Especially worth mentioning was the world premiere of Aulodie by François-Bernard Mâche, like Scelsi (whose numerous premieres were given in Middelburg in 1977) a true exponent of the Festival of New Music. Mâche began composing in 1959 and, from 1960, devoted himself to the genre of living music combined with electronic and concrete sounds on tape, often with sounds derived from nature, or, as in the case of Aulodie, from colloquial language (morse structures). Frank van Koten demonstrated tremendous precision and tension in the numerous lightning-fast unisoni. In the finale, Mâche, in Terry Riley idiom (blaring soprano sax-hysteria), brings an ecstatic finale, endless. Well, if there was one lesson to be drawn from this marathon it is this : ecstasy cannot be contained, at least in Western works !
 
                                                           Ernst Vermeulen, N.R.C. Middelburg, Juin 1983

With Aulodie (1983) by F.B. Mache, Kientzy also showed how an interplay between saxophone sounds transformed by digital sound synthesis and live sounds can be created. This piece requires a high degree of reaction and spontaneity in order to communicate with the irregular time spectra from the loudspeakers or to counterpoint them, partly synchronously (imitation and counterpoint), partly asynchronously (communication). Both are a matter of course for Kientzy, which he masters with an almost frightening nonchalance.

            Alexander Schwan Erlangen ?     (november 1986)

François-Bernard Mâche…has a neat line in rather suggestive non-verbal dialogue between, say, voice and contrabass clarinet, but often lets his processes run on too long.
Aulodie, for instance, begins with clarinet and tape engagingly chasing each other’s tail, but subsides into an extended pentatonic busk.

         Robert Maycock, The Independent  6 Juillet 1988

This contemporary medley offers everything - or almost everything - that can be done with an instrument such as the saxophone... love (Stockhausen), anger (Mâche)...

     Elisabeth Sikora, Diapason n°341, September 1988

The rood screen room at the Musée de l'Œuvre Notre-Dame is a splendid place, filled with medieval statues, the originals of those in the cathedral. An unusual environment, under the remains of a cathedral gable, for voice, clarinets and percussion dedicated to contemporary works that paradoxically make reference to the most distant antiquity.
The "Cathedral Builders" exhibition uses computer-generated imagery to illustrate the structure of medieval architecture. Should we see a parallel in the approach of François-Bernard Mâche, who seems to be reconstructing, in a new way, music from the past that is indecipherable as such, but using linguistic references to write it down, and being more concerned with an approach that would allow immediate perception? In the comments on the programme, there is a subtle discourse on models, which the composer, a musicologist and scholar, once made the subject of his thesis, and on a 'ritual of oblivion', which in its own way updates not so much a mythical past as the creative gesture. A touch of archaeology and the imagination immersed in modernity: the cocktail produces some very pretty results.
In 'Aulodie', Armand Angster's small soprano clarinet takes a Hellenistic turn, against a backdrop of magnetic tape that digitally synthesises, in almost direct time, noises that start out a little petromanitic, then become more vibraphone-like, with the toms juxtaposed and blending happily into polyrhythm.
... The audience packed into the museum hall could not fail to be seduced by this concert, so original in its content.

   M.M. Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace, 9 or 10.11.1989

The quests of François-Bernard Mâche

Unclassifiable, François-Bernard Mâche! In tune with the world, off the beaten track of post-serial and post-modern followers, he pursues a veritable quest, questioning age-old societies, examining Mother Nature and listening with an ear that is both acute and delighted to everything that sounds, buzzes, chimes, tinkles, horns, striulates or sings.
He was one of the first to incorporate the slow melodies of whales into his compositions, he tracked down the language of the Mohicans or the Xhosas, captured the sounds of water in Cycladic caves or, like Messiaen, he spent a long time intoxicated by birdsong.

At the crossroads of nature and culture
An "ecologist" before the word existed, his work is situated at the moving intersection of culture (he holds a degree in literature and was for a long time the music editor of the NRF review) and nature. From these far-flung sound expeditions, in space and time but also in the interior of things, he has brought back shells, fossils, cuttings, sea airs and handfuls of fine sand, which he sometimes uses in an almost raw state, sometimes after long distillations or macerations...
A firework display of virtuosity begins with Jean-Pierre Peuvion's little clarinet in dialogue, half mischievous, half serious, with a magnetic tape in Aulodie (1983). After this delicious ear apéritif, we set off for the New Hebrides...

     Fernand Leclercq, Le Soir, Brussels, 16 March 1992

Aulodie for soprano saxophone and magnetic tape, in a delicate dialogue of confrontation and seduction.

                                                               D.M-A.  Ouest-France 1 February 1996

(Chamber music

The tape music of François-Bernard Mâche, born in 1935, has always been a little more discreet: like a natural sound added to the instruments. For example, the clarinet solo "Aulodie" is accompanied by sounds diverted from the tape; and the solo voice of "Kengir", five Sumerian love songs, is accompanied by the sampler. In the first case, the result is a quirky scherzo; in the second, a strange atmosphere that is touching in places. Despite the most recent techniques, it is still the ancient myths that preoccupy Mâche, including in the other chamber music works that the Accroche Note ensemble plays on this CD. However, this music dispenses with any mysterious artifice. 

                                                                             Tages Anzeiger 19 June 2002)

Mâche Normalien poète

It's superb: a banal phrase for a living composer, a disciple of Messiaen. This CD devoted to François-Bernard Mâche by Accroche-Note is nothing but a source of joy in the form of discoveries. There are both birds and insects in Mâche, who forages in the realm of sounds, making honey of everything his ears catch. For he believes in the "universals" of music as Messiaen believes in God. It doesn't matter if the result is constantly poetic. It is both constructed and natural, drawing on the many sources from which Mâche draws his inspiration, from birdsong to the Javanese gamelan.

                                                                   J.Doucelin Le Figaro 4 July 2002
                                               (CD Assai : Kengir, Phénix, Brûlis, Figures, Aulodie)

CD Assai: Kengir, Phénix, Brûlis, Figures, Aulodie

An enviable university degree (agrégation de Lettres Classiques), music studies without blinkers, a patient and lucid study of non-Western music, the writing of major works and - of course! - an open and critical ear for the music of his contemporaries, François-Bernard Mâche is a respected musicologist, an ethnomusicologist with very personal views and an independent composer whom I deeply admire. In his introduction to the CD booklet, Martin Kaltenecker presents the whole with great sensitivity and intelligence, before briefly commenting on four of the works on the CD. These pieces were composed between 1991 and 1999, and the percussion - acoustic or synthetic - is treated with mastery and originality. Familiar with Mâche's work, the Accroche Note ensemble has once again demonstrated its talent. The group's percussionist, Emmanuel Séjourné, gave an analysis of Phénix in Percussions... Excellent booklet (English, French) with the lyrics of Kengir. I really like this record.

                                                                         Percussions, November 2002

Profile of an independent
François-Bernard Mâche (born in 1935) has been pursuing an independent career for many years, outside the mainstream of the avant-garde. Mâche is an intellectual/artist whose work is born of a position towards music based on considerable reflection and research. In parallel with his creative work, the French composer has carried out a vast and fruitful activity as an essayist, the most ambitious fruit of which is the book Musique-Mythe-Nature (1983). In these pages, Mâche develops his main theses: criticism of serialism and of much of the musical avant-garde of the second half of the twentieth century for its worship of writing and its abstract formalism. Mâche's poetics revolve around what are known as 'musical paradigms', structural codes present in nature that composers have always assimilated and used in music. Mâche has defined and determined these through an in-depth study of nature music (a field in which he has an impressive erudition) and of the history of music. His aim has always been to develop complex musical models without losing the ability to communicate directly with the listener.
This CD on the Assai label is the third monographic album devoted to Mâche, following those released by Erato (1993) and INA (1999). It brings together five relatively recent works (from 1982 to 1999) which, given the homogeneity and coherence of the composer's thinking over the years, can be considered a good sample of his aesthetic and offer a valuable introduction to his music. The reference to instruments and musical forms from non-European cultures and the assimilation of the lessons of Varèse, Messiaen and Xenakis are the most striking elements of his work, but not the only ones...
Phénix (1982) for solo percussion, Figures (1983) for bass clarinet and vibraphone and Aulodie (1983) for clarinet and recorded sounds had already appeared in the Erato monograph. Figures and Aulodie create a magical, primordial dimension, revealing a world in which rhythms live in the shadows of Xenakis and Messiaen. Aulodie, for its part, refers to ancient Greece, although here the end result is marred by the coupling of the solo instrument with a tape recorder done in rather vulgar taste. At times, Mâche's pieces seem to spring from an abstract idea to which the composer imposes a sound translation.

                                                                 S.R. Diverdi 115 (Spain) May 2003

                         D.M-A.  Ouest-France 1 February 1996