...marimbas, vibraphones, glockenspiels, gongs and timpani, which the composer chose not to create a firework display of brilliant sonorities but to develop a rather meticulous 'harmonic' and rhythmic research: the sounds grouped by family in each episode are first struck to the same rhythm and the same note, then gradually shift into chromatic 'fans' coinciding with a differentiation of movements of up to six superimposed tempi. The result is some curious and beautiful playing, albeit rather monotonous in the long run because of the repetition of the process and the often infinitesimal finesse of this differentiation, which is difficult for the Western ear to appreciate.

                               Jacques Longchampt, Le Monde 4 April 1979

...Ionisation by Varèse and...Aera by F-B.Mâche by the Percussions de Strasbourg, two works as opposed as possible, the first like a concentrated explosion, the second all progressions...

                                 Gérard Condé, Le Monde 26 September 1979

The three or four hundred spectators present enjoyed and appreciated this musical shock. Of course, there were the connoisseurs, but the majority (the uninitiated) were discovering this prestigious international ensemble, in a programme of contemporary music with compositions by François-Bernard Mâche and Iannis Xenakis... At first, one fears being bored, but little by little it is the spell of sound and rhythm that grips you. The mass of sound reaches its peak. It's powerful! It takes hold of you, from crescendo to decrescendo, to a whisper, like a breath that settles in. You don't know why, but you feel it, you live it, you forget the moment. François-Bernard Mâche's Aera and Iannis Xenakis's Pléïades are truly powerful works. The audience sang along to the Percussions de Strasbourg and, in the end, like a swarm, they invaded the stage to see and touch the instrument, to seek explanations from the musicians. It was an event of discovery and success.

            15 June concert in Lorient) E.G., Ouest-France, 18 June 1991

At the start of the concert, the Percussions de Strasbourg gave a foretaste of their instrumental and sonic virtuosity in the raw harmonies of Aera, composed by François Bernard Mâche in 1978, a primal interplay of metals and skins (keyboards, gongs and timpani). 
                                                                    HYPERLINK "http://www.resmusica.com/contrib.php3?id=31&art=285 "Bruno Serrou, Res Musica.com (29/12/2002)

  François-Bernard Mâche, born in Clermont-Ferrand in 1935, studied with Olivier Messiaen, among others. He has appeared only occasionally in Germany, where his work is largely unknown. For him, the combination of "human music" and natural sounds takes on a mystical quality...
 The compositions "Maraé", "Aera" and "Khnoum", created for the Percussions de Strasbourg, are among Mâche's outstanding works. They left just as strong an impression as Mâche's creation of 'Chikop' for soprano and ensemble, based on poems by Humberto Ak'abal: magical word pictures full of associations with nature, including the sounds of birds.
                                                                                           Gerhard Rohde 7.6.2004

										
Aera... [a surprisingly mysterious piece] which, after a rather frenzied timpani and gong part, escapes the principle by ending with three dispassionate notes.
                            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...
In Aera, from 1978, the determined sound instruments recreate deep harmonic resonances.

      Marc Munch, Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace 23 September 2004

François-Bernard Mâche is a rare sight in concert and on record: an unfortunate tendency, for driven by an insatiable thirst for knowledge, the composer, who celebrated his seventieth birthday last month, has managed to carve out his own path away from chapels and fashions. The six soloists of the Percussions de Strasbourg are a timely reminder of this in the nineteen minutes of hypnotic magic of Aera (1978): repetitions, slow progressions and complex superimpositions produce more of a sonic halo than a sense of speed or rhythm, thanks in particular to the use, without any 'local colour', of nineteen Thai gongs.

                                  Simon Corley ConcertoNet.com
                           (on the Beauvais concert of 5.10.2005)

Aera (1978), for six percussion instruments, seems to be in search of the ideal balance between the two domains evoked by its title, which has Latin (bronze) and Greek (air) connotations. It is the work of a perfumer who simultaneously invents a new composition and the bottle in which to preserve it.