Performance: Refining The Third Ear - Night 1

Refining The Third Ear - Night 1

September 3, 2025

7:00-9:00pm

Doors at 6:30pm

Tickets:

$10 Student - use code STUDENT at checkout

(Valid Student ID will be requested at the door)

$10 IMSS Members Presale - use code IMSSMEMBER at checkout

(Valid IMSS Membership card will be requested at door)

$15 GA Presale

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$15 Student & IMSS Members (With valid ID & Membership Card) at Door

$20 GA at Door

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

September 3rd Program:

Michael Harrison — Radians Phase

Itsï Ramirez — Burned Glimpse

Bret Schneider — Third Ear Preludes

Composer/pianist Michael Harrison (called "an American maverick" by Philip Glass) forges a new approach to composition through just intonation (the system of tuning based on pure harmonic proportions). His works blend classical music traditions of Europe and North India. He is a Guggenheim Fellowship and NYFA Artist Fellowship recipient.

Michael Harrison creates dedicated tuning systems for many of his works. He pioneered a structural approach to composition in which the proportions of harmonic relationships organically determine other musical elements such as pitch, duration, and dynamics. He also invented the "harmonic piano," a grand piano that plays 24 notes per octave, documented in the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Harrison seeks expressions of universality via the physics of sound – music that brings one into a state of concentrated listening as a meditative and even mind-altering experience.

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