Maryanne Amacher: Expressway to Your Skull

In 1973-74 Maryanne Amacher worked with John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, collaborating on a ten hour piece. Called Empty Words/Close Up, it joined his spoken and sung text based on Thoreau with her sound environment based on the acoustic properties of Walden Pond. “I remember going out there in the middle of the night with our tape recorders,” she recalls. She also composed the storm environment for Cage’s multimedia Lecture On The Weather, based on texts from Thoreau’s journals, and many works for Cunningham’s dance pieces from 1974 to 1980. Rhys Chatham recalled one piece “scored as a duet between the high tones generated by our nervous systems, which we hear inside our heads, and an external sinewave frequency between 15,000 and 17,000 cycles per second. Amacher would bring the external sinewave in and out of the edge of consciousness to create a breathtaking new kind of harmony. Unfortunately, most of the audience heard the piece as 45 minutes of silence! She performed the same piece at the Kitchen to an audience of about one hundred hardened New Music fans. I would guess that about 15 out of the 100 people in attendance were able to fully appreciate what she was doing.”

In the 80’s Amacher began working on Music For Sound-Joined Rooms, for which she spent weeks on location studying the architectural specific buildings, and then created sonic and visual events for each hallway, room, staircase, etc. As she explains, utilising multiple speaker configurations created “the effect that sounds originate from specific locations and heights rather than from the loudspeakers”. By travelling through the building, an aural narrative emerged. Maryanne continued this idea in Mini Sound Series, which modified the Sound-Joined Rooms concepts to a format based on that of a TV mini-series. It involved a long running concert series over a four or five week period, “an evolving sound work ‘to be continued’ as opposed to a continuous installation or a traditional concert setting”.

All this intense interest in site-specific sound doesn’t readily conform to the notion of popping a CD into a Discman. A concert I saw at the Performing Garage in New York several years ago featured more than a dozen speakers placed carefully around the room, producing a two hour hurricane of sound that filled not only the space but the listener’s skull, to the extent that the sound actually seemed to be pouring out of your ears. More recently Amacher performed with Glenn Branca, Rudolph Grey and Z’ev at New York’s Knitting Factory, whose speaker system was hardly up to the challenge of dealing with her extreme samples.

With these experiences of her music in mind, I trekked to Maryanne’s home in upstate New York to listen to the Sound Characters CD. In my little corner of the world, its release is highly anticipated – I’m hoping it will give her the same kind of audience that other heretofore overlooked people like Tony Conrad or Loren MazzaCane Connors are starting to enjoy. The first thing I hear is piercing, cycling high-pitched melodies that immediately cause musical vibrations inside my ears. Maryanne calls this “Third Ear Music”, which “stimulates our ears to ‘sound’ their own tones and melodic shapes” – The same literally earsplitting experience I’d had at the Performing Garage. Next, I thought I heard a truck coming down the street; I soon realised it was a wave of electronics crashing over the still cycling first set of tones. Trembling, I knew that this music was too massive to really be experienced in a living room. It’s like having King Kong for a pet – it resists captivity at every level. By the same token, the music filled me with a sense of wonder and awe I have experienced only a handful of times in the presence of pure sound. The CD played on, with excerpts from the Sound-Joined Rooms series remixed to two channel stereo. Maastunnel Sound Characters (originally presented in a three storey tunnel in Rotterdam) features sustained tones in the midst of a maelstrom of electronic sound.

One of its most interesting features is the extended fade, which Amacher says is intended to give the listener a kind of aural afterimage. “I had an hour long version of it originally,” she notes. And how long was its fade? “About 40 minutes.”