Ondes Martenot in 'Lawrence of Arabia'

The Ondes Martenot is the eerie, wailing instrument you hear threading through Maurice Jarre's Lawrence of Arabia score. Invented in 1928, it uses a ribbon controller and pressure-sensitive drawer to produce haunting, voice-like tones that perfectly captured the desert's otherworldly atmosphere. Jarre used three of them alongside a full orchestra, helping him win the Academy Award for Best Original Score. There's far more to this instrument's story than you'd expect.

Key Takeaways

• Maurice Jarre used three Ondes Martenots in the score, blending them with harp, two pianos, cithara, and a full orchestra.
• The instrument's ribbon controller and tremolo capabilities created the ethereal, desert-like qualities that defined the score's atmospheric identity.
• Cynthia Millar performed the iconic Ondes Martenot solos on the 1991 Philharmonia Orchestra re-recording, delivering the score's signature ethereal wailing.
• The Ondes Martenot's prominent role contributed directly to Maurice Jarre winning the Academy Award for Best Original Score.
• The instrument's continuous pitch bends and microtonal range mimicked the human voice, perfectly evoking the desert's vast, unstable landscape.

What Is the Ondes Martenot?

The Ondes Martenot is an early electronic instrument invented in 1928 by French cellist Maurice Martenot. It produces electrical oscillations similar to radio signals, converting them into audible tones through speakers. You'll notice it consists of two units: a keyboard section and a separate speaker diffusion unit.

The instrument's keyboard mechanics allow players to shift keys laterally for pitch variation and vibrato. A ribbon controller, operated by the index finger, enables expressive portamento, producing smooth, continuous pitch sweeps resembling a fretless string instrument. Its sound ranges from a pure, voice-like tone to an eerie, drone-rich quality.

Martenot patented the instrument as "Perfectionnement aux instruments de musique électriques" and first demonstrated it at the Paris Opera on April 20, 1928. A separate drawer unit on the left-hand side gives players access to controls that shape articulation, dynamics and tone. Much like the Golden Ratio in art, the Ondes Martenot was embraced during its era as a tool for achieving a sense of ideal harmony and balance in musical composition.

The instrument features four distinct speaker types, known as diffuseurs, each altering the instrument's timbre and resonance in unique ways. Among these, the Palme speaker contains a resonance chamber with strings tuned to all 12 semitones, causing in-tune notes to resonate particular strings and produce chiming tones.

Ondes Martenot vs. Theremin: Why the Difference Matters

Understanding the Ondes Martenot's design naturally raises a comparison to its closest electronic relative, the Theremin. Both instruments produce electronic tones without traditional mechanical strings, but their gesture mechanics differ fundamentally.

The Theremin responds to your hand movements through open air around two antennas, making electronic intonation extremely difficult since even slight air disturbances shift pitch unpredictably. You'll find no tactile reference points to anchor your playing.

The Ondes Martenot solves these problems directly. You control pitch through a keyboard or marked wire, giving you reliable electronic intonation and physical feedback. Your left hand shapes volume and timbre through a pressure-sensitive drawer. This design precision explains why composers chose the Ondes Martenot for films like Lawrence of Arabia, where controlled, expressive eeriness mattered more than the Theremin's unpredictable wavering.

Both instruments share a common era of origin, with the Theremin emerging around 1920 and the Ondes Martenot following in 1928, making them pioneering electronic instruments that helped define what electronic music could become. Maurice Martenot spent a full decade refining his invention to offer musicians far greater control than the Theremin could provide.

Why Maurice Jarre Chose the Ondes Martenot for Lawrence of Arabia

Circumstance, not deliberate design, first brought Maurice Jarre to Lawrence of Arabia. He'd originally been hired just to orchestrate Richard Rodgers' rejected themes. But when Jarre composed a single original theme, David Lean immediately asked him to score the entire film.

Faced with capturing both desert timbre and Arab settings, Jarre turned to the Ondes Martenot. Its ethereal, unstable quality matched the harsh, unforgiving landscape in ways a traditional orchestra simply couldn't deliver alone. He incorporated three of the instruments alongside a cithara, harp, and two pianos, layering an electronic texture that felt genuinely otherworldly. In particularly intimate moments, such as the "Night and Stars" sequence, the delicate Ondes Martenot weaves together with harp and two pianos to render a soft phrase of the Desert Theme.

Jarre's background as a percussionist also shaped his choices, emphasizing rhythmic intensity throughout. The entire score was performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, recorded at Shepperton Studios with an ensemble that included 60 strings, 11 percussionists, two grand pianos, two harps, and three ondes Martenot. The result wasn't accidental—it was instinct refined under pressure, and it earned him the 1963 Academy Award for Best Original Score. Much like Georges Seurat's Pointillist color theory, which sought greater luminosity by layering pure elements rather than blending them, Jarre built his sonic palette by combining discrete timbres whose true effect emerged only when heard together.

The Player Behind the Sound: Cynthia Millar's Role

Behind Jarre's layered electronic textures stood a performer whose mastery of the instrument was essential to realizing his vision. Cynthia Millar brought her deep knowledge of the ondes Martenot's instrument history and performance techniques to the 1991 Philharmonia Orchestra recording, conducted by Tony Bremner. Her role as soloist among three ondes Martenot players gave the score its signature ethereal wailing quality.

Millar's performance techniques include blending the ondes with strings during melodic peaks and using the ribbon controller for precise pitch control. She plays original instruments identical to 1940s models, preserving their pure sine-wave sound. Her work with Jarre on this recording reflects the same creative depth she's brought to collaborations with composers like Elmer Bernstein, Messiaen, and Dario Marianelli throughout her career. A later recording of the score was made across two January sessions in 1989, featuring Tony Bremner and the Philharmonia Orchestra with completely new digital audio and additional music.

How the Ondes Martenot Creates Its Haunting Desert Sound

Millar's virtuosity would mean little without an instrument uniquely built to conjure the desert's vast, alien atmosphere. The Ondes Martenot's ring or keyboard controller lets you bend pitch continuously, producing microtonal phrasing that mimics howling wind or the human voice. You can't replicate that fluid glissando on standard instruments.

Jarre integrated three Ondes Martenot into his orchestra, pairing them with harps, pianos, and vibraphones to build sweeping, eerie textures. The instrument's tremolo capabilities, combined with bowing techniques from the string section, create gossamer layers of wonderment and dread. Tritones played on the Ondes Martenot sharpen that unease, rising and pulsing through desert cues like heat radiating off sand. Together, these qualities make the instrument indispensable to Lawrence of Arabia's atmospheric identity. Maurice Jarre also used the Ondes Martenot to shape the film's title theme, extending the instrument's haunting presence beyond the desert sequences alone.

The score went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Score, a recognition that affirmed the Ondes Martenot's unconventional contribution to cinema as much as it celebrated Jarre's orchestral vision. Much like Brutalism's béton brut philosophy, the Ondes Martenot prioritized honest, unadorned expression over ornamentation, letting raw sonic texture carry emotional weight.

Night and Stars, the Beach at Night, and the Cues That Define the Score

Stillness defines "Night and Stars," where Jarre deploys the Ondes Martenot alongside harp, two pianos, and cithara to render the Desert Theme's A Phrase with an almost fragile delicacy. Shimmering tremolo strings layer beneath while a flute solo joins the Martenot in the second part. You'll hear Desert, British, and Arab 2 Themes interwoven throughout, with Alford's "Voices of the Guns" joining the musical communion.

The track captures Lawrence and Tafas bonding over a desert campfire, translating starlit introspection into tritonal harmonics and melody.

"The Beach at Night" opens mystically before erupting into full orchestral statement at 1:15. Elsewhere, "Attack on Akaba" drives strings agitato against snare drums, while "After Quicksands" deploys harsh hammer-struck piano chords following Daud's death, each cue anchored by the Martenot's unmistakable presence. The album as a whole features over 25 minutes of previously unreleased music alongside improved sound quality compared to the original soundtrack release.

The Composers Lawrence of Arabia Inspired to Use the Ondes Martenot

Jarre's Lawrence of Arabia score sent ripples through Hollywood and beyond, drawing composers toward the ondes Martenot who might never have considered it.

Science fiction and horror film composers became primary adopters, recognizing the instrument's capacity to generate genuinely otherworldly soundscapes in their film scores.

Elmer Bernstein embraced it as a go-to tool for creating unearthly atmospheres, while Jarre himself returned to it, using three ondes Martenots again in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

The influence didn't stop with that generation. Modern composers like Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead and Damon Albarn later incorporated the instrument into their own work.

Daft Punk even drew on its electronic qualities. You can trace a direct line from Jarre's desert epic to all of them. Remarkably, Jarre produced the entire Lawrence of Arabia score, including its innovative use of the ondes Martenot, in about a month.

How Lawrence of Arabia Changed What Hollywood Composers Reached For

When Lawrence of Arabia hit theaters, it didn't just win Jarre an Oscar—it rewrote the playbook for what Hollywood composers thought they could reach for. You can hear it in how the score weaponized instrumental exoticism—davuls, kanuns, and augmented seconds—not as novelty, but as dramatic architecture. Jarre's use of orchestral modality, particularly the harmonic minor's haunting augmented second interval, gave composers a new blueprint for building worlds through sound rather than just underscoring action.

The Arabian theme didn't decorate the film; it defined it. Suddenly, composers understood that non-Western tonal systems and unconventional instruments could carry an entire epic. Jarre's work set the ceiling higher, proving that film music could match the grandest visual ambitions without ever sacrificing emotional precision. The score even contrasts this Arabian material directly against a march-like British theme, carried by brass and wind instruments, to musically embody Lawrence's fractured sense of identity.

The sprawling score required Gerard Schurmann's orchestration assistance, as Jarre's sketches lacked dynamics and instrumentation beyond percussion, with copyists working in relays to meet the demands of an extended recording schedule with the London Philharmonic Orchestra.