In Maraé, F.B.Mâche (1935), who is concerned with the disappearance of the conventional boundary between nature and culture, composes a work with two voices: that of a magnetic tape on which raw sounds (aquatic rustling, for example) are recorded, barely manipulated, and that of percussion. While we can only praise the economy of the writing, it is not certain that the intellectual challenge has been won: why broadcast through loudspeakers sounds that could be produced on stage in a more 'natural' way?

                                    Gérard Condé, Le Monde 28 March 1975

The Percussions de Strasbourg concert exploded like a joyous firework in the middle of the festival......the Frenchman François-Bernard Mâche merely added a striking superimposition of the percussionists' interventions to a recorded tape evoking the play of the sea on the rocks.

                                       Pierre Petit, Le Figaro 28 March 1975

François-Bernard Mâche's Maraé seeks to erase the conventional boundary between nature and culture. The percussion gradually builds up a difficult counterpoint to the raw sounds reproduced by two tapes. It's a remarkable piece of technical work, and the whole of the second part is a highly interesting achievement in terms of its plasticity and expressiveness.

                 Gérard Mannoni, Le Quotidien de Paris 28 March 1975

François-Bernard Mâche's Maraé...also demonstrated the virtuosity of the Percussions de Strasbourg, who were eagerly awaited in Royan after several years' absence from the Festival d'art contemporain.

               M.Coynault, Les dernières nouvelles d'Alsace 31 March 1975

A khâgne teacher triumphs at the Royan Festival

François Mache, a 40-year-old native of Clermont-Ferrand, was widely applauded. He has the unique distinction of being not only one of the leading contemporary composers, but also a former teacher at the Rue d'Ulm.
This professor of Khagne at Louis-le-Grand gave us Maraé, an investigation into pure sound. 
                                    L'Aurore, 31 March 1975
 = France-Presse, L'Union de Reims, L'écho La liberté de Lyon etc. 1 April 1975

The Percussions de Strasbourg, in their first concert, performed... François-Bernard Mâche (Maraé)... a concert that was a great success and in which the members of the group once again demonstrated their mastery.
R.Geng, L’Alsace, 10 avril 1975

François-Bernard Mâche probably occupies the most unconventional position among French composers at the moment. His pieces are full of tension - you never get the impression that they are too long. He is selective in his material. Maraé (1974), premièred by the Percussions de Strasbourg, begins with sheet wind and the sounds of inanimate nature and finally leads to African magic with buzzing woods and drums. What is reduction in Stockhausen's work becomes the starting point for sophisticated differentiation: the most hidden sound effects are savoured via microphones, but never remain static.

                                                Detlef Gojowy, Frankfurter Allgemeine 18 avril 1975

Tuesday, 25 March.... In the afternoon, the Percussionnistes de Strasbourg, with a work by François-Bernard Mâche, Maraé, where percussion instruments and music on tape create a musical atmosphere all the more dense because the timbres chosen are grey, unglamorous, deliberately without charm or easy effects.
Antoine Goléa, Carrefour 24 April 1975

François-Bernard Mâche's Maraé, like Rituel d'oubli or Naluan, establishes a dialogue between the raw sounds of nature (sea, animal cries) and the instruments. The field is infinite, and the success is full of mystery.

          Françoise Ferrand, Paris-Normandie 24 April 1975

The Strasbourg audience framed...a novelty: Maraé by François-Bernard Mâche. Mâche comes from concrete music: he has water, wind and fire sounds recorded on tape, to which percussionists then have to imitate. The piece probably belongs in the context of the new realism that introduces nature as a quotation. Mâches Maraé is not free of a certain artifice, but nevertheless impresses with its richness of sound.

         EB, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger n°272, 3 décembre 1976

The other main protagonist of this year's festival, François-Bernard Mâche, also deserves this accolade, for he is one of the very few composers fully aware of what they are doing. However, his self-knowledge and great erudition in various fields did not - as is often the case - lead him to be absorbed as an artist by an intellectual. Mâche's musical works testify that these two personalities of the composer do not interfere with each other, but on the contrary interact perfectly. Just like the two elements from which almost all his works are made up : patterns taken from nature and his own music. A beautiful example of this coexistence is the piece entitled Maraé, in which the sounds of percussion have been so skilfully joined to the sounds of nature (sea, winds, fire) that the essence of the latter remains intact, only sublimated aesthetically. François-Bernard Mâche should therefore be rewarded for his culture of musical mores....

Tadeusz Kaczyński   Ruch Muzyczny n°23, 10 November 1985

....If I were forced to isolate myself on a desert island with my favourite record, I would certainly choose a recording of one of Mâche's 'natural' works. During the quartet concert, we also heard Maraé for six percussion instruments and the sounds of the sea, wind and fire (recorded on tape). This 'symphony of the elements' shows less clearly than other works the subtleties of Mâche's style in favour of the severe power of the forces of nature. But here, too, the successive interventions of the instruments and the tape must be listened to, and remain in the memory for a long time. Although this music, the 'noisiest' of the works I know by this composer, is somewhat marginal, it is extremely significant. Aren't his highly expressive discoveries a little reminiscent of P. Schaeffer's musique concrète?....
                    Tadeusz A.Zieliński,  Ruch Muzyczny n°24, 24 November 1985

François-Bernard Mâche, born in Clermont-Ferrand in 1935, studied with Olivier Messiaen, among others. He only made a few appearances in Germany and his work is largely unknown here. His combination of "human music" and natural sounds takes on a mystical quality...
 Mâche's distinctive works also include the compositions " Maraé ", " Aera " and " Khnoum ", written for the Percussions de Strasbourg, which left just as strong an impression as the world premiere of Mâche's " Chikop " for soprano and ensemble on poems by Humberto Ak'abal: magical word pictures, full of associations with nature, including bird sounds.
  
									Gerhard Rohde.   7.6.2004

At 11pm, Les Percussions de Strasbourg took to the stage of the Palais des Fêtes for a high mass of the kind they're famous for. We heard Maraé, a piece from 1974, ending with a frenetic finale in the same vein as those we heard at the end of the afternoon.

                            Bertrand Bolognesi, Anaclase.com September 2004

Elisabeth Chojnacka, Françoise Kubler and Accroche-Note, the voices of Musicatreize, then the Percussions de Strasbourg were the experienced and efficient craftsmen of the François-Bernard Mâche day at Musica.
In the presence of the composer, of course, the event produced an elegant monograph on this musician born in 1935, now a member of the Institut, a scholar and musicologist who was also an academic in Strasbourg. His entire body of work, spanning more than thirty years, nourishes, through infinite reflections on the relationship between language and music, a contemporary meditation on the universal archetypes of culture, and on nature as a model.
And his original approach has always resulted in pages of the utmost finesse, in which sonority plays the leading role, but does not shy away from sometimes highly advanced technologies. These are always lively pieces, with a dramatic structure. Mâche takes us on astonishing planetary journeys, in which he draws on the deep historical and cultural strata of vanished civilisations as much as on the sounds of the natural elements...
The evening concludes with the Percussions de Strasbourg, with three classic pieces that Mâche dedicated to them, and for which they are the privileged mediators: Maraé, from 1974, evokes the white noises of the sea, swell and fire.

              Marc Munch, Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace 23 September 2004

Maraé (1974) for six amplified percussion instruments and magnetic tape is more about action than writing. The fever of creation arises from the mixing of sounds, whether recorded (water, wind, fire) or not. This exaltation is enhanced by the use of rhombes, ancestral instruments that roar when whirled overhead. With its free conditioning lasting some fifteen minutes and its final two minutes of organised crackling, the piece is reminiscent of a Neanderthal Prelude and Fugue.

                    Pierre Gervasoni, La musique contemporaine en 100 disques, MF, Paris 2007