June 15, 2015
On May 30, Pauline Oliveros, the internationally acclaimed experimental music composer and performer, turned 80. It’s been a joyful occasion, attended by several important releases of her music and new books about the experiential sound practice she invented called Deep Listening.
Since 1988, Oliveros has lived with her long-time partner, fellow artist and collaborator Ione in a Victorian house in the Rondout. During a recent visit by this reporter one hot afternoon, she laid out the treasured gifts, as she considers them, on a large table in the high-ceilinged parlor below a hanging of a colorful mandala. Of particular historic significance is the new boxed set of 12 CDS containing the pioneering taped and electronic music she made from 1961 to 1970, never before been released. They showcase her improvisational approach to electronic music that broke new ground and has influenced subsequent generations of cutting-edge artists and musicians.
Also on the table were a CD of her collaboration with Cecil Taylor at the Experimental Media Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at RPI, in Troy, and an artfully packaged vinyl record of a 1963 performance. There was a beautiful book chronicling the 2011 performance of a piece for the Tower Ring, a monumental art installation at the Oliver Ranch, in Sonoma County, as well as a book of word scores—graphic scores using pictures and words, which are accessible to people who can’t read conventional musical notation–published by the Deep Listening Institute, which is based in a suite of lofts in the Shirt Factory.
The new anthology of essays about Deep Listening particularly thrills Oliveros, given the pieces were unknown to her previous to the book’s publication. Oliveros’ own Sounding the Margins, one of her three books, was also on the table, as was a CD of a signature 1989 recording of a performance by the Deep Listening Band.
“I couldn’t be happier to have all this,” said Oliveros, whose peripatetic career shows no signs of slowing down. She teaches full time at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, as well as a composition class at California’s Mills College by Skype. Earlier this year, she traveled to Poland, the UK, France (twice), and Canada to perform, with reviews of her performances and recordings appearing in The Guardian, The New York Times, and other publications.
In March she received the John Cage Award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, in New York, which is the latest in a long list of honors. A list of her recent commissions shows her original approach to composing continues to make experimental in-roads. They include pieces for the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, a group of composers and artists who gather pieces for the online computer game Second Life; the New York Miniaturist Society, who commissioned 100 one-minute pieces; and the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, a work that involved simulating an experiment in which a bell curve created by a random movement of balls was altered into a more interesting shape by a participant’s concentrated thought.
Such far-out experiments have a ring of familiarity, Oliveros said, thanks to the Buck Rogers shows she listened to on the radio as a child. She recalls Dr. Huer beaming Buck Rogers 500 years into the future and the two men communicating through thought, a notion that thrilled her.
Through the Deep Listening Institute, she’s been working to use the marvels of technology to help people with disabilities. In 2007 the institute developed a software interface that enabled mobility-impaired kids at Abilities First, a nonprofit located in Poughkeepsie, to create their own music. Simply by moving their heads, users are able to activate a series of digital switches displayed on the monitor, each of which is attached to a particular note.
Helping others surmount barriers is a natural outgrowth of Oliveros’ own success in forging her own way. Born in Houston in 1932, she was raised by her mother, who taught piano, and grandmother, a females-only household that was a factor in helping her deflect the chauvinism she encountered as a young female composer in the 1950s. (Also it helped being from Texas, where “you had to walk the street like you owned it. I just owned what I did and who I was whether anyone liked it or not.”)
Since her mother brought an accordion home in the early 1940s, the instrument has played a central role in Oliveros’ art. In college she transcribed orchestra and band music for the accordion, resulting in some extraordinary sounds. By the end of college, she was writing her first compositions, which reflected her interest in dissonance and “got more and more wild.”
In her performances today at some of the world’s most prestigious cultural institutions, including the Tate Modern and the Pompidou Center, she plays a digital accordion, an “electro acoustic” instrument that creates a delayed sound when she strikes a key, which she then modifies with foot pedals. Sometimes she also uses it in conjunction with her “expanded instrument system,” a software interface that further transforms the sound.
She finds particular pleasure with her audiences in Canada and Europe, who “are just amazing and wonderful. They really seem to understand and are deeply interested in what I do.” Such respect for artists has been lacking in the United States, although Oliveros said she’s seen a change in young people now, who are “very very interested.”
Oliveros moved to San Francisco and formed the San Francisco Tape Music Center with Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick, and other influential experimental musicians. She used found instruments, such as curb scrapers, then standard equipment on automobiles, piled on an apple crate. The catalyst for these experiments was magnetic tape, which had recently been invented and gave composers new freedom in editing, recording and playing music. The center moved to Mills College, becoming the Center for Contemporary Music, with Oliveros serving as co-director. In 1967, she was hired by the University of California at San Diego to establish a program of electronic music.
In 1981, Oliveros left the university and came East, initially to help run the Creative Music Studio in West Hurley, whose teachers included such innovative giants as Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. She was artist in residence at the Zen Mountain Center, in Mount Tremper. The development of her own Sonic Meditations, prose instructions designed to direct attention to listening “with the whole body”—“take a walk at night and walk so silently the bottoms of your feet become ears” is an example—marked her radical departure into the areas of listening and attention.
Knowing she would be on the road a lot, Kingston initially appealed as a base because it offered services, access to several airports and stress-free living. Plus, Oliveros discovered a kindred soul here: before buying her house, she stayed at the house of Mary Ann Amacher, the recently deceased experimental musician. “It’s kind of amazing there would be two women who are extremely well known in the field of experimental music living in Kingston,” Oliveros said.
She started the Pauline Oliveros Foundation in 1985 and changed the name to Deep Listening Institute after a seminal performance with Stuart Dempster in an abandoned, underground army cistern in Washington State in 1988. The extraordinarily long reverberation time in the cistern—45 seconds—inspired new ways of playing and responding. “It was playing a sound, hearing the sound, listening to yourself playing, thinking what your partner is playing and what the cistern itself is playing. I called it deep listening and then realized those two words really encapsulated the experience of what I was trying to do with the sonic meditations.”
She started hosting Deep Listening retreats in 1991 and began offering a certification program so people could teach the practice themselves. Meanwhile, she taught and served as composer in residence at numerous universities. She had been teaching at Mills College every fall semester for a number of years when she was wooed to RPI in 2001. RPI’s development of EMBAC, which was designed to combine arts and technology as the basis of research and performance, fell right in line with her interests and was an irresistible lure.
At her 80th birthday celebration concert at EMPAC on May 10, Oliveros and Dempster, in a program featuring other artists as well, improvised to the simulation of the sound environment of the abandoned cistern where they had played 25 years before, using software developed by acoustic scientist Jonus Braasch. The concert was attended by 600 people and the performance was repeated at the Winter Garden in New York last month. It was a Buck Rogers moment, for sure.
Deep Listening Institute has long offered a program of performances, festivals, and other events to the local community. If that community has sometimes seemed oblivious to the institute’s avant garde offerings, which have created such excitement elsewhere, the invitation for engagement continues to be extended. This October, during its annual Dream Festival, the institute plans to play the newly issued 12 CDs of Oliveros’ cutting-edge work from the 1960s up through the early 1970s. It will be a seminal event in the world of experimental music, happening right here in Midtown.