Performance: Refining The Third Ear - Night 4

Refining The Third Ear - Night 4

October 16, 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

October 2nd Program:

Kevin Harris — Overdetermined #4

Itsï Ramirez & Bret Schneider — Vocal Piece #1

Henryk Golden — Anatomie

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

Henryk Golden (1999, Warsaw) is a composer who focuses on the nature of objects in art (i.e. material) and how to expose them in new ways to the audience, how to humorize and more importantly how to humanize them. He works intensely with classical and jazz musicians, dancers, video artists and art scientists. He performs his own pieces through the use of voice and tuba. He is currently a doctoral student at the University of Southern California with Ted Hearne. Previously he attended the one-year course at the institute of Sonology in the Hague with Richard Barrett. He completed his master studies in composition with Richard Ayres at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. In 2024 his work “Sprechen Sie Musik?” was selected to be performed at MATA in NYC. In the summer of 2021, he was awarded a bursary to complete the collaborative composition course at the Dartington Summer School with Christopher Fox and Juliet Fraser. His works have had recent performances in Carnegie Hall, New York by Eliane Menzel; Wigmore Hall, London, UK by Naomi Sullivan and Luke Newby; Amare, Den Haag by the Residentie Orkest and Nicholas Collon; and in the Philharmonie de Paris, France by Ensemble Multilatérale and Léo Warynski.

Kevin Harris (b. 1975, Oklahoma City) lives and works in St. Louis as an artist, curator, composer, and electrical engineer. His practice is broadly focused on using media installations to establish methods of communication and communal conditions by which to explore the psychological manifestations of the contemporary life under industry and empire. Harris is known for his large-scale sculptural installations involving sound, video, text, electronics, motors, wood, and metal. He was artist in residence at The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis where he curated the sound art series, Audible Interruptions. Prior to that, he ran the St. Louis performance space Floating Laboratories. He is currently program director at the non- profit arts organization, HEARding Cats Collective and serves as artistic director of The

Center for Aesthetic Research (CAR). Harris holds a BA in music composition and an MFA in electronic media art. His most recent solo exhibition (2023 at The Luminary) constructed a universal graphic symbol language, utilizing multimedia installation to explore its usage. His art has been shown at many galleries and museums, and he has performed hundreds of music and sound events over the years.