Andrew Infanti : extract from « Cultural and historical models in the piano works of F-B.Mâche »

…The concept of model, crucial in F.-B. Mâche's aesthetic approach, imposes a concrete starting point for the composer, who never works ex nihilo, but rather by observing a form, an expression that already exists. Mâche divides his attention between natural and cultural forms, blurring the distinction between the two. In the work Styx, for example, he composes from a datum that is both natural (a physical reality) and culturally charged with meaning. Each of the six sections of Styx derives from a single sonic model: the note A in the extremely low register of the keyboard, a sound belonging solely and concretely to the piano. This note demonstrates the radically inharmonic character of an instrument around which the modern harmonic system has developed, with its equal temperament and fixed enharmonic equivalences. Played fortissimo on the piano, the lowest note causes a wrapped string to vibrate, accentuating partials far removed from the harmonic series, giving the impression of a completely denatured instrument, F.-B. Mâche plays with the unusual spectral composition of this sound by transcribing its development over time in several ways. The increasing inharmony of the sound due to its decomposition is suggested by a range of chords in letter B of the score. At letter C, the composer invents a 'spherical' sound in which the fundamental seems to slip away while leaving the harmonic structure intact. At letter E, an imperceptible descent is proposed, transforming the note A into a mobile cluster, like volcanic magma. At F, two pianists hammer out a modal melody in the space of a fifth (A-E) in the extreme low register, before revealing the sinister resonances produced by silently depressed keys. When the original spectral structure returns at the end, blurred by a foreign B flat and E flat, the 'harmonic' partials seem to have moved on to a different universe. An even more striking effect is to be found in letter C: the composer evokes the beating of dissonant partials by employing staccato chords for each performer in a different tempo. 
In Styx, the vast field opened up by the cultural model that generates the discourse (genotype) - that of myth - in no way prevents the composer from making a historical critique of a derived model (phenotype): piano harmony. The staging of a sonic reality in conflict with the cultural history of an instrument once again demonstrates the modalities of a critical journey through the piano oeuvre. Styx plunges back into the naturalness of a sound in conflict with the cultural norms of the harmonic system that determined it as a 'note'. The structural analysis of certain myths leads to the conclusion that myth - neither natural nor cultural - is an attempt to understand the passage from nature to culture. From this point of view, F.-B. Mâche's musical gesture reveals a kind of third object through which Styx resembles a myth….