Maryanne Amacher
Maryanne Amacher (25 February 1938, Kane, Pennsylvania – 22 October 2009, Kingston, New York) 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 known for working extensively with a family of psychoacoustic phenomena called auditory distortion products (also known as distortion product otoacoustic emissions and combination tones), in which the ears themselves produce audible sound.
Background and Education
Maryanne Amacher was born on February 25, 1938 in Kane, Pennsylvania, and spent her youth playing the piano. She received a full scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied music composition, and earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1964. While there she studied composition with George Rochberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Subsequently, she did graduate work in acoustics and computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Working Method and Sound
Auditory distortion products are phenomena in which the ears themselves produce audible sound. Most of her pieces have been site-specific in this way, often employing dozens of loudspeakers to create what she dubbed "structure-borne sound", which took on a life and quality of its own, in opposite to typical airborne sound. By using many diffuse sound sources (either not in the space or speakers facing at the walls or floors) she would create the psychoacoustic illusions of sound shapes or "presence".
Maryanne Amacher (1938 - 2009) is one of electronic music's true mavericks, whose music is almost exclusively presented in huge spaces and installations and rarely captured on any recorded formats. This collection of electronic soundscapes and "ear-dances" was compiled by Amacher in 1999 with the specific aim of working in more intimate settings.
Major Work Series
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 Room, and the Mini Sound Series—Amacher refashioned composition as a dramatically staged creative undertaking in experimental acoustics.
In 1967 Amacher began her ongoing, twenty-two-site series City-Links. In this piece she transmitted sounds from various locations within and among cities through telephone lines and mixed them together. This serial work employed early telecommunications infrastructure as both instrument and composition medium, presaging later network-based art practices.
Collaborations and Recorded Work
Amacher often collaborated with Merce Cunningham and John Cage. She composed the music for Cunningham's Torse (1976) and several other evening-length works. She produced a storm soundtrack for Cage's Lecture on the Weather (1976), and a sound environment piece titled Close Up to accompany his Empty Words (1978).
In 1999, the Tzadik label released a recording of pieces that Amacher chose for CD, entitled Sound Characters (making the third ear). One of a handful of Maryanne's works for tape, 'Petra (1991) For Two Pianos' joins her seminal Tzadik CD releases 'Sound Characters (Making The Third Ear)' [1999] and 'Sound Characters 2 (Making Sonic Space)' [2008] as only the 3rd official release of Maryanne Amacher's remarkably unique music.
Teaching and Later Life
For the last decade of her life she taught at the Bard College MFA program. In 2005 she received Ars Electronica's highest honor, the "Golden Nica." At the time of her death she had been working three years on a 40-channel piece commissioned by the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York.
Legacy
Maryanne Amacher has been an important influence for composers such as Rhys Chatham and Thurston Moore. 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 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.
Sources
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