Maryanne Amacher (1938 – 2009)
Maryanne Amacher was born in Kane, Pennsylvania. She studied piano at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music and composition with George Rochberg at the University of Pennsylvania. She also studied in Europe, and privately studied composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Maryanne Amacher is primarily known for her electronic sound installations, often involving filling multiple rooms of a location with sound. In the 1970s, she collaborated with John Cage and composed scores for Merce Cunningham.
Her City Links series began in 1967. Sounds from various locations within a city would be transmitted over telephone lines and mixed together, often then broadcast live over the radio. The first in the series combined sounds from five locations in Buffalo into a 28-hour live radio broadcast. The City Links series continued into the 1990s, eventually numbering 22 installations, and sometimes involved multiple cities. She was quoted in her New York Times obituary: “I was particularly interested in the experience of ‘Synchronicity,’ hearing spaces distant from each other at the same time, which we do not experience in our lives.”
Amacher composed Petra for two pianos in 1991:
The liner notes for the recording describe the work like this:
Written for two pianos, the piece is a unique example of Amacher’s late work, a direct extension of her working methodologies for electronic composition taken into an acoustic realm that alludes to the music of Giacinto Scelsi and Galina Ustvolskaya. Petra is a sweeping, durational work based on both Amacher’s impressions of the church in Boswil where the piece was premiered and science-fiction writer Greg Bear’s short story of the same name, in which gargoyles come to life and breed with humans in a post-apocalyptic Notre Dame.