The demiurge of sounds and the poeta doctus
Contemporary Music Review, 8 (1):
131-182 (1993)DOI: 10.1080/07494469300640251
Abstract
At the start of his career. F.-B. Mâche faced a severe challenge: he could have chosen equally from the aesthetics of E. Varèse, J. Cage, postserialism, I. Xenakis or the GRM.<. With special affinities to cultural history, he pinpointed with a keen eye the hidden problems of all the former trends against the background of the shortcomings of our civilization: the deficiencies of artistic content provoked by reason, rationalism-intellectualism, logic or excessive freedom, alienation from the natural-environmental context. With his “naturalist poetics” anticipating the 21st century he explored and mapped both artistically and scientifically all the natural, linguistic, mythological models that could revive composition with the elementary force of originality and an ideal mode of construction. The article presents the poetics and the crystallized “archetypical” units of form: their structuring principles, their “mythemes” of expressive content as well as the types of form themselves conforming to traditional musical thought and to a geometric, metaphorical or mythological logic.