A few weeks ago, the New York Philharmonic gave two performances of Jonny Greenwood’s live score to There Will Be Blood. Mary Chun performed the ondes martenot part. Before the second performance, I met with Mary at Lincoln Center to discuss playing the score and the ondes martenot more broadly.
Chun is a San Francisco-based conductor and music director who’s renowned worldwide for her work in Opera and New Music. She’s collaborated with composers including John Adams and Olivier Messiaen, and given many key premiers of their works. With Earplay, she’s championed the chamber works of contemporary composers including Tristan Murail, Thomas Adès, and Krzysztof Penderecki. She’s directed musicals too, perhaps most notably in bringing Broadway plays like Man of La Mancha and Avenue Q to China. And on the ondes martenot, she’s performed early electronic works such as André Jolivet’s Incantation and Ives’s Fourth Symphony, and served as a key interpreter of Messiaen’s works in the United States. Mary was also the cover conductor and one of the 3 ondistes in the 2003 San Francisco Opera’s production of Saint François d’Assise, the only production of Messiaen’s only opera in this country.
I wanted ask you about your approach to this score. Did you know the movie and score before you were approached?
Mary Chun: I have to confess that I was ignorant of it. I knew that Jonny was working a lot with ondes martenot. I got the music, I just sort of studied it, and I said, you know, this is very ondes-friendly. [Jonny] wrote really, really well for the ondes and wrote the best kind of expression that the ondes is good for.
How was that expression written into the score?
M: It was notated, like going from nothing and growing over a long period of time. And in fact there were bracketed dynamics, because they did the recording for the soundtrack – they had one set of dynamics that were very loud, but for live screening, it says in the score use the bracketed dynamics for live screening. So we can replicate the relationship with the dialogue and sound effects to the orchestra. So we’re playing softer dynamics than the soundtrack was recorded at. I was really curious about that as a musician, because of course if you crescendo to a double forte, you’re playing with a certain force and feeling, and certain molecules are vibrating differently to play really loud. But you have to subdue that: your whole scale drops down and everything about your performance also flattens out a little bit.
How does working with a movie over your head compare to an opera like Messiaen’s Saint François d'Assise, where you’re in the pit?
M: It’s pretty different, because if you’re playing opera or symphony you are the main event, you are what people are there for. If you’re playing movie soundtracks live – I do a lot, because I play synthesizers also, I just did a few harry potters this year – you’re basically backing up the film, and especially with Jonny’s score, where he really underpinned the unspoken emotions of the scene.
Do you just do live scoring, or have you played on soundtracks as well?
M: Both. Playing on soundtracks is actually fun, because you can play with full expression. They [compress] it in post production later. But doing it here, it’s sort of like you have to be really aware not to get too energetic.
That’s such a let down, in a way.
M: It is a little bit, because I can see the double sets of dynamics, I can see where it says piano to double forte. For the rest off the orchestra it was more of a challenge, because they’re used to playing acoustic more of the time, and for me-
Did you just turn it down a little?
M: No I didn’t. I thought about just putting the maximum volume lower, but I didn’t because I wanted to have that headroom. Probably the loudest you heard me was my mezzo forte.
A photo of the stage at the David Geffen Hall, from what is probably the intermission of the second New York Philharmonic performance of There WIll Be Blood (tonylee333).
How did you adjust your instrument for this hall in particular?
M: It took me a couple of hours to get set, my ears to set, to figure out how I could hear it correctly to how other people could hear it. It was tricky. It’s an interesting acoustic, the Geffen hall… You notice I have all of my speakers together because partly it’s a space issue and partly because the performance is not “spatially-designed”. That is, the sound of the ondes is only needed to appear from one single location.
When did you actually get your ondes martenot?
M: ’85
So you have one of the very last transistor models, I imagine?
M: Yeah yeah, it’s like 385. When I bought my instrument, I was on a waiting list for Palme, and then they closed…
But it’s great that you have three originals diffusers that still work.
M: But I’m very, very fussy about how my instruments go out, how they come back, and I oversee everything physically. It went by a crate, by air freight. I felt confident, because I personally knew the person who built the crate. On my instrument, the only thing that’s been touched… I was really worried about the plugs: handmade French, just little tongues… you can’t replace those. So I had a technician friend who’s really big on sound design change them to RCA plugs, so I have RCA plugs. Oh, and I have a tuner. I only have my one single ondes from 1985. I didn’t really want to go further than what I had, because I was disappointed with the one I own, because I was trained on [a vacuum tube model]. It was so rich, so alive, it really had a heart-beat.
A sixth-generation vacuum tube ondes Martenot from 1960 (photo by Andrew Garton).
I know that, if they work anymore, those have an amazing sound, right?
M: That’s why I fell in love with the instrument. When I first learned, I was young and stupid, I was assistant conductor to an orchestra in California, and we were doing a big Messiaen cycle, and my conductor, Kent Nagano, just says “Mary, I want you to play the ondes martenot solo in Turangalîla next year. I didn’t really know what that was. I mean, I loved Messiaen’s music, but-
So you just picked it up from that?
M: Well, because I was playing everything in the orchestra, I was playing keyboards, I was playing organ, I was playing harpsichord… I mean, I just didn’t say no to anything. you know, you’re just a starting musician and you don’t say no to anything. Plus it’s really interesting, it’s super interesting! So I said yes, I will play the ondes solo, and I saw a picture and said this looks like a keyboard… but of course when it came, it was not anything like that.
We found an old vacuum tube ondes that was owned by Ronnie Montrose, from Gamma. Ronnie was very interested as a guitarist, like Jonny Greenwood, in all these electronic instruments, so he bought one from Bernie Krause in LA, the sound effects guy. it didn’t really work when he bought it, but he tinkered with it, and actually improved it, stabilized it a little bit. So he brought it over to me and say “I’m going to lend [it] to the orchestra for the year, you can practice and learn it. Here’s the manual.” It was a little, typewritten thing, like five pages, that just described the buttons, the ring, the switches, the speakers.
So did you teach yourself?
M: Yeah, I taught myself. But then later, when I had fallen in love with the instrument, because that sound was so warm, the vacuum tubes were so warm, but it was so particular because it had to heat up for a certain amount of time to get tuned, and then if was on too long, it would go the other way, as you go up the keyboard it would roll down tritones.
We kept doing the Messiaen cycles, and then the Messiaens came to America and we worked with them, Olivier and Yvonne, and Jeanne Loriod. I became her interpreter, because I had worked in Lyon for a long time, and she gave me some master lessons, because we were playing Saint Francis together. She had heard about me, and I was so terrified to play for her, because I’m, you know, self-taught and she’s, you know, the Master.She only corrected a couple things about my technique, and the rest of it she said “no, you’re doing a great job.”
That was the US premier of Saint Francis, right?
M: It was the US premier of some scenes, you know it’s three and a half hours. Later I did do the whole thing at the San Francisco opera. I was the associate conductor as well as one of the ondists, where I played with Genevieve [Grenier] and Jean [Laurendeau].
Were you running back and forth?
M: We had two associate [conductors] and myself, so I was [conducting] a lot of stage rehearsals, when we didn’t have the orchestra. But then when we had the orchestra again the director was conducting.
A photo from the San Francisco Opera’s 2003 production of Saint François d’Assise (photo by Friedman).
You’re a conductor and an ondes player – do you think that if people want to learn it, they should learn something else too? I know [Jean] Laurendeau plays clarinet and ondes martenot. Is it an instrument best for multi-instrumentalists?
M: You know, it’s not at all keyboard-like, the sensation of playing. So when players take to it really well, because of the the fingering, the pitch identification first and the breath later, – you know, Geneviève, she’s a flutiest, and Jean is a clarinetist, and they took to it very well. I’ve had had violin friends come to my house, and they seem to manage it ok… but any of my keyboard friends are just whaaa? They just can’t deal with it.
Do you have any advice for young people who might want to pick up the ondes? Because you picked it up in such an usual way…
M: I was required to because I had an assignment to play it!
But you kept going!
M: Oh, because I fell in love with the instrument… I could not continue living if I did not have my own ondes. And if you have that passion go for it, get one, teach yourself or go to Paris! I mean, it’s an instrument, so people do this all the time – “oh, I want to learn to play the guitar, I’m going to buy a guitar…”
But there’s no rank and file musicians that play ondes martenot. There’s either people who specialize, or people who’ve never heard of it. There’s not ondes martenot in every home like guitar.
M: Not yet!
Not yet!
M: You know, Martenot himself had this idea – like you know how at one time in the US there were pianos in every house? He wanted to do that in France, because he made little ondes martenot – there’s still people in this country and in France who say “oh, I have this thing in the garage, this thing in the basement” – I was playing in Atlanta several years ago, and someone called the Atlanta Symphony and said “can I talk to your ondes martenot player, because we might have one?” he had the keyboard body, but no other parts. He didn’t have the speakers, he didn’t have the cables – it was an ondes made for US electricity.