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The ondes Martenot ( ; , ) or ondes musicales () is an early electronic musical instrument. It is played with a lateral-vibrato keyboard or by moving a ring tied to a wire, creating "wavering" sounds similar to a theremin. Dynamics and timbre are adjusted using controls in a drawer on the instrument's left side. A player of the ondes Martenot is called an ondist.
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 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 . It has also been used by contemporary acts such as Daft Punk, Damon Albarn, and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood.
Martenot first demonstrated the ondes Martenot on April 20, 1928, performing Dimitrios Levidis's Poème symphonique at the Paris Opera. He embarked on a number of performance tours to promote it, beginning in Europe before going to New York. In 1930, he performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, after which he embarked on a world tour. 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. Beginning in 1947, the ondes Martenot was taught at the Paris Conservatory, with Martenot as the first teacher.
The earliest model of the ondes Martenot was similar to the Theremin. The second model of the instrument, demonstrated in 1928, lacked most of the features that are now associated with the instrument. It was played in a standing position by pulling on a wire connected to a wooden box. Over the following years, Martenot produced several new models, introducing a keyboard with the ability to produce vibrato by moving the keys laterally. According to Cynthia Millar, "by the 1940s, the instrument had settled into what was to be, with minor variations, its final form." Instruments were manufactured to order, and "often differed according to the wishes of the player." Martenot was uninterested in mass-producing the ondes Martenot, which may have contributed to its decline in popularity following initial interest. Jean-Louis Martenot, Maurice Martenot's son, created new ondes Martenot models. In 2009, The Guardian reported that the last ondes Martenot was manufactured in 1988, but that a new model was being manufactured.
The third model, unveiled in 1929, had a non-functioning simulacrum of a keyboard below the wire to indicate pitch.; This model also had a "black fingerguard" on a wire which could be used instead of the ring. It was held between the right thumb and index finger, which was played standing at a distance from the instrument. When played in this way, the drawer is removed from the instrument and placed on a bench next to the player. Maurice Martenot's pedagogical manual for the ondes Martenot, written in 1931, offers instruction on both methods of playing. versions added a real functioning keyboard; the keys produce vibrato when moved from side to side. This was introduced in the 1930s with the 84-key fourth version of the instrument. Subsequent versions had 72 keys. Combined with a switch that transposes the pitch by one octave, these instruments have a range from C1 to C8.
Early models can produce only a few . Later models can simultaneously generate Sine wave, peak-limited Triangle wave, square, Pulse wave, and full-wave rectified sine waves, in addition to pink noise, all controlled by switches in the drawer. The square wave and full-wave rectified sine wave can be further adjusted by sliders in the drawer. On the Seventh model, a dial at the top of the drawer adjusts the balance between white noise and the other waveforms. A second dial adjusts the balance between the three speakers. A switch chooses between the keyboard and ribbon.
Further adjustments can be made using controls in the body of the instrument. These include several dials for tuning the pitch, a dial for adjusting the overall volume, a switch to transpose the pitch by one octave, and a switch to activate a filter. The drawer of the seventh model also includes six transposition buttons, which change the pitch by different intervals. These can be combined to immediately raise the pitch by up to a minor ninth.
Martenot produced four speakers, called diffuseurs, for the instrument. The Métallique features a gong instead of a speaker cone, producing a metallic timbre. It was used by the first ondes Martenot quartets in 1932. Another, the Palme speaker, has a resonance chamber laced with strings tuned to all 12 of an octave; when a note is played in tune, it resonates a particular string, producing chiming tones. It was first presented alongside the sixth version of the ondes Martenot in 1950.
According to The Guardian, the ondes Martenot "can be as soothing and moving as a string quartet, but nerve-jangling when gleefully abused". Greenwood described it as "a very accurate theremin that you have far more control of ... When it's played well, you can really emulate the voice." The New York Times described its sound as a "haunting wail". Messiaen, discussing its sonic capabilities, describes “an extraterrestrial, enchanted voice", “a cracked bell”, and "a crumbling pile of sand.”
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. 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. Milhaud, who also enjoyed the unusual nature of the ondes Martenot, used it several times in the 1930s for incidental music. 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.
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. A British pupil of Loriod, John Morton (1931-2014) from Darlington, 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.
English composer Hugh Davies estimated that more than 1,000 works had been composed for the ondes. Loriod estimated that there were 15 concerto and 300 pieces of chamber music. The instrument was also popular in French theatres such as the Comédie-Française, the Théâtre National Populaire and the Folies-Bergère.
Thomas Adès's opera The Exterminating Angel makes extensive use of the ondes Martenot, which Adès says "could be considered the voice of the exterminating angel".
The ondist Thomas Bloch toured in Tom Waits and Robert Wilson's show The Black Rider (2004–06) and in Damon Albarn's opera "" (2007–2013). Bloch performed ondes Martenot on the 2009 Richard Hawley album Truelove's Gutter and the 2013 Daft Punk album Random Access Memories. In 2020, the French composer Christine Ott released Chimères (pour Ondes Martenot), an avant-garde album using only the ondes Martenot.
The composer Danny Elfman used the ondes Martenot in the soundtrack to the comedy science fiction film Mars Attacks! He originally intended to use a theremin, but was unable to find a musician who could play one. The director Lucille Hadžihalilović used the ondes Martenot in her film Evolution (2015) as it "brings a certain melancholy, almost a human voice, and it instantly creates a particular atmosphere". Other film scores that use the ondes Martenot include A Passage to India, Amelie, Bodysong, There Will Be Blood (2007), Hugo (2011)Howard Shore, Hugo – Original Score, CD booklet, published by Paramount Pictures in the year 2011 and Manta Ray.
The ondes Martenot is the subject of the 2013 Quebec documentary Wavemakers. It is used in a performance of the fourth movement of Messiaen's Fête des belles eaux in an episode from the third season of the Amazon Studios series Mozart in the Jungle, where a musician plays the ondes Martenot to inmates on Rikers Island (with piano accompaniment substituting the three other ondes). The British composer Barry Gray studied the ondes Martenot with Martenot in Paris, and used it in his soundtracks for 1960s films including Dr Who and the Daleks, and Doppelgänger. The ondes Martenot is sometimes claimed to have been used in the original Star Trek theme; the part was in fact performed by a singer.
According to music journalist Alex Ross, fewer than 100 people had mastered the ondes Martenot as of 2001. 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."
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 had variable results.
Several instruments have taken inspiration from elements of the ondes Martenot. In the 1930s, Frenchman Georges Jenny took inspiration from the Martenot's vibrato keyboard to create the Ondioline as a low-cost alternative to the Martenot.
/a> The Yamaha GX-1 synthesiser, released in the 1970s, featured two lateral-vibrato keyboard manuals inspired by the Martenot. 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. In 2012, the Canadian company Therevox began selling a synthesizer with an interface based on the ondes Martenot pitch ring and intensity key.
There have also been more thorough replicas of the ondes Martenot. A replica called Ondéa was created by Ambro Oliva in the early-2000s. It went out of production in 2011 due to bankruptcy, but was still in use by professional Ondists in 2018. 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".
In 2017, the Japanese company Asaden manufactured 100 Ondomo instruments, a portable version of the ondes Martenot.
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