The Politics of Collaborative Performance in the Music of Pauline Oliveros

The Politics of Collaborative Performance in the Music of Pauline Oliveros Barbara Rose Lange IN 2003, TWO SETS OF MUSICIANS in neighboring U.S. cities initiated a project to collaborate on a performance of Pauline Oliveros's Four Meditations for Orchestra. Disputes arose between the groups, nearly derailing the performance. They differed over such basic issues as the number of rehearsals to hold, the purpose of rehearsal, who should par ticipate in the performance, and how the musicians should be con figured. I believe that these conflicts arise from the popularizing of new music. Critics, audio producers, musicians, and composers celebrate the fusion of jazz, rock, and classical music, the adoption of punk as avant garde art, and the expansion of sound tapestries through mixing (Eno 2004; Gendron 2002; Tierney 2000). Georgina Born commented in the mid-1990s that such combinations tend to be restricted to individual artists and single projects (1995, 21), but a generation of young adults 40 PerspectivesofNew Music isnow juxtaposing sonic values. Pauline Oliveros's music, composed for groups, attracts artists from disparate backgrounds?those with no musi cal experience, jazz players, indie rockers, and classical musicians. Her pieces perform egalitarianism; they disrupt composer-performer rela tionships, reorganizing how musicians accumulate artistic and economic capital. Oliveros's music has been called experimental, postmodern, or avant garde. Some writers reserve the avant-garde term formusic that ishighly systematized (Born 1995; Nyman 1999). But Peter Burger, in developing a theory of the avant-garde for literature and the visual arts, articulates a characteristic of radical reorganization that is relevant to Oliveros's music. Burger comments that avant-garde art, like consumer oriented craft, isutilitarian. The latter ingrainsmainstream practices, but avant-garde art attacks them, thereby initiating a transformation (Burger 1984, 53-4, 90-1). The best-known approach is to integrate the popular, as with the Surrealists or 1970s punk. Oliveros's compositions restructure in a different way, by overdetermining social practice. "Reality in its concrete variety penetrate[s] the work of art," states Burger (1984, 91), and this is the experience of many musicians who perform Oliveros's music. Ethnomusicology, because of its focus on performers as social agents, can provide some insights into issues of avant-garde performance, especially as itnow preoccupies musicians in numerous American cities. Martin Scherzinger has argued that by privileging cultural context, ethnomusicology obscures both the researcher and the musical actors (2001). Musical ethnographies of the late 1990s and 2000s have escaped this by tracking flows of musical commerce, sounds, and performance strategies (Meintjes 2003; Slobin 2000; Waxer 2002). This essay, in discussing specific negotiations and tactics, follows a "radically contextual" approach (Scherzinger 2001, 9). In order to delineate this music scene of today's complex society, I augment the standard ethnographic modalities of participant observation, interviews, and directed conversation with online communications and study of recordings made bymusicians themselves. The conflicts described in this essay illustrate that such sources are "partial truths" (Clifford 1986). Oliveros's Musical Strategies Oliveros designs her music to breach divides ofmusical training. Begin ning in the 1970s, she created exercises in sound production and perception, publishing them as a group of sonic meditations, "just to PoliticsofCollaborative Performance 41 make it possible for people to work together using sound and music" (Oliveros and Maus 1994, 179). In her view, the set is "deeply political in that it challenges certain premises in themusical establishment, that it opens theway for people to participate who aren't musicians" (Smith and Smith 1995, 209). Oliveros objects to the score as "a symbol of control" (Oliveros and Maus 1994, 184) so thatmany of her composi tions, like her sonic meditations, use prose instructions rather than musical notation. Sound Piece, written originally for art school students, asks the performers to produce sounds with unique qualities from awide variety of sources, but to avoid making them "identifiable as a fragment or phrase of music." It suggests that the sounds "enliven the perfor mance space" and adds the factors of distance and motion (Oliveros 2005a). Oliveros's pieces formusicians and other artists differ from her sonic meditations in that they aestheticize collaboration. Many compositions mark the configuration of players as non-hierarchical. Oliveros frequently mandates...