Bruno Serrou: Rituel d'oubli was composed in September 1968 and premiered a year and a half later. You constantly refer to this work. Why do you do that?

François-Bernard Mâche: I think it's the first work that corresponds to my maturity. In it, I integrate the two teachings I had assimilated, that of Messiaen and that of Schaeffer, turning my back on one and the other, while perpetuating them. Let me explain: Messiaen never integrated recordings of birds into his music, and Schaeffer never authorised or considered legitimate the approach of integrating natural sounds without manipulating them. I was therefore in contravention of both of them, while following in my own way a certain number of their leads. I was integrating recognisable raw sounds into the instrumental writing for the first time, betting on the fact that, depending on the context, they would take on a different meaning. The work opens with the call of a hornbill, an enormous tropical bird that makes very hoarse, repetitive sounds. This hornbill is linked to what is perhaps the oldest instrument in the world, since it dates back to prehistoric times: the rhombe, which was used to accompany ceremonies in Africa, Australia and in the caves of our Palaeolithic ancestors. It produces a deep, repetitive sound. Rituel d'oubli opens with this immemorial allusion to the presence of music in the world, beyond the human species and beyond any cultural tradition. I called this score Rituel d'oubli because, when I was composing it, we were in the middle of May 1968, at the very moment when the crisis of modernity was breaking out. In other words, people were dramatically wondering whether the world was progressing, whether it was going anywhere, whether history had any meaning. Such was the modernist ideal, of which the music of the 1950s offered a symbolic image. We were constantly innovating, and we would endlessly develop music towards an incredible adventure, towards "the edge of fertile country". We were heading for this new frontier that Kennedy spoke of, and we had to cross it. May 1968 was both the exasperation of this approach and its downfall, in that mystical, irrational preoccupations suddenly or almost suddenly reappeared, moving in a completely different direction, and the term 'ritual' expressed for me the need to rediscover the force of myth in a society that had thought itself so totally liberated that it believed itself to be weightless. As for 'forgetting', it instils an apparent contradiction between the two expressions since, for a ritual, you have to exercise your memory, which is the opposite of forgetting, and is therefore an a priori paradoxical exercise. The project was a response to both personal and aesthetic concerns. The latter, you will understand, are easier for me to explain. The idea was to go beyond the categories of both the traditional routine and the established avant-garde. So I intended to forget all that, to start again from the utopia of the clean slate, and at the same time to rediscover what was the opposite of the clean slate, tradition in the sense in which people like Ohana define it, i.e. not just what is handed down from era to era, but a timeless truth.

Bruno Serrou: What criteria did you use to choose one sound rather than another in the theme of your piece?

François-Bernard Mâche: I made this choice because I wanted to exorcise the painful memories of the Algerian War, which I incorporated into the work itself, using sounds of fighting, for example, recorded in the streets of Oran. For me, it's a way of getting rid of this burden and these memories. But I've avoided the Grand Guignol.

François-Bernard Mâche, De la musique, des langues et des oiseaux, Michel de Maule -INA 2007, p.235-238