Ondes Martenot
The ondes Martenot (/ˈoʊnd mɑːrtəˈnoʊ/ OHND mar-tə-NOH; French: [ɔ̃d maʁtəno], "Martenot waves") or ondes musicales ("musical waves") is an early electronic musical instrument. It is played with a keyboard or by moving a ring along a wire, creating "wavering" sounds similar to a theremin. A player of the ondes Martenot is called an ondist.
Ondes Martenot
1928–present
none[1]
heterodyne
72-note rail-mounted keyboard capable of producing vibrato by lateral motion
The ondes Martenot was invented in 1928 by the French inventor Maurice Martenot. Martenot was inspired by the accidental overlaps of tones between military radio oscillators, and wanted to create an instrument with the expressiveness of the cello.
The ondes Martenot is used in more than 100 orchestral compositions. The French composer Olivier Messiaen used it in pieces such as his 1949 symphony Turangalîla-Symphonie, and his sister-in-law Jeanne Loriod was a celebrated player of the instrument. It appears in numerous film and television soundtracks, particularly science fiction and horror films. It has also been used by contemporary acts such as Daft Punk, Damon Albarn and the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood.
History[edit]
The ondes Martenot (French for "Martenot waves") is one of the earliest electronic instruments,[2][3][4] patented in the same year as another early electronic instrument, the theremin.[2] It was invented in 1928 by the French cellist Maurice Martenot.[2] Martenot had been a radio operator during World War I, and developed the ondes Martenot in an attempt to replicate the accidental overlaps of tones between military radio oscillators.[2] He hoped to bring musical expressivity of the cello to his new instrument.[5] According to The Guardian, the ondes Martenot visually resembles a cross between an organ and a theremin.[2]
Martenot first demonstrated the ondes Martenot on April 20, 1928,[6] performing Dimitrios Levidis's Poème symphonique at the Paris Opera.[7] He embarked on a number of performance tours to promote it, beginning in Europe before going to New York.[8] In 1930, he performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, after which he embarked on a world tour.[8] In 1937, the ondes Martenot was displayed at the Exposition Internationale de Paris with concerts and demonstrations in an ensemble setting with up to twelve ondists performing together at a time.[8] Beginning in 1947, the ondes Martenot was taught at the Paris Conservatory, with Martenot as the first teacher.[9]
Units were manufactured to order.[6] Over the following years, Martenot produced several new models, introducing the ability to produce vibrato by moving the keys, a feature adapted in the 1970s by some Yamaha GX-1 synthesisers.[3] Martenot was uninterested in mass-producing the ondes Martenot, which may have contributed to its decline in popularity following initial interest.[8] Jean-Louis Martenot, Maurice Martenot's son, created new ondes Martenot models.[3] In 2009, the Guardian reported that the last ondes Martenot was manufactured in 1988, but that a new model was being manufactured.[2]
Use[edit]
Classical music[edit]
The ondes Martenot is used in many classical compositions,[3] most notably by the French composer Olivier Messiaen. Messiaen first used it in Fête des belles eaux, for six ondes,[27] and went on to use it in several more works, including Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine and Saint François d'Assise. For his Turangalîla-Symphonie, Messiaen used it to create "shimmering, swooping musical effects".[6] This symphony featured the ondes Martenot and piano as soloists against the backdrop of a large orchestra. It is widely renowned as a masterpiece, and its fame associated the ondes Martenot with Messiaen.[9] Messiaen's widow, Yvonne Loriod, arranged and edited four unpublished Feuillets inédits for ondes Martenot and piano which were published in 2001.[28]
Other composers who used the instrument include Arthur Honegger, Claude Vivier, Darius Milhaud, Edgard Varèse, Marcel Landowski, Charles Koechlin, Florent Schmitt, Matyas Seiber, and Jacques Ibert.[6] Honegger's most notable work including the ondes Martenot was his dramatic oratorio, Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher in 1935, in which the ondes Martenot's unique sonority was used to augment the string section.[29] Darius Milhaud, who also enjoyed the unusual nature of the ondes Martenot, used it several times in the 1930s for incidental music.[30] Edgard Varèse did not use the ondes Martenot often, but it did appear in the premiere of Amériques in Paris; he also replaced the theremin parts of his Ecuatorial with ondes Martenot.[31]
According to the New York Times, the ondes' most celebrated performer was the French musician Jeanne Loriod (1928–2001), who studied under Martenot at the Paris Conservatory. She performed internationally in more than 500 works, created 85 works for a sextet of ondes she formed in 1974, and wrote a three-volume book on the instrument, Technique de l'Onde Electronique Type Martenot.[6] A British pupil of Jeanne Loriod, John Morton of Darlington (1931-2014), performed his own ondes instrument in works by Messiaen, Milhaud, Honegger and Bartok, amongst others, at the Royal Albert Hall and elsewhere in the 1970s, as well as on television and radio.[32]
The English composer Hugh Davies estimated that more than 1,000 works had been composed for the ondes.[6] Jeanne Loriod estimated that there were 15 concertos and 300 pieces of chamber music.[6] The instrument was also popular in French theatres such as the Comédie-Française, the Théâtre National Populaire and the Folies-Bergère. [33]
Thomas Adès's opera The Exterminating Angel features an ondes Martenot, which Adès says "could be considered the voice of the exterminating angel".[34]
Legacy[edit]
In 2001, the New York Times described the ondes, along with other early electronic instruments such as the theremin, teleharmonium, trautonium, and orgatron, as part of a "futuristic electric music movement that never went remotely as far as its pioneers dreamed ... proponents of the new wired music delighted in making previously unimaginable noises".[6] The French classical musician Thomas Bloch said: "The ondes martenot is probably the most musical of all electric instruments ... Martenot was not only interested in sounds. He wanted to use electricity to increase and control the expression, the musicality. Everything is made by the musician in real time, including the control of the vibrato, the intensity, and the attack. It is an important step in our electronic instrument lineage."[13]
According to music journalist Alex Ross, fewer than 100 people have mastered the ondes Martenot.[4] In 1997, Mark Singer wrote for The Wire that it would likely remain obscure: "The fact is that any instrument with no institutional grounding of second- and third-raters, no spectral army of amateurs, will wither and vanish: how can it not? Specialist virtuosos may arrive to tackle the one-off novelty ... but there's no meaningful level of entry at the ground floor, and, what's worse, no fallback possibility of rank careerism if things don't turn out."[6]
The ondes Martenot's electronics are fragile, and it includes a powder which transfers electric currents, which Martenot would mix in different quantities according to musicians' specifications; the precise proportions are unknown. Attempts to construct new ondes Martenot models using Martenot's original specifications have led to mixed results.[13]
In 2000, Jonny Greenwood of the English rock band Radiohead commissioned the synthesiser company Analogue Systems to develop a replica of the ondes Martenot, as he was nervous about damaging his instrument on tour. The replica, called the French Connection, imitates the ondes Martenot's control mechanism, but does not generate sound; instead, it controls an external oscillator.[3]
A version called Ondéa was also created in the 2000s.[2] In 2011, Sound on Sound wrote that original ondes Martenot models were "all but impossible to obtain or afford, and unless you can stump up 12,000 Euros for one of Jean‑Loup Dierstein's new reproduction instruments, the dream of owning a real Ondes is likely to remain such".[3] In 2012, the Canadian company Therevox began selling a synthesizer with an interface based on the ondes Martenot pitch ring and intensity key.[54] In 2017, the Japanese company Asaden manufactured 100 Ondomo instruments, a portable version of the ondes Martenot.[55]
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