Maryanne Amacher

Maryanne Amacher’s visceral electroacoustic compositions engulf the listener in aural territories that range from mildly perceptible ripples to vibrating sensory incursions. Her score for Merce Cunningham’s Torse, 1976, which she titled Remainder, is at moments barely audible, while Living Sound, Patent Pending, 1980, is a high-volume sonar-esque drone layered over soft ambient trills. A seminal figure in psychoacoustics and architectural installation, she specialized in experiments that treat the body as an interpretive listening device, and explore the relationship between space and sound by incorporating acoustic feedback formed by the installation’s own conditions, such as humidity levels and building materials. Amacher created encompassing site-specific installations consisting of large darkened rooms filled with huge speakers, or even entire buildings, and she pioneered a compositional structure that the listener completes: The high-volume timbres she used activate otoacoustic emissions, tones generated by the listener’s inner ear.

Homing in on two major series of work, “City-Links,” 1967–88, and “Intelligent Life,” 1979, this show features rarely exhibited ephemera and sound samples, and an expansive public program. A sonic telepresence series performed on the radio or as installations, the “City-Links” compositions comprise layered urban sounds, such as bird chirps and traffic whirrs, taken from live microphones Amacher installed in various locations in one or two cities. She used FM-quality telephone wires to stream the sounds to her studio as well as to the radio stations that broadcast her performances. Despite her widespread accolades and her collaborations with lionized figures such as Cunningham, Amacher remains somewhat of an artist’s artist, best known by a specialized audience. Seeking to introduce her work more broadly, “Intelligent Life” is the most impressive and extensive presentation of her work in Europe to date.