Jean Laurendeau lives on an ordinary street in West Montreal. But tucked away in a small second-floor studio in his home is something quite out of the ordinary: a rare musical instrument called the ondes Martenot.

At first glance, it doesn’t look very remarkable. Consisting of a piano keyboard on legs with a few mysterious buttons and switches, it could easily be mistaken for an early prototype of a Moog synthesizer. But it’s much older than any synthesizer: It was invented in France by Maurice Martenot in 1928, and is now eight decades old.

“The right hand plays on the keyboard to determine the notes,” says Laurendeau, a soft-spoken, professorial man of 70 years. “The left hand controls the sensitivity - like the bow on a violin.”

In some ways the instrument is like a theremin - famously used to create weird, otherworldly sounds in old horror and sci-fi flicks. Both instruments work on the same principal: “heterodyning oscillators” control pitch and volume. But according to Laurendeau, the ondes Martenot is more sophisticated.
“When you play the theremin, you don’t touch anything. Everything is in the air, and it’s hard to be precisely in tune and to make a clean attack on a note. The keyboard allows a kind of virtuosity that the theremin does not permit.”

By adjusting the settings on his ondes Martenot, Laurendeau demonstrates how it can warble sweetly or penetrate like a knife. By altering pressure on the keys, he coaxes a gentle vibrato from it. When he puts a metal ring on his finger and slides it up and down the keyboard, a distinctive wail is produced.

“Maurice Martenot was a very simple man,” continues Laurendeau, who studied with the inventor in Paris in the 1960s, and later wrote a book about him. “He was not very good at marketing - it was non-existent for him. Once, some people from a bank came to him and said ‘What do you need?’ He said, ‘I want to be left in peace in my studio.’ “During his lifetime, Martenot built fewer than 300 instruments.

On the other hand, the Russian inventor Léon Theremin was an aggressive advocate for his instrument, performing concerts on his invention throughout Europe and America. As well, the theremin soon found its way to Hollywood - and was also popularized by the Beach Boys in the song Good Vibrations.

As a result, the theremin is much better known in North America. But in the Francophone world, the ondes Martenot holds a position of respect. In France, the instrument can be studied at music conservatories in Paris and other cities. And until the mid-1990s, Laurendeau taught it at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal.

Yet despite its rarity, the ondes Martenot shows no sign of dying out. It also continues to crop up - sometimes in unlikely places. It can be heard in the soundtracks of the movies Lawrence of Arabia and A Passage to India. Jonny Greenwood of the band Radiohead plays one, and it was used in the 1970s by the Quebec rock groups Harmonium and Beau Dommage. As well, the instrument is the subject of Wavemakers, a documentary film currently being made by the Montreal-based Productions Artifact company.

Most significantly, the ondes Martenot is essential to a small but valued body of 20th-century classical repertoire. Messiaen’s opera Saint François d’Assise requires three of them.

Laurendeau, one of the few professional “ondistes” in North America, is often called upon when his services are needed: He’s performed throughout Canada, and in the United States with the orchestras of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis and Houston, among others.

“Its past guarantees its future. There are great works that need the instrument to live, and new compositions are still being written for the ondes Martenot.”

Excerpted from Colin Eatock, Globe and Mail, April 9, 2008

Canada Reads finalist Mavis Gallant was interviewed this past Sunday on the radio show Writers and Company. There is a RealAudio version of the interview, or you can download the show as a podcast.

Mavis Gallant is a bona fide trailblazer. She moved to Paris to eke out a living as a writer at a time (1950) when most women wouldn’t have dreamt of being so bold. Yes, Mavis has guts — so much so that she opened one of her books with this quote from Boris Pasternak: “Only personal independence matters.” And judging from her lively interview, she’s still as feisty as ever at age 85.

Her bravery paid off—Gallant has published over 100 short stories in her career, many of them in The New Yorker.

When she was working as a young reporter for the Montreal Standard, Ms. Gallant had a chance to interview famed French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre! With characteristic wit, Gallant told the interviewer, “I had seen that he noticed me. He liked girls. He had a wall eye, but I still noticed that the good one was swivelling….”

In addition to discussing subjects as varied as her childhood, life in post-war Europe and her ability to be hypercritical of her work, Gallant was also forthcoming about her writing — likening her process to glimpsing movie stills outside a cinema, and saying of her characters, “They arrive…. It’s like a stage and the curtains part and there’s just a phone ringing, and then someone picks up the phone…. But you know all about this woman, the one that came in and picked up the phone.”

Apparently, this way of working, of “glimpsing” a character or scene and then writing from there, was how Gallant was able to create two of the stories—The Remission and The Moslem Wife—featured in her Canada Reads contender From the Fifteenth District.

(The Moslem Wife grew out of the image of a couple walking across the Place Masséna, while The Remission began with a picture of a couple and their children descending the steps of a train.) From there, Gallant proceeded to provide her listeners with valuable insights about The Moslem Wife that should be required listening for all of us before we choose our top picks for Canada Reads.

Mavis’s talk of Paris gets one daydreaming about the City of Light, surely one of the best places on earth for a bookworm to soak up some literary history, with some remarkable book-themed sites.

Oscar Wilde’s tomb at Père-Lachaise cemetery:
Absolutely breathtaking, and covered with flowers and lipstick kisses left by Wilde fans who’ve come to pay their respects.

Marcel Proust’s grave (Père-Lachaise):

Le Sélect (99, bd. du Montparnasse): One of the many – so many you’ll never see them in one trip–bars frequented by Ernest Hemingway during his expatriate years.

Les Deux Magots (6, pl. St-Germain-des-Prés): another haunt frequently visited by Hemingway and other literati during the late ‘20s. This also seems like the kind of place Mavis would have frequented, back in the day.

Café de Flore (172, bd. St-Germain): practically next door to the Deux Magots, this establishment was the spot favoured by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. A booth on the upper floor is kept empty in their honour year ‘round.

Shakespeare and Co. (37, r. de la Bucherie): A world-famous bookstore, whose founder, Sylvia Beach, facilitated the first publication of Ulysses. During the shop’s lengthy history, the rooms on the second floor (informally referred to as the “tumbleweed hotel”) have housed many aspiring writers and starving, literary-minded travellers.

And finally, here are some titles that should appeal to those of you who are into tough dames like Mavis, expatriates and all things Paris:

A Moveable Feast

The Rainy Moon and Other Stories (Colette)

That Summer in Paris (Morley Callaghan)

The Left Bank and Other Stories

The Great Good Place: American Expatriate Women in Paris

Anything by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Time Was Soft There

The Beat Hotel

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, if only because it pairs Parisian recipes with breezy reminiscences along the lines of, “one day when Picasso came to lunch I decorated a fish in a way I thought would amuse him…”

From the Fifteenth District

Interview in The Walrus

Paris is a city of boutiques and a city in love with visual design, so there is no shortage of beautiful windows to look at wherever you go, especially at Christmastime.

In the window of a toy store on the rue du Commerce, large pneumatic bears, in various shades of the rainbow, frolic amid a flurry of fake snow. At haute grocery store Fauchon, near the Madeleine, the window is filled with jewel-coloured Christmas pastries as brilliant as any stained-glass window.

Most dazzling are the Christmas windows of Les Grands Magasins — the connected but rival Galeries Lafayette and Au Printemps department stores — presenting onto boulevard Haussmann, directly behind the ornately sculpted Palais Garnier on the nearby Place de l’Opéra.

The opera house, with its Chagall ceiling and eight-ton crystal chandelier, is where one might pay dearly for a ticket to see a choreographed show. But there, outside these belle époque temples of commerce, the spectacle is free, but no less impressive.

The windows don’t showcase toy shops. No families eating plum puddings, either.

Beyond a scene showcasing a sultry-looking mannequin swathed in fur and a pack of ferocious animals, themselves brushed and styled, the windows depict a winter wonderland made up of globes, glitter, mirrors and simulated white stuff that carry out the Printemps’ Nordic Christmas theme with aplomb.

Designed by artists possessed with that distinctly Parisian flair for work that combines, in equal measure, the whimsical, the poetic and the absurd, the windows are light-years from anything that spoke to the ye-olde-yuletide windows of one’s youth.

In true Paris fashion, they are up-to-the-minute creations, propelled as much by technical know-how as by imagination. Anyone looking for a trip down memory lane would be disappointed — but also delighted by the sudden shift in point of view.

Globe and Mail: Parisian Christmas

Francis Peyrat photos

Houston Chronicle photos