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Artist Panel: Refining The Third Ear
Refining The Third Ear – Artist Panel
September 20, 2025
1:00-3:00pm
Doors at 12:30pm
Tickets:
$10 Student – use code STUDENT at checkout
(Valid Student ID will be requested at the door)
$15 GA
Free for IMSS Members
Tickets include Museum admission
Organized by Itsï Ramirez and Bret Schneider
A discussion between musicians Bret Schneider, Itsï Ramirez, and Lula Asplund on the history of avant-garde art and music, and the unfinished task of creating and developing music for the Third Ear. Together they will discuss what the 21st-century music maker’s relationship is to this history and its forms, its failures, and its lingering demands.
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
Lula Asplund is an experimental composer and Chicago-based sound artist. Her work invokes voice as object and atmosphere—dislocated, refracted, tactile. Using spectral play, vocal manipulation, and fragmented sound poetry, she enters the nonlinear logic of dream and memory. Asplund has a BFA from Mills College and has performed at Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, The Lab SF, CalArts, Elastic Arts, Bohemian National Cemetery, and Experimental Sound Studio.
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