Pauline Oliveros (1932 – 2016)
Pauline Oliveros was a composer of electronic and experimental music who advocated for a type of holistic approach to music that she called “deep listening.”
Pauline Oliveros was born in Houston. She began performing music at an early age, and at age nine, started with the accordion, an instrument that she continued to play for the rest of her life. She attended the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston and earned a BFA in composition from San Francisco State College.
In her 20s, she started experimenting with tape machines, and went on to electronic music in the 1960s. But in the 1970s, she began gravitating towards a more communal, improvisatory, and contemplative approach to music. Her work Tuning Meditation from 1971 instructs the participants to “Inhale deeply; exhale on the note of your choice; listen to the sounds around you, and match your next note to one of them; on your next breath make a note no one else is making; repeat. Call it listening out loud.” YouTube features several performances; this one was done virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic:
This performance was organized by the renowned flutist Claire Chase and Pauline Oliveros’s longtime creative partner and wife, writer Carole Ione Lewis (called Ione). An article in the New York Times describes the process.
In 1988, following an experience of improvising with other musicians in an underground cistern, Oliveros developed the concept of “deep listening” — the phrase started as a pun — which she described as the difference between hearing and listening. Here’s a TEDxIndianapolis talk where she discusses the concept:
This is one of Pauline Oliveros’s more conventional compositions. Six for a New Time was written for Sonic Youth for their 1999 album “Goodbye 20th Century (SYR 4),” which also included compositions by John Cage, Christian Wolff, Steve Reich, and others: