Ondes Martenot! More like, Ondes Martenyes!
Look at the beautiful musical instrument!
I went down the Ondes Martenot rabbit hole a few years ago and never really came out of it! Firstly, because I loved a Brian Ferry Record called “As Time Goes By” . This Album has Brian singing a bunch of beautiful songs, mostly from the 1930’s, with a small hot jazz /swing combo. On 5 out of 15 tracks you hear the beautiful haunting sound of the Ondes Martenot played by a musician named Cynthia Millar according to the album credits. It sounds a bit like a theremin but with a warmer tone.
Here it is on “Where or When” :)
Anyway, I thought it sounded different from a monosynth or theremin, which is what I thought I was hearing initially. It sounded warmer and more expressive and it turns out it’s inventor was trying to create an electronic instrument with the expressiveness of a cello. I looked it up online to see what instrument was used for these tunes (the Ondes Martenot) and then looked up what it looked like and wow! It is a little wooden cased keyboard with a little drawer on the left that you open to operate certain expression controls, a finger ring on a wire that you use to float over a keyboard to find your notes, and very art deco looking speakers (called diffusseurs). One of the diffusseurs is called the “Palme Diffuseur” and looks like this:
Palme Diffuseur
Also, my favorite discovery about this instrument was this:
“In Martenot's instruments, the touche relied on a leather bag, filled with a mixture of powders. This magical powder bag is incredibly responsive, and has been the subject of numerous scientific studies.”
I found this in an article online:
Instead of a linear or circular carbon film in a common potentiometer, the Ondes Martenot uses a small leather bag filled with carbon powder, similar to the microphones used for telephones prior to the electronically amplified microphones that came up in the 1980s.
I so want the little leather pouch with magic dust to play music with! I’ll be like a little elf!
I did a little research and found this:
The Ondes Martenot (French for "Martenot waves") is one of the earliest electronic instruments and was patented in the same year as another early electronic instrument, the theremin. It was invented in 1928 by the French cellist Maurice Martenot. Martenot had been a radio operator during World War 1, and developed the Ondes Martenot in an attempt to replicate the accidental overlaps of tones between military radio oscillators. He hoped to bring musical expressivity of the cello to his new instrument.
I did a bunch of searching around the internet and discovered a 2013 Quebec documentary about the Ondes Martenot called Wavemakers. It is very fun! Go watch it right now!
A couple things I discovered:
- They started building new models to the original specifications in 2009 and they are very expensive! Like 12,000 dollars.
-Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead bought one of the first of the new versions
-Olivier Messiaen composed beautiful pieces for the instrument
-A canadian company called theravox created an affordable instrument that tries to recreate some of the expressiveness of the instrument
-I put 400 dollars down on one of the theravox instruments but I don’t have the money to pay the rest of what I owe for it. Haha. I stay in contact with Mike Beauchamp from the theravox company and keep pushing my name down the list until I have more money. He is very nice!
A cool scientific article about the instrument
