Long Distance Music: Maryanne Amacher's City-Links
From 1967, Maryanne Amacher wired harbors, mills and storefronts to her studio over telephone lines and mixed them live, a 22-part series whose archive Blank Forms helped bring to New York.
In 1967, during a residency at the State University of New York at Buffalo, composer Maryanne Amacher put microphones in 8 places around the city, among them a steel plant, a stone tower, the airport, flour mills and the old Erie Canal area. She sent their sound over leased "15kc" telephone lines, wide enough for FM radio quality, to the studio of the public station WBFO, and mixed it live on air for 28 hours. She called it Long Distance Music. It became the first of City-Links, a 22-part series that ran until 1988.
The idea was to hear distant places "together in time." In Boston, she fixed a microphone to a window of the New England Fish Exchange at Pier 6 and, from November 1973, kept an open line to her studio at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, feeding the harbor's changing tone into works like Tone and Place and Hearing the Space, Day by Day. For No More Miles at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1974, she piped in an "acoustic twin" of the gallery: a Budget Rent a Car office in an indoor arcade, where voices and footsteps matched those heard in the room. Listening to the Boston line also gave her the breeze recordings for Lectures on the Weather, her 1976 collaboration with John Cage.
New York got its own link in late 1979, when Amacher wired a window at the Battery Park fire house to her Pearl Street studio for 6 months of harbor sound, 24 hours a day. She used it in Intelligent Life with John Cage and George Lewis, sending Cage from her studio and Lewis from the water to her mixing desk at The Kitchen. Blank Forms calls City-Links "a very early example of telematic performance," and "a prescient tremor of the 'network culture' thematics to come in recent media art."
Amacher died in 2009 without a will. Blank Forms and the Maryanne Amacher Foundation inventoried and rehoused her archive, which sat in storage in Saugerties, New York, until the New York Public Library acquired it in 2020. It is now open to researchers at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center: over 1,000 reel to reel tapes, hundreds of cassettes, notebooks, scores and the City-Links files, with Buffalo recordings still labeled by site and time of day. Blank Forms keeps the work audible through Labyrinth Gives Way To Skin, its series of seminars and listening sessions.
Sources
- The Maryanne Amacher Foundation, Blank Forms
- Maryanne Amacher Long Distance Music Listening Session, Blank Forms
- The Maryanne Amacher Archive is Now Accessible at the Library for the Performing Arts, Blank Forms
- Maryanne Amacher papers, New York Public Library
- Maryanne Amacher: City-Links, Ludlow 38, 2010
- Thumbnail: Maryanne Amacher Archive, via Blank Forms