Bruno Serrou: Another work based on a dead language, Manuel de résurrection. What idiom did you use? 

François-Bernard Mâche: Ancient Egyptian. 

Bruno Serrou: So hieroglyphic. Do you know how it was pronounced? 

François-Bernard Mâche: That's a huge problem. We now know how to translate hieroglyphics and reproduce the consonant pattern, but we don't really know what the vowels sounded like. We are therefore condemned to reconstruction. We do, however, have a trace of it, since ancient Egyptian is one of the sources of Coptic, which is written with Greek vowels, but there are many uncertainties. But that hasn't stopped me because, when I use a dead language, doing imaginary archaeology stimulates me, rather than leaving me paralysed by doubt. Where scientific knowledge wisely stops, I take the risk of continuing.

Bruno Serrou: The poet speaks.

François-Bernard Mâche: He tries. And when he speaks Egyptian, it produces something quite astonishing. I also wanted to explore a universal form of music, the litany of repetition, which is as common in Egyptian sacred texts as it is in all the sacred texts of every culture in the world. To vary this litany, I used the form of the responsory, with two voices alternating. In the Egyptian litany, there is the famous declaration of innocence by the man who, on entering the Underworld, lists all the sins he could have committed and did not. I alternated this litany between a sung and a spoken voice, all in Egyptian. But I didn't have an Egyptian available, and rather than train a reciter to say it as I thought I could hear it, I used a synthetic voice, adapted from Spanish phonetics, which allowed me to get as close as possible to the sounds of Egyptian consonants. But I think that if I'd had a computer-generated voice in Arabic, the result would have been even better. 

Bruno Serrou: Why Manuel de résurrection?

François-Bernard Mâche: This slightly humorous title is an almost literal translation of the exact title of what we know as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, aka "Instructions for rising from the dead". It's a collection of magical formulas supposed to allow the soul of the dead not to die completely and to hope to live again. I'm very sceptical about the effectiveness of the manual, but that's how I wanted to translate the title. I don't just use Egyptian, but also Iberian, the language of ancient Spain, which has nothing to do with Castilian, and which I have put into dialogue with Egyptian in the interests of diversity, while remaining in worlds that have disappeared.

Bruno Serrou: What kind of personnel do you use?

François-Bernard Mâche: I use two samplers and a singer. The samplers have a variety of timbres, often percussion instruments - electronics allow for virtuosity and timbres that classical percussion does not.

Bruno Serrou: As well as ancient and dead languages, do you use corresponding archaic instruments?

François-Bernard Mâche: Most of the instruments are archaic because, when you use a percussion instrument, you can be pretty sure that its sounds were already used a few thousand years ago. The idea of banging on something came to the chimpanzee, which leads us to think that our ancestors also had it very early on. But of course there are also new instruments. In one of my recent works for percussion, Achéron - a tribute to Xenakis after his death - I use, for example, the spring drum, which is such a recent instrument that it is hard to find, which blocks the propagation of the piece. It consists of a long, thin spring suspended in the centre of the stretched skin of a small bongo-type drum, which swings around, producing dark and very varied resonances.

François-Bernard Mâche, De la musique, des langues et des oiseaux, Michel de Maule -INA 2007, p.272-274