Bruno Serrou: Around the same time as Rituel d'oubli, you wrote Répliques.
What did you reply to?

François-Bernard Mâche: It's not me who replies, but the audience. It's an avatar, It's a humorous avatar of the utopias of the Sixties, or the musical version of "poetry must be made by all, not by one".  At the time, we were making a series of speeches which, today, seem comical, about the composer as a super-boss who abused his power and mistreated the poor performers. It was therefore important to stop being dirigiste. No more
works, because a work is in itself an unbearable constraint, so that the spontaneity of everybody can express itself freely. At the same time, free jazz
was flourishing, and nobody realised that the more spontaneous you are, the more clichés are expressed unconsciously. My slightly humorous way of participating in this prevailing utopia was to say : well, if music has to be made by everyone, not just by one, let's see what happens in a dialogue between the composer and the listener,  between the audience and the orchestra. I had Radio-France, which commissioned the work, to buy hundreds of birdcalls, divided into categories according to the geography of the Royan casino, the venue for the premiere. Some people had sparrows,
A superb photo of Bernard Gavoty, the most conservative critic of the time, shows him trying to play the sparrow with the utmost seriousness.
He was soon to write horrors about the work. Others had a red partridge...
Calls produce a caricature of animal sounds, but such a successful caricature that they are now banned from hunting because they are too effective. When you know how to imitate an animal's call, you can attract other animals, trap them and shoot them easily. So Messiaen said he was very angry that I was using bird calls because they were harmful to bird life. But there were no birds in the Royan casino, and the public were able to have unrestricted fun with the birdcalls. I had planned a number of sequences where I invited the audience to do as the orchestra did, and if they didn't show enough discipline, I had planned strategies where the orchestra would counter-attack, there would be conflicts, and conflict resolution. The whole thing didn't work out exactly as I'd envisaged, but it was my way of seeing music as a social game. I remembered that a few years earlier, I had arbitrated
Simonovitch and Maderna, the two conductors at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées conducting Xenakis's Stratégie. I had a blackboard on which I counted the points, and I checked that the points scored by one conductor were in accordance with the strategies he had deployed compared to the other leader. Maderna lost because his main concern was to please himself by the musical strategies he liked, even if they weren't the most valuable, conventionally .
The idea of play, of dialogue with the public, was in the air, and the public
and the audience had so much fun that we couldn't get the birdcalls back, 
everyone left with their own to continue the fun.

Bruno Serrou: Is this your vision of randomness?

François-Bernard Mâche: Oh, it was a very controlled randomness, because in principle the conductor, Charles Bruck, gave the starts and made comments in his inimitable tone, saying : "There are a few elements up there that are slightly inadequate". And the audience was obviously delighted.

Bruno Serrou: Has this work ever been performed again?

François-Bernard Mâche: No... Manufrance has disappeared, and with no replacement, it became difficult to find hundreds of bird calls. No one thought of investing so much, and I don't particularly want to.

François-Bernard Mâche, De la musique, des langues et des oiseaux, Michel de Maule -INA 2007, p.238-240