The Mini Sound Series: The Maryanne Amacher Archive Seminar

The  two-day seminar Mini Sound Series: The Maryanne Amacher Archive is a collaboration between Sonic Acts, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Blank Forms presented by Amy Cimini, Bill Dietz, and Robert The. The program offers a selection of documents, images, and audio from various iterations of Maryanne Amacher’s work The Mini Sound Series, as well as works leading to its development, all recently digitised by the Maryanne Amacher Archive.

The seminar is an intensive knowledge-exchange opportunity for those interested in Amacher’s work and in methodologies of post-Cagean sonic art. Following the second day of the seminar, a public listening session of additional unpublished Amacher audio will be presented as a practical elaboration for seminar participants, and as an introductory overview for the general public. More about the Maryanne Amacher Archive and seminar program here.

Listening Session at De Appel Arts Centre: The Maryanne Amacher Archive presents The Mini Sound Series

As legendary as Maryanne Amacher’s work remains, few if any of Amacher’s listeners have been able to experience her variegated body of work as a whole. Amacher’s prescient use of media coupled with her insistence on perceptually anchored situational specificity made the question of documentation and publication of her artistic work complicated, if not moot. Now for the first time as more and more of the materials from the Maryanne Amacher Archive are digitized, the first sketches of an overview of her life's work are on hand. The Listening Session offers a live-annotated audio-outline of moments throughout Maryanne Amacher’s 50 year career, comprised entirely of unpublished audio. The listening session is accompanied by pertinent and likewise unpublished images of scores, notes, and texts selected from the Amacher Archive, presented by Bill Dietz, Amy Cimini & Robert The. 
Date: Tuesday 13 December
Time: 20:00 hrs
Location: de Appel arts centre, Prins Hendrikkade 142, Amsterdam 

About Maryanne Amacher

Amacher (born 1938 in Kane, Pennsylvani) is best known for her groundbreaking acoustic art that staged entire buildings and offered listeners exciting new ways of hearing. Following studies with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Amacher’s development of otoacoustic-based music with the help of Marvin Minsky’s Triadex Muse, her seminal telematic City Links series, and her collaborations with John Cage and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, in the late 1970s and early 1980s Amacher sought out a format that would best allow visitors to navigate her large-scale sound works.

Bill Dietz
Composer and writer Bill Dietz is one of the supervisors of the Maryanne Amacher Archive. Since 2007 he has been the artistic director of Ensemble Zwischentöne, and co-chair of Music/Sound in Bard College’s MFA programme since 2012. He is currently Guest Professor of Sound at the Academy of Media Arts (Cologne).

Robert The
Robert The is a New York artist known for his altered book pieces and signage, with works in many public collections including MOMA, LA MOCA, Yale, and The Walker Art Center. He initiated the Maryanne Amacher Archive together with Micah Silver in 2009; Bill Dietz joined them not long afterwards.

Amy Cimini
Amy Cimini is a historian and performer of music from the 20th and 21st centuries. She earned her Ph.D. in Historical Musicology in 2011 from New York University. Prior to her appointment at UC San Diego, she held an Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellowship in Music Theory at the University of Pennsylvania from 2011 to 2013 as well as a visiting position in Music Theory at the College of William and Mary from 2010 to 2011.