Pauline Oliveros
Hearing is not listening....
We know more about hearing than listening.
-Pauline Oliveros
Today’s journey is dedicated to my sister - the best sister a brother could ask for.
Pauline Oliveros dedicated her life to experimenting with sounds and changing the way people listened to sound.
I was still in college in 1981 when Oliveros moved from the West Coast to the Zen Arts Center in Mount Tremper in upstate New York. The Arts and Crafts style structures were originally Camp Wapanachki, built in the 1930s. It became the Zen Arts Center in 1980 and, sometime after I left New York, it changed its name to Zen Mountain Monastery.
In the fall of 1983 and spring of 1984, I’d drive up and explore the Catskills Mountains. One day, I stumbled upon the Zen Arts Center. Interestingly, the few times I was there, I didn’t know that Oliveros and her partner, performance artist Linda Montano, worked there.
In 1967, Oliveros left Mills College in Oakland to take a faculty position at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). In 1973, she conducted studies at the University’s Center for Music Experiment and from 1976 to 1979 served as its director. It was at UCSD in 1975 that Oliveros met Montano. Oliveros was openly lesbian and they became romantic partners. They lived together in Encinitas until 1981 when, in search of more creative freedom, they moved East to work at the Zen Arts Center. I did not know who Oliveros was when I was at the Zen Center, but I was familiar with Montano’s work, which I discovered through the Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh.
Hsieh is most known for six one-year performance pieces completed between 1978 and 2000. Perhaps his most provocative is the Time Clock Piece. For one year, from April 11, 1980, through April 11, 1981, he punched a time clock every hour on the hour. Each time he punched the clock, he took a single picture of himself, which together after one year yielded a 6-minute movie.
Here’s a short video in which at the 2:00 minute mark Hsieh talks about his Time Clock Piece:
Here’s a fascinating, short video about Hsieh’s journey from Taiwan to New York and the start of his performance art. It also shows more about his Time Clock Piece (4:30 minute mark):
While I was living in New York during the early to mid-1980s, Hsieh was forward in the art scene, and I read about him from time to time. I first read about Linda Montano through their 1983 – 1984 Art/Life (Rope Piece, 8:53 minute mark in above video).
On the 4th of July 1983, Montano and Hsieh signed this contract and started Rope Piece:
This is a November 1983 flyer announcing the performance.
So, it was through Hsieh that I discovered Montano, and through Montano that I discovered Pauline Oliveros.
However, I would not come to listen to Oliveros’ music until many years later in 2007, when her first two solo albums came out on CD, originally released on Lovely Music - an early label for experimental and electronic music founded by Mimi Johnson. In a 2007 CD review of Oliveros’ 1984 The Wanderer, I noticed that Montano played concertina on one of the songs, a live version of Horse Sings From Cloud, recorded in 1983 at Marymount Manhattan Theatre. Along with playing on that song, Montano also provided the album cover concept and design:
It was on this album and her 1982 Accordion & Voice that I first recall hearing an Oliveros tune. After that, I kept a lookout for her music.
As I learned more about Oliveros’ music, it was not so much the music that struck me, but her dedication to the healing power of music. For example, in 1987, Oliveros released Tara’s Room, which contains two solo pieces as “meditations on transition and change” dedicated to those who have lost loved ones in war.
From this release, here is The Beauty of Sorrow:
This is music for healing in the most dignified way. It seems to be presented in a way to address sorrow without negating the emotions. I find this incredibly tender music.
Here is Oliveros in November 2015 talking about the difference between hearing and listening at a TEDx Indianapolis talk:
The album she is talking about at the beginning is the seminal Deep Listening CD, released in 1989 on the New Albion label. The music took advantage of the unusual acoustics found in a WWII-era water cistern at the Dan Harpole Cistern at Fort Worden in Port Townsend, Washington:
The cistern once held two million gallons of water, but is empty now and distinguished by a 45 second reverberation decay cycle. From that album, here is Suiren:
This recording led to the formation in 1988 of Oliveros’ Deep Listening Band with Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis, also known as Peter Ward.
One of her most important innovations, “deep listening,” is an approach she described as “hear with your ears, listen with your heart” and as “exploring the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary, selective nature — exclusive and inclusive — of listening.”
I recently wrote about Joe McPhee, who was a big fan of Oliveros and the Deep Listening Band. You can read more about him here:
McPhee first met Oliveros in 1981, at the New Music America Festival in San Francisco. She introduced herself and they became friends immediately. McPhee lived in Poughkeepsie and Oliveros lived just 30 minutes up the Hudson River in Kingston, so collaborations were easy to arrange.
In 2003, Oliveros' Deep Listening Band commissioned a piece from saxophonist Joe McPhee. He offered Unquenchable Fire, a 67-minute work in four movements (preceded by an introduction) scored for both the Deep Listening Band and his own quartet. The work was inspired by Rachel Pollack's award-winning novel of the same title. It premiered at the Center Out-of-Doors festival on the plazas of Lincoln Center.
In 2013, McPhee recorded on the classic album Looking Back, which was a handful of rediscovered archival tapes from a June 1999 recording at the Deep Listening Studio in Kingston, New York. From that album here is Luolong:
In a 1998 interview with Walt Davis shortly before this recording, McPhee shares his admiration for Oliveros, “If anything like a ‘Wonder Woman’ exists, it is Pauline. I have seldom met anyone with the energy, vision, and courage that she possesses... She is a role model for me. Working with Pauline and the Deep Listening Band is an improviser's dream come true...marvelous people; extraordinary music.”
On the back of Oliveros 2006 Hat Art Records CD The Roots Of The Moment, McPhee wrote this about Oliveros:
For more than 50 years, Pauline Oliveros has been on a continuing mission: “... to explore new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.” If those words bring to mind the voyages of the Starship Enterprise from the television series Star Trek, the parallels are more than coincidental. In fact Pauline would be as able a captain of any Starship in the fleet of the United Federation of Planets. A bit of a difference here though, for Pauline Oliveros, space is not necessarily the final frontier and the barrier at the end of the universe is just another interesting challenge. For Pauline Oliveros, like Sun Ra, Space is the place.
Pauline Oliveros’ influence is deep and wide and, perhaps, not yet even fully understood.
On Sunday, January 29, 2023, Daniel Weintraub’s film Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros made its New York City premiere at the Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn. To help fund the continued success of the film, please donate here:
This is the film’s official trailer:
Here’s one more for the road. Accordion & Voice is the first Oliveros album I heard and it remains my favorite - truly a masterpiece. The first song, Horse Sings From Cloud, is a Sonic Meditation which began under the title Rose Mountain Slow Runner dedicated in 1975 to Linda Montano. The second song, Rattlesnake Mountain, is the Native American name for gently rounded Mount Tremper in the Catskills. The song records her responses to watching the shape of the mountain and the effects of breezes blowing through the meadows and forest below:
What I admire most about Pauline Oliveros is that she was a force to be reckoned with. Along with the Sisters with Transistors from last week, they did “beat on, boats against the current.” However, they refused to be “borne back ceaselessly into the past.” They subverted the establishment and became catalysts of invention and inclusion. In her 1970 New York Times article And Don’t Call Them ‘Lady’ Composers, Oliveros wrote:
Why have there been no ‘great’ women composers? The question is often asked. The answer is no mystery. In the past, talent, education, ability, interests, motivation were irrelevant because being female was a unique qualification for domestic work and for continual obedience to and dependence upon men. This is no less true today.
She dedicated her life and inspired the lives of many others to making this less true today. But to see this, we just need to listen - and listen deeply.
Pauline Oliveros died on Thanksgiving Day 2016 at her home in Kingston, New York, less than 20 miles from the Zen Center at Mount Tremper, where she recorded Accordion & Voice.
Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of Black Fire Records and the Oneness of Juju.
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Until then, keep on walking….
I love her music. Thank you for the inspired read