Interview with Thierry Pécou by François Mauger

Thierry Pécou: ...My interest in animals is a way of decentring myself, of decentring ourselves. The question is: how do humans place themselves in their environment? The human species is perhaps not the only one with the capacity to create. I'm talking about "pure" creativity in inverted commas. We humans make art for art's sake. Don't birds and other animals, like whales (but there are others too), have the same capacity to create, to make music without it fulfilling a biological function? Simply for pleasure? Some ethologists and biologists have demonstrated this through very detailed studies. In the major animal families, this only concerns a few species. For example, not all birds have the same ability to invent. But François-Bernard Mâche, whose work you can hear on the CD, has established that certain species of bird can create musical motifs that are astonishingly creative, with no other aim than to invent, and sometimes to imitate other species... I find the idea of working with animal sounds very interesting, because it questions our approach to creation. The idea, if I may say so, of François-Bernard Mâche and myself, is that by working with the songs of birds or whales, we try to put ourselves on their level. Humans need to come down from their pedestal and enter into a form of creative dialogue with their environment. Of course, it's difficult to have a direct dialogue with an animal, so we use an artifice, a recording... 

F.Mauger :You mentioned François-Bernard Mâche. Why did you commission a piece from him for this record?

Thierry Pécou: François-Bernard Mâche is someone I know well, someone I've worked with for several years. For me, it was really important to have him on this record. He's a pioneer in this approach to animal song as a real object of creation. He was really one of the first, based on scientific studies (and he's an academic himself), to sketch out this way of renewing human creation. He looked to nature and mythology for a new inspiration that would take us in a different direction and take us away from the formalism of the 1950s and 1960s. I said to myself, "Why not commission a piece from him? He very generously agreed to write a short score for the Variances ensemble, based on birdsong. The bird sounds like just another instrument. There is nothing anecdotal or illustrative about it. The bird's line is counterpointed by all the musical work of François-Bernard Mâche.

Thierry Pécou https://music-artsnetwork.ffm.to/grandsespaces.oem Crescendo magazine.  30.6. 2021:
This album seeks to resonate with very contemporary issues such as the redefinition of the concept of nature, through the human/animal relationship, the major ecological challenges, but also the relationship between cultures, particularly the place of so-called 'indigenous' cultures. I wanted to bring together several of my scores dealing with these subjects, by associating them with a creation by the composer and musicologist François-Bernard Mâche, whose works and thinking have greatly nourished me in recent years. I consider his book Musique, Mythe, Nature, published in the 1980s, to be a major work that opens up exciting prospects for musical creation, away from the arid formalism of the post-war period on the one hand, and sterile neo-romanticism on the other. I recognised a lot of myself in Mâche's approach, even though our music is very different, and I wanted his very recent work Vigiles, composed and commissioned by the Ensemble Variances, to appear on this album as a kind of reference piece. 

                  Whales, birds and musicians vibrate in unison to survive 
    By mixing instruments and sounds, "Humain non humain" acts as an alarm bell 

...Vigiles...was written in 2018 by François-Bernard Mâche, at the request of Thierry Pécou, whose militant enterprise is based on the analyses published by the anthropologist Philippe Descola,   in Par-delà nature et culture (Gallimard, 2005). A pioneer, over half a century ago, for the integration of animal sounds into an instrumental device, the composer, born in 1935, uses recordings of the bush warbler, a 'night-vigilant bird' singing at night. These recordings set the tone for an ensemble in which the instrumentalists respond by mimicry. It's as if you're attending a concert in an aviary. 
                                                                                   
               Pierre Gervasoni, Ohuaya Humain non humain CD review Le Monde 17 September 2021