ADDITIONAL
TONES: A TRIBUTE TO
MARYANNE AMACHER
Amy Cimini, Bill Dietz, Marianne Schroeder & Joana Gama, Thomas Ankersmit, Lisa Rovner

Additional Tones:
A Tribute to Maryanne Amacher is an homage and an
opportunity for sharing and contributing to a greater understanding and
well-deserved visibility of this remarkable artist and thinker’s life and work.
The program includes the screening of the documentary film Sisters With
Transistors, a
seminar and listening session dedicated to Amachers’s series of works Music
for Sound Joined Rooms and Mini Sound Series led by
researchers Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz,
the online video series of readings and discussions Remote Links celebrating the book
edition of Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews in
partnership with New York Public Library, the interpretation of the composition
for two pianos Petra by the unprecedented duo of
pianists composed by an historical name - Marianne Schroeder -
and the young Portuguese musician Joana Gama, and the
presentation in yet another national premiere: Thomas Ankersmit's Perceptual
Geography for Serge Modular synthesizer, a piece inspired by and
dedicated to Amacher.
Image: Maryanne Amacher at work at the
Capp Street Project, San Francisco (1985), Photo by and Courtesy of Peggy Weil
Programme
08 JAN
AMY CIMINI AND BILL DIETZ
18:00, Seminar and Listening Session
20:00, “REMOTE LINKS” (Introduction) / Book launch of Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews
Please submit your questions, throughout the Remote
Links series, to Amacher@nypl.org
They will be addressed at the final Panel.
Library
09 JAN
“SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS” (2020), a documentary film by LISA ROVNER
11:00, Auditorium
10 JAN
MARIANNE SCHROEDER & JOANA GAMA play “PETRA” by Maryanne Amacher
10:30, Auditorium
THOMAS ANKERSMIT presents “PERCEPTUAL GEOGRAPHY”
11:30, Auditorium
JAN – MAR
“REMOTE LINKS”
Online video series of readings and discussions of Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews
(Presented by The New York Public Library, The Maryanne Amacher Foundation, Blank Forms and Fundação de Serralves, Porto)
Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) was an American composer especially
known for her large-scale, fixed-duration sound installations and multimedia
environments. She studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and
went on to collaborate with Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Her work was
pioneering and visionary in several fields of musical and artistic creation
such as the exploration of sound spatialization, new media, acoustic ecology,
artificial intelligence and psychoacoustics.
Still in the 1960s, Amacher began working with what she called ‘long
distance music’, or telematics, which would be consolidated in City Links,
a series based on real time, on site mixing of sounds transmitted from several
remote places and cities via telephone. In the 1970s, she specialized in
working with the Triadex Muse synthesizer developed by Marvin Minsky using
artificial intelligence principles. In the series Music for Sound Joined
Rooms (1980 -) she used the architectural structure of the site of the
installation as the physical medium of the work by resorting to idiosyncratic
speaker placements. Her Mini Sound Series (1985 -) explored the
potential of sounds as characters, applying the dramatic principles of
television series and other popular formats to the relationship between sounds
and the ways in which they were perceived and transformed across various ‘episodes’.
Her remarkable work The Sounding of Casa de Serralves: Supreme
Connections, presented in 2002, can be framed within the two later series.
In this sound, visual and performative installation, Serralves’ emblematic
villa was transformed into a place for multidimensional and immersive
experiences. The sound spread through the architectural structure, through the
rooms, bedrooms, columns and anterooms. Architecture shaped the propagation of
sound and the listening experience. The house’s spaces became an integral part
of the sound system and the house itself a giant musical instrument. Scenic
elements, or videos could be found in different rooms and, from inside the
house, strange creatures were seen in the formal gardens around the villa. In
addition to reflecting Amacher's research on the materiality of sound and the
ways in which it propagates in space, this work also reflected the exploration
of the phenomenology of aural perception (in particular the sounds emitted by
the ear itself), the physicality of listening and the staging of the experience
as essential elements in the perception processes.
International recognition of the importance and singularity of Amacher's
work has recently translated into the acquisition of the artist's archives by
the New York Public Library of Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, the
constitution of The Maryanne Amacher Foundation and events dedicated to her
work organized by such institutions as Tate Modern and ICA in London, the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the São Paulo Biennial.
On going
Past