Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros (born May 30, 1932, Houston, Texas, U.S.—died November 24, 2016, Kingston, New York) was an American composer and performer known for conceiving a unique, meditative, improvisatory approach to music called “deep listening.”

Oliveros was raised in a family that encouraged involvement with music. At age 10 she was introduced to the accordion by her mother, who was a pianist. Oliveros felt an immediate affinity for the instrument, and she maintained an allegiance to it throughout her career, though in school she played violin and horn.

Oliveros studied music at the University of Houston in the early 1950s before attending San Francisco State College, from which she received a bachelor’s degree in music composition in 1957. After graduation she worked independently for several years as a performer and composer of avant-garde music, with a focus on new techniques and technologies of sound production. In performance she typically worked with a custom-tuned accordion whose sound she manipulated further by electronic means. In 1961 she cofounded the San Francisco Tape Music Center to provide a positive and productive work environment for young composers. Five years later the centre moved to Mills College (Oakland, California), where Oliveros became its first director; it later became known as the Center for Contemporary Music.

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Oliveros taught music at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), from 1967 to 1981. During that time her compositional style shifted in response to her study of Native American cultures and East Asian religions, particularly Buddhism. She began composing pieces that incorporated both natural sounds—such as the performers’ own breathing—and those that were shaped through meditative improvisation. Collectively called Sonic Meditations (1971), these pieces laid the foundation for her concept of deep listening, which in turn informed her Deep Listening Pieces (1990), a series of some three dozen works composed for her students during the 1970s and ’80s. The aim of deep listening was to merge the involuntary, unfiltered act of hearing with listening—a voluntary act involving selective inclusion and exclusion of sounds from the auditory experience. Truly deep, or “global,” listening, admits all ambient sounds in a performance space. Through a constant broadening and narrowing of focus on the total spectrum of available sounds, Oliveros proposed, deep listeners—whether composers or performers—would be able to comprehend their place within a sonically complete, complex, and unique performance environment.

Oliveros left her position at UCSD in 1981 to settle in Kingston, New York, and pursue freelance work as a performer and composer. In 1985 she established the Pauline Oliveros Foundation, dedicated to the principles of deep listening; it was renamed the Deep Listening Institute in 2005. Meanwhile, she received a steady stream of commissions, performed internationally, and served as a composer in residence at various universities. She also compiled her ideas about music in several influential books, including The Roots of the Moment: Collected Writings 1980–1996 (1998) and Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (2005). From the mid-20th century, Oliveros’s innovative use of tape, electronic sounds, acoustic instruments, acoustic spaces, and noise—as well as her fundamentally humanistic approach to music—was an inspiration for new-music composers and performers. In recognition of her achievement, she received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, ASCAP, and numerous other organizations.