Bruno Serrou: The last work to be premiered to date, Chikop, was performed in Strasbourg in September 2004 as part of the Festival Musica. Where does this title come from ?

 François-Bernard Mâche: "Chikop" means bird. In the course of her many travels, my daughter found herself in Guatemala one day, where she discovered the existence of a Quiche Mayan poet, Umberto Ak'abal, who was very famous in his country. She sent me a record of this poet reciting his poems in his mother tongue alternating with Spanish. I was seduced by the personality of the poet, who writes a kind of haiku - short, dense poems, apparently simple but very evocative and sometimes very humorous. Above all, I was seduced by his voice and his language, which I didn't know, thinking that Mayan was a dead language, whereas it is still spoken by over a million people. This poet lives in a small Guatemalan village called Momostenango. I wanted to use both this language and this poetry, so I translated his poems from Spanish into French and asked the author for permission to use them. When I contacted him, he said he was delighted and gave me his agreement. I've incorporated his voice into my piece as it is, with a few silences punctuated differently, while I sing the same poems translated into French. The singing and the spoken voice alternate or intervene simultaneously, while both the instrumental writing and the orchestration are derived from the rhythm and inflections of the voice.

 Bruno Serrou: What is the instrumentarium?

 François-Bernard Mâche: Flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, violin and cello.

Bruno Serrou: Why this ensemble? 

François-Bernard Mâche: I often work with the Strasbourg-based ensemble Accroche Note, which created the work. The singer, Françoise Kubler, created Manuel de résurrection, and she also sings these poems in French. The twelve short poems are highly varied and follow on from one another. Some are dark and melancholy, others are humorous, even very caustic. I have tried to take account of the mood of the poem, by making a synthesis between the phonetic use of the language and its semantic use, to avoid this time the usual divorce between sound and meaning. 

François-Bernard Mâche, De la musique, des langues et des oiseaux, Michel de Maule -INA 2007, p.277-278.