seconds for each combination. The early introduction of the instrument was fortunate for Cowell and Theremin as brothers Otto and Benjamin Miessner has also been working on a similar instrument with the same name. Introduction Cowell had planned to exhibit the rhythmicon in Europe. In October 1931, in a letter to Ives from Berlin, he said, "I have been composing and have finished the second movement of my work for the Rhythmicon with orchestra for Nicolas to use in Paris in February." Composer Charles Ives, Cowell's close friend, commissioned Theremin to build a second model of the Rhythmicon for use by Cowell and his associate, conductor Nicolas Slonimsky. The Rhythmicon was publicly premiered January 19, 1932 by Cowell and fellow music educator and theorist Joseph Schillinger at the New School for Social Research in New York. Schillinger had known Theremin since the early 1920s and had a lifelong interest in technology and music. The radically new instrument attracted considerable attention, and Cowell wrote a number of compositions for it, including Rhythmicana, 1931 (later renamed 'Concerto for Rhythmicon and Orchestra'), and Music for Violin and Rhythmicon (1932). Slonimsky said that Cowell's special piece Rhythmicana (presumably the one Cowell referred to in his letters to Ives) was completed too late to be used at the Paris concerts. On May 15, 1932, a New Music Society concert in San Francisco included – along with the premiere of Xanadu, a new work by Mildred Couper – a demonstration of Cowell's new instrument. According to some sources, the concert premiered Cowell's "Rhythmicana", in four movements with orchestra, and "Music for Violin and Rhythmicon". According to several others, the Rhythmicana concerto was not performed publicly until 1971, and it was played on a computer. (Cowell later used the same title, Rhythmicana, for a set of solo piano pieces he composed in 1938.) Before long the shine wore off. In 1988, Slonimsky wrote: Like many a futuristic contraption, the Rhythmicon was wonderful in every respect, except that it did not work. It was not until forty years later that an electronic instrument with similar specifications was constructed at Stanford University. It could do everything that Cowell and Theremin had wanted it to do and more, but it lacked the emotional quality essential to music. It sounded sterile, antiseptic, lifeless — like a robot with a synthetic voice. Cowell soon left the Rhythmicon behind to pursue other interests