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Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros (May 30, 1932 – November 24, 2016)[2] was an American composer, accordionist and a central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music.

Pauline Oliveros

(1932-05-30)May 30, 1932

November 24, 2016(2016-11-24) (aged 84)

Musician

Carole Ione Lewis

She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, and served as its director. She taught music at Mills College, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Oliveros authored books, formulated new music theories, and investigated new ways to focus attention on music including her concepts of "deep listening" and "sonic awareness", drawing on metaphors from cybernetics.[3][4] She was an Eyebeam resident.

Early life and career[edit]

Oliveros was born in Houston, Texas.[5] She started to play music as early as kindergarten,[6] and at nine years of age she began to play the accordion, received from her mother, a pianist, because of its popularity in the 1940s.[6] She later went on to learn violin, piano, tuba and French horn for grade school and college music. At the age of sixteen she resolved to become a composer.[7]


Oliveros arrived in California and supported herself with a day job, and supplemented this by giving accordion lessons.[6] From there Oliveros went on to attend Moores School of Music at the University of Houston, studying with Willard A. Palmer, and earned a BFA degree in composition from San Francisco State College, where her teachers included composer Robert Erickson, with whom she had private lessons and who mentored her for six to seven years. This is also where she met artists Terry Riley, Stuart Dempster and Loren Rush.[6][8]


When Oliveros turned 21, she obtained her first tape recording deck, which led to her creating her own pieces and future projects in this field.[8] Oliveros was one of the original members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which was an important resource for electronic music on the U.S. West Coast during the 1960s.[9] The Center later moved to Mills College, with Oliveros serving as its first director; it was renamed the Center for Contemporary Music.[10]


Oliveros often improvised with the Expanded Instrument System, an electronic signal processing system she designed, in her performances and recordings.[11] Oliveros held Honorary Doctorates in Music from the University of Maryland (Baltimore County), Mills College (Oakland, California), and De Montfort University (Leicester, England, UK).

UCSD[edit]

In 1967, Oliveros left Mills to take a faculty music department position at the University of California, San Diego.[6] There, Oliveros met theoretical physicist and karate master Lester Ingber, with whom she collaborated in defining the attentional process as applied to music listening.[12] She also studied karate under Ingber, achieving black belt level. In 1973, Oliveros conducted studies at the university's one-year-old Center for Music Experiment; she served as the center's director from 1976 to 1979. In 1981, to escape creative constriction,[13] she left her tenured position as full Professor of Music at University of California, San Diego[14] and relocated to upstate New York to become an independent composer, performer, and consultant.[14]

Other[edit]

Oliveros taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mills College. She was born in Houston, Texas in 1932, and died in 2016 in Kingston, New York.[5]


While attending the University of Houston, she was a member of the band program and helped form the Tau chapter of Tau Beta Sigma Honorary Band Sorority.


She was openly lesbian.[24] In 1975 Oliveros met her eventual partner, performance artist Linda Montano.[25] The titles of Oliveros' pieces Rose Moon and Rose Mountain refer to Montano having gone by Rose Mountain at one time.[21] In her later years, Oliveros developed a 32-year romantic partnership and creative collaboration with sound artist IONE (Carole Lewis).[26] The couple worked together on several major musical theatre productions, dance operas, and films.[27] They were influential figures in their community. Sound artist and experimental turntablist Maria Chavez, a friend and mentee of Pauline, describes Pauline and Ione: "when you saw them together, you saw love."[28] Annie Sprinkle’s 1992 production The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop – Or How To Be A Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps, which was co-produced and co-directed with videographer Maria Beatty, featured music by Oliveros.


Oliveros received a 1994 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award.[29]


In 2007, Oliveros received the Resounding Vision Award from Nameless Sound.


She 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.


She was the 2009 recipient of the William Schuman Award, from Columbia University School of the Arts.


Oliveros was the author of five books, Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings 1992–2009, Initiation Dream, Software for People, The Roots of the Moment, and Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice.


In 2012, Oliveros received the John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.[29]


Some of her music was featured in the 2014 French video game NaissanceE.[30]


Oliveros' work Deep Listening Room was featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.[31]


Oliveros was a member of Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, a global collaboration of composers, artists and musicians that approaches the virtual reality platform Second Life as an instrument itself.[32]


She was also a patron of Soundart Radio in Dartington, Devon.

Sonic Meditations: "Teach Yourself to Fly", etc.

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)

Sound Patterns

I of IV, included in the collection New Sounds in Electronic Music, published by Odyssey Records, 1967

Music for 's The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop—Or How To Be A Sex Goddess in 101 Easy Steps (1992)

Annie Sprinkle

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. 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)

Jackson Mac Low

Crone Music (1989)

Six for New Time (1999), music score for

Sonic Youth

"the Space Between with Matthew Sperry", (2003) 482Music

[29]

1976 – Music with Roots in the Aether: Opera for Television. Tape 5: Pauline Oliveros. Produced and directed by . New York: Lovely Music.

Robert Ashley

1993 – The Sensual Nature of Sound: 4 Composers – , Tania León, Meredith Monk, Pauline Oliveros. Directed by Michael Blackwood.

Laurie Anderson

2001 – Roulette TV: Pauline Oliveros. Inc.

Roulette Intermedium

2005 – Unyazi of the Bushveld. Directed by . Produced by African Noise Foundation.

Aryan Kaganof

2020 – . Directed by Lisa Rovner.

Sisters With Transistors

Zimmerman, Walter, Desert Plants – Conversations with 23 American Musicians, Berlin: Beginner Press in cooperation with Mode Records, 2020 (originally published in 1976 by A.R.C., Vancouver). The 2020 edition includes a cd featuring the original interview recordings with , Robert Ashley, Jim Burton, John Cage, Philip Corner, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Joan La Barbara, Garrett List, Alvin Lucier, John McGuire, Charles Morrow, J.B. Floyd (on Conlon Nancarrow), Pauline Oliveros, Charlemagne Palestine, Ben Johnston (on Harry Partch), Steve Reich, David Rosenboom, Frederic Rzewski, Richard Teitelbaum, James Tenney, Christian Wolff, and La Monte Young.

Larry Austin

Official website

Deep Listening Institute

Archived 2003-08-04 at the Wayback Machine

Pauline Oliveros Foundation

Arts Department, School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: Faculty and Staff: Pauline Oliveros, Clinical Professor

by Ron Drummond

The Sonic Rituals of Pauline Oliveros

EST Interview

Archived 2005-11-02 at the Wayback Machine

Pauline Oliveros in conversation with Frank J. Oteri

Listen to an excerpt of Oliveros' Alien Bog at Acousmata music blog

by Bruce Duffie, April 5, 1996

Interview with Pauline Oliveros

by Lutz Felbick, July 10, 1999

Interview with Pauline Oliveros

MSS 102. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Library

Pauline Oliveros Papers

UbuWeb Film

Pauline Oliveros' entry

UbuWeb Sound

Pauline Oliveros' entry

Pauline Oliveros Interview – NAMM Oral History Library (2016)

documenta 14, featuring many of Oliveros's manuscripts

exhibit in Athens, Greece