A musical pioneer several times over, the late composer Pauline Oliveros influenced American music profoundly through her concert works, as well as her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. Her primary instrument was the accordion, one which she tuned in just intonation, and manipulated with electronics for her Zen-like meditative improvisational music.

Pauline Oliveros coined the term "Deep Listening," which she described as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Her interest in “Deep Listening” led her to experiment with unusual sonic venues; she was particularly fond of places with rich reverberant properties (like the Winter Garden atrium, cisterns, and the like), and she developed an electronic component for many of her works that enabled her to bring that sonic density to concert halls and venues around the world. 

Oliveros believed in the act of music-making as a communal art and traveled the world leading audiences in Sonic Meditations where everyone in the venue would hum, or sing, or somehow contribute to the “performance.” Additionally, she would sometimes write a work where the score was not traditional notes on a staff, but rather a list of instructions to the performers – “do this, listen to that, match it” almost a Zen-like simplicity -  a so-called “open score.” 

For this New Sounds, listen to some of Pauline Oliveros’s work - some of “Primordial” and some of “Lift,” along with her work, “Tuning Meditation,” basically crowd-sourced choral music. Then hear some of her work with the Deep Listening Band, along with her bandmate trombonist Stuart Dempster’s music in reverberant places. 

PROGRAM #4032, Deep Listening (First Aired: 10/05/2017)

ARTIST: Pauline Oliveros
WORK: Tuning Meditation [6:48]
RECORDING: Live at the Kitchen, 1979
SOURCE: Orange Mountain Music #0015 
INFO: orangemountainmusic.com

ARTIST: Pauline Oliveros
WORK:  Primordial/Lift, excerpt [10:34]
RECORDING:Primordial/Lift
SOURCE: deeplistening.org
INFO: paulineoliveros.us

ARTIST: Stuart Dempster
WORK: Standing Waves
RECORDING: In The Great Abbey of Clement VI
SOURCE: deeplistening.org
INFO: paulineoliveros.us

ARTIST: Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis 
WORK: Lear
RECORDING: Deep Listening
SOURCE: New Albion 22
INFO: paulineoliveros.us