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Wild Sound

Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life

Amy Cimini author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:13th Apr '22

Should be back in stock very soon

Wild Sound cover

"We haven't even made it to breakfast!" was a phrase often used by composer Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) to shorthand her critical and partial approach to knowledge production across the vast artistic, technical, and scientific discourses with which she worked. The same could be said about her own musical thought, which encompassed original presentational formats in existing and speculative media and approaches to sound and listening that conjoined real and imagined social worlds. Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life discerns meeting points between frameworks for life that emerged from Amacher's multidisciplinary study of sound and listening: within acoustical spectra, inside human bodies and ears, across cities and edgleands, hypothetical creatures and virtual, fictive or distanciated environments. These figurations guide interpretative study of six signal projects: Adjacencies (1965/1966); City-Links (1967-1988); Additional Tones (1976 / 1988), Music for Sound-Joined Rooms (1980), Mini Sound Series (1985) and Intelligent Life (1980s) and countless sketches, notes and unrealized projects. Author Amy Cimini explores Amacher's working methods with an interpretive style that emphasizes technical study, conceptual juxtaposition, intertextual play, and narrative transport.

Wild Sound can help all of us rethink how to hear and imagine sounds. * Noah Kahrs, Music Theory Online *
Amy Cimini's Wild Sound is the first comprehensive study of the work of Marianne Amacher, whose stature continues to rise in both artistic and musical realms. Through detailed analyses and archival research, Cimini reveals Amacher's prescient engagement with the media frameworks, technoscientific dictates, and biopolitical dynamics that continue to determine our contemporary moment. * Branden W. Joseph, author of Experimentations: John Cage in Music, Art, and Architecture *
Cimini locates in Amacher's world of musical creation a nascent techno-feminist theory of embodiment; this theory is a goad to imagine the world otherwise. Wild Sound will set a new high standard for emerging waves of scholarship at the intersection of late-twentieth-century experimentalism, global political economy, and feminist theories of power. * Brigid Cohen, Associate Professor, New York University *

ISBN: 9780190060893

Dimensions: 165mm x 246mm x 31mm

Weight: 635g

336 pages