Event Detail

In this concert, Amy Cimini offers music from her 2025 solo album See You When I Get There.  While playing in noise bands and experimental projects for over 25 years, Cimini has developed a sonic palette for the amplified viola that combines overtone-rich distortion with percussive techniques nestled in reverb and delay effects meant to fill large acoustical spaces. Her music embraces noise abstraction as much as a tuneful directness, that evokes Cimini’s fellow experimental string players, historical protest musics and her early, enduring love of feminist punk. This is a personal, intimate music that questions how sound interacts with power, social organization and surveillance.  

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Amy Cimini is an Associate Professor of Music at UC San Diego in the Integrative Studies Area. As a musicologist, teacher and musician, my work addresses power, community and technology in 20th & 21st century experimental music, sound art and auditory culture. My research methods connect archival research and oral history with experimental writing and performance, anchored by questions like: How do musical performance and technological mediation shape collective knowledge and practice? What ideologies of value and community shape practices of sound and listening in U.S. auditory culture after 1945, especially when viewed through the lens of understudied or marginalized figures and analytics of gender, race and class?  What theoretical frameworks can expand the concepts of body, life and materiality through which music studies register difference and power in analysis and historical narration? 

For the last few years, the work and musical thought of composer Maryanne Amacher have guided my inquiries across listening, gender and histories of US technoscience.  Spanning the early 1960s through the turn of the millennium, my book, Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life (Oxford 2021) engages Amacher’s approach to original presentational formats in existing and speculative media as engagements with sound and listening that conjoined real and imagined social worlds. The book discerns frameworks for life that emerged from Amacher’s multidisciplinary study of auditory experience and engages, broadly, with how conceptualizations of sound can attach social value unevenly to bodies, materials and relations that has relevance across civic and environmental contestation, telecommunications and science and technology in the late 20th century U.S. I also co-edited Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (Blank Forms Editions 2020) with composer and theorist Bill Dietz and engage with Amacher’s  legacy through public presentation, performance and exhibition  as a member of the Supreme Connections Working Group and the Maryanne Amacher Foundation. You can watch an 9-episode conversation series between Dietz, myself and invited guests about Selected Writings and Interviews hosted by the New York Public Library here. 

I came to music studies through performance (viola) and musical practice and collaboration are key ways that I attend to how people and relations are differently valued in sites where music is made and circulated. This supports long-standing research interests in collaboration, embodiment, performance studies, problems in site-specificity, DIY practice and critical approaches to the archive. You can watch a solo performance at the San Diego Public Library here and listen, here, to my long-standing duo project,  Architeuthis Walks on Land with bassoonist and composer Katherine Young, on our album The Surveyors (Carrier 2014). 

At UC San Diego, I teach undergraduate courses on music history and culture as well as film and media as well as research and teaching methods. My graduate courses include Gender and Experimental Music; Arts of the Archive; Music and Affect; Music, Sound and Biopolitics as well as Introduction to Research and Teaching Methods. My teaching is committed to the analysis of power and the demystification of knowledge production and inherited hierarchies across all dimensions of music and research practice. 

I am Affiliate Faculty in Critical Gender Studies and currently serve as Director of Graduate Studies in the Music Department. I also serve on the editorial board of the journal Women and Music and take part in the Graduate Education Committee in the American Musicological Society. I am a founding member of the Music and Philosophy Study Group of the AMS and I also serve on the board of the Maryanne Amacher Foundation. I hold a Ph.D. in historical musicology from New York University and a B.A. in English and a B.M. in Viola Performance from Oberlin College and Conservatory.