An article I wrote on the subject of transcendental empiricism in the work of Maryanne Amacher has just been published with Routledge as part of the Musical Psychedelia collection.
Here’s an excerpt from the introduction :
The active role of listening itself in producing the objects and events of auditory experience, along with the shaping of sonic events by the mediums through which they travel, are central concerns in much of the work produced by North American composer Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009). The majority of her works exceeded forms of containment and documentation in their complexity and scale. Despite these challenges, these central concerns are evident in her own theoretically rich writings and some of the few works available in common formats such as CDs and digital audio files. While acknowledging that these recordings do little to represent the true scale and ambition of Amacher’s work, they nonetheless provide insight and focus on a single thread that runs throughout much of her work, a focus on the productive capacities, limits and potentials of listening itself, a focus that gives her work a distinctly transcendental orientation. The nature of this transcendentalism is uncovered through exploring the overlap that exists between Amacher’s compositional approach—which in part drew upon psychoacoustical experimentation and research—and Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism. A concern of this article is to show how these compositional and philosophical programmes shed light on each other, but do so via a peculiar mirroring that sees each other at times moving in opposing ways about a common point: the generative potential of sensation itself. Identifying connections between these approaches adds depth to both, but also provides us with a practical and theoretical framework that leverages critique of recent materialist trends in sound studies and aesthetics: where the asymbolic affectivity of sonic events for some poses a vibrational continuum connecting us with the matter without, the overlapping concerns of Amacher and Deleuze paint a more complex picture that is more sensitive to the mediating and productive role of auditory sensation.
Promotional literature accompanying the release of Amacher’s few recorded works refers to a psychedelia active within her music; this connection with psychedelia is established less on the grounds of aesthetic commonality than it is a more fundamental aspect of psychedelia, the journey undertaken to the limits of possible experience, and specifically sensory experience, not so that we might peer beyond but so that the intensity of sensibility itself might rise up from its subliminal status, flooding our conscious experience and thereby (re)introducing an intensive creative force into thought.
If you want to read more you can access a pdf here: