Maryanne Amacher; wove volumes of sound into music
NEW YORK - Maryanne Amacher, an influential composer whose experimental sound installations and multimedia works sometimes required full buildings to present their powerful melding of electronic timbres and live, natural ambience, died Oct. 22 in Rhinebeck, N.Y. She was 71.
Ms. Amacher was drawn to extremes: some scores - for example, the music she composed for the choreographer Merce Cunningham’s “Torse’’ (1976) - could be so soft as to be nearly inaudible at times. But more typically, she reveled in powerful, high-volume sensory assaults.
“With three tape recorders and a huge set of speakers spread out around a darkened room,’’ Peter Watrous wrote in The New York Times after a performance at the Kitchen in 1988, “she used immense volume to make sound feel liquid, all-enveloping, as if it were pouring into ears, between fingers, and through hair. Ms. Amacher layered her noises - buzzing tones wrapped in sandstorm textures, rumblings like faraway thunderstorms late at night, an idling motorcycle, jets swooping by - into an apocalyptic, terrifying landscape.’’
Many of Ms. Amacher’s most notable works are known only by reputation. They were site-specific installations that would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to re-create, though several were staged in different locations.
In Ms. Amacher’s “City-Links’’ series, which she began in 1967 and returned to periodically through the 1990s to create 22 installations, sounds from different locations within a city or cities were transmitted via telephone lines and mixed together.
In “City-Links 15,’’ Ms. Amacher combined sound from New York, Boston, and Paris for a live broadcast carried by WBAI-FM in New York and Radio France Musique in Paris.
Ms. Amacher, who left no surviving relatives, taught electronic music at Bard College, beginning in 2000. She was also an important influence for a generation of composers who combined rock instrumentation and avant-garde sensibilities, among them Rhys Chatham and Thurston Moore.