Theremin

Olea Nova is an experimental composer and performer working with theremin, synthesizers, voice, and electronic processes. Her work explores sustained tone, melody, dissonance, layered texture, and evolving form, treating sound as material that occupies and transforms space.

For Nova, composing and painting are parallel practices. Both involve the articulation of space through movement, density, interruption, and relation. In her music, independent sonic processes coexist, interfere with one another, and gradually alter the structure of the work. Theremin lines, electronic frequencies, vocal fragments, and synthesized textures unfold through air and time as shifting fields rather than fixed accompaniment.

Olea Nova with theremin, synthesizers, score, and paintings

Selected Works

When Chaos and Order Danced Together

2025 · Seven scenes for Theremin and Synthesizers

A 35-minute work of musical theater in seven connected scenes, centered on Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi. The piece moves through waiting, trance, interpretation, procession, offering, reflection, and the unstable nature of truth, while also considering how individual utterances become collective belief and action. The theremin functions as a shifting melodic and gestural presence within a larger electronic structure, moving between intimacy, tension, instability, and ceremonial intensity. Rather than returning to a fixed song form, the work develops through successive states, with each scene changing the conditions of what follows. The complete performance includes the seven scenes and the dance sections that trace the responses of groups and crowds to the unfolding events.

Complete work ↗

Inventing Melodies

2025 · Theremin, voice, live looping, effects

An album built through live theremin performance, vocal material, looping, and electronic processing. Repetition establishes a provisional structure while newly recorded layers alter the density and direction of the music in real time. Strong Shadows serves as the representative entry into the album.

Strong Shadows ↗

Dawn

2024 · Theremin, Synthesizers, Voice, and Xylophone

A large-scale work combining live theremin improvisation, synthesizers, voice, xylophone, and prerecorded composed and improvised material. Synthesizers establish a changing sonic environment through which the theremin moves as both melodic line and unstable expressive presence. The work unfolds as a continuous sequence of contrasting sections rather than a collection of separate songs. Improvised and composed materials repeatedly intersect, allowing the relationship between solo gesture and electronic environment to shift throughout the performance. Rain is presented here as an immediate excerpt from Dawn, with the complete work available separately.

Rain, from Dawn ↗ Complete Dawn ↗

Aquarium

2024 · Solo Theremin + Effects

A solo theremin work shaped through continuous performance and electronic effects. The piece centers the instability and physical phrasing of the instrument rather than placing the theremin over a fixed accompaniment.

Listen ↗

Theremin Solo

2024 · Graphic score · Solo Theremin

A solo work in which the movement of theremin pitch is organized through a graphic score. The score establishes directional and spatial relationships while leaving articulation, pacing, and the exact realization of the line to performance.

Listen ↗

ONA

2023 · Theremin · Three realizations

ONA brings together three realizations of the same musical project. ONA A and ONA B are two performances of the same notated theremin score, shaped through different electronic treatments. ONA Improvisation approaches the material more freely, extending the project through live improvisation and effects. Together, the three versions examine how notation, interpretation, timbre, and improvisation can produce substantially different outcomes from related melodic material. ONA Improvisation is presented here as the representative track.

ONA Improvisation ↗ Complete ONA ↗

Winds

2023 · Two Theremin Voices · Sequence · Drone

Two theremin voices were improvised independently against a composed sequence and drone. Their lines were not designed as conventional counterpoint; they occupy the same field as separate trajectories whose overlaps and divergences continually change the perceived space of the piece.

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The Call

2022 · Theremin · Live performance work

A work created for live theremin performance with a composed electronic background. The theremin was performed through effects, functioning less as a solo line placed over accompaniment than as a dramatic presence moving inside an already structured sonic environment. The piece unfolds through extended contrasting states and significant changes of texture and intensity. Theremin phrasing, gesture, and timbral transformation become part of the work’s dramatic action, making The Call an early point in the more explicitly theatrical direction of the theremin practice.

Listen ↗

Night Music

2022 · Theremin + Eurorack Synthesizer

The earliest work in this selection. A complex drone composed on Eurorack specifically for the piece establishes the harmonic and timbral environment for the theremin. Against this slowly evolving electronic field, pitch movement, duration, hesitation, and subtle changes of articulation become the principal musical events. The interaction between the composed drone and freely shaped theremin line establishes an early version of the spatial, sustained, and timbrally unstable language developed in the later works.

Listen ↗