Text by CLOT Magazine
Additional Tones: A Tribute to Maryanne Amacher is an homage to the renowned sound artist taking place this weekend at Serralves, the well-known art institution in Portugal.
Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) was an American composer especially known for her large-scale, fixed-duration sound installations and multimedia environments. She studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and went on to collaborate with Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Her work was pioneering and visionary in several fields of musical and artistic creation such as exploring sound spatialization, new media, acoustic ecology, artificial intelligence, and psychoacoustic.
This special event offers an opportunity for sharing and contributing to a greater understanding and well-deserved visibility of this remarkable artist and thinker’s life and work. The program includes the screening of the documentary film Sisters With Transistors, a seminar and listening session dedicated to Amachers’s series of works Music for Sound Joined Rooms and Mini Sound Series led by researchers Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz, the online video series of readings and discussions Remote Links celebrating the book edition of Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews in partnership with New York Public Library, the interpretation of the composition for two pianos Petra by the unprecedented duo of pianists composed by a historical name – Marianne Schroeder – and the young Portuguese musician Joana Gama, and the presentation as another national premiere: Thomas Ankersmit‘s Perceptual Geography for Serge Modular synthesizer, a piece inspired by and dedicated to Amacher.
