Korwar is a word belonging to the peoples of New Guinea, for whom the skull, a reservoir of spiritual strength, is carefully preserved in a sort of wooden cabinet where it is over-modelled and repainted. It is therefore both a sculpture in terms of the clay, the colours that cover it and the wooden frame in which it rests; but it is also an eminently natural and raw object, visible beneath the aesthetic coating. (. . . )
In a somewhat analogous way here, the magnetic tape of raw sounds receives an instrumental overlay. Extreme realism (the composer told us during our interview in June 1998) sometimes comes close to the fantastic, and it is a question of abolishing the frontier between raw sound and musical sound".
In the West, Korwar is the equivalent of medieval reliquaries (a box, casket or object containing relics:  the remains of saints' bodies, objects belonging to them). There are hundreds of reliquaries in France.
Korwar is one of François-Bernard Mâche's most striking works. It contains a subtle blend of sounds, most of them natural. With ingenuity and originality, the composer arranges them, and juxtaposes them with a variety of instrumental music.
The sonic naturalism of this piece is not just another fortress consolidating a certain aesthetic oasis of our creator, that is to say, naturalist music. Rather, and above all, it is a way of suggesting to listeners that they share in the realistic musical poetics of animals on the one hand, and the very elements of nature on the other.
It should be noted that, beyond any aesthetic considerations, such a treatment of musical material remains, for the composer, "a political gesture": by this gesture, he notably turns his back on  pure musical humanism. He thus combined nature and culture to create a counter-culture, with the aim of creating a work that reveals the music contained in the natural environment.
Through this work, but also through all his creations, the author of Korwar also invites his Western contemporaries an experience of musical life linked to the reality of nature. The idea is to be able to perceive the raw sounds of nature as music.
At the same time, this musician remains convinced of the ramifying force, in the universe, of the echo of this natural reality, an echo that serves as a link between the various components of the cosmos, particularly man, animals, and the four elements (air, earth, fire and water). So he strives to render, through the reality of nature's song, a sound material that is practically free of the abstract formatting  made possible by musical writing using conventional signals and codes. In this way, his human "art of sound" becomes an extension or development of the animal voice and the echo of nature, be it inanimate or otherwise.
In the case of Korwar, the composer practises this kind of xenophony or xenoplastics of sound, combining human and animal language with the written music of the harpsichord. To do this, he chose as models the Xhosa language of southern Africa and the song of the shama (a Malaysian bird of the blackbird family, merula). These are archetypes that, here, are reshaped instrumentally on the harpsichord, in a discourse that also incorporates the creaks and rustles of animals and other birdsong, including the red partridge (alectoris rufa).
As a result, and paradoxically, the reality of sound is both disguised and exposed. Animal cries are exploited like musical instruments, in the same way that the instrument - in this case the harpsichord - masquerades as these animals, and even as humans, by imitating the characteristics of their sound models. In this way, a link is established between a naturalizing culture and a socializing nature: a "counter-culture" is created at last!
Generally speaking, Korwar begins with the entrance of a South African xhosa vocal phrasing, with melodic accents and rattles. It was in collaboration with a woman called Dlulane that he produced the part relating to this language. She recited and interpreted words and phrases for him, at different speeds and in different tones, which he recorded. Over the course of the musical discourse, this speech gradually becomes monochordal, then recurs with the singing of the famous malaysian shama.
Here, the imitative writing of the harpsichord offers rigorous synchronisation with the rhythm of the xhosa. The instrument colours the Xhosa text, and its struck atonal chords destroy  the final rhythmic values of the phrase. Further on, the same spoken voice is supported by the harpsichord, which varies the sounds from mute indefinite sonorities when hitting the pedal to chords with occasional snatches of clusters.
All of this develops with interventions of natural animal sounds. In their sequence, the composer alternates a few melodic-rhythmic motifs that he modifies, imitates and even repeats.
On the whole, the rhythm, marked by a dynamism bequeathed to the weak beats, remains irregular thanks to the use of syncopations and off-beats.
The harpsichord imitates, ornaments or improvises on highly oscillatory cluster motifs, which in turn become dense, gaining in intensity, speed and repetitiveness. Intruding into the zoo, the sonic jungle at the heart of musical naturalism, the harpsichordist engages in dialogue, daring to make her instrument speak both the language of animals and that of music, by using  imitation and counterpoint of their fascinating sounds.
After the spoken Xhosa, there are the clicks of Shama's beak, followed on the magnetic tape by the croaking of five frogs and the cries and flapping wings of starlings (sturnus). This is followed by the rutting cries of the un-neutered boar pig, the great singing solo of the Shama bird, the cries of wild boars and the Peruvian guanaco, (wild llama from the Andes, the size of a large deer, domesticated for its wool, meat or use as a pack animal), the sounds made by orcas, the killer whales of the Pacific Ocean, and shrimps in particular.
It is with these strange natural sounds that Elisabeth Chojnacka engages, on the harpsichord, in this subtle conversation with the animals we have just heard. with the animals we have just mentioned. She intervenes with great delicacy.
Thus, alternately and with a firmness that allows the architecture of the entire work to be articulated (particularly from a rhythmic point of view), the instrumentalist emphasises, responds to and enters into various dialogues with pre-recorded sounds of animals and inanimate nature. The sounds of rain, for example, are followed by a flow of notes from two concomitant harpsichords, also pre-recorded. Chojnacka joins in, playing live during the performance a plethora of notes that sound like bees buzzing in a jug.
In its unfolding, the musical discourse includes recorded sound elements and harpsichord interventions that are remarkably synchronised, while the rhythmic pattern remains rigorous and almost static. This stagnation is due solely to the repetition of a few notes.
As the foregoing suggests, Korwar's African influence, or rather inspiration, manifests itself above all in the injunctions of the Xhosa language, the rhythmic and even polyphonic ostinatos, and the reference to the practice of vivified myth (the myth around the skull of a deceased person that is carefully preserved by the people of New Guinea).
In fact, the composer uses almost ten Xhosa phonetic clicks, which he places in concomitance with the shama and the harpsichord, evolving in a very harsh rhythmic synchrony. The composer also interposes the concordant rattling of birds and uses pitches  in perfect correlation with the vowels of the language. The same applies to the fixed intervals of these notes and the consonants of Xhosa. The work concludes, in coda, with an exacerbated toccata, an obstinate rhythmic pattern and increasingly dense clusters in the harpsichord.