Maryanne Amacher

"Living Sound, Patent Pending" MUSIC FOR SOUND-JOINED ROOMS" Series 1980. (Excerpt) Dual channel remastered edit of feature length multichannel installation/ performance.

“I produced my first large scale multichannel installation/performance in the MUSIC FOR SOUND-JOINED ROOMS Series, Living Sound, Patent Pending (Traveling Musicians Being Prepared) for the Walker Arts Center, during the New Music America Festival, Minneapolis-St. Paul (June 7-14 1980). The music and visual sets were staged architecturally, throughout the nearly empty Victorian house of the conductor Dennis Russell Davies and filmaker, Molly Davies. The visual elements gave clues to a story discovered in the different rooms, and in the outside garden. The house, on a hill in St. Paul with its panoramic view of Minneapolis, was lit by tall quartz spots, as if a movie set. The time: midnight. Davies' music room, where two grand pianos had been, was now an "emergent music laboratory," where 21 petri dishes with "something" growing in them (the musicians and instruments of the future) were placed beside metal instrument cases marked Fragile: "traveling musicians being prepared" and "the molecular orchestra"; TV story boards refering to "symbiotic aids," biochemical companions tailored to enhance neurophonic recognition; "making new scores." DNA photos and biochemical diagrams were placed on music stands. Meanwhile, the entire house was full of sound, circulating throughout the rooms, out the doors and windows, down the hill, past sedate Victorian mansions. I was thrilled to discover that the law to patent life forms (the Diamond V. Chakrabarty decision) followed a few days later. As the possibilities of biocomputers and emerging media approach, perhaps this work was not as much fantasy as it may have seemed at the time.”