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Amy Cimini, In Your Head: Notes on Maryanne Amacher’s Intelligent Life, The Opera Quarterly, Volume 33, Issue 3-4, summer-autumn 2017, Pages 269–302, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbx025
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Extract
“Aplisa Mixes”
An idiosyncratic three-part storyboard drops us into the middle of Maryanne Amacher’s media opera Intelligent Life (1981–1982) (see figure 1). Readied for submission to directors and funders throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the opera consisted of nine one-hour-long episodes designed for television broadcast with in-home FM simulcast. As of yet, it has not been taped, recorded, or broadcast. Rather, it persists as five short texts, totaling 150 pages in length, with Amacher’s surprising membership in the Professional Screenwriters of America foregrounded on the cover page.1 A “Premise” and “Background to the Story’s Intrigue” introduce the opera’s fictive milieu. The year is 2021—the bicentennial of Hermann von Helmholtz’s birth—and the plot concerns Supreme Connections LLC, a music research and entertainment company, following the workaday lives, research practices, and aspirations of its leading figures. In a “Partial Treatment and Material for Pilot Story,” Amacher’s characters narrate how Supreme Connections came into being. Forged amid the failure of algorithmic music recommendation services and a second-generation artificial intelligence that could compose in nearly any historical idiom,2 the company proposed an alternative world of public media interactivity: “smart” technologies for the car and the home, enchanted architectures of customizable audio, and multisensory designs for a burgeoning “urban informatics” that re-cast the city as a kind of theme park that could respond to passersby with all sorts of original but also highly situated forms of sounding.3 Though its technologies are fictive, Supreme Connections’ story makes a clear reference to concerns that long structured Amacher’s own work.
