21/11/2024 – 20:00
STUK
Twenty years after her live performance in Leuven, STUK and Sound in Motion honour iconic American composer and sound artist Maryanne Amacher with a unique reconstruction of her seminal composition GLIA by Ensemble Contrechamps and Zwischentöne with Bill Dietz.
American composer and sound artist Maryanne Amacher was unequivocally one of the most exceptional musical mavericks of the 20th century. A student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, she was a major innovator in the fields of sound perception, spatialisation and aural architecture. Amacher explored the creative possibilities of the way the cochlea in our ear processes sounds itself (so-called ‘otoacoustic tones’). On her visionary path, she collaborated with artists such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Thurston Moore. Three years before her death, in 2006, Amacher was still a guest at STUK, bringing a live performance at our Soetezaal.
Now, almost twenty years later, STUK honors this sound icon with a new interpretation of GLIA (2005). It was performed only once in Berlin before her untimely death in 2009. Named after the brain cells which assist in neurotransmission between synapses, Amacher’s work stages “glial” interplays between otoacoustic emissions elicited from listeners’ ears, live instruments and electronics. In 2012 Bill Dietz set to work on an interpretive reconstruction of the work for future performances. To date, Ensemble Contrechamps, members of the original ensemble (Zwischentöne) and Dietz have offered iterations of GLIA in Germany, Italy, Norway, Switzerland and the UK. Each performance of GLIA is a new episode in the cumulative, collective re-staging of Amacher’s work.
With members of: Ensemble Contrechamps & Ensemble Zwischentöne | Flute: Susanne Peters & Dorothee Sporbeck | Violin: Maximilian Haft & Akiko Ahrendt | Cello: Lucy Railton | Accordion: Volker Schindel & Helles Weber | Artistic direction, electronics, conductor: Bill Dietz
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