RIP Pauline Oliveros

On October 24, 2016, we welcomed Pauline Oliveros to the Red Bull Music Academy for a lecture in Montréal. In the wide-ranging, career-spanning talk, she talked about the incredible scope of her career in music. Below are a few of the topics that she touched in the chat, which lasted nearly 90 minutes.

Listening To Your Field Recordings

As soon as I got my first tape recorder I put the microphone in the window of my apartment and recorded. What I noticed was that there were sounds on the tape that I had not heard, so I tap myself on the shoulder now, anytime I record, make sure I listen to everything. I tell myself to listen to everything all the time. That’s my trip. [laughs]

“Bye Bye Butterfly”

I invented my own way of making electronic music at the time, was to set the oscillators above the range of hearing, say, around 40,000 Hertz. Then there would be differences between the two or three oscillators that I would use. If you know what a tube oscillator looks like, it has a big dial in the center of the face and it has the possibility of setting ranges so you can go above the range of hearing.

The only way you could change the pitch of the sound was me to turn this dial, so that was not necessarily a good way to make some music. The way I was playing the oscillators was by just barely turning the dials. I had reduced that aspect of oscillator playing to being able to sense where you wanted to be in an improvisational way, and by listening to what was coming out.

I was listening intently, and performing, to get the sounds that I got. I was very interested in layering sounds, and in taking the same tone and then microscopically varying so that you got side bands, they were called. This was a simple setup, actually, but it could produce very complex results.

Expanded Instrument System

Expanded Instrument System is about delay times, so it does requires equipment, yes. In the early days of the Expanded Instrument System it was me lugging around a couple of tape recorders. It was a heavy-duty experience to set that up and do it. I think what I had were a couple of Sony Triple 7 recorders. You needed a truck load, or train load of equipment to do things in the very first instance of trying to make electronic music. Through the years it’s come down to the fact that you can do things on your phone now.

Delays

I’m an accordion player. If I play a sound I have very little possibility to bend it. If I play the sound and then had a delayed sound return, I could bend it with a foot pedal so that I would have voltage control over the delayed sound. I got to be quite a pedal-er so that I can control the pitches with my feet that were coming back. That’s why delays were important, because I couldn’t bend the original sound but I could certainly bend the second sounds or third or fourth, whatever.

Deep Listening

In the late ’80s, Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis and I went to the cistern in Fort Ward and in Washington state, climbed down 14-foot ladder into the cistern which had 89 pillars and was made of reinforced concrete and had a 45 second reverb time.

That’s where we made the CD that’s called Deep Listening. [When] we had decided that we had a release, we had to name the album. I came up with Deep Listening and then we laughed a lot, rolled on the floor because we had been 14 feet underground. Deep Listening comes from a pun. Punning can be good.

What happened then was that I started naming different programs that we were doing deep listening. We had the first deep listening retreat was in 1991, it was in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico at a small retreat center where we were the only thing that was happening besides the generator for electricity. It was a very peaceful and wonderful place to start this practice.

I said it was going to be a Deep Listening retreat but I didn’t know what that was. In the next, I would say eight years, I learned how to lead or facilitate – I rather like facilitation than leadership because that’s too hierarchical.

Ione

Ione has practiced listening in dreams as part of deep listening and facilitates what she called dream community, because when people start dreaming together they often have experiences in their dreams which are relational. It creates a kind of interesting community. It’s not about analyzing dreams. It’s about the creativity that comes from what happens in dreams. That’s part of our deep listening practice. What she does and then the other part is from Heloise Gold. Heloise is a movement practitioner and does Tai Chi and creative movement. That’s part also, of listening through the body. Which is very, very important to this practice.

Noise

Engineers often ask me, “Well, why do we have to listen to the noise pieces [in your classes]?” Then I have a lot of fun. I say, “What about the sound of New York City? Do you know who composed that?” I say, “You guys. You guys, you engineers, you’re the ones that have risen the noise level in New York City and other places so high,” so I said, “Why don’t you do some deep listening?”

Sensational Sounds for Hearing and Non-Hearing Performers

I just recently had an experience which illuminates deep listening very, very well. For a whole year now I have been working with Tarek Atoui, who is an improviser and composer and has commissioned instruments to be built for the hard of hearing and deaf. In my teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tarek was in residence as an artist at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center.

The students, there were eight of them, were working on a project to build an instrument or interface for the hard of hearing and deaf. Which is a very interesting project. How do you do that? That took a bit of thought and experimenting and so on. At the end of the semester we had a concert with the student’s projects and another concert in May with instruments that Tarek had commissioned. Then the next time to be working together was in Bergen, Norway, this past August.

This was the first time that I got to work with this project with actually deaf people. There were three. On the first day of my residency there I interviewed Robert Demeter. Robert was very, very beautiful and interesting and vibrant. We communicated through a translator. About halfway through I decided, the decision I would make would be to ask Robert to conduct my piece, which was called “Sensational Sounds for Hearing and Non-Hearing Performers.”

When I arrived in Bergen, that’s all I had, was the title. That’s all. That decision to ask Robert to conduct the piece was a first kind of compositional decision, right? We had the musicians that we were going to use for the piece, were from the Norwegian Philharmonic. There were a dozen of those musicians, and I asked the three deaf performers to teach the musicians how to perceive their instruments and play them. I told the musicians they had to leave their own instruments at home. That was another compositional decision. The instruments that were performed were all instruments that Tarek had commissioned.

It was so beautiful to see them engaging, right away, the non-hearing and hearing performers because of the relationship turned around so that the deaf had something to teach to the hearing.

Robert’s task as conductor was to bring people in and take them out. What happened was that they started to do this improvisation and it was quite obvious that Robert, with no kind of amplification device at all, was perceiving the music. OK? It was clear. He conducted and gave the musicians expressiveness. The expressiveness came from his understanding of gesture and feeling and sensing, at some level, which is probably the whole body, the music.

The venue was the former Sentralbadet, which was the municipal swimming pool. Most of the instruments were set up in the deep end of the pool. Which was appropriate, right?

Pauline’s Orchestration

I do practice what I call deep listening all the time. I’m always listening for what is around me as well as what is in my mind. In performing, I generate the first sound that happens and I’m listening to that. I have to listen. Maybe I listen exclusively or maybe I’m listening to everything. If I hear something, then I incorporate it into what I’m performing.

For example, there was an interesting time in Vancouver, Canada of playing in a really beautiful wooden structure and I was playing solo accordion. Not the V-Accordion but my other accordion, the one that’s been through my life. Somewhere in probably 40 minutes into my performance, fire engines went by. After the performance, there were not one but there were three people came up to me and said, “How did you get the fire engines to go by on time?” The only answer I have is that I was listening and I heard them, so they became part of the piece. That’s called Pauline’s orchestration. [laughs]

Spirituality

For me, listening is a spiritual path because the more you listen, the more you learn and the more you’re able to put yourself in someone else’s position which is part of spirituality.

Watch the full lecture below.