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.
Related
SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS
Feature documentary, 84 min, UK, 2020
Written and Directed by Lisa Rovner
Produced by Anna Lena Vaney
SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS is the untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, re-markable
composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly
transform how we produce and listen to music today.
The history of women has been a history of silence.
Recent protests calling for greater recognition of women’s achievements have
swept across politics, business, even Hollywood. The world of music is no
exception. Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne
Amacher, Pauline Oliveros, Wendy Carlos, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and
Laurie Spiegel are among the greatest pioneers of modern sound and we continue
to feel their influence yet most people have never heard of them.
As one of the film’s subjects, Laurie Spiegel
explains: “We women were especially drawn to electronic music when the
possibility of a woman composing was in itself controversial. Electronics let us
make music that could be heard by others without having to be taken seriously
by the male dominated Establishment.” With the wider social, political and
cultural context of the 20th century as our backdrop, this all archival
documentary reveals a unique emancipation struggle, revealing a central role of
women in the history of music.
With Laurie Anderson as narrator, the story begins in
1929 New York with Clara Rockmore, whose world-wide performances helped to
establish electronic and experimental music as a viable form in the public
imagination. In 1950s Greenwich Village, we discover how the first entirely
electronic film score was composed by Bebe Barron and her husband Louis for the
movie ‘Forbidden Planet’. In post World War II Europe, where large numbers of
women were recruited into jobs vacated by men who had gone to fight in the war,
we’ll meet the first generation of women working in radio – Daphne Oram (UK),
Eliane Radigue (FR), and Delia Derbyshire (UK) – whose unique experimentations
with tape would later be felt in the early sound experiments of Les Paul, the
studio manipulations of Beatles producer George Martin, the concrete pranks of
Frank Zappa, the sampling and turntablism of hip-hop DJs from Grandmaster Flash
to Q-Bert. Outside the bounds of famous institutions like the BBC, iconoclastic
composers were building their own instruments made from army surplus stores.
The story of one of such composers, Pauline Oliveros, takes us to San Francisco
in the ’60s – the epicentre of experimental music “where synthesiser and tape
loops met light shows and LSD”. As for Maryanne Amacher’s work, it anticipated some of the most important
developments in media, sound and installation arts.
While some experimental artists were exploring the
outer limits of sonic perception, others were bringing electronic music into
the mainstream. In 1968, Wendy Carlos scored a hit record with ‘Switched-On
Bach’, a collection of Bach pieces played on a Moog synthesiser, making Carlos
a superstar and the synthesiser a thing of wonder. In turn, electronic wizard
Suzanne Ciani tell us about working with a Buchla synthesiser to compose scores
for television commercials and movie soundtracks. Laurie Spiegel’s prescient
computer program Music Mouse from 1986 counts among the earliest music software
available to regular consumers and underpins the practice of most of today’s
bedroom producers.
Near the end of the film, over new images of some of
these first wave of pioneers, we’ll hear from the younger generation of
contemporary female musicians, how finding out about these women impacted them,
nurtured them.
LISA ROVNER is an artist and filmmaker based in London. All of
her creative projects, ranging from short films, music videos, adverts and art
exhibitions are strung together by a fascination with archives and sound and
her underlying aspiration to transform politics and philosophy into
cinematographic spectacle. Rovner has collaborated with some of the most internationally
respected artists and brands including Pierre Huyghe, Liam Gillick, Sebastien
Tellier, Maison Martin Margiela and Acne. Her films have been presented
internationally in art venues and theaters. Currently, she is in development on
an episodic comedy about the art world and on a television series about
revolutionary architecture. SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS is her first
feature documentary.