Organized by Itsï Ramirez and Bret Schneider

A series of concerts exploring the third ear and other psychoacoustic phantasmagoria.

Over four concerts artists premier third ear music — music which emphasizes the listening faculty as an active instrument. The late composer Maryanne Amacher appropriated the term third ear to describe a music that expands the latent perceptual capabilities of the ear, composing music that transforms the ear itself into a sound-producing, neurophonic instrument. Such music is a projection of new aesthetic forms, a virtuality that anticipates the augmentation of both the creative and listening process. If Amacher’s ambitious work was to make the third ear, we ask what it would mean to refine the third ear, to compose music for and with it. We aim to explore how we apperceive musical material, and the ways in which new harmonic experiences can cultivate new emotions and stimulate the imagination.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare

– Keats

Further reading:

Groundwork for a Study of Maryanne Amacher

La Monte Young’s Orphic Revolution

Interview with Michael Harrison

October 2nd Program:

Bill Dietz — They were astonished at us when we told them that we did not eat our enemies, but you’re just hot and you’re walking

Itsï Ramirez & Bret Schneider — Square Wave Piece #1

Micah Schippa-Wildfong — Music for Assembly

Itsï Ramirez is a Chicago based musician. Stepping out of the naturalized preoccupation with sound as sound, she takes on the project of recovering a new music that has been forgotten.

Bret Schneider is a composer, essayist, and poet. For the first quarter of the 21st century, Schneider has attempted to synthesize the outer limits of third ear music with modern beauty. Via novel formal experiments, his music cultivates dreamspace and reverie. Recent works include live-composing to a just-intoned player piano. Schneider is also a co-founder of Caesura Magazine.

@bret_fall

Micah Schippa-Wildfong is an artist, writer, and musician based in Chicago, US. They have recently shown with Triangolo IT, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Benny’s Video NY, and Pech AT.

Bill Dietz is a composer and writer, born in Arizona. His work on genealogies of reception and the “political aesthetics of listening” is often presented in festivals, museums, and academic journals, but also in apartment buildings, magazines, and on public streets. Alongside his artistic work, he has served as artistic director of Ensemble Zwischentöne (2006-2014) and of Overtoon – Platform for Sound Practitioners (2022-2025). He has published two books of listening scores: one on his Tutorial Diversions series, for home performance (Eight Tutorial Diversions, 2009–2014, 2015); and the other, made up of “concert pieces,” based on historical and contemporary audience behavior (L’école de la claque, 2017). In 2013, he co-founded Ear│Wave│Event with Woody Sullender. With Amy Cimini, he co-edited Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (2020), and he is co-author, with Kerstin Stakemeier, of Universal Receptivity (2021). He has been co-chair Bard MFA’s Music/Sound discipline since 2012.

Official Website

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Tags: Amy Cimini, Bill Dietz, Bret Schneider, Chicago, IMSS, International Museum of Surgical Science, Itsï Ramirez, Kerstin Stakemeier, La Monte Young, Maryanne Amacher, Micah Schippa-Wildfong, Michael Harrison, Near North Side, Refining The Third Ear, Woody Sullender