In Khnoum, Mâche combines the natural resources of instruments with the synthesised sounds of a concertante sampler. Christian Hamouy plays the keyboard. There's a fine alchemy at the start, followed by a toe-to-toe dialogue, culminating in a grand finale that's perhaps a little more gratuitous. Les Percussions was a great success. Well deserved.

        Marc Munch, Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace, 30 September 1990

No Musica without the Percussions de Strasbourg, who have done so much for new music. These six fantastic musicians, who can tap like deaf men to trigger a thunderclap and, the next moment, make a zephyr blow, premiered two pieces in the former dairy, wisely converted into an auditorium...
Khnoum, by François-Bernard Mâche, combines five percussion drums with a kind of synthesiser that acts as a soloist: here too, past and present merge harmoniously. Violence and calm follow one another as the memory of a Balinese gamelan fades into the background...

                          Jacques Doucelin, Le Figaro, October 1990

Works that...managed to be strongly marked by the personality of their author and each used different groups of instruments, specific associations, according to their style and climate. What they have in common, these works by T.Scherchen, François-Bernard Mâche, Varèse, Carlos R.Alsina and Y.Taïra, is a fascinating alliance of mystery and violence, a very strong expressive power. Sometimes using the voice... or preferring to leave it to instruments with specific sounds to create the strangeness of the sound climate, as with... Mâche (who, in addition to the xylo and marimba, also uses the infinite resources of the synthesiser)...
Let's not forget...the dreamlike character of Khnoum by François-Bernard Mâche (present in the auditorium)...

                          Louis Garde, Le Dauphiné libéré, 9 December 1991

Contemporary music is often thought to be the product of intellectual speculation, a constant praise of complexity. This is not entirely untrue. But to reduce all of today's musical creation to such statements is to ignore the work of François-Bernard Mâche, for example. Invited by Grame to take part in the biennial Musiques en Scène, this sixty-seven-year-old composer and musicologist draws all his inspiration from non-European traditions, reviving certain primitive aspects of music. François-Bernard Mâche's search for universals, i.e. everything that different cultures and eras have in common, has given rise to a personal language based on models and archetypes. In terms of content, he could be compared to the composer Stockhausen, who was also attracted by the idea of universal music. The form is totally different. Mâche lays bare ethnic sounds and rhythms, transforming and breaking them down to create a boldly coherent whole. This is by no means mere plagiarism. As he himself says, "What is perhaps most interesting about the phenomenon of folklore is its ability to reinvent itself and reincarnate itself in new forms". His music is therefore made up of multiple hybrids, reflecting the cultural cross-fertilisation of contemporary civilisations. The concert given by the Percussions Claviers de Lyon on Sunday 17 March at Les Subsistances was perhaps the easiest way to understand this approach. The four works presented (Hiérogamie, Phénix, Figures, Khnoum), all written for percussion (sometimes accompanied by a wind instrument), offered a global and faithful vision of the composer's resources: research into timbres, integration of Hindu rhythms, dilation of time, 'transposition' of mythological or sacred themes. It has to be said that the performance by the Percussions Claviers de Lyon, accompanied by a number of students from the CNSMD, made a major contribution to the effectiveness of this portrait concert.

S.S-A.  Lyon, March 2002

François-Bernard Mâche, born in Clermont-Ferrand in 1935, studied with Olivier Messiaen, among others. He only made a few appearances in Germany and his work is largely unknown here. His combination of "human music" and natural sounds takes on a mystical quality...
 Mâche's distinctive works also include the compositions " Maraé ", " Aera " and " Khnoum ", written for the Percussions de Strasbourg, which left just as strong an impression as the world premiere of Mâche's " Chikop " for soprano and ensemble on poems by Humberto Ak'abal: magical word pictures, full of associations with nature, including bird sounds.

									Gerhard Rohde      7.6.2004

Elisabeth Chojnacka, Françoise Kubler and Accroche-Note, the voices of Musicatreize, then the Percussions de Strasbourg were the experienced and efficient artisans 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...
Khnoum, from 1990, combines the sampler with five other percussion instruments to evoke the Egyptian ram-god who shaped humanity on his potter's wheel. The composer is a demiurge himself - Mâche's world of sound is nourished by a rich imagination that makes you dream in space and time. What a day!

         Marc Munch, Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace 23 September 2004

In François-Bernard Mâche's colourful language, the term Akaï could have been used to describe a score. However, it refers only to an instrument (the Akaï S1000 sampler), required to dialogue with five percussion instruments in a form of communication based on onomatopoeia. Khnoum (1990) - named after an Egyptian ram-god - is seen as a modern form of sacred hybridisation.