Maryanne Amacher: In the Immediate Space of the Body
Maryanne Amacher. Photo: Arthur Jafa.
Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection
75001 Paris, France
Over two nights at Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Collection, Blank Forms presents two artists whose work takes orthogonal approaches to notation. Using the archival notes and sketches of Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009), several of the artist’s longtime collaborators reconstruct GLIA and Petra, two pieces from her oeuvre which are notable exceptions to Amacher’s ethos of ephemerality; the majority of her work has too many undocumented but temporally and spatially specific parameters to be restaged posthumously. Meanwhile, Diamanda Galás, Amacher’s friend and fellow traveler through the extremities of the music world, performs De-formation: Piano Variations, a solo work about the plight of gueules cassées, disfigured WWI veterans referred to in the French as “broken faces.” Galás improvised De-formation in 2019; in 2023, she transcribed it with the help of Thomas Feng, making the piece reproducible for the first time.
Thursday, March 27: Maryanne Amacher’s GLIA
8pm doors, 8:30–9:30 performance
In 2005, Maryanne Amacher composed GLIA, a work for seven instruments and electronics, for the Berlin-based Ensemble Zwischentöne. At the first and only performance of GLIA during Amacher’s lifetime, she staged the performers on a pyramid structure, with loudspeakers installed in idiosyncratic positions throughout the space, including behind a wall. Imagining the listener as an interface between the electronic and acoustic elements of the work, she named the piece GLIA, after the abundant brain cells which assist in neurotransmission between synapses.
Amacher was famously exacting about activating her site-specific sound installations, and GLIA remains one of the few pieces with sufficient notation to be reinterpreted after her death. In 2012, Amacher’s previous collaborator Bill Dietz reconstructed GLIA for a series of performances across Europe. This March, continuing to build on GLIA’s long-evolving lineage, Dietz will provide artistic direction, electronics, and conducting for a new performance in Paris.
GLIA will be performed with members of GLIA’s original Ensemble Zwischentöne (Dorothee Sporbeck on flute, Volker Schindel and Helles Weber on accordion); the Ensemble Contrechamps (Susanne Peters on flute, Maximilian Haft and Akiko Ahrendt on violin); and Lucy Railton on cello.
Friday, March 28: Diamanda Galás’s De-formation and Maryanne Amacher’s Petra
8:30pm doors, 9–10pm performances
De-formation: Piano Variations is a work for solo piano. Composed and recorded by Diamanda Galás on September 2019, the piece is based on the expressionist poem “Das Fieberspital” (“The Fever Hospital”), a gruesome depiction of warehoused yellow fever patients, written by German poet Georg Heym in 1912, which Galás also set to music on her 2022 album Broken Gargoyles (Intravenal Sound Operations, 2022). De-formation is set in the years immediately thereafter. It depicts the march and delivery of infected WWI soldiers to hospitals, industrial warehouses, and hidden spaces throughout Germany, where they will soon endure medical abuse. During and after WWI, medical professionals often treated the lives of injured patients as forfeit, performing experimental operations on maimed soldiers and confining the infected to woefully inadequate institutions in order to protect the patriotism, health, and mental vitality of the uninfected citizens of the State.
Amacher’s 1991 piece Petra was originally commissioned for the ICSM World Music Days in Boswil, Switzerland at the behest of Marianne Schroeder, who performed the piece with Amacher. Written for two pianos, Petra is an exceptional work in her otherwise multimedia oeuvre, a direct extension of her working methodologies for electronic compositions taken into an acoustic realm that alludes to the music of Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustvolskaya. The piece is based on both Amacher’s impressions of the church at Boswil and science-fiction writer Greg Bear’s short story of the same name, in which gargoyles come to life and breed with humans in a post-apocalyptic Notre Dame. Like much of Amacher’s work, a performance of Petra is not as straightforward as it might appear. There is no definitive score, but rather a series of fragments and working notes left to be deciphered by the interpreters. Schroeder will be joined by Stefan Tcherepnin, who has worked on arrangements and interpretations of the composition with her for the last decade.
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 this nascent genre. Often considered to be 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.
The “Black Witch” to Amacher’s “White Witch,” Diamanda Galás has spent much of her musical career interrogating the grotesqueries of death and suffering. Educated as a classical pianist, Galás spent her twenties immersing herself in jazz, working with David Murray and Butch Morris, then avant-garde composition, with Vinko Globokar and Iannis Xenakis. In the 1980s, she garnered mainstream recognition—and controversy—for her album The Divine Punishment (Mute, 1986), which reformulates Old Testament texts to subvert the decade’s conservative rhetoric condemning AIDS patients for living in sin. On successive albums, Galás continued to work in and against religious musical traditions; Saint of the Pit (Mute, 1986) emulates the improvised, call-and-response form of Greek Maniot mourning songs, while You Must Be Certain of the Devil (Mute, 1988) draws on gospel music of the American South. Her most recent album is Broken Gargoyles (Intravenal Sound Operations, 2022).