News: 28 may 2025
Saint-Petersburg (Russia) – Russian Institute of History of Arts
Conference by Daniele Buccio: Wyschnegradsky the synesthete / Wyschnegradsky the playwright
Publication by Camerata Bern of « Exile », CD which contains the 2nd quatuor op. 18 by Wyschnegradsky.
At the top of the website page bibliography, you’ll find a new text of remembrances which the american dancer and choregraph Margaret Fisher recently wrote on our request upon her meeting with Ivan Wyschnegradsky in Paris in 1977.
New publication to be seen on the website page videos: the Méditation sur deux thèmes de La Journée de l’Existence op. 7, with Katharina Gohl Moser, cello and Anton Kernjak, piano, produced by La Pataconera in february 2024 in Basle.
The American Festival of Microtonal Music in New-York made a compilation of several Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s works they had published in CDs during the last 30 years: https://johnnyreinhard.bandcamp.com/album/ivan-wyschnegradsky-pierce-jonas-tom-chiu-johnny-reinhard-dan-auerbach-soldier-string-quartet-american-festival-of-microtonal-music
If you are able to communicate the details of a concert, research or an event concerning Ivan Wyschnegradsky, we would be grateful for your informing us.
EDITO
NB Previous editos are available by clicking here.
Concert in St-Pierre de Montmartre, 02/03/2025. Trio by Wyschnegradsky, with Nathalie Forget, Pierre-Emmanuel Hurpeau and Kevin Plante – Photo Joël Houzet
Two concerts featuring the Ondes Martenot have just taken place in Paris, on March 2 at the Saint-Pierre de Montmartre church and on April 5 at the media library of the National Superior Conservatory of Music and Dance. The first concert was devoted exclusively to works for 1 to 4 Ondes Martenot, by Claude Ballif, Judith Ring, Imsu Choi, Tristan Murail, Pierre-Emmanuel Hurpeau, Junichi Ariki, Ivan Wyschnegradsky and Olivier Messiaen. The second concert, entitled The Universe of Microintervals, brought together the Carrillo piano in 1/16th of tone with Ondes Martenot in works by Claude Ballif, Pascale Criton, Bruce Mather, Alain Moëne and, once again, Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s Composition for Trio d’ondes Martenot.
We asked Nathalie Forget, professor of Ondes Martenot at the National Superior Conservatory of Paris, to present her instrument.
Ivan Wyschnegradsky used it in many of his chamber music and orchestral works: the 2 Transparences op. 35 and op. 47 for Ondes Martenot and 2 pianos tuned apart at 1/4 tone, the 4th Fragment symphonique for Ondes Martenot and 4 pianos, the Etude sur les Mouvements rotatoires op. 45b for 3 pianos, ondes Martenot, orchestra and choir, the Polyphonies spatiales op. 39 for chamber orchestra, the Symphony in one Movement op. 51b for large orchestra, the Composition for Trio and for Quatuor d’Ondes op. 52 and the Affirmation of the Paradoxe éthique for two baritone, Ondes Martenot and 6 pianos tuned apart of ¼, 1/6 and 1/12th of tone. For more details, see Catalogue and Discography of the website.
THE ONDE MARTENOT
The onde Martenot is a monophonic and electroacoustic instrument covering minimum 8 octaves, with a « body » connected to different loudspeakers. This body is formed by a little ruler with a ring and a thread (winded round a potentiometer), a hanging keyboard, a little drawer with an expression key and where the musician will choose his timbres and loudspeakers, then, a pedal replacing the expression key.
The ring play is truly the heart of the instrument. It allows us to do slides from infrasounds to almost ultrasounds, an incredible variety of glissando: giant to minuscule, fast and lively, sharp or with an inhuman slowness, but also a melodic play extremely fluid and continual like in Messiaen’s music. The keyboard completes the ring permitting different sensitive vibratos, masses of sound with polyphonic illusion (like in Tristan Murail’s music for example), banging attacks and virtuosity (with tempered notes, quarter of tones or even little slides) impossible with the ring.
Expression key offers surprising dynamics, sounds emerging from silence to painful intensities. We can do many kind of touch: legato, clumsy, accents, staccato, struck, held-struck, hit and various tremolos and flatterzung…
There are four kinds of loudspeakers: a principal one, a reverberation, a metallic and the palme. For each of them it’s the same idea: the sound makes natural vibrations on different elements (strings, gong or cymbal and springs), by sympathy. Those special loudspeakers are the acoustic part of the instrument. We have a range of timbres from excessively soft sounds to nasal, reedy and offensive ones, and even accompanied or replaced with breath (pink noise).
Ondes Musicales Martenot, circa 1946/50 (body, principal loudspeaker, métallique and palm)
The official birth of the instrument is 1928 when the ondes are played for the first time at the Opera of Paris. It’s impossible to classify onde lutherie, there isn’t two instruments similar neither two loudspeakers; each onde is made by hand and unique, but we can say that Martenot built seven models of ondes from 1928 until 1980 (first with tubes then transistorized). An eighth model (digital) was designed by his son Jean Louis Martenot around1997, then a 9th model by Mr Oliva in 2004; actually a 10th model is made by Mr Dierstein in France since 2011, as well as a model in Japan by Mr Omo and in Canada by Mr Kean.
More than 800 composers wrote for the onde and we find the instrument in various music styles:
. Classical music of the XXth century: André Jolivet, Edgar Varèse, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Marcel Landowski, Olivier Messiaen, Giacinto Scelsi, Charles Koechlin, Germaine Tailleferre, Bohuslav Martinu, Tristan Murail, Claude Ballif, Giacomo Manzoni, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Sylvano Bussotti, Claude Vivier, Fernand Vandenbogaerde, Akira Nishimura, Alain Louvier, Pierre Boulez, BetsyJolas, Michaël Levinas, Bernard Parmegiani or Thomas Adès, just to mention a few.
. In movies or TV music: from Franju, Schlondorff and Losey to Brian de Palma and Imamura, with compositions by Barry Gray, Elmer Bernstein or Maurice Jarre for example.
. In theatre music and ballet (Henri Dutilleux, Jolivet, Milhaud…)
. In popular and electronic music (ranging from Jacques Brel and Léo Ferré to Kraftwerk, Bjork, Radiohead and Zaho de Sagazan for example).
The very first class of ondes opened in 1947 at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris, with Maurice Martenot as professor, then Jeanne Loriod in 1970 and Valérie Hartmann-Claverie in 1993. This symbolic and so important class for the instrument is still alive today (and I’m so lucky to teach there). The instrument is also taught in several other places: at the Conservatories of Boulogne-Billancourt, Evry and Strasbourg, in Montreal Conservatoire in Canada and in the Ikebukuro College in Japan.
We are around fifty players in the world to my knowledge, taking all kind of music together. Many composers still explore and travel with the ondes (Campo, Adamek, Criton, Tanada, Rønsholdt, Gaussin, Vodenitcharov, Zorina, Suarez di Fuente, Kazerouni, Neyrinck, Choi, Lacaze, Markeas…)
It’s important to keep imagination and research alive. For me, it’s an instrument of excess which is unclassifiable. While the primary material of ondes is quite immaterial (electricity), the onde Martenot is also very much linked to the body, hypersensitive, ranging from palpitations and heartbeats to screams.
It’s a real gigantic toy of sounds, with an ideal voice of extreme and impossible sweetness, and infinite color vibrations, to the violence of an explosion. The onde has infinite possibilities against the stiffness and limits of a materialistic, hard, and love-forgetting world. And it’s a sound and crazy world yet to explore.
Nathalie Forget – april 2025
For a selected repertoire, photos, and audio clips: www.nathalieforgetondes.com
Palms – Photo Nathalie Forget
IVAN WYSCHNEGRADSKY
‘I could have been a poet, a philosopher or a musician. I chose music: I am therefore a composer.’
Ivan Wyschnegradsky, born in Saint Petersburg in 1893, lived in Paris from 1920 until his death in 1979. Admired by numerous composers, amongst whom we can mention Olivier Messiaen, Henri Dutilleux, Bruce Mather, Alain Bancquart and Claude Ballif, Ivan Wyschnegradsky is recognized by the musical world as one of the pioneers in 20th century music.
Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s 1/4 tone piano, which in 1927 he had ordered from the August Förster manufacture, first was in the home of Claude Ballif, to whom he had bequeathed it. Since 2009 it belongs to the Paul-Sacher Foundation in Basel. Photo René Block (1979).