The first ever book on American composer and sound-art pioneer Maryanne Amacher! An immense volume of work and stories that are little known.
The chronologically grouped documents, ranging from private writings and letters to program notes, manifestos, and proposals for unrealized projects, are framed by interviews in which Amacher discusses corresponding periods of her life. This structure leads readers carefully into the composer’s musical thought as it develops and transforms over time, while working strenuously against the definitiveness associated with “collected” writings. This study of a still-unfolding body of work approaches its materials as provisional, promissory and open-ended.
Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz offer a heterodox and idiosyncratic selection of largely unpublished documents spanning the breadth of the papers included in the Amacher Collection. Here, Cimini and Dietz have compiled a volume full of staggeringly rich primary documents, while the question “who was Maryanne Amacher?” still remains open.

Because Amacher worked across nearly every imaginable media format, this book will be be of interest to theorists and practitioners of urban design, contemporary art history, media and communications, music and sound studies, film, radio, art criticism, and performance studies. This volume is about doing things a different way. It is organized to foreground Amacher’s voices and soundworlds so that readers can experience her work in, and through, her own words.

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 regarded as a pioneer of what has come to be called “sound art,” although her thought and creative practice consistently challenged key assumptions about the capacities and limitations of that genre. Often considered in light of post-Cagean art practices, her work anticipated some of the most important developments in network culture, media arts, acoustic ecology, and sound studies.

“Amacher’s electronic music work is paralyzing for its combination of extreme sound and precise architecture. The resulting propulsion is unrelenting and subterranean. This is a woman who would sleep in many of the studios in which she worked, forbidding anyone to disturb her. Supremely articulate, bold, and exacting in the demands of her work, she drew for us a picture of one of the most unusual minds in any field of art.”

—Diamanda Galás

about the editors:

Bill Dietz is a composer, writer and co-chair of Music/ Sound in the Bard MFA program. Amy Cimini is a musicologist, violist and Assistant Professor of Music at UC San Diego.

Cloth hardcover with dust jacket, 6.5 x 9.5 inches, 398 pages.

Look here for the table of contents.