Maryanne Amacher

I’m putting the finishing touches on a chapter I’m writing with a colleague, for a forthcoming book on performance spaces in music. In contrast to the more prosaic topics of concert-hall architecture or the urban planning of cultural centers, we’ve written about a singular event of the postwar, examining composer Maryanne Amacher’s 28-hour radio broadcast from 1967, titled CITY-LINKS WBFO, Buffalo. It’s a starkly ambitious piece not just in its æsthetics or logistics (technicians from the University as well as Bell Telephone were engaged to wire high-fidelity audio feeds from eight different locations around the city into the mixing board at the studio), but also for the experience Amacher was pursuing for herself. By listening over such a long duration to juxtapositions of environmental sounds, she was trying to hear something inside those sounds, to open up her own perception to something otherwise inaccessible. In her text for the accompanying program guide, she likened it to discovering musical instruments in the wood of surrounding trees, “celebrating” through the act of carving the artistic potential waiting within.

But that’s not what lingers in my mind about this project: rather, in writing about this broadcast I’ve learned a great deal more about Amacher’s practice, and also about her as a person. My own expertise on her life and work is embarrassingly limited—I credit my co-author, musicologist Emma Devillé, for bringing a great deal of recent scholarship to bear on our essay—and her untimely death in 2009 has curtailed the possibility of closing that gap to the perusal of archives and what little scholarly literature is available.

Part of the difficulty is that Amacher’s art is almost impossible to categorize, or even to experience. Her most famous works are massive, building-sized sound installations in which the physical structure of the building itself is set to vibrating: creating much longer sound waves than when traveling through air, the experience of sound carried through concrete and steel becomes a manifest, physical one. The waves of sound become so large that you can feel their contours as a tangible presence, through the walls, the floor, your own body, around corners. Trying to constrain such an experience within the limits of any of modern art discourse’s limited genre categories—“environmental art” or “installation” or “site-specific art” or even “music”—makes all of those categories seem woefully inadequate, revealing the poverty of expressive breadth in the arts of our times. Once you’ve heard one of her works live in all its fullness (an experience I sadly never had) you realize how laughable it is to propose that what’s really needed for her art to be more widely known is to distribute it in neatly packaged CDs or convenient Youtube videos.

Amacher’s refusal to compromise her artistic ambitions, her relentless pursuit of some experience of sound that she could scarcely put into words, came at no small personal and professional cost. Our research for this essay included an interview with William H. Siemering—the manager of WBFO at the time, who went on to found NPR and its flagship programs, a towering figure in his own right—and one of the things he said about her early in our interview struck me as emblematic of Amacher’s relationship to her work:

I don't think she had friends particularly. I don't know if there’s room for friends in her single-minded work in composition.

Bill Dietz, one of her associates who has been a tireless caretaker of her legacy in the years after her death described her, in the same article in which he proposes the concept of the “subjunctive” as key to understanding her art, as “ecstatically, excruciatingly lonely” while also admitting that she would have laughed at such a romanticist characterization. I’m inclined to think Siemering’s description is probably the more accurate one: there was an intensity to her work that left little room for much of a social life, or for missing it.

And yet, she was famously generous, as Dietz also notes and I was able to experience personally. I had the brief pleasure in 2007, on a beautiful summer afternoon that contrasted distressingly sharply with the fraught and chaotic personal circumstances that occasioned my passing through her home town of Kingston, NY, to meet her for lunch and spend some hours with her in her home. I was driving a moving van from my previous home in Buffalo—I was packing up the remnants of a brief and disastrous marriage to take them back to my parents’ house near Washington DC and dump them into storage before leaving the country—and as my route happened to pass near Kingston I had called Bard College to negotiate the visit; and thus we spent a few hours at a nice Italian restaurant for lunch, and then in the one livable room in her house as she played some of her recent work on a wonderfully retro hi-fi set.

I am ashamed to admit that I, in my unmindfulness, did not appreciate any of it to the degree that I should have. She was, in retrospect, excited for the visit—she put on bright red lipstick and matching snowpants—and I was woefully unprepared. Had I known her work better, I should have asked some insightful questions; and I might have learned something of the enormous contributions to the arts that she’d made. I remember thinking at the time that this didn’t address my then-interest in just intonation, and that it was almost painfully loud. Such is the folly of youth.

As I’ve been writing this I’ve also been reading a balm for my frequent struggles as student, musician, and author: an essay by David Bentley Hart, “How to Write English Prose.” He is refreshingly unapologetic about using the English language to the full range of its expressive power, deploring the infantile admonitions of modern style guides to avoid the expressive, the elusive, the evocative, or the extravagant; the numbing monotony of modern prose and all the manifestations of similar tendencies in other arts are, as he puts it, “reflections of an age of bloodless capitalist economism, the reign of brutally common sense, the barbarian triumph of function over form, a spare, Spartan civic architecture of featureless glass and steel and plastic, a consumerist society that lives on the ceaseless production and disposal of intrinsically graceless conveniences.” Maryanne Amacher strikes me as somebody who was unwilling to make space, in her art as well as in her life, for such banality.

In this, I recall an account I read many years ago, the exact details of which now escape me, but which concerned the tendency of certain artists to withdraw into seclusion: not because of any antipathy or revulsion toward the ordinary world, the aloofness of the artiste or the cultivated eccentricity of the auteur, but out of finding themselves overwhelmed with their own art to such a degree that they simply cannot tolerate anything else occupying that space. I believe (though I’m unsure) that the example given in the text was of Ingmar Bergman, who retreated for the last twenty years of his life to an isolated cabin on Swedish Fårö Island in the Baltic Sea. The uncanny alien wildness of the environment, and the deep psychological complexity of his own work, was already too much; there simply wasn’t space for other things.

Maryanne, as Dietz writes, was frequently cast as “difficult” for her own and her work’s inability—or rather, refusal—to accommodate that bloodless capitalist economism: she lived constantly on the edge of privation—when I visited her, she warned me not to enter certain rooms, as they were no longer structurally sound—apparently able to sip only the barest sliver of a living from the world outside; though I suspect it was not entirely due to the outside world’s unwillingness—or rather, inability—to value her work, and at least partly because she simply wasn’t interested in what we, in this later capitalist age, celebrate as “the hustle.”

And so I find myself, as I’m working with my colleague putting the finishing touches on our essay, struggling to come to grips with Maryanne’s life and work, and what lessons I might learn from it now (at least as I affect to see myself) that I know better. It’s all too easy to make her into a heroic figure—one of the newspaper reporters promoting her work in Buffalo compared her, apparently on the basis of her flaxen hair and a French-sounding surname, to Joan of Arc—and to imagine nobility in her poverty and isolation, a sacrifice in the service of ideas and ideals larger than herself. That would be unfair to her: doubtless she would have preferred to have felt more financially secure, and less frustrated in her artistic ambitions by the neglect she faced, and her own disarming humility would have scoffed at it in any case.

Partly, I must also admit, is a temptation to assuage my own vanity: some part of me wants to identify my own financial struggles and professional frustrations with hers, to make her into something mythic so that I can feel myself redeemed by association. If I were to claim a nobler purpose, it would be to decry the ignominious state of the arts in the present age, to attribute the struggles and frustration I feel to something systemic, an affliction of both economic and cultural decline, yet another bitter remnant of the failure of the revolutionary movements of the 60s.

I don’t even really know why her life and work has become so captivating for me. She hardly even made scores after her first concert pieces in the 60s, though what scores she did make (such as Adjacencies for two percussionists, which preceded CITY-LINKS) were mostly graphic. Her interests in music lay at almost the opposite end of music’s production cycle, deeply enmeshed in the sound itself, in the process of listening to things in order to hear inside them and discover something otherwise inexpressible. My own work treats the sound as almost an afterthought: far more concerned with the cognitive operations that produce it than any experience of listening on its own.

If there is any affiliation at all, I think it nevertheless lies in this fascination she had with sound, and how it changes you if you adopt modes of listening outside the conventional. That is, when it becomes a form of listening more in the Cagean sense, hearing the inner reality of sound in a way most music utterly fails to encompass: what remains after you sweep aside all of our conceits of musical expression as a form of rhetoric. My own work with graphic scores is, as noted, a means to enable the production of unanticipated, unknown sounds: though on the other end of the chain of production, it also creates tools enabling the experiencing of things otherwise inexpressible. If I’m able to claim the honor of any affinity with Maryanne Amacher, it is in spending my life chasing after that inexpressible thing, unable to let go of it even though it will always be fundamentally ungraspable. If I claim the pretension of calling myself “artist,” it applies only to the extent that I experience Christoph Menke’s perpetual state of failure: forever unable to grasp the thing because the thing can only exist as unknown: an unnamed, unnamable not-thing.

That unknown, fundamentally unknowable part of music is the wild, untamed part of sound that I think is the true legacy of Cage’s turn to indeterminacy: a future of music for which Maryanne Amacher might have been, in a more enlightened age, the heiress and heroine.1

Months after our meeting, as I was living and working in Stuttgart, I received a package that Maryanne had sent to my parents for them to bring on a visit to help me move in. I had left my sunglasses on a side-table in Maryanne’s living room, and she sent them back with a letter. Writing in red marker, she described how she was preparing a performance of Cage’s Lecture on the Weather for the first time since his death, and how much it had meant to her back then, and how much emotional weight it was for her to be preparing it now on her own. It was the last I heard from her.