Wild Sound
Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life
Published on 13. April 2022
Book
Hardback
336 pages
978-0-19-006089-3 (ISBN)
Description
"We haven't even made it to breakfast!" was a phrase often used by composer Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) 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.
Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life 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. Author Amy Cimini explores Amacher's working methods with an interpretive style that emphasizes technical study, conceptual juxtaposition, intertextual play, and narrative transport.
Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life 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. Author Amy Cimini explores Amacher's working methods with an interpretive style that emphasizes technical study, conceptual juxtaposition, intertextual play, and narrative transport.
Reviews / Votes
Wild Sound can help all of us rethink how to hear and imagine sounds. * Noah Kahrs, Music Theory Online * Amy Cimini's Wild Sound is the first comprehensive study of the work of Marianne Amacher, whose stature continues to rise in both artistic and musical realms. Through detailed analyses and archival research, Cimini reveals Amacher's prescient engagement with the media frameworks, technoscientific dictates, and biopolitical dynamics that continue to determine our contemporary moment. * Branden W. Joseph, author of Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture * Cimini locates in Amacher's world of musical creation a nascent techno-feminist theory of embodiment; this theory is a goad to imagine the world otherwise. Wild Sound will set a new high standard for emerging waves of scholarship at the intersection of late-twentieth-century experimentalism, global political economy, and feminist theories of power. * Brigid Cohen, Associate Professor, New York University *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
666 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-006089-3 (9780190060893)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
03/2022
OUP eBook
€48.99
Available for download
E-Book
03/2022
OUP eBook
€48.99
Available for download
Person
Amy Cimini is Assistant Professor of music at UC San Diego in the Integrative Studies Area. Her research, teaching and performance engage 20th century philosophy and political thought with an emphasis on embodiment and ethics in experimental practice. Dr. Cimini is co-editor of Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (2021). She is also a violist who has recorded and toured extensively with experimental music ensembles and as a solo artist.
Content
Acknowledgments
List of Figures
List of Tables
CHAPTER ONE: "I want to make a music"
Introduction
Tenses and Moods of the Audible
Book Overview and Selected Works: 1965-1990
Amacher Among the Musicologies and Other Studies
Life in a Sound and its Figurations
Life in an Eartone and its Figurations
The Archive and The Title
"Dear Parents:" Desires and Plans, 1965
CHAPTER TWO: Adjacencies and its Negations
Introduction
A Tape and Untaken Pictures: Learning Adjacencies
How to Wish for Sound: Negative Notation
The Space Notebook: An Analysis in the Subjunctive
Life in a Frequency Spectrum and its Figurations
Here - (ish): Another Tape and City-Links, WBFO Buffalo, 1967
"A Page From a Musical Composition:" In City, 1967
Conclusion: Adjacencies and the Phone Block
CHAPTER THREE: Scenes from a Long Distance Music: City-Links 1973-1975:
Introduction
How to Glow in the Dark: 1970s Textual Experiments
Dirty Water and the Microphone at Pier 6, 1973
Tone at the Harbor and Three Long Distance Musics on Tape
Incoming Night, Blum at Pier 6, May 1975
Long Distance Music at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies: Anywhere City (1974)
Telephones, Telepaths and Other Linkless Listenings: Presence (1975)
Leased Lines and Direct Distance Dialing: Obsolescing City-Links (1989)
Televisions and Mirrors: No More Miles - An Acoustic Twin (1974)
Conclusion
CHAPTER FOUR: Eartones and Third Ears:
Introduction
Stereoscopic Cochlea and "Live Space" on Paper
Intervals and Interchanges in "Head Rhythm" & "Play Thing" (1999)
Doublings and Coils in "Labyrinthitis" (2008)
Life in a Third Ear and its Figurations
"The Phantasm Coming From My Head!" and Other Interaural Genealogies
OBSERVE:POTENTIAL: Inside the Tone Scans
Conclusion: The Levi-Montalcini Variations (1992)
CHAPTER FIVE: Amacher's House for Strange Life:
Introduction
A Walk into Living Sound (Patent Pending)
The Tribute at 223 Grotto Street
CLUE I: MID RANGE Microbes and Other Creative Recyclers
Enchanted Cablecasts and Structure-Borne Sound: 1974-1979
CLUE II: Orchestral Metabolisms and Unheard Microbial Music
CLUE III: Diamond v Chakrabarty Among the Third Men
Acoustical Research as Dramatic Form in Amacher's Other Laboratories
Conclusion
AFTERWORD: Notes with Ears
Notes
References
Index
List of Figures
List of Tables
CHAPTER ONE: "I want to make a music"
Introduction
Tenses and Moods of the Audible
Book Overview and Selected Works: 1965-1990
Amacher Among the Musicologies and Other Studies
Life in a Sound and its Figurations
Life in an Eartone and its Figurations
The Archive and The Title
"Dear Parents:" Desires and Plans, 1965
CHAPTER TWO: Adjacencies and its Negations
Introduction
A Tape and Untaken Pictures: Learning Adjacencies
How to Wish for Sound: Negative Notation
The Space Notebook: An Analysis in the Subjunctive
Life in a Frequency Spectrum and its Figurations
Here - (ish): Another Tape and City-Links, WBFO Buffalo, 1967
"A Page From a Musical Composition:" In City, 1967
Conclusion: Adjacencies and the Phone Block
CHAPTER THREE: Scenes from a Long Distance Music: City-Links 1973-1975:
Introduction
How to Glow in the Dark: 1970s Textual Experiments
Dirty Water and the Microphone at Pier 6, 1973
Tone at the Harbor and Three Long Distance Musics on Tape
Incoming Night, Blum at Pier 6, May 1975
Long Distance Music at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies: Anywhere City (1974)
Telephones, Telepaths and Other Linkless Listenings: Presence (1975)
Leased Lines and Direct Distance Dialing: Obsolescing City-Links (1989)
Televisions and Mirrors: No More Miles - An Acoustic Twin (1974)
Conclusion
CHAPTER FOUR: Eartones and Third Ears:
Introduction
Stereoscopic Cochlea and "Live Space" on Paper
Intervals and Interchanges in "Head Rhythm" & "Play Thing" (1999)
Doublings and Coils in "Labyrinthitis" (2008)
Life in a Third Ear and its Figurations
"The Phantasm Coming From My Head!" and Other Interaural Genealogies
OBSERVE:POTENTIAL: Inside the Tone Scans
Conclusion: The Levi-Montalcini Variations (1992)
CHAPTER FIVE: Amacher's House for Strange Life:
Introduction
A Walk into Living Sound (Patent Pending)
The Tribute at 223 Grotto Street
CLUE I: MID RANGE Microbes and Other Creative Recyclers
Enchanted Cablecasts and Structure-Borne Sound: 1974-1979
CLUE II: Orchestral Metabolisms and Unheard Microbial Music
CLUE III: Diamond v Chakrabarty Among the Third Men
Acoustical Research as Dramatic Form in Amacher's Other Laboratories
Conclusion
AFTERWORD: Notes with Ears
Notes
References
Index