Sound Microscopies

Morton Subotnick & Lillevan – »As I Live and Breathe«

00:00

Maryanne Amacher – »GLIA«

00:00

Ticketing closed

Morton Subotnick is an intermedia artist, electronic music pioneer, and developer of one of the world's first modular analogue synthesisers together with Don Buchla. The work which brought Subotnick celebrity was Silver Apples of the Moon (1966-7), which marked the first time an original large-scale composition had been created specifically for the disc medium – a conscious acknowledgment that the home stereo system constituted a present-day form of chamber music.

The work technique and process of the last decade of Subotnick's creativity has resulted in »As I Live and Breathe,« which Subotnick feels will be the ultimate fulfillment of his public performance; one of the last, if not the last, of his public performance works. Centered around Subotnick’s breath – which becomes ever more musically and visually ornamented, only to end with a single, exhaled breath – the work is meant as a musical metaphor for the composer’s life in music.

Reconstructed posthumously after her passing by Bill Dietz, and performed at the Biennale by members of ensembles Contrechamps & Zwischentöne, Maryanne Amacher’s »GLIA« explores the potentialities of our ears as they interface between the electronic and acoustic instrumentation.

The late Maryanne Amacher was a composer of large-scale, fixed-duration sound installations and a highly original thinker in the areas of sound perception, spatialisation, and aural architecture. After studying with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Amacher took off on her own psychoacoustic flight, developing a body of unique methodologies and concepts that underpinned her life-long research into the experience of sound in particular spaces, ways of hearing, and the creative potentialities of how the ear itself processes sounds.

Amacher’s practise rigorously opposed the idea of fixed-form electro-acoustic composition in favour of an ethos of experiential investigation, such that most of her works are near-impossible to recreate. This applies also to »GLIA,« a work for seven or eight instruments and electronics commissioned in 2006 for the Berlin-based Ensemble Zwischentöne. In this work, Amacher was interested in the glial cells of the brain, which assist in neurotransmission between synapses. She saw the listener as a sort of glial interface between the electronic and acoustic instrumental elements of the work. More specifically, she imagined the otoacoustic emissions created in the ears of the listener (the »ear tones«) as this neural interface.

Since her passing in 2009, Bill Dietz has conducted intensive research into reconstructing »GLIA« for future performance, resulting in re-premieres that continue a collective interpretive re-presentation of Amacher’s practice.

About Micro-Music

The 67th International Festival of Contemporary Music will run from 16-29 October 2023, and is directed by Lucia Ronchetti. The programme will feature daily events focused on the new forms of computer and algorithmic composition, experimental performance, and generative music. The activities of the Biennale College Musica will be part of the Festival’s programme as usual.

Full information is available via the Venice Biennale website, including a schedule overview PDF.

»GLIA« is performed by members of Ensemble Contrechamps & Zwischentöne: Susanne Peters and Dorothee Sporbeck (flute), Maximilian Haft and Akiko Ahrendt (violin), Lucy Railton (cello), Volker Schindel and Helles Weber (accordion), Bill Dietz (artistic direction, electronics, conducting).

The concert is produced in collaboration with CTM Festival.