Pauline Oliveros

• Born: May 30, 1932
• Birthplace: Houston, Texas
• Died: November 24, 2016

American classical composer

Oliveros became a leader in the avant-garde movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, creating works that required concentration and meditation upon sound as an end in itself and as a means toward deeper self-awareness and consciousness of one’s environment.

The Life

Pauline Oliveros spent her youth in rural Texas, where she was fascinated by sounds, ranging from those of cicadas, crickets, and frogs to the static noise and imperfect signals found in between radio stations. In 1942 her mother brought home an accordion. Oliveros quickly picked up its techniques, and her love for its sound became lifelong. She ultimately performed on an instrument tuned in just temperament. She studied accordion and French horn at the University of Houston from 1949 to 1952, and she completed her bachelor of arts degree at San Francisco State University in 1957, where she studied composition with Robert Erickson. In San Francisco she met composers such as Lamont Young, Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick, and Steve Reich, working with several of them at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, where she was its director in 1966 and 1967. At this studio, Oliveros was a pioneer of novel tape-delay techniques that had not been possible prior to the mid-1960’s. She found her interests differed slightly from those of her colleagues, principally because her curiosity was in sound as its own end, without links to any formalist composition.

Oliveros became a professor at the University of California, San Diego in 1967, remaining there until 1981, when she moved to the Hudson Valley region of New York to pursue composing on a freelance basis. She assumed a professorship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and she also served on the faculty at Mills College in Oakland, California. In 1985 she became president of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation (since 2005 called the Deep Listening Institute). She was honored with awards, grants, and concerts internationally, including the SEAMUS (Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the U.S.) Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1999; the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) Standard Award for 1982 to 2008; and National Endowment of the Arts fellowships in 1990, 1988, and 1984. She was the 2009 recipient of Columbia University School of the Arts' William Schuman Award, and received the John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2012. As a feminist who is openly lesbian, she also established a significant role in the GBLT (gay-bisexual-lesbian-transgender) arts community.

Oliveros died on November 24, 2016, at her home in Kingston, New York. She was eighty-four years old.

The Music

As a composer of the avant-garde movement, Oliveros took an all-encompassing approach to music, in composition, performance, writing, teaching, improvisation, and blending music with philosophy, psychology, and spirituality. Her mission was less about composing pieces for entertainment and more about the attempt to get at the root of music and listening through a process of intense attention and focus, which she calls Deep Listening.

Sonic Meditations. Content and context in her music is relevant if the participant in her music deems it relevant. Her piece “Native” from Sonic Meditations reads, “Take a walk at night. Walk so softly that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” While context plays a role here (for example, city versus rural settings and time of day impact the piece’s content), the piece is not dependent upon its context, and its content is limitless. Her opening piece, entitled “Teach Yourself to Fly,” from the same collection, however, depends even less upon contextual variables. It reads:

Any number of persons sit in a circle facing the center. Illuminate the space with dim blue light. Begin by simply observing your own breathing. Always be an observer. Gradually allow your breathing to become audible. Then gradually introduce your voice. Allow your vocal cords to vibrate in any mode which occurs naturally. Allow the intensity of the vibrations to increase very slowly. Continue as long as possible, naturally, and until all others are quiet, always observing your own breath cycle. Variation: translate voice to an instrument.

Soundscapes. Oliveros also wrote about finding or creating soundscapes, meaning sonic environments with which the focused listener interacts, ideally achieving a unity with the sound through meditation. There is a strong social conscience in some of Oliveros’s music and thought, linking it to ideals of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Self-awareness merges with awareness of local space and, ultimately, with a deeper sense of the infinite.

Musical Legacy

Oliveros’s compositions, statements, theories, and practice forge a path toward the holistic experience of sound at a time when, at least in Western culture, holistic thinking is just beginning to be understood and practiced. Given time, Oliveros’s approaches to sound and to meditation will acquire a widespread following, as Western culture discovers ways to experience the wholeness of life, healing, and peace. Oliveros has challenged people to listen “in every possible way to everything possible to hear, no matter what you are doing.” In her holistic music, she has given the concept of sound a simultaneously universal and personal importance that it may not have had since the civilization of ancient Greece.

Principal Works

accordion works:Rattlesnake Mountain, 1982; The Wanderer, 1982; The Seventh Mansion, 1983; Waking the Heart, 1984; What If, 1991; Cicada Song, 1996.

chamber works:Trio, 1955 (revised 1961); Variations for Sextet, 1960; Outline, 1963; Duo, 1964; Circuitry, 1968; 1000 Acres, 1972; Horse Sings from Cloud, 1975; Gone with the Wind, 1980; Monkey, 1981; Mother’s Day, 1981; The Wheel of Time, 1983; Wings of a Dove, 1984; Spiral Mandala, 1984; Portrait of Quintet of the Americas, 1988; All Four of the Drum Bum, 1990; From Unknown Silences, 1996.

choral works:Sound Patterns, 1961; Meditations on the Points of the Compass, 1970; Angels and Demons, 1980; Legend, 1985; Midnight Operas, 1992.

electronic works:Time Perspectives, 1961; Before the Music Ends, 1965; Bye Bye Butterfly, 1965; 5000 Miles, 1965; Big Mother Is Watching You, 1966; The Day I Disconnected the Erase Head and Forgot to Reconnect It, 1966; Participle Dangling in Honour of Gertrude Stein, 1966; Bog Road with Bird Call Patch, 1970; Tara’s Room, 1988.

orchestral works:To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation, 1970; Tasting the Blaze, 1985.

performance works:Seven Passages, 1963; George Washington Slept Here Too, 1965; Pieces of Eight, 1965; Seven Sets of Mnemonics, 1965; Theater Piece for Trombone Player, 1966; Double Basses at Twenty Paces, 1968; The Dying Alchemist Preview, 1969; Please Don’t Shoot the Piano Player, He’s Doing the Best He Can, 1969; Sonic Meditations, 1971; What to Do, 1972; The Yellow River Map, 1977; Traveling Companions, 1980; Njinga the Queen King, 1993.

vocal works:The C(s) for Once, 1966; SY;YdY = 1, 1969; The Wheel of Life, 1978; Oh Sister Whose Name Is Goddess, 1984; The Wandering, 1984; The Chicken Who Learned How to Fly, 1985; InMemory of the Future, 1991; Reflections on the Persian Gulf, 1991; Beyond the Mysterious Silence, 1996.

writings of interest:Pauline’s Proverbs, 1976; Initiation Dream, 1981; Software for People: Collected Writings, 1963-1980, 1984; The Roots of the Moment: Collected Writings, 1980-1996, 1998; Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, 2005.

Bibliography

Mockus, Martha. Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality. Routledge, 2007.

Oliveros, Pauline. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. iUniverse, 2005.

Oliveros, Pauline. The Roots of the Moment: Collected Writings, 1980-1996. Drogue Press, 1998.

Oliveros, Pauline. Software for People: Collected Writings, 1963-1980. Smith, 1984.

Oliveros, Pauline. Anthology of Text Scores by Pauline Oliveros 1971–2013. Edited by Sam Golter and Lawton Hall, Deep Listening Publications, 2013.

Oliveros, Pauline, and Becky Cohen. Initiation Dream. Astro Artz, 1981.

Service, Tom. "A Guide to Pauline Oliveros's Music." The Guardian, 7 May 2012, www.theguardian.com/music/tomserviceblog/2012/may/07/guide-contemporary-music-pauline-oliveros. Accessed 23 Mar. 2017.

Smith, Steve. "Pauline Oliveros, Composer Who Championed 'Deep Listening,' Dies at 84." The New York Times, 27 Nov. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/arts/music/pauline-oliveros-composer-who-championed-deep-listening-dies-at-84.html. Accessed 23 Mar. 2017.

Von Gunden, Heidi. The Music of Pauline Oliveros. Scarecrow Press, 1983.