Maryanne
Amacher

What is most striking about archives in general, and the DAAD archival material on the American composer and installation artist Maryanne Amacher in particular, is that there is never just one narrative. Gaps, idiosyncracies, lost and duplicate documents, private notes, false dates, and contradictory accounts generate plural stories and possibilities. They produce archive fictions of the in-between, which resonate with the simultaneity and connecting logic of Amacher’s practice. Therefore, they do not falsify the account of her visit to Berlin, but bring her body in its lived complexity, to the body of her work.

Amacher was a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin fellow between January 1986 and April 1987. In this time, she pursued her technology-enabled work of sonically linking or networking different spaces and rooms, performing sound’s simultaneity, breaching walls and geographical separations, to create what some called “spatial sound sculptures” that transform a listeners’ sense of position and duration and produce what she called “long distance music,” which foregrounds what is barely audible and brings distance into proximity. Of her major works that preceded her stay in Berlin, City Links (1967-1980), Music for Sound-Joined Rooms, and the Mini Sound Series, the latter two found new renditions in a mini sound series at daadgalerie called The Music Rooms, which concluded her residency. These works do not foreground a musical engagement as such, but enable listening to sound as it creates new dimensionalities. They can be heard as a step towards another project she worked on during her stay but that was never fully realized, Intelligent Life, a simulcast composition for TV and Radio.

Her invitation was part of an ongoing relationship with the DAAD dating back to at least 1980, when her 1976 work Lecture on the Weather, collaboratively composed with John Cage, was performed in Berlin, albeit in her absence. Numerous letters in support of and to the artist testify to the intrigue of Amacher’s work, commenting on its sensuality but also its power and her forcefulness in working with tones beyond a normative reach. These exchanges also reveal speculations about why such an exciting and prolific composer who had collaborated with many of the great male artists still enjoyed less recognition, citing the difficulty to classify her work, and the demand with which it transforms and disturbs our local environment.

The connection with the DAAD was maintained beyond her residency, and Amacher was invited back for a shorter visit in 2006, during which, among other things, she realized an exhibition at singuhr gallery, Gravity, Music for Sound Joined Rooms Series. Her influence on and importance for the German music/sound art world is further demonstrated in the posthumous exhibition with workshops and research sessions, Intelligent Life, which brought together elements of this never fully realized project. It was staged at daadgalerie, and framed her work as radical “artistic research” long before that term was established.

The press release to Intelligent Life calls her an “artist’s artist,” which reads as a positive and stands in acknowledgement of the interest of her peers in her compositional processes and the research aspects of her work. But it also describes the challenges of Amacher’s oeuvre for a contemporary audience who could not quite grasp the work’s complex, relational demands and the indivisible spatiality that it makes audible

Spaces distant from each other.
Together in time. Like music.
Here there is no boundary to the outside.
No wall to the outside. To receiving.
But the wall might be with us. Inside.

(poem as her means to describe her own work in “A sound ambience from inner space” Thomas Willis, Chicago Tribune: Friday May 10 ,1974)

Text: Salomé Voegelin