Last night I was in Earl's Lounge watching the Colorado
Rockies lose to the Boston Red Sox.

They often play very good music on tape and disc in
Earl's Lounge.

One of the songs they played was Don McLean's
American Pie- the long version of it- the one that goes
on for 9 and a half minutes.

I think American Pie is one of my favourite songs ever.

And I do love Don McLean's version of it- since Don McLean
was the original singer-songwriter who wrote and recorded the
song back in 1971.

I love American Pie because the lyrics are so haunting and
the melody is so haunting as well.

However I must confess that when Madonna came out with 
her version of American Pie back in 2000, for some reason I found
myself liking her version of American Pie even better than the Don McLean
original.

Which is strange for me. Because I find that for myself, I've
generally liked the original versions of songs better than I do
re-recordings by other artists.

So sometime back in 2000, with nothing better to do I suppose,
I sat down and thought, why do I like the Madonna version better
than the Don McLean version?

Was it the voice?

No, it wasn't the voice.

And then it came to me, it was a certain melody, a certain touch...
a certain je ne sais quoi... that made the Madonna version sound
even more haunting and mournful than the Don McLean version.

There was a certain something in the Madonna version that added
even more the right dash of melancholy to those haunting McLean lyrics.

But what was it?

It was a certain instrument I determined.

There was a certain instrument that was played in the Madonna
version that wasn't played in the original McLean version and it was
that instrument that pushed the melody of American Pie over the line
from masterpiece to... grand masterpiece.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out what that instrument was.

Then in the year 2001 I went to see the 1919 German silent film
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari performed in a repertory theatre.

Accompanying the film was a quartet of singers singing below
the screen. And a man playing a musical instrument- an instrument
I had never seen before.

When the film was over, there was an audience discussion
afterwards. And the man explained the instrument- it was
called the theremin and it was the world's first electronic
musical instrument.

He invited members of the audience up to try it.

You ran your hands in the air between three oscillators
and two antennas to produce the sound.

I rather enjoyed doing it. The sound sounded so... ethereal
and haunting. As if the world of spirit beyond the material world
was sending a tune into this... the material world.

Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas both spoke of the Music
of the Spheres- the Harmony of the Spheres- this idea
that the celestial bodies themselves made music- a type
of melody which man could not hear but only the angels.

This theremin to me at least seemed to be a frequency into
the melodies of this metaphysical Music of the Spheres.

After leaving the theatre, I returned home and googled an
image of the Theremin.

I showed it to my dad and he remembered seeing this instrument
being played at a country fair in the town near the farm where he was raised.

He too recalled it having a very haunting and otherworldly melody
when it was played.

The theremin is of course the world's first electronic
musical instrument.  It was invented by a young Russian
physicist named Leon Theremin back in 1919.

Lenin was so impressed by the instrument that he commissioned
600 of them to be made and distributed throughout the Soviet Union.

He sent Theremin on a trip around the world to demonstrate this
example of Soviet technology which was the invention of electronic
music.

It was the first musical instrument designed to be played
without being touched.

The theremin consists of two pitch and one volume radio
frequency oscillators and two metal antennas.

To play the Theremin, the player moves his hands
around the two metal antennas controlling the 
instrument's frequency pitch and amplitude volume.

Theremin the inventor of the Theremin made his way to
America in 1928 and obtained a U.S. government patent for
it in 1929. He granted commercial production rights to RCA.

Anyways one day in 2001 my dad and I were sitting in 
a restaurant called Tasty Tom's when suddenly the
Madonna version of American Pie came on as background
music.
 
I listened for those sudden elusive twists of melody which
somehow made the Madonna version of American Pie better
than the Don McLean version.

Then when I heard it this time, recognition dawned on me.

I had heard that instrument before.

It was the Theremin that I had heard performed at that
musical recital that accompanied the showing of the
silent German horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
that I had been at earlier that year.

So then I asked my dad when that melody was played again,
if he had ever heard a similar instrument before.
 
(I didn't mention my own opinion of what I now believed it
to be)

After listening to it for awhile, he answered, "I think that's the
Theremin that electronic musical instrument I heard played at
that fair years ago- the one you showed me the picture of off the
Net recently."

So there it was- mystery solved.

It was the playing of the Theremin that gave the Madonna
version of American Pie that extra ethereal haunting quality
to it that so perfectly matched the lyrics of the song American
Pie.

Because the lyrics of American Pie seem to give one a sense of
a loss of innocence-  that something terrible and so evocatively
tragic has happened and the world will never be the same again-
that something good and beautiful and lovely and wonderful-
has been irrevocably lost.

Much like the sad voices of choirs of angels weeping over man and woman 
being cast out of the Garden of Eden.

Much like the haunting melancholy ethereal sound of the...
... Theremin itself.

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