The Most Human Sensitive Electronic Instrument You’ve Never Heard Of

Maurice Martenot (1898 – 1980), the cello prodigy middle child of a music saturated Parisian family, was working as a military telegraph operator during the First World War and heard a musical instrument that didn’t yet exist amid the wandering tweets and whistles of his radio apparatus. Unlike the more familiar synthesized Casio relatives that now assemble the most common example of electronic instrument, Martenot dreamed of one more acutely responsive to the human digit than the numerical one. Over the next half century, he developed seven successive versions of the ondes Martenot (ondes in French = “waves” en anglais) that has attracted composers such as Olivier Messiaen and was gathering recognition and popularity before the Nazi occupation. Afterwards, a small cult following of musicians continued to press Maurice to resume fabricating and refining his invention, which he eventually took up once again in the 1950s.

For all of its interior electronic wizardry, which was developed around the same time as the Theremin, the ondes Martenot is a temperamental, artisanally crafted instrument, carefully tailored to each specific player, as prone to circumstantial quirks as double reeds, wood, strings, metal or skin and easily upset by incidentals such as travel. The instrument has since begun a gradual comeback as younger electronic luthiers have begun crafting technologically updated, more resilient versions.

Montréal filmmaker Caroline Martel was present at the New York debut of her new feature length documentary about the onde Martenot, Wavemaker, at Astoria’s Museum of the Moving Image, which was followed by a short demonstration performance with the instrument by Geneviève Grenier. The director’s visual sensibility, affinity for story and adept sense of pacing delightfully seduce the viewer into nearly forgetting that this is a documentary film at all. We meet Maurice Martenot through archival footage and audio excerpts along with dedicated “ondists,” instrument crafters and his son, Jean-Louis, who leads us through basements, archives and workshops in pursuit of further advancing his father’s visionary innovations.

Maurice’s early musicality was nurtured under the tutelage of his older sister Madeleine’s avant garde teaching approaches, and he later likewise dedicated a great deal of his own energies to teaching, along with his sisters, what’s become known as the Martenot Method. His conviction that “you are the instrument” guided his design of an electronic instrument that doesn’t impose mechanization on either the musician or the sound, while still reaping the enhanced timbral palette and expanded pitch range promised by this newer technology.

Most electronic tools, such as MIDI related devices, for all that they offer, tend to dictate their own terms, which is to say their limitations and biases, to the ear and to the musician, forcing both to adapt to the mechanism rather than vice versa. Computer scientist, composer and co-inventor of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, had this to say:

In contrast with the affable, consumer authoritarianism of so much contemporary sonic machinery, Martenot, in Caroline Martel’s words, “conceived the instrument as an extension of the human nervous system, its sensitive design linking electricity to the human body. …For him, technological, musical, and organic systems were to be conceived in tune with one another. Martenot objected to the notion of music as an abstraction in relation to the human world.” He was “more interested in discovering the possibilities for universal, collective, physiopsychological, and even biological resonances in our rapport with music.”

Martenot seemed in a way to be dreaming of the zipless instrument, of sound straight out of the imagination, of almost the virtual lover; but then that would have left out what stone sculptor M. Scott Johnson has called the “ecstasy of resistance.” Part of what musics music is the friction and flow of relationship, and Martenot’s material instrument offers an especially responsive accomplice to that interaction.

For me, what I’d really love to hear is what Alice Coltrane would have done with an ondes Martenot.