Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz – "a Step into It: Maryanne Amacher’s Mini Sound Series"

Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz –
A Step into It: Maryanne Amacher’s Mini Sound Series

Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz are co-editors of the recently released Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (Blank Forms Editions, 2020). Since 2016, Cimini and Dietz have led a series of Seminars and Listening Sessions that publicly facilitate access to the still largely inaccessible contents of the Maryanne Amacher Archive. For Songlines, Cimini and Dietz offer a Seminar dedicated to the large-scale presentation format Amacher launched in San Francisco in 1985: “THE MINI SOUND SERIES.” Not long after initiating her “MUSIC FOR SOUND JOINED ROOMS SERIES,” Maryanne Amacher was on the lookout for a temporal format that would best allow visitors to navigate her architecturally staged sound works. During a residency at Capp Street Project in 1985 she presented SOUNDHOUSE, the first iteration of “THE MINI SOUND SERIES,” a “serialized musical continuity.” About this format, Amacher writes, “As a form, the Mini Series is powerful and challenging, yet up to now, only television uses it. I wanted the kind of engaging format television has developed […], an evolving sound work ‘to be continued,’ as distinguished from a continuous installation, or traditional concert genre.” For the next 20 years, Amacher would present MINI SOUND SERIES’ across the US, Europe, and in Japan. As recounted in a 1989 interview, the format was a great success with “ticket demand in Berlin […] so great that the number of performances was increased from eight to eighteen, […] and the lines in San Francisco wrapping around the block.” The Seminar offers a selection of documents, images, and audio from both from various iterations of THE MINI SOUND SERIES as well as from other works that led to and contextualize the series.

URLs:
Virtual: https://go.evvnt.com/740853-0?pid=5072
Facebook: https://go.evvnt.com/740853-3?pid=5072

Artist: Maryanne Amacher

Category: Arts | Performing Arts | Music