Electronic music pioneer made works that were full of surprises
Pauline Oliveros created an influential body of recorded work as a composer and instrumentalist, but her greatest contribution may have been as a music philosopher, a role she filled with passion as she encouraged people to listen deeply.
Oliveros died Thursday at age 84. The Houston native was a pioneering electronic musician, and among the most heralded artists in the 20th century avant garde music scene. But her life’s work was inviting people to change the ways they responded to sound.
“She was at the forefront of so much interesting music, and just major in every way,” says Jason Moran, the jazz pianist and composer. “This is a big, big loss. Her approach to listening, not just to music, was monumental. She was a special woman and a special artist.”
In addition to her work as a musician, Oliveros founded the Deep Listening Institute, which spread her philosophies about listening, often taking into account not just the music being played at any given moment but also the ambient and at- mospheric sound on the periphery.
David Dove, a Houstonbased musician who runs the Nameless Sound organization, which evolved out of Oliveros’ Deep Listening Institute said Oliveros offered “a practice that will nurture anyone who participates in it, in a communal way, in a personal way, in a local way, in a global way.”
For Oliveros the path started as a child in Houston when her mother bought an accordion.
Growing up, Oliveros’ home was a haven for the arts. Her father was a
dancer who collected jazz albums that provided the soundtrack to her youth. Her mother brought home an accordion thinking she could become an instructor and make some money on the side. Instead Oliveros took a life-long interest in the instrument.
She referred to the accordion as “a survivor.”
“It is the only surviving portable, acoustic instrument capable of playing melody, harmony and rhythm without accompaniment,” she wrote. Early recordings
As a teen she was part of a 100 accordion orchestra that played the livestock show. “The rodeo was very different then,” she said.
She graduated from then-Reagan High School in the Heights and stopped briefly at the University of Houston before transferring to San Francisco State College. Oliveros would regularly return to her hometown for performances, but outside of Houston she found a new community of musicians and artists working outside the mainstream.
By the early ’60s she was immersed in a rich culture of experimental music, making some of her first electronic recordings as early as 1961. The market for such music being limited, many of those recordings remained unreleased for decades. “Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music,” released four years ago, captures Oliveros’ early fascination with capturing sound, mixing deliberate and incidental sounds into music that likely would have confounded listeners in its day. More than a half century later, contemporary electronic music has clearly found inspiration and influence in Oliveros’ work, while never quite catching up with her.
She befriended bandoneon player David Tudor, and in 1964 they launched Tudorfest at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Hers was music full of surprises. More than music, she created musi- cal environments. They couldn’t be inked on paper with precision, but they offered an opportunity for full immersion. Nontraditional venues
In the late 1980s she developed her Deep Listening philosophy, inspired by a trio recording she made in a deep concrete cistern. She often would stage events in non-traditional venues like the cistern that both affected sound in a particular way and that also commanded attention: caves, churches, outdoor spaces.
The philosophy grew into the Deep Listening Institute, which supported and promoted an outsider’s music that often struggled to find an outlet. Houston’s Deep Listening Institute transformed into Nameless Sound, which puts on several shows each year as well as providing music education in the city. Her reach far exceeded her name recognition.
Moran and his band dedicated their Friday night show at the Village Vanguard in New York to her. After years of playing together, Moran and the Bandwagon recently looked to Oliveros to help them better communicate with one another.
“We needed a coach,” he says. “After 17 years we needed to learn how to listen to each other again. It was so powerful working with her. She had each person close their eyes and told us to find our tone inside ourselves and let that tone out of our body. It was an amazing experience to get back to just listening again.”
Oliveros wrote at length about listening experiences, with several published books on the subject. She disliked the phrase “classical music,” suggesting “composed music” as an alternative that recognized music of the 20th and 21st centuries that didn’t fit into popular music categories. She also addressed issues of gender in music canonization, arguing that female composers were marginalized and poorly represented.
And she remained a prolific recording artist. “Deep Listening,” recorded in the cistern in 1989, has proven an influential ambient album. Earlier this year she released “Four Meditations/Sound Geometries,” a fascinating and complex recording that in parts found Oliveros manipulating a recording with a surround sound system of her own devising. Even at 84, she continued to push the parameters of how sound could be made, captured, altered and recaptured.