Like Iannis Xenakis, who was a close friend, and numerous other composers, Mâche studied with Olivier Messiaen. Unlike any of his colleagues, however, he was the only one (as far as I know) to have obtained a degree in archaeology as well. In addition, he studied classical literature of which he was appointed a professor at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Mâche is also professor of musicology at the University of Strasbourg.

Perhaps under Messiaen’s influence, he turned his attention, among many other things, to ornitho-musicology and has written a study which sets out to demonstrate that birdsongs are organized according to a repetition-transformation principle. As he puts it: One purpose of the book was to “begin to speak of animal musics other than with quotation marks.”51

I.

I can report on two experiences which—while they did not have the dimension of Lutosławski’s—have left deep traces.

One was my encounter with musique concrète in 1955. It was at that time that works by Pierre Henry were released on record. It was not any particular composition that interested me but the new sound world of concrete music.

The other experience occurred by chance: I heard Xenakis’s Metastasis in a German radio broadcast. That will have been in 1957 or 1958. I was a young composer, still rather green, and while I could not yet offer an alternative to serial music with my own works, I felt an antipathy toward serialism which was similar to Xenakis’s. His Metastasis proved for me that there existed a new musical language which had nothing to do with serialism. The significance of that encounter could be likened to that with concrete music.

Xenakis was working toward the same end as Varèse had done and I believe he succeeded in achieving many things where the older composer had failed. When I first heard Metastasis, I had not yet come across Varèse; years later, his ideas related to mass were to make a stronger impact than Xenakis’s researches.

In 1960, I composed a piece which I called Volume. It was scored for orchestra and included elements of concrete music. Volume merged both influences: the sound world of concrete music and the organization of orchestral sounds as suggested by Xenakis.