Bruno Serrou: The first of your official works is aptly entitled Prélude. Which is quite a programme in itself.

François-Bernard Mâche: It's not exactly the first, but it's definitely one of the first. It's called Prélude, because I wanted to go further. I composed it in 1958-1959, and it was premiered at the Salle Gaveau in 1959. I was not yet a seasoned composer. I had the nerve to ask for acoustic experiments, by putting loudspeakers behind the organ in the Salle Gaveau. This was no mean feat, as the loudspeakers were heavy and access to the back of the organ pipes was tricky. At the time, no one knew exactly how tape music should be projected. There had been several experiments with spatialisation, notably with Pierre Henry, but it wasn't always possible to apply them, and the Salle Gaveau was perhaps not the best place to venture into, but I was very happy all the same. At the time, we were reaching a very enthusiastic, curious and open audience. Those were happy years for me. The public was very curious about the new trends in contemporary music.

Bruno Serrou: Did you title this work after the fact?

François-Bernard Mâche: As soon as I'd finished it. I had the firm intention of continuing to progress in electro-acoustic music, where I hadn't said my last word with this fairly short piece. Prélude incorporates sounds from a wide variety of sources, including very complex montages of what we used to call looping. Today it's a simple gesture on a computer screen, but back then it was a matter of making a very long loop of magnetic tape by hand, running at seventy-six centimetres per second and passing in front of the tape recorder's playback heads to circulate on microphone stands by means of pulleys. These loops wore out so quickly that after a few revolutions they began to sound seriously damaged. But this medium made it possible to extend fine rhythmic structures, the little bits of magnetic tape composing very short rhythms and sequences at a speed of seventy-six centimetres per second. It was therefore possible to create complicated rhythms and highly composite sounds by hand, although it was laborious. I incorporated the sounds of frogs being manipulated, the resonance of rubber bands on piano strings forming clusters, guitar sounds in glissando on the neck, and I concluded with crumpled paper evoking the white sounds of the sea and fire. From that time on, therefore, I was concerned to integrate the sounds of heterogeneous elements, but I produced them rather artificially.

François-Bernard Mâche, De la musique, des langues et des oiseaux, Michel de Maule -INA 2007, p.225-226