Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World

5. Pauline Oliveros

102 For me Deep Listening is a lifetime practice. The more I listen the more I learn to listen. Deep Listening involves going below the surface of what is heard and also expanding to the whole field of sound whatever one’s usual focus might be. This is the way to connect with the acoustic environment and all that inhabits it. – Pauline oliveros, 19931 In a career spanning nearly sixty years, Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932) has been at the forefront of multiple twentieth-and now twenty-first-century musical movements. Starting in the late 1950s, she was among the vanguard of American composers exploring analog electronic technology and the promises it held for musical composition; as a woman working in that field she was a rare presence and force. In the 1960s, Oliveros expanded her composerly reach with movement and theater pieces, collaborating with dancer/choreographers Elizabeth Harris, Anna Halprin, and Merce Cunningham, among others, and creating works that reached across artistic disciplines.2 Like John Cage, a friend and fellow explorer of new meanings of “music,” “composer,” and “silence,” attention to the total environment became as important to Oliveros as attention to the sonic environment alone. At the end of the 1960s, Pauline Oliveros began her move toward a type of sound-meditation practice that has since become synonymous with her name. In a paper that she delivered at the 1978 International Studies Seminar on Musical Creation held in Mexico City, Oliveros commented upon the fu5 Pauline Oliveros � Pauline Oliveros 103 ture of music, her own experiences in music, and her evolving ideas regarding focal and global modes of attention, awareness, and listening. Reflecting her pioneering work with tape music, music technology, and computer programming , she called her paper “Software for People,” and in 1984 that same title became the name of her first collection of published writings.3 In the paper Oliveros explained her gradual evolution over the 1950s and 1960s toward a practice she called “Deep Listening” and concluded her talk by inviting attendees to join in exercises that allowed them to experience the concepts she had just described. In 1994 the composer provided one of her fullest descriptions of Deep Listening: “listening in every possible way to every thing possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds.”4 In the intervening years, Deep Listening® has become the trademarked name of workshops, retreats, and a three-year certified training program in which Oliveros and her team teach essential practices and skills; an ensemble, the Deep Listening Band, and the name of a cD they issued in 19895 ; and Oliveros’s Deep Listening Institute, whose mission is succinctly stated on its webpage: Deep Listening Institute, Ltd. fosters a unique approach to music, literature, art, and meditation, and promotes innovation among artists and audiences in creating, performing, recording, and educating with a global perspective.6 Oliveros has become among the most effective and beloved advocates for disciplined aural awareness in the United States and abroad. She regularly travels the globe to teach and perform. Today Oliveros is Distinguished Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (rPi) in Troy, New York, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College in Oakland, California, positions she has earned without the highly valued doctoral degree .7 For Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening is a life practice; her decadeslong dedication to listening–to everything, all the time–confirms her place among these skillful listeners. As is the case with other musicians discussed in this book, starting at an early age she was deeply attuned and susceptible to her natural surroundings. In an article that appeared in American Music in 2007, Oliveros explained the impact of her 1930s rural Houston upbringing. She had been back in the Nature All Around Us 104 area to receive an award, and the ceremony was held at a studio near where she grew up: Certainly my childhood in Texas opened into a ‘wonderland’ of natural sound. There were large rural areas, which I relished early on. . . . All of the farmland is pretty much gone now, but the studio’s location is very much like what I knew about and experienced as a child, with a pecan orchard, pine woods and berry patches. In those days, what you could hear in terms of the natural world...