Early Work

Coming of age during the institutional support for new art, media and cultural studies of the Great Society era, Amacher capitalised on many of the newly available grants, postgraduate research fellowships and residency programmes.Footnote ³ After her undergraduate studies in composition and piano at the University of Pennsylvania and her subsequent studies in Lejaren Hiller's experimental music studio at the University of Illinois, Amacher took up her residency as Creative Associate at the University of Buffalo from 1966 to 1967. This period saw the genesis of a compositional practice concerned with perceptual space in musical form and material that defined the rest of her career.

Despite her reputation as an installation artist, Amacher began her mature compositional career working within concert music, and the Audjoins Suite represents perhaps some of her earliest music in this genre.Footnote ⁴ I say perhaps because the entire scope of the Audjoins Suite is not entirely clear, although it is generally understood to consist of the choral work Arcade and the percussion and tape work Adjacencies.Footnote ⁵ These works reveal that early in her compositional development Amacher had already gravitated towards elaborate, bespoke electroacoustic presentations. The production notes for Arcade, for example, call for ‘3 chamber choirs, 9 members each, brass, strings, woodwinds, percussion… 3 chamber choirs are separated in space depending on the stage and room area… Percussion is amplified out through 4 channels… Areas of woodwinds, strings and choral sounds are to be pre-recorded on a 4-channel tape to fuse conveniently with the performing sounds’.Footnote ⁶ There is, however, no public record that Arcade was ever performed; the score exists only in fragments and there is no known recording.

Performance materials for the second work in the Audjoins Suite, Adjacencies, are better preserved, but the initial performances in Buffalo at the Albright-Knox Gallery and in New York City at Carnegie Hall succeeded only in dissuading Amacher from further work on concert music.Footnote ⁷ Amacher described her initial compositional approach to the Audjoins Suite:

Amacher realised, however, that the constraints of concert music on her interest in open-durational forms and complex spatialisation and sound diffusion were irreconcilable. Nevertheless, this initial compositional philosophy would serve as the departure point for the radical new forms of presentation that typified the rest of her career.

Notes on Source Materials

In a letter to her parents written some time in the 1960s, Amacher differentiates herself from the ‘idiot composers who can't write about their own ideas’: she instead, is someone whose ‘written word and theories are there and solid’.Footnote ⁹ One of her significant publications, Psychoacoustic Phenomena in Music Composition: Some Features of a Perceptual Geography, illustrates Amacher's eloquent and revolutionary foray into the musical potential and possibilities of psychoacoustics.Footnote ¹⁰ These writings serve as a useful starting point in contextualising her work, although many other personal and/or unpublished resources have only recently been collected and made publicly available.Footnote ¹¹ Amacher's published and private writings, sketches, preparatory diagrams, technical riders and grant applications are central to any musicological or art-historical examination of her work. Given her commitment to projects that reject conventional documentation in audio, video or notation, these sources must exist not as a compromise in place of recordings or scores but as evolving contributions to a new musical and artistic historiography. Amacher's work demonstrates the imperative to develop new ways of experiencing contemporary art and music whose existence is ephemeral; her position at the forefront of a new understanding of the materiality of sound means that historically privileged tools for musical analysis are insufficient for any thorough examination of her work.

An Overview of the City-Links Series

Two works created during Amacher's tenure as a Creative Associate in 1967 in Buffalo, In-City #1 and In-City, Buffalo 1967, are the first clear examples of her revolutionary new direction, following her dissatisfaction with the Audjoins Suite. These works are the foundation of what would become City-Links, a series of 22 projects, realised between 1967 and 1988.Footnote ¹² The series is comprised of performances or installations, taliored to specific presentation locations. Amacher defines a “City-Link” as ‘the sounding resources of 2 or more remote locations (cities or locations within a city): through electronic links music is composed, at spaces distant from each other, together in time’.Footnote ¹³ Each work introduced new developments in Amacher's engagement with ideas such as new technology in sound diffusion and telecommunications, urban planning and architecture and information theory, but here I will examine just a few of these..

In-City #1 was Amacher's first major engagement with radio broadcast and live transmission as a musical medium. Realised in May 1967, it consisted of a 28-hour broadcast on Buffalo's WBFO radio programme, during which Amacher mixed eight incoming audio feeds, connected to the studio via telephone lines, in real time from various sites throughout the city. These sites included: ‘the live sound from the microphones installed at Bethlehem Steel, a stone tower (at Niagara Mohawk Power Company), the airport, Pillsbury Four Machines, main street, [the] surrounding area of the old Erie canal, exhaust pumps (Central Gas Plant) and in the old grain mills area’.Footnote ¹⁴ The realisations of these works relied heavily on the support of the Bell telecommunications utility company, which installed 15 kHz telephone lines between the composer's specified sites to allow continuous transmission of the sound to be captured by Amacher's microphone array. The resulting presentations of the composite sounds varied in form and duration. The works often took the shape of long-form radio broadcasts, as in the initial work for WBPO Buffalo, or as more extreme installation works such as City-Links #4 (Tone and Place, Work I) and City-Links #14, which saw a microphone installed in a window near the New England Fish Exchange at Pier 6, Boston Harbor. This microphone transmitted sounds from the harbour environment to Amacher's studio, again via a 15kHz telephone line, 14 hours a day throughout the nearly three years of her fellowship at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, from 1973 to 1976.Footnote ¹⁵ In a 1988 interview with Jeffrey Bartone for the Olympia, Washington-based KAOS 89.3 FM radio programme, Amacher describes her design for the Boston Harbor City-Links work:

The work in Boston Harbor was one of Amacher's most successful City-Links, and recordings and/or live feeds from the window microphone and additional microphones installed after 1976 would inform or constitute several subsequent City-Links throughout the US.Footnote ¹⁷ The sounds were rerouted and/or mixed specifically for installation spaces, including the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Hayden Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the sounds were also included in singular performances in a collaboration with Merce Cunningham's dance studio in Manhattan and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.Footnote ¹⁸ Given the logistic complexity of many of her projects, collaboration was often critical in Amacher's development of new works, especially the City-Links series.

(Post-)Cageian Compositional Paradigms and New Media Implications

The collaboration with the Cunningham Dance Company offers crucial insight into the partnerships and aesthetic and ideological networks in which Amacher's realisations of these works took place, and Amacher's relationship with John Cage offers significant insights into the relationship between her work and the innovations of the avant-garde in the latter half of the twentieth century. Cage commended the beauty of Amacher's work in a recorded conversation with Richard Kostelanetz in 1979, and the two composers performed together, Amacher providing electronic accompaniment to Cage's Lectures on Weather and the long-form text composition Empty Words.Footnote ¹⁹ A surviving letter reveals that Amacher turned to Cage for support during a period of personal crisis, and their relationship was one of mutual trust in both their artistic aspirations and personal lives.Footnote ²⁰

Cage's ‘radio works’ offer a particularly useful point of comparison with Amacher's City-Links. Cage produced 14 works utilising radios to generate sound and performance materials as part of his increasing incorporation of found sounds and indeterminacy into his compositions. Because Cage believed that visual stimuli were an obligation of the contemporary composer, their soundworlds were often generated in highly performative concert presentations. Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (March No.2), composed in 1951 for 12 radios, 24 performers and a conductor, is perhaps the most frequently discussed of the radio works and employs a conventionally notated score requiring the performers to manipulate both the tuning of each radio and their dynamics or timbre.Footnote ²¹ The result is an entanglement of collaged radio sounds, ranging from static and white noise to momentary glimpses of music or speech stations.Footnote ²²

Any discussion of the way that media and technology became primary tools for artists and composers, particularly those inclined towards radical experimentation, would be incomplete without reference to the writings of Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan's ideas influenced Cage and, given Cage and Amacher's shared commitment to technological innovation, are invaluable in discussing their works.Footnote ²³ Cage and Amacher's broadcast- or transmission-oriented works are similar in their innovations in ‘instrumentation’, but any comparison must focus on their means of receiving and perceiving sound and information. Alana Pagnutti, writing on Cage's radio works, makes a critical note of the inadequacy of the word ‘listener’ when describing a ‘receiver’ of these works.Footnote ²⁴ For Cage, the sight of the performers grappling with their radios represents as significant a contribution to the work as the resultant sounds. In Amacher's City-Links the performance may not provide a visual stimulus, but the situation of the sounds in space, such as the architectural features of an atrium or gallery, provides an immediate environmental context that is part of the experience of the work. The unique structural qualities and acoustics of the various transmission nodes – the sonic image of the harbour, the acoustic profile of Amacher's studio and the spatialisation of speakers within an installation space – affect the listener through their interaction with elements beyond their initial situation in physical reality.Footnote ²⁵ Recorded documentation of these installation works or radio broadcasts is scarce because it fails to capture the receiver's particular experience of the particular presentation format.

At the 1989 Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Amacher characterised her work as an extension of Cage's engagement with the sounds of everyday life.Footnote ²⁶ Her presentation of these sounds, however, has less to do with what the listener is hearing than with how they hear it, an approach encapsulated in McLuhan's axiom ‘the medium is the message’.Footnote ²⁷ Amacher understood that her role as composer of City-Links was to foster listening that was concerned with shared social experiences, achieved by unifying disparate sonic environments. When sounding locations are linked with and within a receiving space, such as Amacher's studio or an installation space, an aural bridge in time and space is created. The invisibility of the transmission tele-links directs the listener's focus away from the physical means of the sound production and towards a conceptual awareness of the listener's own limits, limits revealed and expanded by Amacher's transmission and presentation. According to McLuhan, ‘the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs’.Footnote ²⁸ The radio as a medium is not simply an innovative sound producing mechanism and its use by Cage does not place it within the lineage of instrumental development as, for example, a proto-sampler. As Pagnutti says, ‘the radio in the radio-works functions not to communicate information, but instead to create a unique effect on the viewer of the works’.Footnote ²⁹ Similarly, in Amacher's City-Links the role of telecommunications and the 15 kHz tele-links in transmitting or broadcasting sounds illustrates a clear continuity with Cage's work.

Despite the similarities in medium, however, there are conceptual distinctions between the composers’ handling of material and form. Unlike Cage's radio-work performances, Amacher seeks to underpin the socialised phenomena of ‘hearing’ by revealing the inherent qualities of her transmitted sounds to be collectively experienced. Her works might focus on phenomena such as drones or beating that provide a singular reference point for change within a specific parameter; by contrast, Cage's interest in chance in performance is a driving force in the audience's holistic reception of the work as an amalgamation of individual perceptions of an ever-changing array of fleeting material.

A crucial distinction between Cage and Amacher's approaches to these works lies in their respective interpretation of McLuhan's conception of time as experienced through new technological innovations. McLuhan believed the advent of new electronic technologies, particularly in communication and media, and their introduction into art and culture had paved the way for a uniquely modern perception of time. In this new temporal order ‘sequence yields to the simultaneous’Footnote ³⁰ and, as Pagnutti argues, the radio is the epitome of this new simultaneity,Footnote ³¹ with the accelerated experience of events broadcast from many locations instilling a new empirical awareness of time and space. Pagnutti argues that Cage's radio works use the new medium to transmit an understanding of the fleeting qualities of time and the volatility of the present moment. Within this conceptual framework, she argues, Cage attempts to cultivate the perceptual awareness of the work's ‘audience’: ‘as opposed to a concrete object which allows for longer contemplation, sound is more closely linked to time in that one must be conscious of the constantly shifting ephemerality of both’.Footnote ³²

This is the clearest distinction in the aesthetic implications of Amacher and Cage's approaches. I would argue that the aspiration towards a concrete objectivity in a sounding environment is fundamental to Amacher's project. In a 1974 interview with Norman Pelligrini, she said of her Boston Harbor transmission to her Cambridge studio that ‘It's almost as if you had such a thing – which of course we don't, that I know of at this moment – as, like a sound hologram.’Footnote ³³ The incoming sonic material varied according to the environmental conditions in which Amacher placed her microphone(s), but at the core of her practice in these works were the hours spent studying the consistent, underlying qualities of sound inherent to a given location and how these qualities would shift, transform, appear and diminish in her processing, mixing and dissemination of the material. In the initial Boston Harbor works, for example, the composite mix of incoming sound into Amacher's studio produced a drone frequency at a consistent 92 Hz (F#2 minus 9 cents).Footnote ³⁴ Amacher's intention was to dissect the environments that she studied and transmitted, making listeners aware of the simultaneity of these objective phenomena occurring across and within one or more spaces. She refers to this idea, categorised by McLuhan as ‘synchronicity’, and offers her own interpretation of time:

The new paradigm of medium as message underpinned an explosion of conceptual art practices and a fiercely critical response from many art historians to what they perceived as a rejection of inherently pictorial values.Footnote ³⁶ Amacher's evolving musical and inter-media practice during the late 1960s and throughout the City-Links series illustrates, on the other hand, a compositional philosophy galvanised by the presupposition that ‘ideas alone can be works of art’.Footnote ³⁷ Interviewed by Frank J. Oteri for NewMusicUSA in 2004, Amacher explicitly detailed this motivation: ‘I would like to dream that I could make music that triggered another music in the listener's mind. I think to me it's almost more interesting than the music itself really.’Footnote ³⁸ The City-Links series is a robust framework for how a composer might conceive both sonic material and also the conditions in which it might be perceived by a listener. To work in this way, Amacher and Cage demonstrate that composers must cultivate a new array of extramusical tools and theoretical implications. These composers’ works reveal the extent to which music-making, even within similar conceptual frameworks, can offer distinctly different interpretations of content, form and extra-material implications.

Interventions in Landscape and Robert Smithson

The tools and methodologies for artistic enquiry change over time, as do the boundaries of media that differentiate artistic disciplines. One particular iteration of Amacher's Boston Harbor work is especially revealing of the expansion of the composer's public reception. This work, shown as an installation entitled Hearing the Space, Day by Day, ‘Live’, was Amacher's contribution to the group ‘new media’ exhibition Interventions in Landscape at the Hayward Gallery in London from 7 November 1973 to 7 June 1974, during Amacher's residence at the Hayward's affiliate institution at MIT. Amacher's press release and her interview with Jeffrey Bartone provide critical insights into the network of non-musicians and artists that constituted Amacher's peers and colleagues. In the interview Amacher recounts her role in the exhibition:

The so-called Land or Environmental Artists were part of the post-war American avant-garde. Casual connections might be made between Amacher's methodologies and several of these artists, but this is one of the few documented instances in which Amacher directly engaged with them. I will argue, however, that Amacher's work at this point in her career represents a direct engagement with Smithson's most influential theoretical writings and that this may provide an integral tool for analysing and understanding Amacher's development and ambitions as a composer of an entirely ‘new’ music.

The main link between Amacher and Smithson is their engagement with displacement as a primary tool for art-making. For Smithson, this is best illustrated in his theoretical dichotomy of ‘sites’ and ‘non-sites’, terms that would serve as the dialectical taxonomy of and methodological approach to his creation of various works during his most recognisable mature period. A ‘site’ refers to an artwork situated outside the gallery, usually consisting of a subtle staging of, or intervention into, the landscape; Smithson's aim is to draw attention to the raw innate qualities of a physical reality and location as an inherent challenge to the natural order of perception. In a conversation between Smithson and the artists Dennis Oppenheim and Michael Heizer, Smithson characterises the site as the ‘unfocused fringe where your mind loses its boundaries and a sense of the oceanic pervades’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Unlike a painting or sculptural work in a museum, gallery or even an outdoor sculpture garden, the visual gestalt that is responsible for the clear boundaries between the ‘space’ or ‘reality’ of the artwork and the world in which it exists are not explicitly discernible.

Like Amacher, Smithson problematises conventional documentation. Smithson's objection to photography of his works mirrors Amacher's opposition to recordings of her installation works. Photography, like audio recordings, would continue to amass a cultural significance that would aid in the long-term preservation of artworks of this nature, but Smithson insisted that this ‘steal[s] the nature of the work’.Footnote ⁴¹ The shortcomings of these documentary media lie in their inability to capture scale and form and to capture time on what Smithson would refer to as a ‘geological scale’. By definition a work that is permanently in flux negates the temporality of a ‘record’. A return to the location of Amacher's Pier 6 microphone would not yield the composite sound experienced in the Hayward Gallery or that on any surviving tape of the City-Links works. The composite of Amacher's strategic sound-capturing, mixing, processing, synthesising and transmitting have accumulated ‘geologically’ in the form of a new aural gestalt that cannot be divided and subsumed back into its original environment.Footnote ⁴²

Most relevant, however, to this comparison of Smithson and Amacher are the ideas articulated in Smithson's writing about non-sites and Amacher's writing about a so-called ‘Long Distance Music’.Footnote ⁴³ Much of Smithson's work is primarily associated with its engagement with natural materials, creating works that can only exist outside traditional gallery settings, but his simultaneous preoccupation with non-sites reveals his problematisation of the Land-Art label. In his ‘A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites’ (1968) Smithson introduces what would become a central conceptual component in his gallery-oriented work:

Smithson refers here to his work Nonsite ‘Line of Wreckage’, Bayonne, New Jersey, also completed in 1968. The work consists of a painted seven-tier aluminium container, housing broken concrete slabs of varying sizes.Footnote ⁴⁵ Its presentation is explicitly constructed for a gallery presentation and is accompanied by a framed map and photographic panels of the source materials and site origin; the non-site constitutes a transmission of this physical reality to a display elsewhere. Similarly, Amacher's transmission of unified sound sources of various environments involves making installations or broadcasts to provide convenient access to her source materials’ origin sites. Amacher situates her mixes in a space or format designed for a specific form of listening in order to reveal a perceptual space that is uniquely possible when the distinctions between environmental material and art or musical presentation are dissolved. The synthesis of sounding sources provides, in Smithson's terms, a sort of aural picture of one or more sites, but without an essential, readily identifiable representation of the source. Amacher aims to capture and mix the sounds so that the material is highlighted at the edges of perception; hearing this material in the appropriate format will offer a conceptual awareness of sound beyond the ‘statistical’.Footnote ⁴⁶

Smithson was acutely aware of the notion of a postmodern or conceptual art as, in the words of Susan Kandel, ‘a space in which distinct categories, genres and media are frustrated’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Citing ‘Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read’, Smithson's press releases from 1972, Kandel elaborates that, for Smithson, ‘in this space, language does not so much trespass on art's sacrosanct province as become wholly imbricated within it, blurring old borders forever’.Footnote ⁴⁸ This perspective is indicative of what the art critic and historian Craig Owens characterises as ‘the eruption of language into the visual field’, a hallmark of postmodern art.Footnote ⁴⁹ Owens was expressly concerned with Smithson's engagement with text, but I would extend his critique to encompass Smithson's art-making as one concerned with the physical embodiment of a new artistic discourse. This aspect of the post-war American avant-garde traverses distinctions in medium between artists and composers. Amacher's work concerns the translation between musical language and environmental sound sources, deliberately challenging the semiotic boundaries to hearing; regardless of interpretation, the space for the listener to confront these principles is dependent on the rhetorical implications of the work, just as it is dependent on the content and material.

Amacher was not the only composer working with microphones and environmental sound as primary compositional tools, and Smithson's ideas often circulate in discussions about field recording or acoustic ecology. The sound-art scholar Brandon LaBelle defines the discipline of acoustic ecology as one that ‘raises issues pertaining to sound and audition and their locational specifics, which can be understood to operate along some of the fault lines of [a] site-specific practice’.Footnote ⁵⁰ At face value, this seems to characterise Amacher's work at this time, and scholars such as LaBelle also cite Smithson's site/non-site paradigm as a reference point for this work.Footnote ⁵¹ Acoustic ecology stems from the belief that recorded experiential investigations, coupled with observations into the acoustic networks of flora and fauna, have broader implications for human experience.Footnote ⁵² If we compare Amacher's Pier 6 transmissions, however, with the work of Hildegard Westerkamp or Steve Peters, the differences are readily apparent. They use the sounds of bird calls, rushing winds, dynamic water sources or busy city streets to surround the listener in a cacophony of distinct environmental sounds. By contrast, in one of the few existing recorded accounts of one of Amacher's Pier 6 transmissions from Boston Harbor, Amacher scholar and biographer Amy Cimini describes a tape of the work:

The sounds and their respective sources in an acoustic ecological context are presented specifically because they are expressive of their associated location. Displacement characterises the process of recording environmental sounds and relaying them elsewhere, but to divorce them from their source would be inappropriate. The expression of place is fundamental and thus clearly different from Smithson's site/non-site paradigm as articulated by LaBelle. Smithson himself decries this expressiveness, claiming that ‘expressive art avoids the problem of logic; therefore it is not truly abstract. A logical intuition can develop in an entirely “new sense of metaphor” free of natural or realistic expressive content.’Footnote ⁵⁴ Amacher uses tele-links to displace her site-specific material because her concern is not the documentation of elements from location to location but rather the displacement that may prompt listeners to consider the limitations of their perception of environmental sounds. In other words, the non-site implications of Amacher's work facilitate a kind of listening that is as concerned with how we hear (and think about) sonic information as with what the information is.