Maryanne Amacher

Maryanne Amacher (25 February 1938, Kane, Pennsylvania – 22 October 2009, Kingston, New York) 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 frequently cited as a pioneer of what has come to be called sound art, although her thought and creative practice consistently challenges key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of that genre. Often considered to be a part of a post-Cagean lineage, her work anticipates some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies.

By her own account, Amacher’s work is best represented by three multimedia installation series produced in the United States, Europe, and Japan between the late 1960s and her death in 2009. In these major works—City Links (1967-1980), Music for Sound Joined Room, and the Mini Sound Series—Amacher refashioned composition as a dramatically staged creative undertaking in experimental acoustics. She was fascinated with the physicality of sound, the way it propagated in space, and the unexpected ways that it provoked images and sensations in the “mind’s ear.” Her approach was slow, deliberate, and empirical. She would spend hours listening to a seemingly unchanging tone or making minute adjustments to loudspeaker placement. For Amacher, these things were not details or minutiae: they were the very heart of her work, the equivalent to the painstaking working out of themes or harmonic progressions in traditional music.
In City Links, Amacher transmitted live sonic feeds from multiple cities (or multiple sites in the same city) via high-quality telephone lines and mixed these sources live during exhibitions, concert presentations, or radio broadcasts. In City (1967), a 28 hour live mix, connected eight locations around Buffalo via phone lines to WBFO. The program was recognized by the Institute for Education by Radio and Television for its innovative, experimental approach to radio’s role in fostering social community. In City Links, Amacher reflected upon the changing sense of place created by the general public’s access to air travel and telecommunications. Work titles often reflected these themes (e.g. No More Miles and Tone of Place). It was a prescient tremor of the “network culture” thematics to come in recent media art. Through 1979, she realized 21 iterations of her City Links series, many of which were collaborations with visual artists and/or architects. They took the form of installations, performances, and combinations of both.