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Maryanne Amacher (1938 – 2009)

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Maryanne Amacher (1938 – 2009) Maryanne Amacher (1938 – 2009) 1. Overview Maryanne Amacher (pronounced “Am‐ah‐shhé”) (1938 – 2009) was a composer of large-scale fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of perception, sound spatialization, creative intelligence, and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called "sound art," although her thought and creative practice consistently challenges key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of this nascent genre. Often considered to be a part of a post-Cagean lineage, her work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies. As a whole, Amacher’s work and collected archive represents one of the most important artistic contributions of recent decades. Assembled shortly before her death in the summer and fall of 2009, the archive contains a wealth of knowledge and research potential that promises to be a source of interest and inspiration for generations of artists and scholars to come. Much of the material was organized by Amacher herself, including for example, a critical series of folders and small boxes containing what she felt to be the most important works and writings from various periods. She also kept her annotated drafts, project notes, performance materials, ephemera, audio versions dating to the early 60s, etc. With future archival efforts, research. and scholarship it will be possible s to trace her working processes and ways of thinking across nearly every category of media. At present, the archive consists of roughly 125 medium sized storage boxes of notebooks, scores, sketches and other papers, and an additional 40 boxes of tapes, cassettes, DATs, floppy disks, videos, and audio in other various formats. There are also oversize papers such as original concert posters and drawings as well as a collection of electronic music tools, some rare and custom-made, as well as a miscellany of personal artifacts. The types of materials present in the archive vary greatly and go far beyond those of the traditional composer, such as scores, recordings, sketches, and correspondence. Working with Amacher’s archive represents a unique opportunity to explore new models for archiving the composers of the future and may serve as a prototype for other composers and artists of her generation. Because Amacher’s work was grounded in first-person research focused on perceptual processes as well as site-specific techniques of sound recording, amplification, and transmission, processing her archive raises important questions about future presentations of her work - how (and if) adequate perceptual and site-specific methodologies can be (re)constructed through archival research. How Amacher's archive is treated can serve as a beacon for new wave of archival development that must ensure a wide range of late-20th and 21st Century cultural production can be adequately communicated into the future. Standard methodologies developed around painters or orchestral composers, for example, will never capture the more ephemeral practices now pervasive in our post-disciplinary framework. At present the Archive is organized contextually or topographically, meaning that each box represents and contains a physical area in her home/studio. There is a complete photographic record of the packing process which connects the her working space and the materials via box numbers within the photography (e.g. a photograph of her desk as it was found, a photograph of those materials in a box, numbered, and overall photographs of the room). While this system in not intended as necessarily the final cataloging method, it is perhaps the most open- ended starting point to develop a system offers the most subtle relationship to the artifact's use and role in Amacher's working process and life. Since her passing, the collection has been housed in climate-controlled storage in the city she lived, Kingston NY. Interest in the Amacher Archive coincides with the recent emergence of sound and listening as a key concern in a wide number of scholarly, artistic, and popular discourses. The interdisciplinary field of sound studies has begun to explore how sonic phenomena like vibration, resonance, rhythm, and silence might offer new interpretive frameworks for literature, film, and social life more generally. The brain sciences have also turned to listening and psychoacoustics and Amacher's practice is the most direct artistic investigation and utilization of inner ear distortions, what she caled “Ear Tones”. Her work has been and will continue to be the subject of research in these areas. Concurrently, journalistic and critical pieces about noise regulation, music, torture, as well as sound in advertising and branding circulate with astonishing urgency in social media, blogs, and other formats. The Museum of Modern Art’s current sound art exhibition (the catalogue for which cites Amacher as a key seminal figure) has re-animated debates about how sound and listening participate in the production and circulation of knowledge, critique, and sociality. Why this so-called “sonic turn” has occurred with such force and urgency at the current moment remains a rich, compelling, and very open question – one that further engagement with the Amacher Archive will surely illuminate. 2. Biography Maryanne Amacher was born in 1938 in Kane, Pennsylvania, a small town in the northwestern part of the state, just south of Erie. Amacher’s formative years were spent in Philadelphia, where she enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. As a music major, she studied with composer and theorist Constant Vauclain, George Rochberg, and the prominent German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen during his tenure in Philadelphia in 1964 and 1965. After her work at UPenn, Amacher went on to hold a series of fellowships at the University of Illinois’ Studio for Experimental Music, MIT’s Center for Advance Visual Studies, SUNY Buffalo, Capp Street Gallery in San Francisco, and many others, also internationally. In the late 1960s, while at SUNY-Buffalo, Amacher pioneered what she called “long distance music,” or telematic, site-related works that would later crystallize into her renowned City Links series. During her time as a fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (1972-1976) she began developing her “ear tone” music with the help of Marvin Minsky's Triadex Muse, a synthesizer and compositional tool utilizing principles of artificial intelligence. Amacher’s “ear tone” music emerged from creative use of combination and difference tones, along with otoacoustic emissions (known, in shorthand, as OAEs), or sounds produced spontaneously within the cochlea. Amacher followed developments and debates in otological research on OAEs and other psychoacoustic phenomena closely. Such independent scholarship was an important stimulus to her career-long research into “ways of hearing” and the creative potentialities of how the ear itself processes sounds both of itself and in situ. While at MIT, her extensive listening research was also profoundly influenced by a continuous, four year long, live feed from Boston Harbor to her studio via a dedicated phone line. This monophonic (transmitting no spatial information via stereo cues) environmental transmission from the Boston Fish Exchange building helped crystallize another unique focus of her approach to spatialization: that the spectral and dynamic transformation of a sound creates a subtle, but perceptible three dimensional shape, literally, in space. After meeting John Cage through Lejaren Hiller at the University of Illinois in 1968, she went on to collaborate with Cage in the mid- 1970s on Lecture on the Weather, and composed Close Up, an accompaniment to Cage’s Empty Words (1979). Remainder was commissioned for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company piece Torse, and later the Charles Atlas film of the same name. In the late 1970s and early 1980s she developed presentational models for how her subsequent work should be “staged”: Music for Sound- Joined Rooms and Mini Sound Series. She spent the 1980s also working on the materials for a multi-part drama originally imagined for TV and Radio simulcast called Intelligent Life. While never fully realized, Intelligent Life reveals much of her thinking on music and the advancement of potentialities for future listeners, transcending the social and physiological limitations of music as we know it. Her work in the 1990s continued largely internationally – most often in Europe and Japan. In the US she was commissioned to compose a large-scale work for the Kronos Quartet, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, performed at Woodstock ’94, participated in the Whitney Biennale, and released her first CD on Tzadik. The 2000s, she joined the faculty of Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and continued to work internationally. In 2005 she received Ars Electronica’s “Golden Nica,” their highest honor. Her last commission, remaining unfinished was an evening-length work that combined stereoscopic video and a multi-story audio composition involving roughly forty loudspeakers. She died in Kingston, NY after sustaining a head injury and a subsequent stroke during the summer of 2009. 3. Her Work By her own account, Amacher’s work is best represented by three multimedia installation series produced in the United States, Europe, and Japan between the late 1960s and her death in 2009. In these major works, City Links (1967-1980), Music for Sound Joined Rooms, and the Mini Sound Series, Amacher refashioned composition as a dramatically staged creative undertaking in experimental acoustics. She was fascinated with the physicality of sound, the way it propagated in space, and the unexpected ways that it provoked images and sensations in the "mind's ear." Her approach was slow, deliberate, and empirical. She would spend hours listening to a seemingly unchanging tone or making minute adjustments to loudspeaker placement. For Amacher, these things were not details or minutiae: they were the very heart of her work, the equivalent to the painstaking working out of themes or harmonic progressions in traditional music.
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