Bruno Serrou: For the Persepolis Festival, you composed a work with a Greek title, Danae. Was it Darius who welcomed Greece?

François-Bernard Mâche: Danaé, which comes shortly after Kemit, is a choral work that was certainly inspired by the recent success of Xenakis' brilliant score. Nuits had made a considerable impression in Royan. It is indeed a genuine masterpiece of exceptional dramatic force, which speaks even to people unfamiliar with contemporary music. I remember playing it for my mother, who wasn't very open to contemporary music, but who was struck by its beauty. When you're struck by the beauty of a work, you want to do it just as well, but at the same time you say to yourself: there's no point in doing it again, it would be catastrophic, so how can you produce a piece that reuses this magnificent 'instrument' of twelve solo voices that Marcel Couraud created at Radio France, without doing Nuits again?  Another source gave me the basic ideas for my score, a recording made in Kashmir, among the Hunzas, which I found on a disc released by Boîte à musique, a very good little publisher of refined rarities. This record introduced me to this little-known region of the world, situated between Kashmir and Afghanistan, in a high mountainous region inhabited by a very special people, the Hunzas, considered pagans by the Muslims and foreigners by the Hindus. Legend has it that they are descendants of Alexander the Great's soldiers. I found this music superb, and there are some echoes of it in Danaé, where I use percussion instruments played at the same time as long vocal lines, finding this combination particularly interesting.  I used instruments that I had built in imitation of the whipping ball drums of Tibet. The Musée de l'Homme has a Tibetan instrument, a damaru, made up of two skullcaps pressed against each other, with a skin stretched over the hollow side, and balls attached that strike alternately on one side and the other. This instrument was not widely used at the time, but today it has become a toy that comes in a variety of forms. The damaru gives a tight rhythm, and as I had twelve singers, each equipped with a damaru, it allowed me to create crackling sounds, an abundance of fine percussion, which then suggested the title. In the legend of Danae, a princess is locked up in a bronze tower to prevent her having children, because if she did, they would kill the princess's father. But she is visited by the Sun himself, who lets his rays fall into the tower like a shower of gold, and the young girl conceives a child despite her isolation. Her father chases her away, locking her and her child in a chest and throwing it into the sea. The child grows up to become the hero Perseus, who saves the princesses, including Andromeda, by riding Pegasus. So it's a very beautiful legend, and the idea of golden rain on bronze walls suggested the title to me.

Bruno Serrou: Didn't the creation in Persepolis also have something to do with it?

François-Bernard Mâche: Persepolis is not the city of Perseus but the city of the Persians. But it's always possible to play on words, and that may have crossed my mind. The work was in fact premiered in the ruins of Darius' palace, by Marcel Couraud's ensemble. We were there as part of the Shiraz Festival and, although the ruins are totally unsuitable for choral acoustics because they are too dry, the performance of the work was very impressive.

Bruno Serrou: Was Danaé the first myth you set to music?

François-Bernard Mâche: At least, this is the first time I've admitted a connection between myth and music. But Danaé is not a work with a programme, it doesn't tell a story. 

Bruno Serrou: Do the voices rely on phonemes alone?

François-Bernard Mâche: On phonemes, on nocturnal animal sounds, stylised frog or insect polyphony, and on rhythmic precision, which is not always what we ask of singers. Bad singers use vowels and sacrifice consonants, whereas in Danaé I wanted impeccable rhythmic precision and articulation, which only very good singers can achieve.

François-Bernard Mâche, De la musique, des langues et des oiseaux, Michel de Maule -INA 2007, p.241-244