Here it is, and it’s a volume! 21 x 28 cm format and 456 pages. A beautiful publication, and very welcome after “Selected Writings and Interviews” that came out in 2021 thanks to Blank Forms. Never published before, this is about Amacher’s magnum opus Intelligent Life, an opera the American composer started working on in the early 1980s, but it was never actually produced. It would have represented the summation of the composer’s concept to date.

As she wrote to John Cage in the autumn of 1983, following the untimely deaths of the opera’s patrons (Wies Smals, founder of De Appel, and curator Josine van Droffelaar), in a plane crash in the Swiss Alps – she would have at last had the support to “communicate the finest of my thought to others.” Amacher’s serial, intended for broadcast, sought to transmit her evolving ideas about perception, listening, and composition to a broader public – shifting music away from “nod and tap recognition” toward a transformative practice that could awaken intelligence to “unrecognized and new perceptual modes.”

The Opera

Set in the year 2021, Intelligent Life follows the employees of Supreme Connections LLC, a music entertainment corporation navigating a future in which artificial intelligence generates music faster than composers can. Anticipating an industry-wide downturn, Supreme Connections president Aplisa Kandel seeks advanced technologies that will revolutionize the act of listening and the future of music, including a bio-music script that lets the user hear Bach from the aural perspective of a reindeer and a wearable device that goes beyond replicating the mechanical tympanic resonances of the listening subject to produce the “listening mind” or the “sophisticated perceiver” – capturing and reproducing all the emotional and psychological associations unique to each individual.

Though Amacher could not realize Intelligent Life in any of its intended forms – she theorized its publication as a serialized radio broadcast and television simulcast, among other configurations – she continued designing “treatments” for the opera for much of her career. This volume makes the most complete of these working documents – including episodic scripts, notes on the use of LaserDisc, and an illustrated storyboard for the pilot – available to the public for the first time.

This beautiful publication was edited by Lawrence Kumpf, founder and artistic director of Blank Forms. He also wrote the introduction.

About Maryanne

Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) 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.