Pauline Oliveros

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Oliveros playing in Mexico City
Oliveros playing in Mexico City

Pauline Oliveros (born May 30, 1932 in Houston, Texas) is an accordionist and composer who currently resides in Kingston, New York. Her instrument is tuned in just intonation and she often includes it in her meditative improvisational music. Her music is not meditative in the sense that it is intended for listening to while meditating; rather, each piece is a form of meditation, such as her aptly titled Sonic Meditations.

A central figure in post-war electronic art music, Oliveros is one of the original members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center , which was the resource on the U.S. west coast for electronic music during the 1960s. The Center later moved to Mills College, where she was its first director, and is now called the Center for Contemporary Music. Oliveros often improvises with the Expanded Instrument System, an electronic signal processing system she designed, in her performances and recordings.

Oliveros coined the term "Deep Listening", which she then applied to her group The Deep Listening Band and to the Deep Listening program of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd. (formerly The Pauline Oliveros Foundation), which she founded in 1985. The Deep Listening program includes annual listening retreats in Europe, New Mexico and in upstate New York, as well as apprenticeship and certification programs. The Deep Listening Band, which includes Oliveros, David Gamper, and Stuart Dempster, specializes in performing and recording in resonant or reverberant spaces such as caves, cathedrals and huge underground cisterns. They have collaborated with Ellen Fullman and her Long String Instrument, as well as countless other musicians, dancers, and performers.

Von Gunden (1983, p.105-107) describes and names a new musical theory, developed by Oliveros in the "Introductions" to her Sonic Meditations and in articles, called "sonic awareness". Sonic awareness is the ability to consciously focus attention upon environmental and musical sound, requiring continual alertness and an inclination towards always listening, and comparable to John Berger's concept of visual consciousness (as in his Ways of Seeing). "Sonic awareness is a synthesis of the psychology of consciousness, the physiology of the martial arts, and the sociology of the feminist movement" and describes two ways of processing information, focal attention and global attention, which may be represented by the dot and circle, respectively, of the mandala Oliveros commonly employs in composition. Later this representation was expanded, with the mandala quartered and the quarters representing actively making sound, imagining sound, listening to present sound, and remembering past sound. This model was used in the composition of her Sonic Meditations. Practice of the theory creates "complex sound masses possessing a strong tonal center", as focal attention creates tonality and the global attention creates masses of sound, flexible timbre, attack, duration, intensity, and sometimes pitch, as well as untraditional times and spaces for performance such as requiring extended hours or environmental settings. The theory promotes easily created sounds such as vocal ones, and "says that music should be for everyone anywhere."

An alumna of the University of Houston and a graduate of San Francisco State College, Oliveros currently teaches at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mills College. She is openly lesbian.[1]

Oliveros is the author of four books, Initiation Dream, Software for People, The Roots of the Moment, and Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice. Several of Oliveros' lectures and published articles are available on her website.

She recently contributed a chapter to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky.

Contents

[edit] Notable works

  • Sonic Meditations: "Teach Yourself to Fly", etc.
  • Sound Patterns for mixed chorus (1961), awarded the Gaudeamus International Composers Award in 1962, available on Extended Voices (Odyssey 32 16) 0156 and 20th Century Choral Music (Ars Nova AN-1005)
  • Music for Annie Sprinkle's The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop—Or How To Be A Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps (1992)
  • Theater of Substitution series (1975-?). Oliveros was photographed as different characters, including a Spanish señora, a polyester clad suburban housewife, and a professor in robes. Jackson Mac Low played Oliveros at the New York Philharmonic's "A Celebration of Women composers" concert on November 10, 1975 and Oliveros has played Mac Low (see Mac Low's "being Pauline: narrative of a substitution", Big Deal, Fall 1976). (ibid, p.141

[edit] Notable students

[edit] Films

  • 1976 - Music With Roots in the Aether: Opera for Television. Tape 5: Pauline Oliveros. Produced and directed by Robert Ashley. New York, New York: Lovely Music.
  • 1993 - The Sensual Nature of Sound: 4 Composers - Laurie Anderson, Tania León, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros. Directed by Michael Blackwood.
  • 2005 - Unyazi Of The Bushveld. Directed by Aryan Kaganof. Produced by African Noise Foundation

[edit] Listening

[edit] References

  1. ^ Ulrich, Allan (May 26, 1998), “Lesbian American Composers”, The Advocate, <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1589/is_n760/ai_20620450> 

Mockus, Martha [(Martha Mockus)]. Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality, Routledge (2007) ISBN: 978-0-415-97376-2 (paperback) 978-0-415-97375-5 (hardback) 978-0-203-93559-0 (electronic)

[edit] External links