François-Bernard Mâche, born in Clermont-Ferrand in 1935, studied with Olivier Messiaen, among others. He was only occasionally recognised in Germany and his work is largely unknown here. His combination of "human music" and natural sounds takes on a mystical quality... Mâche's striking 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...
Mâche's Chikop, for soprano and instrumental ensemble, invites us on a journey to Mayan country: pre-Columbian texts, as a red thread and superimposed on the highly poetic evolutions of Françoise Kubler's voice and the sounds of Accroche Note. 

                  Marc Munch, Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace 23 September 2004