NOCTURNE, dating from 1981, is based on an ancient musical form: the canon, used as a starting point and reincarnated in a contemporary manner. These canons, applied to the contours of the melodic lines on the one hand and to the tempi on the other, are based on dialogue or encounter, or on the contrast between the piano-solo emerging from the low register and the tape, which imitates and metamorphoses the sounds of the original instrument using sounds synthesised by the UPIC system. The structure of the work - although it presents new sonorities and a new syntax - remains "traditional": it realises the tripartite dramaturgy of emergence and enlightenment starting from depth and darkness to reach again the relapse, with the help of the new technology and its new musical means. The laborious piano part was interpreted by Endre Olsvay.

                               Márta Grabócz, C.I.R.E.M., March 1990

Lumini şi umbre... (Lights and shadows)
"Martine Joste, who has 'broken in' to the interpretative approach of contemporary music, fully demonstrated her expressive availability, with its impressive variety of timbres, in total harmony with the repertoire she was tackling... by recreating the atmosphere of an impressionist-style description in shades, like the previous piece, of François-Bernard Mâche's 'Nocturne', a veritable catalogue of colours that the author nevertheless constructs very rigorously...

Loredana Baltazar, Muzica 3/1997 (recital in Bucharest on 27 May 1997)

... The works in this evening's recital definitely evoked the myth of the replicant, of the equivocal twin. Nocturne and Aulodie played this double 'I', conflicting but inseparable, consubstantial with our nature. Which of the recorded part or the piano echoes in the first? Pierre Courthiade is apparently not content with a mechanical synchronicity that borders on syncretism.
All the performer's insight comes through in this struggle between the light of the instrument and the dark forces that sometimes stalk it or precede it in a corrupting and deleterious strategy. Nocturne is also an allegory of the Labyrinth, where the musical Minotaur is never openly revealed, but always suggested. It is a metaphor for otherness, both hated and loved, which Philippe Caillot makes explicit with disconcerting ambiguity in Aulodie...

              Roland Duclos, Centre France La Montagne 12 June 2005

(About the Naxos CD containing Styx, Lèthè, Mesarthim, Areg, Nocturne)

François-Bernard Mâche, for whom sound is an essential element, has endeavoured, without neglecting the other elements of music, to explore it in all its aspects but also to use it as the basis for his compositions for two pianos, two pianos for four hands, piano and magnetic tape. The resonances create a most bewitching sonic space, for there is, it cannot be denied, a magic of sound whose effects the composer has perfectly measured and ordered.

              Jean Roy, Le Monde de la musique n°315, December 2006