Ondes Martenot

Peter Donhauser
Waves on a String

The French music teacher and radio ham Maurice Martenot was inspired to design his original “ondes musicales” by meeting Lew S. Termen, the inventor of the theremin, in 1923. Martenot had acquired the technical skills needed during the First World War, in which he had served as a radio telegrapher.

Martenot filed his first patent on 2 April 1928.² It was followed by many others in France, Austria, Germany and the USA until into the 1950s, including patents to improve the play-back quality of records. The patents clearly show the various versions of his design. Like Termen, he found it necessary to equip his instrument with volume and frequency controls. It began with a draw-string that could be used to adjust a variable resistor or capacitor (he did not think of capacitive control by hand movements as in the theremin). Since playing without points of reference is difficult, he added an aid in the form of the drawing of a keyboard (like Bruno Helberger’s hellertion or the auxiliary keys of the trautonium), and later a genuine keyboard. However, the various versions always had continuous pitch adjustment, with a ring being used to pull a string backwards and forwards in front of the keys. Microintervals can also be created thanks to the ease with which the frequency can be adjusted. Since there are many compositions for the ondes Martenot, the instrument continued to be built by the Martenots until the 1980s.

On 20 April 1928, the instrument was first presented to the public in a performance of the Poème Symphonique by Dimitrios Levidis conducted by René-Emmanuel Bâton at the Paris Opera House. Martenot played his instrument himself, including for a performance of the Poème with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski in December 1930 in the USA. This led to an amazing wave of compositions and to the establishment of formal training for the instrument under Martenot.³ This was followed by a world tour that lasted until 1932. He accompanied his sister to Oslo in 1928 to give two concerts of “music of the spheres” in the National Theatre. The echo in the Oslo newspapers was extensive, with the Aftenposten reporting that the audience had to pinch itself to make sure that it was not dreaming.⁴ This was the first encounter with electronic music in Norway, and the press reaction was cautious. “The sounds were magic, almost airily sensitive ghostly sounds that the congenial music professor conjured up from the unfathomable stage air of the theatre ... However, with time a certain monotony became apparent, probably due to the apparatus itself. And if one forgot that this was merely the beginning and was far from being fully thought through and complete, one would certainly have judged the musical output of this first presentation as too meager.”⁵ The most important performer on the instrument in the 1930s was his sister Ginette Martenot. At the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris, he was awarded the Grand Prix de l’Exposition Mondiale. From 1947 on, he taught the playing of the ondes Martenot at the Paris Conservatory.

What distinguished the ondes from other instruments of its age was the huge attraction that it had for major composers, including Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, André Jolivet, Charles Koechlin and Edgard Varèse. The instrument was also used in film music by composers like the Frenchman Maurice Jarre or the American Elmer Bernstein. As an example of many, mention must be made of Olivier Messiaen and his Fête des belles eaux for an ensemble of six ondes Martenots, Trois petites liturgies de la Présence Divine or the Turangalîla Symphony, all composed before 1948.

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