The life and work of Maryanne Amacher are as vast as they are little known. In this volume, Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz offer a heterodox and idiosyncratic selection of largely unpublished documents spanning the breadth of the papers included in the Amacher Collection. The chronologically grouped documents, ranging from private writings and letters to program notes, manifestos, and proposals for unrealized projects, are framed by interviews in which Amacher discusses corresponding periods of her life. This structure leads readers carefully into the composer’s musical thought as it develops and transforms over time, while working strenuously against the definitiveness associated with “collected” writings. This study of a still-unfolding body of work approaches its materials as provisional, promissory and open-ended. Here, Cimini and Dietz have compiled a volume full of staggeringly rich primary documents, while probing the issue of what it means to assemble these materials while the question “who was Maryanne Amacher?” remains so open. This collection invites the reader to answer.
Because Amacher worked across nearly every imaginable media format, this book will be be of interest to theorists and practitioners of urban design, contemporary art history, media and communications, music and sound studies, film, radio, art criticism, and performance studies—in short, a configuration of disciplines that we might call an Intermedial Humanities. At the same time, this collection challenges any area of music, sound, or media studies that might be remade through the recovery of understudied figures. This volume is about doing things a different way. It is organized to foreground Amacher’s voices and soundworlds so that—whatever future musical and social constellations might join the ongoing excavation of this practice—readers can experience her work in, and through, her own words.
At the time of this writing, the Maryanne Amacher Collection is currently being processed at the New York Public Library, stewarded by Blank Forms and the Maryanne Amacher Foundation.
Maryanne Amacher (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 regarded as a pioneer of what has come to be called “sound art,” although her thought and creative practice consistently challenged key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of that genre. Often considered in light of post-Cagean art practices, her work anticipated some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies.
Bill Dietz is a composer, writer and co-chair of Music/ Sound in the Bard MFA program.
Amy Cimini is a musicologist, violist and Assistant Professor of Music at UC San Diego. Her first book, Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life, is forthcoming in Spring 2021 with Oxford University Press.
“Amacher’s electronic music work is paralyzing for its combination of extreme sound and precise architecture. The resulting propulsion is unrelenting and subterranean. This is a woman who would sleep in many of the studios in which she worked, forbidding anyone to disturb her. Supremely articulate, bold, and exacting in the demands of her work, she drew for us a picture of one of the most unusual minds in any field of art.”
—Diamanda Galás
“An unprecedented entree into the life and work of one of the most transgressively creative composers of our time, this never-before-available compendium of Maryanne Amacher’s scores, notes, and communications is an invaluable and inspirational resource for anyone interested in the history and practice of experimental creative practice.”
—George E. Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music
“Maryanne was an artist who didn’t seem interested in names and definitions. I met her when she was teaching, but she was clearly not an academic… When I saw her play, I couldn’t identify all the forces I felt, could barely catch hold of them. Her work is made of mysteries that linger in the mind, changing shape over time.”
—Seth Price
The Shadow Ring (1992-2002) –
11xCD + DVD box set with book
The Shadow Ring
$200 USD
Cold Drinks, Hot Dreams –
Limited Edition Vinyl LP
Atrás del Cosmos
$25 USD
Turzets –
Limited Edition Vinyl LP
James Rushford
$25 USD
Live on KFJC –
Limited Edition Cassette
The Shadow Ring
$15 USD
DINGGGDONGGGDINGGGzzzzzzz ferrrr SSSOFTTT DIVINI TIESSSSS!!!!!!!!! –
Limited Edition Vinyl LP
Charlemagne Palestine
$25 USD
Turning in Space –
'Motorwave' Cassette
Áine O'Dwyer
$15 USD
Turning in Space –
'Playing Place' Cassette
Áine O'Dwyer
$15 USD
Turning in Space –
'Slipstream' Cassette
Áine O'Dwyer
$15 USD
Turning in Space –
Triple Cassette Box Set
Áine O'Dwyer
$35 USD
Turning in Space –
Triple Cassette Box Set (art edition)
Áine O'Dwyer
Sold Out
Put the Music In Its Coffin –
Limited Edition Vinyl LP
The Shadow Ring
$25 USD
City Lights –
Limited Edition Vinyl LP
The Shadow Ring
$25 USD
Solo for Tamburium –
Limited Edition Compact Disc
Catherine Christer Hennix
$20 USD
Solo for Tamburium –
Limited Edition Double Vinyl
Catherine Christer Hennix
$35 USD
Texas Music –
Limited Edition Vinyl LP
Jerry Hunt, Philip Krumm, Jerry Willingham
$20 USD
Music of Dary John Mizelle –
Limited Edition Vinyl LP
Dary John Mizelle
$20 USD
Music of BL Lacerta –
Limited Edition Vinyl LP
BL Lacerta
$20 USD
Hybrid Musics –
Limited Edition Vinyl LP
Larry Austin
$20 USD
Cartography –
Limited Edition Vinyl LP
Gene De Lisa, Robert Michael Keefe, Rodney Waschka II
$20 USD
Works –
Limited Edition Vinyl LP
James Fulkerson
$20 USD
Cantegral Segment(s) –
Limited Edition Vinyl LP
Jerry Hunt
$20 USD
Neo Seven –
Limited Edition Vinyl LP
7038634357
$25 USD
Aphorisms –
Limited Edition 2xCD
Graham Lambkin
$20 USD
Aphorisms –
Limited Edition 2xLP
Graham Lambkin
$30 USD
The Cat & Bells Club –
Limited Edition LP
The Cat & Bells Club
$25 USD
Larynx –
2xLP
Lary 7
$30 USD
May 99 –
Limited Edition Vinyl LP
Charles Curtis, Alan Licht, and Dean Roberts
$25 USD
New Sense of Hearing –
Limited Edition CD
Takehisa Kosugi + Akio Suzuki
$15 USD
New Sense of Hearing –
Limited Edition Vinyl LP
Takehisa Kosugi + Akio Suzuki
$25 USD
Irida Records: Hybrid Musics from Texas and Beyond, 1979–1986 –
Limited Edition 7xLP + Book (Box Set)
Various Artists
$225 USD
Ground: Five Mechanic Convention Streams –
Limited Edition Double LP
Jerry Hunt
$30 USD
Kazuki Tomokawa 1975–1977 3xCD Box Set
$35 USD
Blank Forms Editions Brooklyn, New York
Blank Forms is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting emerging and underrepresented artists working in a range of time-based and interdisciplinary art practices, including experimental music, performance, dance, and sound art. Blank Forms provides artists with curatorial support, residencies, commissions, and publications to help document, disseminate, and advance their practices. ... more
Streaming and Download help