Pauline Oliveros (May 30, 1932 – November 24, 2016) was an American composer and accordionist. Oliveros is considered a central figure in the development of post-war experimental and electronic music. She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the early 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. She was a resident at the Eyebeam technology center.
Early life and education Pauline Oliveros was born in Houston, Texas, on May 30, 1932. She was of Tejana descent. She started to play music as early as kindergarten, and at nine years of age she began to play the accordion, received from her mother, a pianist, because of its popularity at the time. She 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. Oliveros arrived in California in 1952 and supported herself with a day job, and supplemented this by giving accordion lessons. From there Oliveros went on to attend the University of Houston, studying with Willard A. Palmer. 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 earned a BFA 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. During this period she met San Francisco-based musicians Terry Riley, Stuart Dempster, and Loren Rush, with whom she would later collaborate.
Career When Oliveros turned 21, she obtained her first tape recorder, which led to her creating her own electroacoustic pieces. Along with Ramón Sender and Morton Subotnick, Oliveros was one of the original members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which was an important resource for electronic music on the west coast of the United States during the 1960s. The Center later moved to Mills College, with Oliveros serving as its first director; there it was renamed the Center for Contemporary Music. In 1966, she attended a summer course in electronic music at the University of Toronto, studying with Hugh Le Caine. "I of IV", one of her most famous electronic pieces, was realized there; in 1967, it was released on LP by Odyssey Records alongside works by Richard Maxfield (Night Music) and one-time San Francisco Tape Music Center associate Steve Reich (Come Out). Oliveros often improvised with the Expanded Instrument System, an electronic signal processing system she designed, in her performances and recordings. Oliveros held Honorary Doctorates in Music from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Mills College, and De Montfort University. In 1967, Oliveros left Mills to take a position at the University of California, San Diego. There, Oliveros met theoretical physicist and karate master Lester Ingber, with whom she collaborated in defining the attentional process as applied to music listening. 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, she left her tenured position at UCSD and relocated to upstate New York to become an independent composer, performer, and consultant. In 1987, Oliveros had the tuning of her accordion changed from equal temperament to just intonation. She sings and plays the retuned accordion (without electronics) in the 1993 opera Agamemnon. 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.
Deep listening
In 1988, as a result of descending 14 feet (4.3 m) into the Dan Harpole underground cistern in Port Townsend, Washington, to make a recording, Oliveros coined the term "deep listening"—a pun that blossomed into "an aesthetic...designed to inspire both trained and untrained performers to practice the art of listening and responding to environmental conditions in solo and ensemble situations". Stuart Dempster, Oliveros and Panaiotis then formed the Deep Listening Band, and deep listening became a program of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation, founded in 1985. The Deep Listening program includes annual listening retreats in Europe, New Mexico and in upstate New York, as well as apprenticeship and certification programs. The Pauline Oliveros Foundation changed its name to Deep Listening Institute, Ltd., in 2005. The Deep Listening Band, which included Oliveros, David Gamper (1947–2011) and Dempster, specialized in performing and recording in resonant or reverberant spaces such as caves, cathedrals and huge underground cisterns. They have collaborated with Ellen Fullman and her long-string instrument, as well as countless other musicians, dancers and performers. The Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, initially under the direction of Tomie Hahn, is the steward of the former Deep Listening Institute. A celebratory concert was held on March 11, 2015, at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic.
Sonic awareness
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