François-Bernard Mâche proposes...his creation of Phonographies: organized recordings, almost not manipulated, of sounds (rain, frogs, waves, sea caves). It's an exceptional approach because it's the other way around: natural sounds evoke music, the music of an unchanging theme, that of water. It's an experience that requires unusual listening, a search for a poetic charge that goes beyond noise. This is a new kind of sound art, a kind of cinema of the ear: it is to music what photography is to painting, and what cinema is to theater.
It was as part of the research undertaken at La Chartreuse on the theme of water that F-B. Mâche agreed to collaborate with CIRCA, highlighting the musical aspects.

                       O.Toulet Méridional la France, Marseille July 25 1980

Composition by Mâche : Surf, birds, cranes and rain

Festival of New Music. 
" Pierre Boulez pulled a face as if there were bog flies floating around in his glass. " You use ostinate figures ", said Boulez, " why do you do that ? " François-Bernard Mâche (46) proudly states that he was one of the few French composers of his generation - he speaks of the 1950s - who dared to oppose Boulez. Repetitions had absolutely no place in the strict concepts of Boulez and his kindred spirits, so ostinato figures (with emphasis repeated emotives) were bound to lead to a quick short-circuit. Mâche points to his glass of gravy and draws a grimace in imitation of his respected counterpart.

Sometimes you can tell a lot with an anecdote ; in this case, the anecdote mainly tells what François-Bernard Mâche is not. Namely : not an ex-serialist. Mâche is also the only one (he does not say it without exaggeration) who at the time did not like Anton Webern - the model for the post-war avant-garde. Mâche is also averse to " minimal music ". Although his instrumental music is full of long repeated patterns, he firmly denies any minimalist influences.
His tape music incorporates thousands-only sounds from nature. In this respect, he emphatically denies the influence of the old Parisian radio engineer and composer Pierre Schaeffer, who in the early fifties had the idea of recording everyday sounds on tape and transforming them electronically into musical structures as objets musicaux. In his Phonographies , four electronic compositions, Mâche keeps a low profile as a composer : the sounds he fishes up from nature undergo a minimum of processing. Mâche : " Nature has already been discredited enough. The best thing a composer can do is offer the listener a sound and immediately disappear. "
So it should surprise no one that one of his pieces recently won a Prix Italia in the radio play section. Mâche's Phonographies, which could be heard in extenso at Middelburg's Vleeshal last weekend (over two-and-a-half hours of surf, rain, leaking taps and water birds) mostly evoked nostalgia for the times of Fé Sciarone and Dogi Rugani and their deconductive sound sets.
This year's Festival of New Music paid close attention to Mâche : nine compositions for a variety of line-ups, including a Nocturne for tape and piano written especially for Middelburg (the first time Youth and Music Zealand itself commissioned a composition).
François-Bernard Mâche has recently been considered one of the leading French composers. Although it always remains a bit of a question where such a label comes from (a critic in Vrij Nederland found the qualification, in response to Mâche's Temes Nevinbür played at the Holland Festival, " says more about French tonal art than about Mâche ".
Mâche was a pupil of Olivier Messiaen, the composer who does so much woodcock and oriole in his pieces, not on tape but processed into purely instrumental parts. Messiaen limited himself to ornithology, but Mâche does not just stick to painted fauna. Everything that nature produces in terms of sounds enjoys his warm interest. " Primal sounds " (Mâche) of " earth, water and wind " (as in the Phonographies) and sounds of whales, bullfrogs and other species both endangered and musicianlike (amply represented in the tape to the orchester piece Kassandra.
Mâche counts the languages of various extinct human cultures, musically speaking, in the same category. Thus Korwar (from 1973), for tape and clavicimbel, turns out to be based not only on sounds from the nature of New Guinea but also on rhythm, intonation and sound of the language of natives living there.
In other words, Mâche sets himself up as a kind of musical ecologist. While therein lies his strength as an innovator (although Mâche is not the only one in this field), this attitude is also typical, as it appeared in Middelburg, of his lack of true originality. The Phonographies have too much of a sound décor-less. In instrumental compositions with tape (Korwar for clavicimbel and tape, Kassandra for two pianos, tape, chamber orchestra and percussion), the instrumental part too often appears to be limited to imitation.
Mâche has his best moments in " non-ecological" works like Areg for piano-quatremains (played with appropriate vitality by Gerard Bouwhuis and Gene Clark) and the Nocturne for tape and piano (a new tour de force for Geoffrey Madge). Though even in these, the inspired passages, mostly relying on quasi-improvised chord formations, often give way to daunting repetitions and elaborations. Presented in series, Mâche does not appear to be at its most advantageous.
Apart from Mâche, the Festival of New Music again offered the familiar diversity, and the quality of the performers (outstanding presentations by the Radio Chamber Orchestra, harpsichordist Elisabeth Chojnacka, Harry Sparnaay and cellist Rohan de Saram, among others), proved more consistent than the offerings (from Xenakis, Gelhaar, Ferneyhough and up to new works by Bussotti and Willem van Manen plus an enigmatically corny cello concerto - something for Mâche with its extinction species ? - by Utrecht conservatory student Ed de Boer). But this has been going on for years as far as Middelburg is concerned.

                                     Roland de Beer De Volkskrant 6 Juillet 1981

The Saturday was largely devoted to François-Bernard Mâche
 who personally introduced the afternoon on the occasion of the performance of some of his electronic compositions.
Outside the programme, there appeared to be room for a captivating piece like Hypérion, composed using the computer services of " Le Lupc " [sic] the computer with which Mâche's colleague Iannis Xenakis provided working material for an acclaimed concert at Le petit Forum in Paris a few weeks ago.
In this work, as well and clearly as in the four Phonographies Ianassa, Regmin, Speio and Proteus that followed Hypérion, Mâche made serious use of his premise " back to the origins ; music as a sign of sound, sound as primal form ".
In selection, elaboration and composition, the natural sound - with the theme of " water " as a guiding principle - was given extremely exciting opportunities for very direct forms of expression : the elements reduced to their elementary forces.
Thus Mâche drove this new form of " water music " back to the all-encompassing " everything flows ", always different, always the same, from the oragious powers to a twinkle of rain, from the long wave to the breaking of the short surf.
Not electronic music according to the expectation pattern that has come to be associated with that term, but an entirely unique musical language that touches on the primal form.
Mâche's work also received full attention in the evening. In the Concert Hall, the Radio Chamber Orchestra conducted by Ernest Bour and pianists Thijs Kramer and Gerard Hammerson performed Kassandra. Then, to conclude the evening, there was the world premiere of Nocturne the piece that Mâche composed this year, commissioned by Youth and Music Zealand and baptised by pianist Geoffrey Douglas Madge.

                                                                   L.C. de Br. 6 Juillet 1981

This interest in primal phenomena, in a biological basis of music and in the relationship between music and language is more interesting in theory than in the practice of Mâche's compositions. His four Phonographies are a two-and-a-half-hour radio play of all the sounds associated with water, from a thunderstorm and an agonisingly dripping tap to frogs and all kinds of water birds. Admittedly, the composer has edited some things in there with a careful hand and, for example, combined sounds of animals " which on very good grounds do not let themselves be heard in close proximity to each other ", but that seems to be of interest only to field biologists.

                                                         Renske Koning, N.R.C. 6 juillet 1981

The first piece of the evening was Speio-Ianassa by François-Bernard Mâche, who was born in 1935. Following the GRM tradition, the sounds were all acoustic in origin, and in this case they seem to have been produced mostly with water. At one point a kind of soft gushing moved grandly across the back of the stage. At other points swishing or gurgling emanated from more specific points at the front or to one side. Sometimes little droplets of sound seemed so close that I felt I could almost reach out and touch them.
I thought a lot about « focus » as I was sitting there. The word is mainly visual, of course, but here, where the sound reproduction was so careful ande the signal-to-noise ratio so good, everything seemed particularly sharp. But I do know that other recorded sounds now seem just a little blurry by comparison.
The continuity of Mâche’s composition was pleasant. In general a new sound motif faded in just about the time one became tired of listening to the old one, and we gradually drifted from scene to scene in what might be considered an outdoor soundscape. Mâche likes to call his work « phonography », as compared with « photography », because he works frankly with realistically reproduced sounds, and his composition might also be thought of as a series of water photographs, or « phonographs ».

Tom Johnson  Voice  25 Novembre – 1er Décembre 1981

In this perspective, let us look at a musical example, offered to us by a piece by the French composer François-Bernard Mâche [24]. In Ianassa, (1980), taken from Quatre Phonographies de l'eau, he wants us to understand in the recording of raindrops the rhythms of a kind of dance. It is, essentially, a sound photograph, which makes us recognise in a natural phenomenon a dance. What happens as we listen to this highly suggestive piece?

By giving indications of this tenor, a composer is orienting us, he is suggesting rules, he is inviting us to an interpretative game, which targets the rhythmic regularities that emerge from the dripping.

Listening is not an entirely passive experience, we are invited to listen in search of something, more precisely of a series of rhythmic relations that can be scanned, allowing the enucleation of a form from that natural phenomenon. The ready-made proposed by Mâche has, in fact, very structured rules, it is a game that derives its richness from constraints, which are present in the way the dripping is presented: we are thus led to say that it also looks like a dance to us.

But this happens because we recognise an interweaving of regularity of rhythm and variation, which brings out the undulating pattern of a dance. In focusing our attention on the rhythmic phenomenon, in which regularity and variation must present themselves by successive overshadowings (if this dialectic were not present in the material, we would not detect anything at all), we see a rhythmic sequence pass from the foreground to the background, which has a describable structure: if this did not happen, we could not highlight the musical levity of the variations that determine the rippling of the polyrhythm.

Carlo Serra, Musical Space and Soundscapes juillet 2002
http://users.unimi.it/~gpiana/dm10/paesaggio/serra/serra.html