REMEMBERING MUSICAL PIONEER PAULINE OLIVEROS
Who wants to honor the life and work of one of the city’s greatest musical innovators deep underground in the Buffalo Bayou Cistern, where the echoes are beyond anything you have ever heard and the cathedrallike twilight haunts the edges of your understanding?
OK, maybe it’s a little creepy when put like that.
Pauline Oliveros was a Houstonian musician who, quite literally, changed the world of music forever. An accordionist by trade, she pioneered a concept called deep listening after descending into an underground cistern to record music in the 1980s, like a modern day Orpheus visiting Hades. Instead of coming back with the soul of a departed loved one, she developed deep listening into a musical discipline centered on finding a musical place within the totality of the sound around you, including natural noises. She went on to found teaching programs about deep listening and write several books before she died in 2016.
One of the people she inspired and mentored before she passed was David Dove, director of Nameless Sound, a concert presenter and arts-education organization. He met Oliveros around the time she was developing deep listening through her piano-teacher mother. She encouraged him to start a spinoff version of her program in Houston in 2001 that eventually morphed into the current program of international contemporary music presentation and new arts education.
Now he’s gathered three other artists — Tom Bickley, Juan Garcia and Lisa E, Harris — to memorialize Oliveros in “Sounding the Cistern,” the first public concert in the underground space that was originally designed as a water reservoir for Buffalo Bayou Park in 1926 and was decommissioned in 2007. Originally scheduled for demolition, the Cistern entranced Houstonians with its size and odd beauty and was saved in 2010 when the Buffalo Bayou Partnership changed it into a public space for rotating art installations. Dove was one of the many people fascinated with the possibilities.
“I had the opportunity to go down there on my own before the Buffalo Bayou park system got to it,” says Dove. “I went down the ladder in galoshes to play my trombone down there. This is the first time I’ve done a public performance in this kind of space.”
Before her death, “Sounding the Cistern” organizers originally had hoped to include Oliveros in the concert. Instead, it will honor her ideas in three roughly 30-minute concerts. The cistern is acoustically unique, having a 17-second resonance that does strange things to sound most people have never heard. In keeping with Oliveros’ ideas, the ensemble will practice deep listening, growing and changing as the reverberations ring through the hollow space and reach their audience, themselves a living part of the symphony being produced.
“You go down and you always respond to the environment,” says Dove. “That includes everything about the place. Sounding a place like that is another way to understand a space. You can light spaces to see them in different ways. By taking a trombone, a double bass or a recorder down there, you can reveal different things about the architecture. Animals use sounding to see and navigate space. We’ll sound to see this space, too.”
The “Sounding the Cistern” concerts are part of a loosely affiliated weekend celebrating Oliveros. On Saturday, Lisa E. Harris will perform some of Oliveros’ work at Discovery Green, where Mayor Sylvester Turner will also make a proclamation honoring the composer and educator. The last of the They, Who Sound concert series of the season on Monday at the Lawndale Art Center will also include renditions of Oliveros’ scores.
Oliveros was a unique genius who changed the soundscape of Houston and the world. The chance to see her ideas realized in a setting similar to where they were originally conceived is a once in a lifetime event, not to mention a solid testing ground for the Buffalo Bayou Cistern as a concert space. One way or the other, Houston’s contemporary art scene will never be the same.