kind of let it simmer, if you will, for a couple of years before I was like, okay, I think I'm ready to, to tackle this palette.
00:22:48 Rick Reid
So George, what was it about the story of Lavinia Williams that said, ah, this should be an opera?
00:22:55 George M. Kopp
Okay, everybody knows the story of Leon and Clara Rockmore. And there have been works, there have been novels that have been written about that relationship. And that relationship never impressed me as being terribly interesting. I looked at it as he's just another guy who got dumped. But with Lavinia, I saw something much deeper, and it resonated for a number of reasons. You know, he was a committed communist, a committed Bolshevik. He believed in the whole Bolshevik program, and part of that was to, you know, compressed the Russian race viewpoint with the American race viewpoint. But I think that one of the reasons that Theremin married Lavinia was an Eff you to the United States. I don't think he liked America at all. The circumstances surrounding his return to the Soviet Union, he claimed that he went back voluntarily. Lavinia, who was there, said he was kidnapped. I decided for the opera that the truth was somewhere in between the two, or there was right on both sides. I do believe that he did want to go back to the Soviet Union. I also happen to think that that's probably the main reason why Clara dumped him, because for her, returning to the Soviet Union was absolutely out of the question. And I think that she saw that, you know, he would never be happy settling down in America. Anyway, that's my own theory. But it's such a rich time of history, and it is a rich history that is suppressed in this country. I mean, the whole, you know, Harlem Renaissance, all of that, you gotta learn it yourself. You're not taught that in school.
00:25:08 Rick Reid
Let's talk about the theremin musical instrument and what role it plays in the opera. I see from the samples you sent me that you've involved a friend of the show, Gregoire Blanc. How did that come about? And are you composing with the idea that you'll have a thereminist in the orchestra?
00:25:27 Kennedy Verrett
Gregoire, amazing. He reached out earlier on in the process. And I checked out his work and I was like immediately enamored, right? And so we reached out to have him just record the Madame Theremin theme so it could live in this world of the Theremin. So yeah, the idea is to have Theremin involved more so The terpsitone, which is an instrument that Leon was building for Lavinia, right? Rather than using your hands, you would dance on it thing. And he never really got it perfected, but that is referenced often in the opera. But with regard to the theremin, yes, I'm planning to use it in such a way where opera houses or whoever's doing it, college, university, they don't have to have a dedicated thereminist. but they do have to have some idea about how the theremin works. The cool thing about this etherwave theremin that I have, you can plug it into other synthesizers that have a CV input or some sort of input. And so if someone's in close proximity or they just wave their hand, right, it'll activate the theremin, but it'll go through the synth, and that can be used as a gate to help manipulate it and to get closer to some of the ideas that in the the passages where the music has to be exactly what I wrote. But in the Afrofuturistic stuff, somebody could be dancing in front of that thing. We're talking about having some choreography and some ASL that's done to really showcase the idea of the theremin and that particular sonic world. I think this, for me, that's how I'm planning to feature it. Not so much as like, oh, here's someone's going to play a theremin concerto in the middle of the opera. It's more part of the texture and acknowledging this idea of being able to be the sound and not necessarily touch it, right? So this motion and movement. One of my ideas is to have, as people come in, have a turpsitone or a theremin set up at each entrance. And as they come in, the bodies activate the sound. That sound is then captured. and that creates the texture and the atmosphere that ushers in the overture to start the opera. I'm thinking of it more in terms of less of the traditional instrument and more of this interactive device that just helps to create this world.
00:28:06 Rick Reid
Tell me about this workshop coming up in July.
00:28:08 George M. Kopp
It's a piano vocal workshop of the complete opera. We did a workshop of Act One in New York City a couple of years ago, and now we have the full opera complete, so it's a major, major milestone. And it's, you know, it's for the benefit of Kennedy and myself as much as anyone else, so we can hear the work performed, we have seven terrific singers, pianist, conductor, it's going to be a really important gig.
00:28:45 Kennedy Verrett
This thing has been in my, largely in my brain, so it'll be nice to kind of get it back into the physical space. I'm looking forward to really just experimenting and exploring with the singers all the possible sounds that we can get with the voices of the piano and to see if the story works sonically and how it flows musically. But honestly, I'm also just really looking forward to a good time and just seeing how the story unfolds and develops.
00:29:15 Rick Reid
Tickets to the July 11th performance of Madame Theremin are free, but donations are encouraged to support the performers. For more information, see the Theremin 30 calendar or follow the links in this episode's show notes at theremin30.com. And with that, we are out of time. Thanks so much for everyone who contributed music to this episode and to my guests, Kennedy Verrett and George M. Kopp. Please support these artists with your time, ears, and wallet whenever possible. Until next time, I'm Rick Reid, and I'll see you somewhere in the ether.
00:29:48 David Brower
You've been listening to the Theremin 30 podcast. Visit Theremin 30 on the web at theremin30.com.
