Event

Bowerbird, in collaboration with The University of Pennsylvania’s Music Department and the Kislak Center, are pleased to present “Maryanne Amacher: An Introduction” a talk by scholar-artist Bill Dietz on the life and work of Maryanne Amacher (1938 – 2009). Featuring rarely presented archival material, the talk will illuminate Amacher’s unique methodology and studio practice.

Maryanne Amacher’s formative years were spent in Philadelphia. She enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, where her education was funded in part by a prestigious Senatorial Scholarship. As a music major, she studied with composer and theorist Constant Vauclain, George Rochberg and the prominent German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen during his tenure in Philadelphia in 1964 and 1965. Alongside music classes at the University of Pennsylvania, Amacher pursued a rigorous humanities education, which included courses in literature, French language, philosophy, and journalism. Amacher’s undergraduate work in the journalism department coincided with the department’s first courses on television production and criticism (as well as the founding of the Annenberg School for Communication in 1959), and her lifelong interest in creating work for mass-media broadcast on radio and television suggests that these courses shaped her commitment to weaving perceptual experiments into everyday, domestic life.

Admission is free and open to the public (please show photo ID entrance).

About Bill Dietz

Bill Dietz is a composer, writer, & co-chair of the Bard MFA Sound Department. He has lived and worked since 2003 in Berlin. Born in 1983 near in the US/Mexican border in Bisbee, Arizona, he studied composition at the New England Conservatory and Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota. Initially in Berlin as Peter Ablinger’s student and assistant, he went on to work regularly with Catherine Christer Hennix, Christian von Borries, Chris Newman, and, through 2009, with Maryanne Amacher. Since 2007 he is the artistic director of Ensemble Zwischentöne. With Woody Sullender he co-founded and edits Ear / Wave / Event. In 2012 he was appointed co-chair of the Music/Sound Department in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. From 2016 - 2017 he was Professor of Sound at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. 

His work on the genealogy of the concert and the performance of listening has brought him to festivals such as MaerzMusik & the Donaueschinger Musiktage, museums such as the Hamburger Bahnhof, the Brooklyn Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, & das Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, galleries such as the nGbk, Remote Viewing, 7hours Haus 19, & the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and into publications such as Performance Research Journal, boundary 2, MusikTexte, Positionen, & the 2014 Whitney Biennial catalogue. Large-scale works have been realized at locations such as Le Corbusier's "Cité radieuse" in Marseille, the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin (both with Janina Janke), along the entire length of "Im Stavenhof" in Cologne (with Jordan Topiel Paul), throughout the village & town-hall of Kirnbach (in collaboration with Herbordt/Mohren), around & measuring construction sites in New York's Lower East Side, and inside the Deutzer Brücke in Cologne (with Sebastian Biskup). 

This event is part of Maryanne Amacher: Perceptual Geographies

Major support for MARYANNE AMACHER: PERCEPTUAL GEOGRAPHIES has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, with additional support from the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia and the Aaron Copland Fund For Music. Presented in collaboration with Blank Forms.