The program associated with the exhibition "Corps et âmes" pays tribute to contemporary artist Arthur Jafa by exploring the significant and lesser-known inspirations that punctuate his work through a series of exceptional concerts.
An intimate reference for the artist, American experimental composer Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009), who pushed the boundaries of audible frequency in the 1990s and whose portrait appears in Arthur Jafa's slideshow APEX (2013), is the subject of a musical retrospective.
The Bourse de Commerce and the New York-based label Blank Forms present GLIA and Petra, two works by Maryanne Amacher reconstructed by her longtime collaborators from archival notes and sketches. These pieces stand out in an oeuvre deeply marked by ephemerality – most of Maryanne Amacher's compositions are defined by such numerous temporal and spatial parameters that they cannot be performed again since her passing.
In resonance, Diamanda Galás, a friend of Maryanne Amacher and a fellow explorer of sonic frontiers, performs her solo work De-formation: Piano Variations, a musical adaptation of Das Fieberspital (1912), an expressionist poem by Georg Heym that narrates in tragic and hallucinatory verses the pain and disfigurement of patients suffering from yellow fever, foreshadowing the return of mutilated soldiers from World War I.
Program
Thursday, March 27 (Foyer)
- 8pm: doors open
- 8:30pm: The Zwischentöne Ensemble, Contrechamps Ensemble, and Lucy Railton perform GLIA by Maryanne Amacher (75 minutes), directed by Bill Dietz
Friday, March 28 (Auditorium)
- 8:30pm: doors open
- 9pm: Stefan Tcherepnin and Marianne Schroeder perform Petra by Maryanne Amacher (34 minutes)
- 9:45pm: Diamanda Galás performs De-formation: Piano Variations (20 minutes)
American composer and pioneer of sound art, Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) is recognized for her innovative thinking on sound architecture, perception, and spatialization. A former student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, she collaborated with artists such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Thurston Moore. In the 1960s, she explored otoacoustic emissions, a physiological phenomenon where the inner ear generates and amplifies its own sounds in response to stimuli. These sounds, impossible to record and heard only by the individual generating them, give her performances a visceral and spectral dimension.
About GLIA by Maryanne Amacher In 2005, Maryanne Amacher composed GLIA for the Berlin-based Ensemble Zwischentöne. Designed for seven instruments and electronics, performed only once during her lifetime, the piece takes its name from glial cells, essential to neurotransmission between synapses. For this work, Maryanne Amacher positioned musicians on a pyramidal structure surrounded by speakers, envisioning the listener as a "glial" interface between electronic and acoustic elements. In 2012, Bill Dietz, a former collaborator of Maryanne Amacher, reconstructed GLIA for a series of performances across Europe.
GLIA exposes listeners to intense auditory frequencies that can provoke unusual listening sensations.
At the Bourse de Commerce, GLIA is performed under the direction of Bill Dietz, featuring members of Ensemble Zwischentöne (Dorothee Sporbeck on flute, Volker Schindel and Helles Weber on accordion), Ensemble Contrechamps (Susanne Peters on flute, directed by Bill Dietz, and Akiko Ahrendt on violin), and Lucy Railton on cello.
About Petra by Maryanne Amacher Composed in 1991, Petra is a landmark work from the latter period of Maryanne Amacher's career. Commissioned for the World Music Days of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) in Boswil, Switzerland, it is written for two pianos and draws inspiration from both the composer’s impressions of the Boswil church, where it premiered, and the eponymous short story by science fiction author Greg Bear, in which gargoyles come to life and reproduce with humans in a post-apocalyptic Notre-Dame.
At the Bourse de Commerce, pianist Marianne Schroeder, who performed the work alongside Maryanne Amacher at its 1991 premiere, is joined by Stefan Tcherepnin, with whom she has worked for a decade on arranging and interpreting this piece.
Diamanda Galás
Diamanda Galás has devoted much of her musical career to exploring the grotesque aspects of death and suffering. A classically trained pianist, she immersed herself in jazz at the age of twenty, collaborating with David Murray and Butch Morris, before turning to avant-garde composition alongside Vinko Globokar and Iannis Xenakis. In the 1980s, she gained recognition – and provoked controversy – with The Divine Punishment (Mute, 1986), an album that repurposed Old Testament texts to denounce the conservative rhetoric of the time, which equated AIDS with divine retribution. Her subsequent albums continued this subversive reinterpretation of religious musical traditions: Saint of the Pit (Mute, 1986) draws on Greek Maniot funeral chants, based on improvisation and call-and-response, while You Must Be Certain of the Devil (Mute, 1988) revisits Southern U.S. gospel music. Her most recent album, Broken Gargoyles (Intravenal Sound Operations, 2022), extends this radical exploration of voice and suffering.
About De-formation: Piano Variations by Diamanda Galás
De-formation: Piano Variations is a solo piano work, composed and recorded by Diamanda Galás in September 2019. The piece is inspired by the expressionist poem Das Fieberspital (The Fever Hospital), a striking and macabre vision of yellow fever patients, written in 1912 by German poet Georg Heym. Diamanda Galás’ sonic work, marked by great expressiveness, alternates between sonic outbursts and anxious silences, exploring themes of suffering and bodily transformation.
Blank Forms
Founded in 2016 and based in New York, Blank Forms is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting emerging and underrepresented artists in interdisciplinary and time-based practices such as experimental music, performance, dance, and sound art. Its mission is to develop new frameworks for preserving, fostering, and showcasing the work of both historical and emerging artists to a broad audience. Blank Forms provides curatorial support, residencies, commissions, and publications to help artists document, distribute, and create.
