Another world premiere took place that evening, a partial performance of "La Peau du Silence" by F.B.Mâche, a work dedicated to Olivier Messiaen. We found it a rare pleasure to listen to these pieces, which abound in sonic and rhythmic discoveries of unprecedented richness.
                                   R. Tageblatt (Luxembourg) September 25, 1964

Another work, which struck me as one of the most revealing of the spirit of today's music, is by a young Frenchman, François-Bernard Mâche. The title, La Peau du Silence (The Skin of Silence), may seem mysterious, but it's because, says the author, "Silence is the primordial night", thus establishing an aesthetic postulate by considering music as a material that weaves itself around that other invisible but present element, silence. Moreover, he defines certain types of music in very explicit terms: "Brahms' or Mahler's are thick, Webern's are diaphanous, mine are perforated". These clarifications will help us to understand the conception of this work, which is extremely important in terms of material, since it requires an orchestra of one hundred and ten instrumentalists, including seventy divided strings and two pianos, which play a very important role.

The construction of the work is highly original: of its five parts, three are based on recorded sea noises and the other two on a poem in modern Greek by Séféris, La Citerne, from which the meaning, the dramatic sense, has been discarded,  to retain only what strikes a foreign ear, i.e. the sonorities of the words, the rhythms, the rhymes, the Greek language being a very euphonically rich language, with its open vowels and vibrant consonants.

The author's aim was therefore to recreate a new meaning, not poetic but musical, from the abstract, phonetic content of a text. He began by analyzing the text, drawing up a _diagramme of aggregates, a kind of sound alphabet, and then synthesizing it by working on the cryptogramme in a strictly musical way. As we can see, this compositional process is very new; it involves both a scientific approach (the assembly and use of models taken from nature, the acoustic coding of a literary text) and an aesthetic approach to inventing, on the basis of given materials, a personal sound world.

This great fresco offers a rich palette, with differentiated effects depending on whether we're dealing with passages inspired by poetry - where we sense the underlying model with very brief cells, where we perceive a prosody as in a speech, the whole interspersed with silences - or moments derived from the sounds of nature, where the music proceeds by pulses, by surges, with mass effects, bursts as in musique concrète. In all these sequences, one senses a controlled, concentrated violence; F.B. Mâche uses percussion with finesse and subtlety, proceeding with light touches, never insisting. From time to time, a novelty, such as the "noises" of the percussion being prolonged by the vibrations of the piano, and throughout the work a rhythmic pattern as rich as it is complex, a great density of sound material and, finally, an interest that never wavers.
Here is music which, quite exceptionally in France, departs from the Boulézian line followed by most of our young composers; it achieves a kind of synthesis between the conceptions of so-called experimental music and instrumental writing, the orchestra being envisaged from the angle proper to the musicians who worked with the Groupe de Recherches, i.e. considered as a phenomenon or sound object. François-Bernard Mâche thus finds himself at the crossroads of two trends, and it seems paradoxical that it should take a Polish festival not to discover him, but to measure the place he should hold in the French school.

Madeleine Gagnard
( version II, 29.9.68 ,Automne de Varsovie, Philharmonic Orchestra dir.Witold Rowicki.)

To capture "the skin of silence" (title of the work), François-Bernard Mâche explores the boundaries of orchestral sonorities, drawing inspiration from the adventures of musique concrète and electro-acoustic music. Towards the end of the work, the composer somewhat enlivens an otherwise purposely petrified musical landscape.
                       F. Mr. Les dernières nouvelles d'Alsace, January 15, 1971

Fr.B.Mache, a student of Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Schaeffer at the Centre de Recherche de l'O.R.T.F., has emerged as one of the most gifted composers of "Musique Concrète". His score "LA PEAU DU SILENCE" opened the concert. The sound researches it contains are interesting for those who know how to analyze them by listening to them several times. So the question arises: should this musical orientation remain a music for initiates alone? Is it pure and simple research? And to what extent should it be performed in concert halls without proper preparation? For it has to be said, nothing has been done to enable a wide audience of music lovers to find the link between the avant-garde and the music of the beginning of our century. And yet, to live, music needs an audience! But there seems to be little interest in a real program policy to help build this audience. So the "Musique de Notre Temps" initiative, in the limited field of contemporary music, is commendable, as is the concern for information that drives it. To bear fruit, however, we need to coordinate our many musical events (in terms of program design). It's not easy, as we know, but the future of music depends on it.
                               M.-T. L. Le nouvel Alsacien, January 16, 1971
(Orchestre Radio-Symphonique de Strasbourg conducted by Roger Albin)

...The dodecaphonic technique had revolutionized the writing of solo instruments in the sense of total organization of musical material and increasingly infallible auditory control. The example of electroacoustic processes was to have an equally decisive influence on symphonic writing, counteracting this evolution.
Manipulations et Montage, movements no. 2 and no. 4 of François-Bernard Mâche's Peau du silence (1961-1966), clearly mark this stage. The discourse resembles "stretches of sound" grafted together around shock events. The materials (pizzicati and long holds; stridency and low vibrations) are assembled by contrast. The precision of the line, the fineness of the grain, the transparency of the symphonic fabric, however, throw the whole work back into the past. The central sequence in particular is presented as "a faithful transcription of the rhymes, alliterations and accents of a poem by Georges Séféris". It consists of a succession of continuously varied melodic phrases and silences in an "alla breve" rhythm. It sounds like a parody of a serial rondo.
                                          Anne Rey, Le Monde May 11, 1974

François-Bernard Mâche's "La peau du silence" is a finely orchestrated score that never lapses into anecdoticism. Although certain sonorities are reminiscent of the possibilities of electronic sound processing, I confess to being personally more sensitive to them when they emanate from an orchestra than from loudspeakers.

                                   Gérard Condé, Le guide musical June 8, 1974

On one side, a modern work, still unknown, perhaps confusing for some, but young and daring. On the other, a romantic work, endearing and nostalgic. Two creations, one contrast: such is the 33-turn stereo disc just pressed for the 1976 Festival du son by Radio-France's Direction des Programmes et Services Musicaux. An uncommercial record.
François-Bernard Mâche's modern work, La Peau du Silence, a symphony dedicated to Olivier Messiaen, combines two types of writing: one inspired by electro-acoustic sonorities and processes; the other imitating different sound models (sea, language, animals). The Romantic work is Max Bruch's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, with one of the greatest violinists of our time, Isaac Stern.
The Orchestre National de France masterfully performs these two creations, under the direction of Ivo Malec (La Peau du silence) and Gabtriel Chmura (Concerto pour violon et orchestre)...These two works, so different in their composition, interpretation and recording methods, reveal the diversity of the tasks accomplished by the Orchestre National de France...

                                                          Modes de Paris, April 13 1976

The first work on the program was the Japan première of Mache’s « La peau du silence  I ». Mache was born in 1935, and is recognized as one of the significant composers of our day. After studying with Messiaen, he became involved with la musique concrète. « La peau du silence » is one of Mache’s representative works, of which three versions exist for different size orchestras. The original version, which was played this time, (written in 1962), has the smallest composition : 2 flutes, 2 clarinets, 1 bassoon, 2 pianos, percussion, and a 5-part string section. Nevertheless, Mache’s manipulation of harmony and color bore the distinctive mark of la musique concrète, and his idea of using harmonic and tonal contrasts as the main theme of his music came across in this truly colorful composition. The work has seven parts including three interludes. Basically, it uses a simple concerto form, modernized, the parts juxtaposing dense and open structures, the colors of different instrumental groupings, or contrasts of volume from tutti to silence. Yet despite the simplicity of form, this counterpoint was indeed deeply interesting. The short interlude portions were consistent with the composer’s ongoing experimentation with various color combinations. For example, in the first interlude, the composer sdelected just one lownote and one harmonically compatible high note, and experimented with sustaining a « tone melody » by interchanging the instruments.

Kazushi Ishida (trad. L.A.Kimura), monthly magazine Ongaku-Geijutsu, Tokyo 24.10.1986

Let music be the skin of silence

Tomorrow Saturday, at 5.00 p.m. and at the Sala José Félix Ribas, a work by the French composer Francois-Bernard Mâche, La peau du silence, conceived on verses by Giorgos Seferis, will be premiered on the American continent. Present in Venezuela for the event, the composer tells of his relationship with the naturalist aesthetic...Orquesta Sinfónica de la Juventud Venezolana Simón Bolívar and conducted by Gustavo Dudamel.

To introduce Francois-Bernard Mâche, one would have to say a great deal. His life story is kilometric and his relationship with music is the result of his interest in abysmally dissimilar worlds. It would be enough to know that he is heir to three generations of musicians to understand why a boy from Clermont-Ferrand became the figure that Mâche represents to the world today. But no. At the age of 18, he moved to Paris on the recommendation of his parents, and since then has enriched his knowledge with studies in Greek archaeology, classical letters and ancient history.
His activity as a researcher for Pierre Schaeffer's Group for Musical Studies, his time in Oliver Messiaen's class at the Conservatoire Supérieur de Musique in Paris and his permanent translations from modern Greek have all contributed to this. This is his third visit to Venezuela and he is here to hear the premiere - on the continent - of the third version of The skin of silence, a work based on verses by Giorgos Seferis which, in his opinion, define music in a very poetic sense.

Until what age did you live in Clermont-Ferrand, your home town?

	- Until I was 18. Then I had to prepare myself to enter music school in Paris, because Clermont-Ferrand was not really an artistic capital. It was the city of Michelin, the rubber masters.

	- But Clermont-Ferrand was, in a way, the cradle of your family. A family of three generations of musicians.

	- Of course. My father, who conducted an orchestra, noticed that in his group there was a beautiful violinist. And that's how they became my parents. My paternal grandfather was a violinist and his father, my great-great-grandfather, who made clogs , changed his trade to violin making. I had a very particular childhood. As we lived through part of the war, we didn't go out at night. My parents gave music lessons every day, played with friends, made quartets. My father, a cellist, sometimes played chamber music and from time to time he took me to theatres where he played.

	- When did you write your first work and how did you determine that composition was a path for you?

	- I was eight and a half years old when I wrote my first small piece. It was like a game to imitate my father and grandfather. I was doing it to copy adults. But my Opus 1 is dated between 1956 and 1957, and it was a duet for violin and piano which I sent to an international competition, anonymously, and for which I received a prize that took me to Holland. That distinction stimulated me to continue.

Sea, thunder and frogs

How did you combine music with the study of classical literature, Greek archaeology and ancient history? What leads from one world to the other?

	- My father had a difficult life as a musician. So he encouraged me to take up a more secure life and recommended that I get a teaching diploma. For almost two years I gave up music to dedicate myself to " agregation ", which authorises us to be teachers, and at the age of 20 I was earning my own living. To be a composer is to use your life to make music. What you don't give music is very useful for a composer. At a certain point I wanted to be an archaeologist. I was appointed as a representative of France at the School of Athens, but I noticed that the spirit of archaeologists is very narrow and musical life in Greece was practically non-existent. From my taste for archaeology I kept what I call imaginary archaeology. It is very stimulating for the imagination to think about and bring to life worlds that have disappeared.

Nature plays a very important role in your work, what is your working method?

	- I was one of the first participants in the study of concrete music and the birth of what we know as electronic music. This has given me the ability to listen to any sound as a carrier of music. I have developed a technique that understands these sound forms as instruments. And I have favourite subjects such as the sea, thunder or the polyphony of frogs.

	- How did La peau du silence, the work that Venezuelan audiences will hear on Saturday, come about?

	- One of my secondary activities is translating modern Greek. I did the first translation of Odysseas Elytis in France, before he had won the Nobel Prize. The skin of silence is based on a poem by Giorgos Seferis which says: "the skin of silence often softens without being touched". It is a very poetic definition, that music is the skin of silence. All the elements of the Greek word are transformed into music, phoneme by phoneme. I wrote this work 42 years ago and I have remained faithful to this way of working.

       Francismar Ramirez Barreto, El Nacional, Caracas, 22 October 2004