Québec – Musical Waves
LE CHANT DES ONDES: SUR LA PISTE DE MAURICE MARTENOT / WAVEMAKERS

Caroline Martel | Canada 2012 | 94’ | OV with english subtitles

Maurice Martenot, a young French musician, discovered his fascination for electrically generated buzz and signal noise while working as a telegraph operator during World War I. He then invented the Ondes Martenot (roughly: Martenot waves), one of the first electronic instruments ever, which he built and developed further himself throughout his life, while also working as a renowned music pedagogue.

The film not only documents the history of the Ondes, but also sheds light on how this special chapter in the early history of electronic music continued: we meet an heir, a specialist in repairing the rare instrument (of the less than 300 devices of various designs manufactured by Martenot himself, just under 70 examples remain), but also musicians who have dedicated themselves to actively maintaining the instrument, especially the female quartet Ensemble d’Ondes de Montréal with its repertoire ranging from Bach to Milhaud, from Ravel to Messaien.

We also encounter a representative of successful Pop Music in the person of Radiohead’s guitarist and keyboardist Jonny Greenwood, who is having a new Ondes Martenot built for himself – overall, the story of a passion for modernist technologies, of love for sounds, of burdensome legacies and never-ending connections that arise from a continent-spanning curiosity about new forms of music.