Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life by Amy Cimini (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life by Amy Cimini Elizabeth Frickey Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life. By Amy Cimini. Critical Conjunctures in Music and Sound Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 336 pp. To those familiar with her work, Maryanne Amacher stands out among avant-garde composers of the late twentieth century as a maverick of the sound art genre. A student of Karlheinz Stockhausen and frequent collaborator with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Amacher is primarily known for her large-scale sound installations, including City Links (1967), Music for Sound-Joined Rooms (1980), and Mini-Sound Series (1985). Her work has often been cited as possessing a uniquely ephemeral quality, not just in the temporary nature of her multimedia installations (which she referred to as “structure-borne sounds”) but in the literal phantasmic character of her electronic sounds. Following her death in 2009, Amacher left behind very few officially sanctioned recordings and published scores, leaving only the ghostly traces of her personal archive.1 Amy Cimini’s recent book Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life (2022) is a deeply necessary contribution toward an increased awareness of Amacher’s works and her role within (and contradictions with) modern US experimentalism. Wild Sound brings the reader directly into contact with the peculiarities of Amacher’s personal writings and the traces left behind in her archive. Cimini frames her introduction to the text (and much of the rest of the work) around one such artifact: Amacher’s detailed notes from Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” wherein she adapts Haraway’s “I want a feminist writing” into her own “I want to make a music” (1). In drawing from apparently felt connections between Har-away’s theorization of feminist technoscience and Amacher’s own musical aspirations, [End Page 116] Cimini constructs her critical analysis on a much broader plane than the standard biographical project. Cimini also situates her work not just within the plural “musicologies” she refers to (e.g., “a new, critical, or cultural musicology” or “an embodied musicology” [25]) but within media/technology studies, critical feminist scholarship, and biopolitics as well. To Cimini, in her ventriloquy of Har-away, Amacher is not only reimagining her role as a composer but reconsidering her role in a shifting sociopolitical milieu of the late twentieth century, as reflected in its “industrial telecommunications, urban transformation, and emerging bio-technologies” (5). Wild Sound is more than an exploration of Amacher’s life and work—it is an exploration of Amacher’s curiosity toward the rapidly changing politics of life itself, and, as such, it must consider her constructed sounds through this same framework. Amacher’s fascination with life is felt consistently throughout the text. Tying to previous feminist histories of experimental (and especially electronic) music, Cimini cites Tara Rodgers’s writings in conversation with Annea Lockwood regarding the question of “life in a sound.”2 For composers like Lockwood, the music of the early Cologne school felt incapable of supporting this life in a sound due to its perceived artificiality. Cimini, however, turns this thought on its head in her broader understanding of Amacher, questioning instead, “What is listening for life in a sound when that listening is also informed by a refusal of biopolitics?” (33). As such, Amacher provides an important counternarrative within a “technophilic U.S. experimentalism” (13), offering a compositional approach that acknowledges the potential politics of life inherent in all manners of listening/audibility. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the overall structure of the text and presents a brief overview of Amacher’s biography. However, this introduction to Amacher’s personal background is often fed to the reader through shorter vignettes that mirror those to come in later chapters. This chapter also tackles how “Amacher” as a title unto itself comes to garner “different inflections” (7): not just that of the composer but of an inquisitor of social and technological conditions, and even of an investigative approach to listening. While the chapters follow in an overarching metanarrative about the “organic” nature of Amacher’s imagined...