Maryanne Amacher, "City-Links"
Maryanne Amacher, "City-Links"
Maryanne Amacher, "City-Links"
City-Links #1 (Buffalo)
1967, WBFO FM Buffalo
The sound atmosphere of 8 different locations (indoor and outdoor) in the buffalo area were
transmitted live to the studio of WBFO FM in Buffalo and mixed by Amacher in a 28 hour
broadcast performance. Open telephone lines, called "15kc telephone links" (1), transmitted the
live sound from the microphones installed at Bethlehem Stell, a stone tower (at Niagara
Mowhawk Power Company), the airport, Pillsbury Four Machines, main street, surrounding area
of the old Erie canal, exhaust pumps (Central Gas Plant) and in the old grain mills area.
"City-Links is a piece in which sounding resources of 2 or more remote locations (cities, or
locations within a city) are fed back to each other to allow for interaction between men and
sound at distant locations. It is included with other long distance music in 'Life Time and its
Music'." (Maryanne Amacher)
Portrait of Buffalo Planned by Ch. 17
"Portrait of the City, a special half-hour telecast combining modern environmental music
with the tempo and flavor of life in Buffalo and the Niagara Frontier, is planned this fall on
educational station WNED-TV.[] The experimental program will include the sights and
sounds of downtown redevelopment, the rhythms of industry, Thruway interchange,
Buffalo Airport and modern family life. Realistic and impressionistic motion pictures and
still photographs taken by Ch. 17's Bob Lehman will be reflected in the contemporary
electronic music of pianist-composer Maryanne Amacher, a creative associate of State
University of Buffalo."
(J. Don Schlaerth, newspaper clipping from the archive of Maryanne Amacher, source
unknown)
Note (1): kc = kilocycles, an old term for Kilohertz. Telephone lines with a bandwidth of 15 KHz
transmit sound in FM radio quality.
Hearing synchronicity 'live' as it is: at same moment, birds suddenly begin to sing at one
location, music begins at another. Hearing simultaneously spaces distant from each other,
experiencing over time, more than one space at same time, coincidental rhythms, patterns of
synchronicity, emerge. Awareness suddenly altered by over-view perception recognizing
beyond the boundary of my walls, room, immediate sound I hear from the street outside my
window." (Maryanne Amacher)
A new link from the Pier 6 Microphone was made in May 1976, transmitting Amacher's live
Boston harbor sound installation to loudspeakers at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
From the studies during listening to the telelink from Boston Harbor, "Tone and Place (Work 1)",
Maryanne Amacher constructed the breeze recordings for "Lectures on the Weather", a
collaborative work with John Cage, commissioned for the American Bicentennial by the CBC
Radio and first presented in Toronto, February 1976.
Other works involving recordings from "Tone and Place (Work 1)" studies are:
"City-Links #7 (Everything-In-Air)", Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago 1974
"City-Links #10 (Everything-In-Air)", Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota 1974
"City-Links #13 (Incoming Night, Blum at Pier 6)"
"Labyrith Gives Way to Skin", Merce Cunningham and Dance Company, Roundabout Theatre,
New York 1975
"Remainder", commissioned by the Cunningham Dance Foundation as repertoire music for
"Torse", a new work by Merce Cunningham. Maryanne Amacher gave first performances with
the Company at the MacCarter Theatre, Princeton, New Jersey 1976 and the Theatro Nacional,
Caracas, Venezuela 1976.
Amacher linked her studio mixing facilities to a loudspeaker installation in the exhibition space,
with an open stereo 15kc Bell channel.
Amacher sent the sounding space of a Boston harbor location to the Hayden Gallery installation
the day by day changing acoustic atmosphere (received live in her studio, from a microphone
overlooking the ocean at Pier 6) and performance "interventions", (modifications in The Harbor
Sound Environment,) produced through mixing techniques, processing, synthesis, and additional
new combinations of tone structures. The performance actions were made freely in the course of
each day in the studio, while Amacher lived with the live Harbor sounding space, listening and
responding to its changing patterns.
City-Links #7 (Everything-In-Air)
May 11, 1974, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Incoming night sound from two outdoor sounding environments in Chicago was received and
mixed during the performance with pre-composed sound selected from Amacher's collection
"Life Time and its Music" (2). Incoming sound was received live as occurring from microphones
at Navy Pier, and on a South Elm Street roof two locations selected for the "City-Links,
Chicago" installation at the Museum.
"Maryanne Amacher specializes in hearing spaces. One of America's most interesting
avant-garde figures, she creates sound environments with the aid of multichannel
electronics.[] Anyone who deals with basics as she does tends to speak and write
poems. Her description of 'Everything in Air' is indicative: 'An ambience. Apparent by
sound. Exploring familiar acknowledgments of boundary and illusion. Activating certain
mental possibilities.'"
("Variety: A Sound Ambience from Inner Space", Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1974)
Note (2): A similar collection like the "Life Time and its Music" collection was "Red Seasons for
You" (1966): "Red Seasons for You" is a tape collection making available 11 hours of music for
home or public use. In idea, the collection is modeled of future subscriber oriented storageretrieval possibilities - direct transmission of music from the maker's studio, home, museum via
remote circuitry. The collection is composed to be played in full as a single composition, "Red
Seasons of You", and to serve as an available source for a number of differing pieces, when
only segments of it are selected and played. Music lasting only eight minutes, may be selected
and played as an individual piece, depending on the user's needs and interests at the time. He
might want to give the music he has found to a friend for example, (like a post card) and
especially name what he has selected, e.g., "Sun", "Snow", "Fire", "Moon", etc. with other
additional greetings. A time/material score accompanies the collection indicating possible
selective and combining possibilities for isolating individual pieces. The collection gives the user
the opportunity to make a number of individual selections, and later, after some time, to return
again to the full collection for others as his needs (home, friends, concert hall, theatre,
broadcast, etc.) and interest change.
City-Links #8 (Chicago)
May 11, 1974, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Three outdoor sounding environments in Chicago were transmitted live to a loudspeaker
installation in the gallery space. Amacher installed microphones in open windows at Navy Pier
and the Exchange National Bank Building (La Salle & Adams St.) and on a roof overlooking the
South Elm Street neighborhood. Open 15kc telephone links transmitted the sounding
environments live to the Museum. Recorded video images of these locations were part of the
installation.
"On Sunday afternoon I will receive, mix and alter 'live' sound during performance, occasionally
relating what is sounding in the three spaces to other patterns of frequency and movement, from
previously recorded music and altered environmental sound interrupting the incoming sound
with music and other environmental spaces, by the resonance of a tower, for example, recorded
first in 1968 and later transformed for special characteristics internal to those of other indoor and
outdoor spaces.
City-Links uses electronic means to connect 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." (Maryanne Amacher)
Environmental art: Electronic portrait of our city:
"Environmental artist Maryanne Amacher electronically will bug Navy Pier, the corner of
South LaSalle and west Adams Streets in front of the Exchange National Bank, and the
top of an Elm Street apartment building to paint electronically her portrait of Chicago's
soundenvironment.[]Some of the prerecorded sounds were originated in a studio, but
many were selected from other indoor and outdoor environments. One sample of
harmonic resonances will be from an original instrument, the Tocha, designed by Mike
Guran. Tocha is a Hopi word for humming bird.
'Since 1965, I have explored sound and the environment in terms of acoustical and
architectural space,aswellasthedirectuseofenvironmentalsound.' she said. 'My
hope is that the split which now exists between these two worlds that of musical
language and of environmental sound one day will be closed.'"
(Chicago Style - Chicago today, May 10, 1974, p. 37)
Maryanne makes music from sounds of Chicago
"Ms. Amacher wants her interdisciplinary work to accelerate the arrival of what she calls
'long-distance music'. The technology already exists she explains, to have a musical piece
performed via satellite, with half the participants Chicago and the other side of the world.
She is heading not only for musical and resulting sociological mix, but also to focus on
what she describes as the 'flow of life.' Ms. AMacher has a mental picture of Mozart and
Beethoven composing to the sounds of horses trotting or galloping outside their windows.
Astutely, and by no means humourlessly, she points out that our ears no longer pick up
the rhythms of clicking hoofs. 'Our world is based on entirely different rhythms,' she says.
The sounds of the late 20th Century are more fluid. Sure, you may say garbage cans with
the regularity of a thoroughbred's gait. But who needs to listen to horns hinking, brakes
screeching and the metal of trash cans? Nobody. Ms. Amacher's microphones are placed
at spots where the sounds are 'beautiful or accustically special.' Ms. Amacher has
discovered, for instance, that birds announce the arrival of a plane about two minutes
before the human er picks up, the smooth, distant rumble of engines. That may not be
what we all call music. But neither is it what you went to all that time and expense putting
up the soundproofing to keep out."
(Karen Monson, newspaper clipping from the archive of Maryanne Amacher, source
unknown)
musicians were "on location" with tuba and banjo at the East River Flats, a site on the
Mississippi, and in the area of St. Anthony's Elevator #3 in the General Mills silo landscape.
During the performance the sound environments and instrumental sounds (colored by these
atmospheres) were transmitted live to Amacher's mixing facilities at the Walker Auditorium via
15kc telephone links, and mixed with additional music to become part of the sound work created.
The installation links spaces distant from each other. Together in time. No Walls. Thought. No
obstacles or distant exist for it. An imaginary room within the mind. Who can tell what is the
illusion. Within the room past the wall. Two spaces adjoined. Within the room, past the wall. The
space between the wall the diagonal. Looking there I found Man Ray saying something about
this place. Looking there I found Man Ray saying something about this place. He is a man who
knows places and spaces like I know sound. Miles don't count when you find him." (Maryanne
Amacher)
Mouton. The vegetation of the area includes old palms, Palmenito and Royal palms and a grove
with water oaks. "Fundamental or resonant tone in the air of the Gulf site is a frequency between
74 and 76 hz." (Maryanne Amacher)
"The work has been in observing the site acoustically and interpreting some characteristics of
the acoustic space. Observing levels of movement in the tone within the breeze, that autoperception is not easily accustomed to receive, manipulate, or act with; detecting subjectively,
degrees of movement within the tone which find correspondence to movements within self." (Art
Transitions, exh. cat. CAVS, MIT Cambrigde, MA 1975)
provided a unique setting for the music. Instead of room acoustics, Amacher staged musician
and trombone in the humid, late night, water atmosphere of the harbor. Lewis' instrumental
sounds in this specialized situation, and the acoustic atmosphere of the harbor, were mixed with
Cage's private adding of texts at Amacher's studio.