Maryanne Amacher Selected Writings And Interviews

The first ever book on American composer and sound-art pioneer Maryanne Amacher, with letters, manifestos, notes and more elucidating her eclectic thinking on sound and perception 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 and aural architecture. She is frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called "sound art," although her thought and work challenges assumptions about the limitations of that genre. Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviewsrepresents the first ever book-length collection devoted to the composer, whose life and work are as vast as they are as yet unknown. From personal notes and letters to program notes, manifestos and unrealized project proposals, the documents are framed by longer interviews with Amacher that discuss corresponding periods of her life. Because Amacher worked across nearly every imaginable media format, this book will be of tremendous interest to theorists and practitioners in media and communications, urban design, contemporary art history, music studies, sound studies, film, radio, art criticism and performance studies.

The life and work of Maryanne Amacher are as vast as they are as yet unknown. Situated at the very onset of serious study of her papers, Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz offer a heterodox and idiosyncratic selection of largely unpublished documents spanning the bandwidth of the still unprocessed contents of the Amacher archive.0From personal notes and letters to program notes, manifesti, and unrealized project proposals, the documents are framed by longer interviews with Amacher that discuss corresponding periods of her life. The book's otherwise chronological organization leads readers carefully into Amacher's transforming musical thought, but the book also works strenuously against the definitive completism often associated with a ?collected writings.? Rather, Dietz and Cimini redouble the Archive's unprocessed status as the book's ethical mode of organization. This book is an invitation to an ongoing process that?because ongoing?must be encountered as provisional, promissory and open-ended. The book assembles staggeringly rich primary material and at the same time asks what it means to assemble those materials while the ground is still very much shifting under the question ?who was Maryanne Amacher?? Because Amacher worked across nearly every imaginable media format, this book will be be of tremendous interest to theorists and practitioners in media and communications, urban design, contemporary art history, music studies, sound studies, film, radio, art criticism and performance studies?in short, the burgeoning configuration of disciplines that we might call an ?intermedial humanities.'

"We haven't even made it to breakfast!" Composer Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) often used this phrase to shorthand her critical and partial approach to knowledge production across the vast artistic, technical and scientific discourses with which she worked. The same could be said about her own musical thought, which encompassed original presentational formats in existing and speculative media and approaches to sound and listening that conjoined real and imagined social worlds. In these conjunctions, this book discerns meeting points between frameworks for life that emerged from Amacher's multidisciplinary study of sound and listening: within acoustical spectra, inside human bodies and ears, across cities and edgleands, hypothetical creatures and virtual, fictive or distanciated environments. These figurations guide interpretative study of six signal projects: Adjacencies (1965/1966); City-Links (1967-1988); Additional Tones (1976 / 1988), Music for Sound-Joined Rooms (1980), Mini Sound Series (1985) and Intelligent Life (1980s) and countless sketches, notes and unrealized projects. The book explores Amacher's working methods with an interpretive style that emphasizes technical study, conceptual juxtaposition, intertextual play and narrative transport. This book also takes up Amacher's work as a guiding thread across shifting social discourses on life in the late 20th century U.S. Her projects convoked figurations of life and technoscience that could be partially and ironically accessed or conceptualized via complex auditory thresholds. This nascent feminist epistemology rooted in feminist science and technology studies centers biopolitical questions about difference and power in artistic and critical work that counts Amacher among its precedents"--

The rise of a prominent auditory culture, reveals the degree to which sound art is lending definition to the 21st Century. And yet sound art still lacks related literature to compliment, and expand, the realm of practice. Background Noise sets out an historical overview, while at the same time shaping that history according to what sound art reveals - the dynamics of art to operate spatially, through media of reproduction and broadcast, and in relation to the intensities of communication and its contextual framework

"Her Noise is a season of exhibitions, performances and screenings that maps the activity of international artists whose practice involves the use of sound as a medium. This catalogue forms an invaluable resource, highlighting the often overlooked contribution of women artists to the development of genres as disparate as Fluxus, performance art, punk and sound-based installation."--BOOK JACKET.

One of the twentieth century's most important musical thinkers, James Tenney did pioneering work in multiple fields, including computer music, tuning theory, and algorithmic and computer-assisted composition. From Scratch arranges, edits, and revises Tenney's hard-to-find writings into one indispensable collection. Selections focus on his fundamental concerns—"what the ear hears"—and include thoughts and ideas on perception and form, tuning systems and especially just intonation, information theory, theories of harmonic space, and stochastic (chance) procedures of composition.

A rich collection of essays tracing the relationship between art and sound. In the 1970s David Toop became preoccupied with the possibility that music was no longer bounded by formalities of audience: the clapping, the booing, the short attention span, the demand for instant gratification. Considering sound and listening as foundational practices in themselves leads music into a thrilling new territory: stretched time, wilderness, video monitors, singing sculptures, weather, meditations, vibration and the interior resonance of objects, interspecies communications, instructional texts, silent actions, and performance art. Toop sought to document the originality and unfamiliarity of this work from his perspective as a practitioner and writer. The challenge was to do so without being drawn back into the domain of music while still acknowledging the vitality and hybridity of twentieth-century musics as they moved toward art galleries, museums, and site-specificity. Toop focused on practitioners, whose stories are as compelling as the theoretical and abstract implications of their works. Inflamed Invisible collects more than four decades of David Toop's essays, reviews, interviews, and experimental texts, drawing us into the company of artists and their concerns, not forgetting the quieter, unsung voices. The volume is an offering, an exploration of strata of sound that are the crossing points of sensory, intellectual, and philosophical preoccupations, layers through which objects, thoughts and air itself come alive as the inflamed invisible.

This two-volume set, Poesy Matters and Other Matters, presents selected texts by the Swedish polymath Catherine Christer Hennix. Volume one, Poesy Matters, is divided into two sections: poetry and drama, with each section also containing pieces of commentary by Hennix or her longtime collaborator Henry Flynt. Volume two, Other Matters, is divided into two sections: first, program notes and essays about a wide range of topics (including music, psychoanalysis, and mathematics), and second, a reproduction of Hennix's 1989 work The Yellow Book. The first comprehensive publication of Hennix's written work, Poesy Matters and Other Matters illustrates the singular depth and variety of her contributions to contemporary music, art, literature, and mathematics. Best known as a composer, Catherine Christer Hennix has, throughout her fifty-plus-year career, produced innovative work in the fields of not just minimal and computer music, but psychoanalytic theory, intuition mathematics, poetry, and prose as well. The texts in Poesy Matters and Other Matters reflect Hennix's diverse training as well as her long-standing personal interests in Lacanian psychoanalysis and Japanese and Middle Eastern poetic forms, resulting in a rich, diffuse collection of writings that reveal one of the avant-garde's most implacable, not to mention overlooked, creative minds.

Archival documents and new writings on the intermedia collaborations of avant-garde jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and textile artist Moki Cherry Don Cherry and Moki Karlsson met in Sweden in the late '60s. They married and began to perform together, dubbing their mix of communal art, social and environmental activism, children's education and pan-ethnic expression "Organic Music." Their home in Tågarp became a locus of artistic production, attracting free-spirited musicians, poets, actors and artists with the promise of collective life. There, Keith Knox assembled Tågarp Publication Number One to document the collectivistic practices blooming under the Cherrys' guidance. Reproduced here, the text includes interviews with Terry Riley and Cherry, a piece on Pandit Pran Nath, a report on the Bombay Free School and a survey of the esoteric Forest University by Bengt af Kintberg. This book explores Don Cherry's work of the period through additional interviews by Knox, a piece on his Relativity Suite and an essay by Fumi Okiji. Moki's writings on her workshops are featured alongside full-color reproductions of her tapestries, used as performance environments by Don's ensembles. Cherry collaborators Bengt Berger and Christer Bothén contribute travelogues from the era.

Conversations with the avant-garde's leading lights--from Suicide to Anohni--by experimental music's go-to interviewer, guitarist and sound artist Alan Licht A precocious chronicler of New York's art and music scenes of the last 30 years, Alan Licht's (born 1968) experience as a consummate experimental guitarist and conceptual sound artist--combined with his dry wit and deep erudition--have distinguished him as the go-to interviewer of the avant-garde. Having already published articles on minimalist composers La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, Rhys Chatham and Charlemagne Palestine by the time he graduated from Vassar College, in 1998 Licht began writing frequently and conducting regular interviews for the British experimental music magazine The Wire. Common Tonescollects a selection of those interviews, as well as dialogues from Bombmagazine, transcriptions of conversations that took place at Red Bull Music Academy and the legendary experimental venue Tonic, and interviews conducted expressly for this book. Musicians, artists, writers and filmmakers interviewed by Licht include Vito Acconci, Anohni, Cory Arcangel, Matthew Barney, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Tony Conrad, Richard Foreman, Henry Flynt, Milford Graves, Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo, Ken Jacobs, Jutta Koether, Christian Marclay, Phill Niblock, Tony Oursler, Karl Precode of The Dream Syndicate, Lou Reed, Martin Rev and Alan Vega of Suicide, The Sea and Cake, Tom Verlaine, Wolf Eyes and Rudy Wurlitzer.