CTM Festival 2023: Maryanne Amacher – „GLIA“
Performance by Contrechamps and members of Ensemble Zwischentöne
Concert Festival
© Peggy Weil
© Dimitri Djuric
Ticket Prices
21 Euro, discount 15 Euro
Tickets are sold via the CTM Festival ticketing platform.
During the concert there are parts with very loud music.
We continuously adapt our hygiene concept to current developments and changing regulations. Please inform yourself about the applicable hygiene measures before your visit.
Ticket Prices
21 Euro, discount 15 Euro
Tickets are sold via the CTM Festival ticketing platform.
During the concert there are moments with very loud music.
We continuously adapt our hygiene concept to current developments and changing regulations. Please inform yourself about the applicable hygiene measures before your visit.
Unequivocally one of the most magnificent musical mavericks of the 20th century, the late Maryanne Amacher was a composer of large-scale, fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of sound perception, spatialisation, and aural architecture.
After studying with Karlheinz Stockhausene, Amacher took off on her own psychoacoustic flight, developing a body of unique methodologies and concepts that underpinned her life-long research into the experience of sound in particular spaces, ways of hearing, and the creative potentialities of how the ear itself processes sounds. One such approach was the exploration of "ear tone" music via creative use of both spontaneous and evoked otoacoustic emissions – sounds produced within the cochlea. Along her visionary path, she would collaborate with artists such as John Cage, George E. Lewis, Merce Cunningham, and Thurston Moore.
Amacher’s practise rigorously opposed the idea of fixed-form electro-acoustic composition in favour of an ethos of experiential investigation, such that most of her works are near-impossible to recreate. This applies also to "GLIA," a work for seven or eight instruments and electronics commissioned in 2006 for the Berlin-based Ensemble Zwischentöne. In this work, Amacher was interested in the glial cells of the brain, which assist in neurotransmission between synapses. For the new work, Amacher imagined the listener as a sort of glial interface between the electronic and acoustic instrumental elements of the work. More specifically, she imagined the otoacoustic emissions created in the ears of the listener (the "ear tones") as this neural interface.
The work was performed a single time in Berlin, directed and overseen by Amacher together with the then director of Ensemble Zwischentöne Peter Ablinger and Bill Dietz (its current director). When Amacher returned home to Kingston, New York, taking with her all of the performance material for the work, there was a vague plan of continuing the collaboration, but no thought that the 2006 iteration would ever be repeated. In 2009, Ensemble Zwischentöne invited Amacher to return to Berlin to continue developing "GLIA," however she tragically passed away shortly before this could happen. Since then, Bill Dietz has conducted intensive research into reconstructing "GLIA" for future performance, resulting in re-premieres at Hamburger Bahnhof, ZKM, ICA London, and Radio Suisse Romande. The performance of "GLIA" at CTM forms part of the continuing collective interpretive re-presentation of Amacher’s practice.
More information: http://www.ctm-festival.de
Cast
With members of
Ensemble Contrechamps
Ensemble Zwischentöne
Flute
Susanne Peters
Dorothee Sporbeck
Violin
Maximilian Haft
Akiko Ahrendt
Cello
Lucy Railton
Accordion
Volker Schindel
Helles Weber
Artistic Direction, Electronics and Conducting
Bill Dietz
Biographien
The internationally renowned American composer, performer, and multi-media installation artist Maryanne Amacher – who died in 2009 – was a 20th century maverick of music and sound, working extensively to develop her »ear tone music, with the physiological phenomenon called otoacoustic emission – in which the ears themselves act as aurally active generating devices.
The American, Florence-based composer, writer, and co-chair of the Bard MFA Sound Department, Bill Dietz, centers his artistic and theoretical work on reception – its histories, forms, and performance.
Contrechamps isThe Swiss ensemble of soloists specialises in the creation, development, and dissemination of 20th and 21st century instrumental music.
Sound and music open portals to other realities and to the experiences of others. As such they transport us to real, speculative, and imaginary worlds, which in turn always point back to the realities of their creators. These wormholes allow us to engage with utopian longings, the complex stories of social and artistic movements, alternative histories, collective identities, or deeply personal experiences. Yet in thinking about music as portals and practices of worldbuilding, one must inevitably also deal with questions of access and exclusion. CTM 2023 uses the metaphor of Portals as curatorial shapes through which the festival attempts to make contact with specific modes of experience, histories, communities, and speculative futures, as well as to reflect on the fundamental functions, preconditions, thresholds, and ethics of sound and music as gateways to other realities.
Credits
Funded by Musikfonds and the Federal Government Commissioner of Culture and the Media.
CTM Festival is supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
Media partners: taz. die tageszeitung, tip Berlin, ExBerliner and Rausgegangen.
Unequivocally one of the most magnificent musical mavericks of the 20th century, the late Maryanne Amacher was a composer of large-scale, fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of sound perception, spatialisation, and aural architecture.
After studying with Karlheinz Stockhausene, Amacher took off on her own psychoacoustic flight, developing a body of unique methodologies and concepts that underpinned her life-long research into the experience of sound in particular spaces, ways of hearing, and the creative potentialities of how the ear itself processes sounds. One such approach was the exploration of "ear tone" music via creative use of both spontaneous and evoked otoacoustic emissions – sounds produced within the cochlea. Along her visionary path, she would collaborate with artists such as John Cage, George E. Lewis, Merce Cunningham, and Thurston Moore.
Amacher’s practise rigorously opposed the idea of fixed-form electro-acoustic composition in favour of an ethos of experiential investigation, such that most of her works are near-impossible to recreate. This applies also to "GLIA," a work for seven or eight instruments and electronics commissioned in 2006 for the Berlin-based Ensemble Zwischentöne. In this work, Amacher was interested in the glial cells of the brain, which assist in neurotransmission between synapses. For the new work, Amacher imagined the listener as a sort of glial interface between the electronic and acoustic instrumental elements of the work. More specifically, she imagined the otoacoustic emissions created in the ears of the listener (the "ear tones") as this neural interface.
The work was performed a single time in Berlin, directed and overseen by Amacher together with the then director of Ensemble Zwischentöne Peter Ablinger and Bill Dietz (its current director). When Amacher returned home to Kingston, New York, taking with her all of the performance material for the work, there was a vague plan of continuing the collaboration, but no thought that the 2006 iteration would ever be repeated. In 2009, Ensemble Zwischentöne invited Amacher to return to Berlin to continue developing "GLIA," however she tragically passed away shortly before this could happen. Since then, Bill Dietz has conducted intensive research into reconstructing "GLIA" for future performance, resulting in re-premieres at Hamburger Bahnhof, ZKM, ICA London, and Radio Suisse Romande. The performance of "GLIA" at CTM forms part of the continuing collective interpretive re-presentation of Amacher’s practice.
More information: http://www.ctm-festival.de
Cast
With members of
Ensemble Contrechamps
Ensemble Zwischentöne
Flute
Susanne Peters
Dorothee Sporbeck
Violin
Maximilian Haft
Akiko Ahrendt
Cello
Lucy Railton
Accordion
Volker Schindel
Helles Weber
Artistic Direction, Electronics and Conducting
Bill Dietz
Biographies
The internationally renowned American composer, performer, and multi-media installation artist Maryanne Amacher – who died in 2009 – was a 20th century maverick of music and sound, working extensively to develop her »ear tone music, with the physiological phenomenon called otoacoustic emission – in which the ears themselves act as aurally active generating devices.
The American, Florence-based composer, writer, and co-chair of the Bard MFA Sound Department, Bill Dietz, centers his artistic and theoretical work on reception – its histories, forms, and performance.
Contrechamps isThe Swiss ensemble of soloists specialises in the creation, development, and dissemination of 20th and 21st century instrumental music.
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