Video 1:Pauline Oliveros improvising.
Video 2:TED Talk by Pauline Oliver’s: Sounds carry intelligence. If you are too narrow in your awareness of sounds, you are likely to be disconnected from your environment. Ears do not listen to sounds; the brain does. Listening is a lifetime practice that depends on accumulated experiences with sound; it can be focused to detail or open to the entire field of sound. Octogenarian composer and sound art pioneer Pauline Oliveros describes the sound experiment that led her to found an institute related to Deep Listening, and develop it as a theory relevant to music, psychology, and our collective quality of life.
Pauline Oliveros, an accomplished American composer, accordionist, and experimental music pioneer passed away on November 25, 2016 at the age of 84.
Excerpt from Wickpedia: Pauline Oliveros was a central figure in the development of experimental and post-war electronic art music. She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, and served as its director. She taught music at Mills College, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Oliver’s wrote five books formulated new music theories and investigated new ways to focus attention on music including her concepts of “Deep Listening” and “Sonic Awareness”.
Born in 1932, Oliveros was a multi-instrumentalist who later became a composer and performer. She was also a noted author and philosopher writing five books: Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings 1992–2009, Initiation Dream, Software for People, The Roots of the Moment, and Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice.
In the early ‘60s, Oliveros was an integral member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center. In the late ‘80s, she coined the term “Deep Listening,” and later went on to found the Deep Listening Institute (now the Center For Deep Listening).
From a very young age Oliveros was interested in the sound field around her and started to learn to play music as early as kindergarten. Oliveros learned to play the accordion at nine years of age from her mother because of its popularity in the 1940s as a relatively lucrative instrument.She later learned the tuba and French horn for grade school and college music.
Pauline Oliveros performed in “Bang on a Can” on Thursday, November 10, 2016 at the Jewish Museum in New York City, one of her last performances.”Take Me (I’m Yours)” is on view through February 5, 2017,
The concert featured Oliveros performing ‘The Sound of Meditation’ on V-Accordion, an instrument that produces both accordion and orchestral sounds.The concert also blurred the boundary between the performer and the audience by asking the listener to participate in the making of music.
Since the 1960s Pauline Oliveros influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. In the 1950s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets in San Francisco.
She was the recipient of the John Cage award for 2012 from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, and served as Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. She was interested in finding new sounds and in finding new uses for old ones – her primary instrument was the accordion, perhaps an unexpected visitor to the musical cutting edge.
Pauline was the founder of “Deep Listening,” which she described as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. “Deep Listening is my life practice,” she explained, simply. Oliver’s was the founder of the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, formerly the Pauline Oliveros Foundation.
Oliveros’ album Accordion and Voice (1982) and her Stuart Dempster and Panatois collaboration Deep Listening (1989) are considered landmark ambient records.
Tom Service’s profile of Oliveros was published in 2012 and is a superb introduction to her music. He cautioned that the deep listening concept is nothing about soft-focused meditation. “Her deep listening encompasses the whole world, it doesn’t separate you from it; the noise of politics, identity and representation is part of what she hears.” One of her works, a 1971 “sonic meditation” called Native, contains the instruction: “Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”
At the time of her death, she was the Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. A distinguished explorer of sound, she shared thoughts on deep listening, tape improv, and teaching with Pitchfork in 2011. “I feel that students always learn more from each other than they do from their professor,” she said. “They learn by doing.”
