François-Bernard Mâche

François-Bernard Mâche (born 4 April 1935, Clermont-Ferrand) is a French composer of contemporary music. Biography 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 (1957) and a teaching certificate (Agrégation de Lettres classiques, 1958). 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 (Musique, mythe, nature, ou les Dauphins d’Arion) (1983, 1992 ), 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 (1972) 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