Lydia Kavina is a theremin player, composer and teacher based in the UK, and the author of ThereminSchool. She learned the instrument from Léon Theremin himself — he was her grandfather’s first cousin — has performed on it and written for it ever since, and has been teaching it since 1986. Much of what is taught on this site comes directly from that line of transmission.
Kavina was born in Moscow in 1967 and began learning the theremin at the age of nine, under Léon Theremin’s own guidance. She also studied piano, and later took a degree in music theory and composition at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where she completed a postgraduate assistantship programme. Her professional career began in 1983, when she performed with the Soviet State Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra.
Very few musicians alive today learned the instrument from its inventor. That is why the material in these courses is not a reconstruction from recordings — it is a method handed down in person and refined over forty years of teaching.
Kavina has performed as a soloist at the Royal Albert Hall in London, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory and the Bellevue Palace in Berlin, and at festivals including the Lincoln Center Festival in New York and the Holland Festival.
Her repertoire covers most of the classical theremin literature — Bohuslav Martinů, Joseph Schillinger, Miklós Rózsa’s Spellbound, Edgard Varèse’s Equatorial and Nicolas Obouhov’s Testament — alongside contemporary work written for her. She has also composed for the instrument herself, including a Concerto for Theremin and Symphony Orchestra, premiered by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project under Gil Rose. In 2018–2019 she played the theremin solo in Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony under Kent Nagano in Hamburg and Zurich.
Kavina’s theremin can be heard in Howard Shore’s scores for Ed Wood and eXistenZ, in Roque Baños’s music for The Machinist, and in The Electrical Life of Louis Wain. She appeared on screen as a thereminist in Wolfgang Becker’s Me and Kaminski.
In the theatre she has played in Olga Neuwirth’s opera Bählamms Fest, in The Little Mermaid, the ballet by Lera Auerbach choreographed by John Neumeier, and in Alice and The Black Rider, the Tom Waits and Robert Wilson productions staged in Hamburg.
Her albums include Music from the Ether (Mode Records, 1999), Touch! Don’t Touch! — Music for Theremin with Barbara Buchholz (Wergo, 2006) and Spellbound! (Mode Records, 2008).
In 1994 Kavina recorded the video tutorial Mastering the Theremin with Robert Moog — for a whole generation of players it was the first systematic instruction available anywhere. Among her students are Carolina Eyck, Barbara Buchholz and Masami Takeuchi.
She is also a co-organiser and master teacher at international theremin festivals and academies — among them the Hands Off theremin festivals in the United Kingdom, the Theremin Academie in Leipzig, the Without Touch theremin weekends in Lippstadt and the Electromagnetica festival in Santiago de Chile.
ThereminSchool is where that teaching now lives. The site holds eight structured courses, from your first steps through finger technique and ear training to repertoire, a growing set of exercises, and online workshops she runs herself.