Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality (review)

It is May 26, 2004, and I am sitting at a table at Montreal’s famed Casa del Popolo with a truly remarkable collection of women improvisers. We are having a “get-to-know-you” lunch preparatory to giving a roundtable discussion and performance that evening at a conference on improvisation.¹ Several of the performers vent their frustration at being grouped yet again as “women improvisers.” (Although we have not been asked to talk about gender, there we are, all the women, collected together.) They are expressing the sentiment that Sherrie Tucker has so aptly described: “While ‘improvising woman’ is, for some musicians, a project worthy of their creative energies, many ‘improvising women’ are tired of having to ‘improvise woman’ every time they play.”²

After several minutes of heated discussion Pauline Oliveros—an internationally respected musician who has never been one to brook categorization— matter-of-factly adds her two cents. We need to keep on talking about women, both gender and sexuality, she tells us, because we are still traveling the long, hard road toward true respect and equality for women in music. This work, which she has been laboring at since the 1950s, is by no means finished.

The early part of Oliveros’s own journey forms the subject of Martha Mockus’s book Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality. It is a book about communities, about relationships, and, above all, about sounding and listening, specifically lesbian listening. Mockus draws on interviews with Oliveros (including her own, conducted between 1997 and 2005), and she delves into archives of correspondence between Oliveros, her mother, and many of the most important women in Oliveros’s life: lovers, friends, and colleagues.

Oliveros has generously supported Mockus in creating an unprecedentedly intimate account of a composer—not just that of an icon of experimental music but that of a lesbian whose life and work have been significantly shaped by her relationships with women. By “sounding out,” Oliveros is offering up a rich legacy to all women in music. As Mockus points out, Oliveros has a firm place in the canon of twentieth-century composers; in fact, she is one of a very few women composers who are consistently mentioned in standard histories of twentieth-century music.³ But while most studies situate Oliveros among her male contemporaries such as Terry Riley and Robert Ashley, Mockus argues that “the women in Oliveros’s life were far more important sources of creative energy and exchange than her male colleagues” (3).

By examining representative compositions by Oliveros from 1960 to 1985, Mockus helps us to “hear Oliveros’s work as lesbian musicality—a musical enactment of mid-and late-century lesbian subjectivity, critique, and transformation on many levels” (2). Mockus’s keen ear is also attentive to North American feminist and lesbian theorists of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, including Terry Castle, Audre Lorde, Sue-Ellen Case, and Teresa de Lauretis. Along with writers of lesbian fiction Dorothy Allison, Jane Rule, and Monique Wittig, they provide a context for Oliveros’s work within the ideological and material conditions of Second Wave feminism. In this coupling Mockus exposes herself. We are privy to her sensuous engagements with Oliveros’s music in ways that are both highly personal and political. Here, Mockus replays the somewhat confessional tone of much early 1990s queer and feminist musicology, a strategy that she underscores through citing important articles on lesbian musicality by Jennifer Rycenga and Suzanne Cusick that call for a reconsideration of power relationships in music.⁴ For Mockus, the connection between musicality and sexuality in Oliveros’s music is summed up by the composer’s own stated interest in “the sensual nature of sound” (11).⁵ Invoking Audre Lorde’s famous essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” allows Mockus to define lesbian musicality as both an ethics of respect and collaboration and as “physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual” joy (11).⁶

Sounding Out is organized both...