François-Bernard Mâche

Who is François-Bernard Mâche?

François-Bernard Mâche is a French composer of contemporary music. Born into a family of musicians, he is a former student of Émile Passani and Olivier Messiaen and has also received a diploma in Greek archaeology and a teaching certificate. He was a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris from 1958–63. He has composed electroacoustic, orchestral, chamber, choral, vocal and piano works. He has been a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts since 2002 and occupies the chair of the late Iannis Xenakis.

Mâche's Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion, which as a whole argues for a return in composition to mythic thought, includes a study of "ornitho-musicology" using a technique of Nicolas Ruwet's Langage, musique, poésie paradigmatic segmentation analysis, shows that birdsongs are organized according to a repetition-transformation principle. One purpose of the book was to “begin to speak of animal musics other than with the quotation marks”, and he is credited by Dario Martinelli with the creation of zoomusicology.