Ensemble Contrechamps X Maryanne Amacher: GLIA - Klang Festival Copenhagen Experimental Music Menu

Ensemble Contrechamps X Maryanne Amacher: GLIA

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Maryanne Amacher’s GLIA was performed only once in Berlin before her death in 2009. Named after the brain cells which assist in neurotransmission between synapses, GLIA imagines the oto-acoustic emissions created in the ears of the listeners as a “glial” interface between the electronic and acoustic instrumental elements of the work. In 2012, composer Bill Dietz began intensive research into reconstructing GLIA for future performance, facing the problematics of restaging a work never meant to be repeated. Since 2019, Ensemble Contrechamps has performed GLIA several times, and at this year’s Klang Festival, the work is performed for the first time in Denmark. Amacher’s practice vigorously opposed the idea of fixed-form electroacoustic composition. Rather, she favored an ethos of experiential investigation, such that most of her works are near-impossible to recreate. This applies also to GLIA. Following the premiere, when Amacher returned home to Kingston, New York, there was a loose plan to continue the collaboration with Ensemble Zwischentöne, who premiered the work, but no one thought that the 2006 iteration would ever be repeated. In 2009 Ensemble Zwischentöne, invited Amacher to return to Berlin to continue developing GLIA, however, she tragically passed away shortly before this could happen. To date, Ensemble Contrechamps, members of Ensemble Zwischentöne and Dietz have offered iterations of GLIA in Germany, Italy, Norway, Switzerland, the UK, and now Denmark. Each performance of the work is a new episode in the cumulative, collective re-staging of Amacher’s work.

Concert will be loud. Earplugs will be provided.

Presented by Strøm and Klang Festival.

Venue

KoncertKirken

Blågårds Pl. 6A 2200 København

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Artists

Ensemble Contrechamps

Ensemble of soloists specialized in creating, developing, and disseminating instrumental music of the 20th and 21st centuries. For more than forty years, the ensemble has been dedicated to highlighting the diversity of aesthetics and formats making up the contemporary and experimental music scene.

Maryanne Amacher ((1938-2009))

American composer and installation artist. She is particularly known for her work with the psychoacoustic phenomenon known as “auditory distortion products”, her many collaborations with John Cage, and the multi-part drama, Intelligent Life, which, while never fully realized, reveals much of Amacher’s thinking on the advancement of music.

Bill Dietz ((1983-))

American composer and writer. Since 2012 he has been co-chair of the Music/Sound Department at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in New York. His work on genealogies of reception and the “political aesthetics of listening” is often presented – not only at festivals, in museums, and academic journals, but also in apartment buildings, magazines, and on public streets.