Playing the Space: The Maryanne Amacher Archive

Robert The and Bill Dietz presenting the Maryanne Amacher, photo by Pieter Kers
By Sara Constant For the last six years, artist Robert The and composer Bill Dietz have been sorting through boxes. The boxes belonged to composer Maryanne Amacher, and are filled with audio materials, scores, documents and photos, but also clothing, household items and perfume. They contain the entire contents of Amacher’s house, packed up after she died in 2009. Robert and Bill, who were friends and colleagues of Amacher’s, are organising a Maryanne Amacher Archive. For them, making sense of these materials, and making them public, is key to preserving Amacher’s musical vision. Originally, Robert began compiling the archive for Amacher’s own use in the hospital, after she had a stroke in July 2009. “When it became clear that she wasn’t ever going to be able to return home, I went on Amazon, ordered a wide-angle lens for my digital camera and photographed everything in the house as it was,” he explains. “I bought 200 identical boxes from a storage company. I’d photograph something, box it, photograph it in the box and label the box...the idea at the time was to rescue her work in a way where she could still work [in the hospital].” Now, the Maryanne Amacher Archive exists in a storage facility. But Robert, Bill and their colleagues are in the process of finding a more public home for the materials. At Sonic Acts, Robert and Bill presented their process, playing tapes from the Archive at the Stedelijk Museum during the opening, and displaying recovered documents from Amacher’s career in a talk on Saturday. It marks an important step towards their goal of making Amacher’s compositions, many of which have never been released, accessible to audiences today. Born in Pennsylvania in 1938, Maryanne Amacher was best known for her work with ‘otoacoustic emissions’, sounds created inside the listener’s ear. When played at a high enough volume, Amacher’s compositions generate sympathetic reactions within the ear: repetitive pitches and ‘beats’ that seem to come from inside the listener’s own head. The effects are highly personal and site-specific. “Some of these effects are variable between people,” Robert says, explaining that how a person hears otoacoustic phenomena can depend on their position in a room, or on hormone levels in their body. “It’s those types of variabilities that are essential to experiencing the work,” he says. Since Amacher’s music was so dependent on individual people and spaces, her recordings present a fresh, ecological approach towards the concept of the listener. Her work was never about the sounds she recorded, but rather about the relationship between those sounds and a listener’s body – a creation of a ‘guided’ listening process. The site-specific nature of Amacher’s recordings is one reason why her music isn’t often performed publicly. For Robert and Bill, it can be difficult to marry the Archive’s goal of preserving Amacher’s vision with the desire to see posthumous performances of her work. “There’s a moral responsibility to this,” says Robert. “I would love to see new work, it’s important to see new work, but in terms of her work, we have to keep some kind of linkage to her intention, to what she knew was there.” Bill agrees that capturing Amacher’s intention has been important for those working on the Archive, especially since her music was so site-specific. “This is one of the big questions,” he says. “Does it even make sense to try to recreate any of her older work, in a ‘faithful’ sense? Our conclusion is that maybe it doesn’t maintain the spirit of her work. The approach we used [in one case] was to try to understand as much as we could about her working methodology, and apply that to new spaces. You can’t claim that [our presentations of her work today] are authentic, but it seems somehow more in keeping with her approach.”
Robert The and Bill Dietz presenting the Maryanne Amacher, photo by Pieter Kers
Even though Amacher’s works can never be presented today in the same spaces for which they were originally composed, this search for new spaces reflects her spirit of discovery. “People would say that she would really ‘play the space’,” says Robert. Bill elaborates: “That’s a very literal statement, too. For Maryanne, a given architecture became a kind of analog filtering bank, where sound [could be] transmitted through other media than air. A specific speaker behind a specific wall might create a sound that is diffused or transmitted in a certain way...it might create effects that are hard to achieve otherwise.” The Maryanne Amacher Archive is not only valuable for preserving the work of an important musical figure. In its application of Amacher’s methods to look for new ‘spaces to play’, it also creates a dialogue between the past and the present. By tackling difficult issues of authenticity and speculating how Amacher might have ‘played spaces’ today, the Archive shows that her experiments are still relevant in 2016, keeping Amacher’s own compositional spirit alive in the process.

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