The Music and Recorded Sound Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts acquired the innovative composer and sound artist Maryanne Amacher’s archive in 2020. Now, we‘ve partnered with Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz, editors of Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (Blank Forms Editions, 2020) to present Remote Links: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Maryanne Amacher. This series of short videos, posted on our YouTube Channel, will explore Amacher’s work through conversations as a shared engagement across social time and distance. Although I wish these conversations could have happened on stage in our Bruno Walter Auditorium, in a way, I think these videos speak more to the spirit of Amacher’s work. 

Amy Cimini & Bill Dietz offer the following introduction to the series:

In a short text from the early 1970s, “Long Distance Music,” Maryanne Amacher sketches the conceptual framework out of which her renowned, telematic City-Links series (1967-1981) is imagined. She writes, “Long distance music is developing occasions where boundaries of ONE-PLACE situations can begin to vanish. Some involve electronic links; some do not.” Amacher’s text not only considers the generative possibilities of a music in which participants no longer share and occupy the same physical space, the text also considers the political problematics of what she calls “ONE-PLACE situations.” Amacher continues: “The music we make is confining us to boundaries of ONE-PLACE situations ALL THE TIME. Receptive to our own structures ONLY as we are making them. Becoming more alive to each other — open to receiving and sharing outside our immediate structure — we no longer sit down to play with the same listening habits. We must STOP. Extend our listening out of customary circumstances. OUTSIDE OUR OWN STRUCTURES. Producing change in us and in the Music we are making. The experience of being in more than 1 place at 1 time. Ear is the channel. It activates.” In an effort to conceive of celebrating Amacher in a framework that gestures to the complexity of her work and thought, and in light of the current pandemic-driven limitations on convening, “Remote Links” offers a series of short videos that underscore the creative possibilities of remote participation. We’ll be posting new episodes on our YouTube page periodically, featuring guest artists and theorists reading from the Selected Writings and responding to the book from their perspectives.

Featured guests include Arthur Jafa, Suzanne Kite, Darla Migan, Matana Roberts, Marina Rosenfeld, and more to be announced in the coming weeks.

Amy Cimini reads a selection from "Long Distance Music" on pages 83-85 of Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (Blank Forms Editions, edited by Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz, 2021)  

Bill Dietz reads a selection from the "Interview with Jeffrey Bartone" on page 221 of (Blank Forms Editions, edited by Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz, 2021).

Amy Cimini is Assistant Professor of music at UC San Diego in the Integrative Studies Area. Her research, teaching and performance engage 20th century philosophy and political thought with an emphasis on embodiment and ethics in experimental practice. She is also a violist who has recorded and toured extensively with experimental music ensembles and as a solo artist. Her monograph, Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.  

Bill Dietz is a composer and writer. His artistic and theoretical work on the genealogy of the concert and the performance of listening has brought him to festivals such as MaerzMusik and the Donaueschingen Festival, museums such as the Brooklyn Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, and Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, and into publications such as Performance Research, boundary 2, and MusikTexte. Since 2012, he has been co-chair of Music/Sound in Bard College’s MFA program. 

Remote Links 02: Matana Roberts reads and discusses a selection from the "Letter to Wies Smals and Josine van Droffelaar"

Introduced by Amy Cimini & Bill Dietz, Matana Roberts reads a selection from the "Letter to Wies Smals and Josine van Droffelaar" as quoted in the "Introduction" on page 3 of Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (Blank Forms Editions, edited by Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz, 2021).

Matana Roberts is an internationally renowned composer, band leader, saxophonist, sound experimentalist, and mixed-media practitioner. Roberts works in many contexts and mediums, including improvisation, dance, poetry, and theater. She made two records as a core member of the Sticks And Stones trio in the early 2000s and has gone on to release a diverse body of solo and ensemble work under her own name on Constellation and Central Control over the past decade. She is perhaps best known for her acclaimed Coin Coin project, a multi-chapter work of “panoramic sound quilting” that aims to expose the mystical roots and channel the intuitive spirit-raising traditions of American creative expression while maintaining a deep and substantive engagement with narrativity, history, community and political expression within improvisatory musical structures. Constellation began documenting the Coin Coin project in 2011 and has released the first three of a projected twelve album-length chapters to date, with a fourth chapter arriving this October.

Amy Cimini is a musicologist, violist and Assistant Professor of Music at UC San Diego. Her first book, Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life, is forthcoming in Spring 2021 with Oxford University Press.

Bill Dietz is a composer, writer and co-chair of Music/ Sound in the Bard MFA program.

Remote Links 03: Suzanne Kite reads and discusses the two "Notes on musics for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company"

Introduced by Amy Cimini & Bill Dietz, Suzanne Kite reads the two "Notes on musics for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company" on pages 181 & 183 of Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (Blank Forms Editions, edited by Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz, 2021).

Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California. Kite’s scholarship and practice highlights contemporary Lakota epistemologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance. She is a PhD candidate at Concordia University and holds a BFA from CalArts in music composition as well as an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School. She has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fibre sculptures, immersive video and sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Her essay “Making Kin with Machines,” co-authored with Jason Lewis, Noelani Arista and Archer Pechawisc appears in the The Journal of Design and Science and won the journal’s “Resisting Reduction” essay competition in 2018. Currently, she is a 2019 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, a 2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow, and a 2020 Women at Sundance x Adobe Fellow.

Amy Cimini is a musicologist, violist and Assistant Professor of Music at UC San Diego. Her first book, Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life, is forthcoming in Spring 2021 with Oxford University Press.

Bill Dietz is a composer, writer and co-chair of Music/ Sound in the Bard MFA program.

Remote Links 04: Marina Rosenfeld reads and discusses "Dynamic Range: 'The Head Stretch'"

Introduced by Amy Cimini & Bill Dietz, Marina Rosenfeld reads "Dynamic Range: 'The Head Stretch'" on pages 265-266 of Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (Blank Forms Editions, edited by Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz, 2021).

Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her works explore acoustic architectures and experimental forms of participation and sociality in sound installation, music performance and, more recently, sculpture and image-making, with attention to perception and the (female) body. In the late nineties she began a lifelong practice of creating original dub plates, developing an improvisational practice as a turntablist with a distinctive palette of sounds drawn from her studio practice. From 2008, she turned her attention increasingly to the staging and diffusion of the voice within dynamic systems of amplification. Rosenfeld’s work has been presented by the Park Avenue Armory, the Museum of Modern Art, the Kitchen, the Whitney and Guggenheim museums, the Fondacion Serralves, and festivals and biennials throughout Europe, the US, Canada and Australia. She has mounted solo exhibitions in recent years at Portikus Frankfurt, the Artist’s Institute in New York and, in May 2021, at Kunsthaus Basel. Her most recent project, the multi-part Deathstar, was recently released in 2020 on Shelter Press. Rosenfeld teaches in the MFA programs of Bard College and Brooklyn College, and is currently a research artist with Experiments in Art and Technology at Bell Labs Nokia.

Remote Links 05: Arthur Jafa reads and discusses selections from "—even monsters need sleep" and the "Letter to parents"

Introduced by Amy Cimini & Bill Dietz, Arthur Jafa reads selections from "—even monsters need sleep" and the "Letter to parents" on pages 392-393 and 21-22 (respectively) of Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (Blank Forms Editions, edited by Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz, 2021).

Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi) is an artist, filmmaker, and cinematographer. Across three decades, Jafa has developed a dynamic practice comprising films, artefacts, and happenings that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of Black being. Underscoring the many facets of Jafa’s practice is a recurring question: how can visual media, such as objects, static and moving images, transmit the equivalent "power, beauty and alienation" embedded within forms of Black music in US culture?

Jafa’s films have garnered acclaim at the Los Angeles, New York and Black Star Film Festivals and his artwork is represented in celebrated collections worldwide including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Tate, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The High Museum Atlanta, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Stedelijk, Luma Foundation, The Perez Art Museum Miami, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. Jafa has recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions of his work at the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives; Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Louisiana Museum of Art, Denmark. In 2019, he received the Golden Lion for the Best Participant of the 58th Venice Biennale “May You Live in Interesting Times.”

Remote Links 06: Darla Migan reads and discusses an "Untitled note"