Cage's Influence

Review of Amy Cimini, Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life (Oxford University Press, 2022)

“…(4) Furthermore, listeners approaching Amacher's work face not just the intellectual challenge of negotiating these distinct interests, but also the more practical issue that much of Amacher's work is accessible only in fragmented form. She released only two complete CDs (Amacher 1999;2008); otherwise we have only a few audio excerpts of installations interspersed throughout various anthologies (Wolff et al 2010;Ziegler and Gross 2000;Collins and Christensen 1990); a handful of talks that made their way into print (Amacher [1977(Amacher [ ] 2008Maconie et al 2008;Mumma et al 2001); and a recent volume that assembles short excerpts from her archival papers (Cimini and Die 2020). Beyond these published materials lies a vast realm of installations, live broadcasts, and other projects that left few traces behind.…”

“…Sketches for her unfinished TV opera Intelligent Life, for instance, ask how computers might predict and react to combination tones to match a listener's preferences (see also Cimini 2017a). In a lecture after Cage's death, she imagined how music could extend beyond the limits of duration once CDs and LPs were obsolete (Mumma et al 2001).…”