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Interview with Pauline Oliveros at the Deep-Listening Retreat in the Alps at Murren, Switzerland July 4 - 11, 1999 (English Version)
Interview mit Pauline Oliveros beim Deep-Listening- Workshop in Mürren, Schweiz4. - 11. July 1999 (deutsche gekürzte Version)
Deep Listening - Neugierig werden auf Musik von Pauline Oliveros (Referat Nr. 10 in der Klangbrücke, Aachen, am 19.12.99)
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= page 480, 481, 483 (Oliveros) =
Oliveros, Pauline, b. Houston, Tex., May 30, 1932.
...In 1952 she came to San Francisco. There she attended San Francisco State College (1954-57), earning a bachelor of arts degree in 1957 with composition as major. She took a year of post-graduate work before deciding to quit the university because it interfered with composition. For the first time she came into contact with "new" music and the young adventurous musicians who were creating it.
A six-year period of the study of composition privately with Robert Erickson followed. Erickson reinforced her interest in sound quality, encouraged her to improvise her way through composition rather than rationalize, and introduced her to the concept of organic rhythm, that is, rhythm that shifts, expands, contracts, and is not periodic in the metrical sense.
In 1957, she joined several San Francisco avant-garde composers in creating group improvisations "We simply sat down and played together without prior discussion, recorded and listened to the results," she says. "At first we were amazed at the spontaneous organization in the music... We all felt our hearing expanded by the simple process of throwing oneself into spontaneous music making, getting immediate feedback in the form of the recording, and discussion of the process and results."
...As a result of experiments at the Center, Oliveros began producing tape-recorded music, some of which was heard at a concert of improvised music in San Francisco on March 24, 1962, in collaboration with several of her colleagues. Alfred J. Frankenstein in the Chronicle referred to the music heard at this performance as "stimulating sounds too new to be named." He added: "While the musicians are busy, mostly with percussive sounds, and the two others were acting and singing and what not, Ramon Sender was taping the goings-on, and the taped sounds came back often in greatly altered forms, on speakers located at various points in the hall. As a result, the past of this improvisation became a part of its present, and this use of the past as both substance and subject for improvisation in the present seems to me to be a most remarkable idea.
... Oliveros's interests now widened again, this time to include visual, kinetic and dramatic elements in her music as well as electronic sounds. There representative works of this period are Pieces of Eight, a theater piece for wind octet and tape (1965), which contains the seeds of many of her later works; Theater Piece for Trombone Player, for garden hose instruments (constructed by Elizabeth Harris) and tape (1966), written on commission for the trombonist Stuart Dempster; and I of IV, a two-channel purely electronic piece (1966; Oakland, Calif., January 1967), which is a solo studio improvisation in real time.
Pieces of Eight, reported Arthur Bloomfield in the San Francisco Examiner, "unwound amidst a concatenation of alarm clocks, cuckoo clock, cash register, and assorted glissandos, burps and bellows from an ensemble of eight performers who looked rather more plausible than they sounded." As part of the overall whimsy, the oboist entered in a fur-lined parka which he removed, then unpacked his instrument, sounded an eight-second whirling cadenza, and put on his parka again and stalked off. There was a solo for a cash register. A bust of Beethoven was paraded up and down the aisles.
In Theater Piece for Trombone Player, the sonic elements are an arrangement of an improvised vocabulary and mixed on tape in a sequence by the composer, while the soloist has specific instructions for improvising with tape. He is called upon to light and extinguish candles on a dark stage, to scrape the strings of a piano, bark like a dog, and perform on several lengths of garden hose each of which is fitted with a trombone mouthpiece. Through these garden hoses, lawn sprinklers were set into operation, cigarette smoke was exhaled, and sounds were reproduced while the performer whirled one of the hoses overhead.
In I of IV the composer elaborated a strong mental sonic image as she became the medium or channel through which she could observe the emerging improvisation. ... ...Before leaving for San Diego, she ended her fifteen-year stay in San Francisco with a twelve-hour "Tape-a-thon: Electronic Music by Pauline Oliveros," on July 22, 1967, a program of compositions in which she presented most of her electronic music. This represented for her the end of an era.
... PRINCIPAL WORKS: Variations for Sextet, for flute, clarinet, trumpet, horn, cello, and piano (1960); Sound Patterns, for chorus (1961); Trio, for flute, piano, and page turner (1961); Trio, for trumpet, accordion, and string bass (1961); Time Perspectives, for four-channel tape (1961);
Seven passages, for two-channel tape, mobile, and dancer (1963); Five, for trumpet and dancer (1964): Apple Box Orchestra, for ten performers, amplified apple boxes, and small sound sources (1964); Apple Box, for two performers, amplified apple boxes and small sound sources (1964);
Light Piece for David Tudor, for four-channel tape, amplified piano, and prismatic lighting effects (1965); Before the Music Ends, for two-channel tape, amplified piano, and prismatic lighting effects (1965); Pieces of Eight, a theater piece for wind octet and tape (1965); George Washington Slept Here, for amplified violin, film, projections, and tape (1965); A Theater Piece, for fifteen actors, film projection, and tape (1965); Winter Light, for two-channel tape, mobile, and figure (1965); Cat o' Nine Tails, a theater piece for mimes with two-channel tape (1965);
Theater Piece for Trombone Player, for garden hose instruments constructed by Elizabeth Harris and tape (1966); The C(s) for Once, for trumpets, flutes, voices, organ, and tape delay system (1966); I of IV, for Two-channel tape (1966); II for IV, for two-channel tape (1966); Hallo, a theater piece for instruments, tape delay system, amplified piano, mimes, and light projections (1966);
Circuitry, for five percussionists, voltage-controlled light score, and light events (1968); Mills Bog, for two-channel tape (1968);...
Typed by Cheryl Vega 7-31-95
Copyright 1981 New Music Alliance/New Music America NEW MUSIC AMERICA '81 JUNE 7-13, 1981 catalog 1791w
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Interview: Carl Stone interviewing Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros is Professor of Music at University of California at San Diego. She was Director of the Center for Music Experiment at UCSD from 1976-79. She is represented in "Music with Roots in the Aether", a series of video portraits of American composers by Robert Ashley and Phil Makanna. Her current interests include modes of human attention and Karate for self-awareness. She holds a black belt in Shotokan style.
Carl Stone: Pauline, you were born in Houston, were you not?
Pauline Oliveros: Right. Born in Houston and lived there until I was twenty and then went to San Francisco in 1952.
CS: And been in California ever since?
PO: Yes.
CS: And what was musical life like for you in the '50s?
PO: In San Francisco, the only new music activity was the Northern California chapter of the Composer's Forum, which gave concerts at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Francisco and I used to go to those concerts. People who were involved in that forum in those days were people like Jerome Rosen, Richard Swift, Leon Kirschner, who was at Mills at the time. And at UC Berkeley, Andrew Imbrie and those folks.
And then by 1953 I had started to go to San Francisco State college and I was involved in the composer's workshop there. That year Robert Erickson happened to be teaching at San Francisco State as a substitute and he had a piece on the workshop, and that's how I met him. Then I started to study with him privately. Then, KPFA. He became the music director there. About 1953. It was after I met him, and KPFA began to play a large role in new music in the Bay Area. They began to do studio concerts. And of course, they played whatever they could get, tape recordings and...
CS: Was it a kind of yeasty situation there, a feeling of a lot of activity and a lot of shared information?
PO: Well, it seemed to be so, yes. My working with Erickson was very important. Loren Rush was also working with him. We started studying with him at about the same time. Also, the other people in the Composer's Workshop were Stu Dempster and Terry Riley. That was about it though, as far as new music was concerned in the Bay Area, that workshop, the forum, and KPFA.
CS: How was it for you as a woman in the Composer's Workshop_was that a difficult situation?
PO: No, it wasn't. Being a woman didn't have anything to do with it, the difficulty was my music. It would sort of clear out of the workshop. As soon as Wendell Otey would turn his attention to my music everybody would walk out, except Loren Rush. And the same thing would happen to him, so I didn't feel like I was exclusive. There would be one person staying besides Loren after a while, and that was Terry Riley...and then, Stuart Dempster.
CS: So it started expanding. And these are really the names that we remember now.
PO: You don't really hear of any of the other students that were in the workshop with us.
CS: So tell me then how things developed at that point. What other people appeared on the scene, say, a little later?
PO: By 1959 Morton Subotnick was around and he was operating with the Composer's Forum, playing clarinet and involved in studio concerts with KPFA.
By 1960, Bob Erickson organized the American Composer's Workshop at the San Francisco Conservatory. That was a really exciting and large event, compared to anything going on at that time. He had organized concerts and rehearsals and lectures and all sorts of things, and Thomas Nee came to conduct and Glenn Glasow came, Phil Winsor, Will Ogden, Ernst Krenek was the featured guests.
And then I had a piece played , my Variations for Sextet, which later won the KPFA-Pacifica Foundation award. Mort had a piece on that, an Elliot Carter orchestra piece was played, and a number of things like that.
CS: Did composers at that time, these people that you mentioned, have a kind of, at least a feeling of, commonality or purpose, or was it very competitive and individual?
PO: I think there were cooperative feelings. There was some separation between UC Berkeley composers and others, and then there was a feeling of academia. There was a division which was represented by the Schoenberg-Stravinsky polarity. I remember that was one of the things that was thrown at me often, that particular polarity. And my music seemed to be representative of the Schoenberg side at the time, except I was never a twelve tone composer. I mean I never used any theory or techniques at all.
Ramon Sender was going to the Conservatory and in Bob Erickson's class there and we met and the product of that was Loren Rush, Terry Riley and myself had begun to do free improvisation, group improvisation. By 1958, Ramon Sender, Loren Rush, Terry Riley, and myself were using KPFA as a studio to go in and improvise and record. That was a very important thing to us. We began to meet about once a month, once a week, I forget, and do that activity.
And then terry met with LaMonte Young and began to work with him and with Ann Halprin. Also, Mort Subotnick began to work with Ann Halprin, so there was a lot of activity generated around her Dancer's Workshops.
Then in 1960, Ramon came on the scene and organized the first electronic music studio at the Conservatory. We did a program there in 1960 called Sonics and that was the beginning, actually, of San Francisco Tape Music Center, only it wasn't known as that at that point. The following years, Mort and Ramon pulled out of the Conservatory and started the San Francisco Tape Music Center, in a place on Jones Street in San Francisco, an old Victorian building.
Then the next year it opened at 321 Divisadero in San Francisco and it was there that a lot happened, over the next three years. We gave concerts once a month and a lot of people came through to work in the studio. By 1965 we had a grant from Rockefeller for $15,000.
The following year the $400,000 (?) grant was offered, but we had to move to Mills in order to accept it, because there had to be a way to administer the money. And then it became the Mills Tape Music Center and I was the first Director there. But I think the Tape Center played quite a role in the musical life of the city at that time.
CS: So then, when it moved to Mills, was it any information loss, did people drop out at that time, or did you pick up new ones?
PO: Naturally it was a big change. What I had asked to be written in was that it be a public access studio always. I don't think Mills cared for that aspect. But, that's the way it was...people could come to work there with no academic credentials. There were also people around, doing work, that has been true to the present day.
CS: At this point was Don Buchla involved?
PO: Well, Buchla worked with Mort and Ramon to develop the first Buchla Box in 1965. That's when it happened. That's when the prototype was ready, about December of 1965. And he had demonstrated that at the old tape center.
CS: At this point how much cross-cultural influence do you think that you felt as a result of, say, the proximity of California to the Orient and Pacific cultures? Was it kind of a cultural force for you at that time?
PO: No, not that I knew of. I was only aware of Schoenberg and Stravinsky and what we were doing. And what was going on in general in the Bay Area. Gradually things that were coming in from Europe; Stockhausen, Boulez, Berio.
CS: Did you have much contact with Henry Cowell at all?
PO: No, not at all, as a matter of fact.
In 1963 I met David Tudor. The following year we had a festival at the Tape Center with David Tudor and the works of Cage and then people like George Brecht. That was rather a big event also. That's when the influence of Cage was really clearly felt again in the Bay Area. It was the first time his music has been played there for a long time, since probably the '40s. For instance, on a version of Atlas Ecliptical, the performers were Terry Riley, Mort Subotnick, Ramon Sender, myself, Douglas Levy, John Chowning, Rush, Stuart Dempster.
CS: Did you ever spend much time away from California after this period?
PO: No, I went to New Hampshire in 1962 to play in the New Hampshire Festival Orchestra n the summer__that was sort of my first experience in the East Coast at all. Then I went that September to Holland and spent a couple of months in Europe and came back to New York and arrived back in San Francisco in January. That was my first time away from California.
CS: When did it become apparent to you that there was a California aesthetic or a set of concerns that weren't common with people from the East Coast or from Europe?
PO: I was very startled to find people who didn't know anything about improvisation anywhere, because Loren and Terry and I had started this free improvisation group and the only people who were doing anything about improvisation were Lucas Foss, but they were doing very guided improvisation. We were dismayed to see that they had prompters on their music stands. We didn't have any music stands.
CS: When they saw works like your Duo for Accordion and Bandoneon (with Optional Myna Bird)...?
PO: They really just didn't have any relationship to that. I think that's really funny, considering what's happening now.
CS: Yes, one of life's little ironies. So now after almost 30 years in California you're moving to New York.
PO: I'm kind of interested in change and what it would be like to be in the East Coast after all these years. I do have a number of friends [there], and it will be nice to connect with them on a more day-to-day basis. I don't know, I might be right back in California after a while.
ISSN 0276-3052 PO Box 8027, San Diego, CA 92102 1159w
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-page 16, 17, 18, 20- excerpts from: Toward a Rolling Sky Some Pearls on Pauline Oliveros by Ron Drummond
...Pauline left home at twenty and moved to San Francisco where she majored in music at San Francisco State University and supported herself by teaching accordion and French horn privately. It was here that her musical world really exploded. She was beginning to realize just how limited her exposure to human music had been. "I had not the slightest notion of the existence of so many manifestations of music." Her scope had been limited to Western European classical and romantic music, popular music, jazz, Dixieland, and Country Western, and she only vaguely understood that there was other music. As she puts it, "Mozart's Turkish Rondo and Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies were only faint clues."
And so, as she threw herself into her studies in composition at State, she began what would become a huge collection of recordings of music from diverse and often obscure cultures around the world, in addition to attending the occasional concert where these musics were featured. She also had her first exposure to the "avant-garde" here.
In Wendell Otey's composition workshops at State, Pauline began discovering others who thought along the same lines as she, and together they experimented with different forms of improvisation. This process of discovery was a bit unusual, considering that every time Pauline would perform one of her compositions in class, all of the students would leave. For even then she was trying to transform the accepted boundaries of musical expression, by inventing new and additional ways of organizing sound in a coherent, albeit unusual, manner. Soon up to three students were sticking around for Pauline's performances, and, as it turned out, these same students were remarkably efficient at emptying classrooms with their music too. Pauline had found her crowd.
...She became interested in dwelling on single pitches in her music, and how the ambiguity of a long, sustained note increased against a shifting background. A tone in and of itself became of interest, instead of where it might lead. She began tuning in to the various drones that were present in the environment. "The mantra of the electronic age is hum rather that Om." Now, only one thing remained to finally establish the range of influences that would serve as a life-long well-spring of inspiration for her considerable compositional aspirations.
After receiving her bachelor's degree in composition in 1957, Pauline conducted the experiment that would change her life completely. She had begun working with electronic means, and the whole field of time and sound became her material, as John Cage predicted for composers in 1937. Sitting in her little apartment on Presidio Avenue one day, Pauline pointed a microphone out an open window and recorded the sound environment until the tape ran off the reel. "What shall I record next?" had been her impetus.
While the recorder ran she sat and listened carefully, and discovered upon replaying the tape that she had not heard all of the sounds found there. "I discovered for the first time how selectively I listened and that the microphone discriminated much differently from that which I did." From that moment she became determined to expand her awareness of the entire sound field. To do this, she gave herself a seemingly impossible task: To literally listen to everything all the time. Why? "If nothing else, music in any of its multitudinous manifestations," including the songs of nature, "is a sign of life. Sound is intelligence. If I don't listen I don't learn, I don't expand, I don't change." Through this exercise, which by now has become a life-long process, Pauline began to hear the sound environment as a Grand Composition. The rhythms and relationships that occurred began to enter her work consciously.
But her listening assignment proved painful at times. Whenever she found herself not doing it, she realized this caused gaps in the Grand Composition, at least for her. And the artificial environment and its wastes were snuffing out what must have been a world symphony of natural sounds. Anyone can attest to how distasteful industrial noise pollution can be. But her work with electronic music provided a channel for that and allowed her to experiment further with tonal composites, splintering overtones and partials, and what she calls "the delightful ambiguity between pitch and sounds." But doing her assignment soon made it clear that it was possible to give equal attention to all that entered the sound field.
This awareness is very general, open, and non-judgmental, as compared to concentrated attention which is narrow, clear, and selective but limited in capacity. What is amazing is that Pauline discovered she could use both modes at the same time, that listening to everything generally did not distract at all from her ability to concentrate on specific things. ... In the 1960's, after her experimental forays into electronic music (consisting in one case of subjecting the Beatles' version of "Roll Over Beethoven" to increasing electronic distortion and feedback), her interests again widened, and soon she was including visual, kinetic, and dramatic elements in her music. She began to perceive rhythms in the way sonic elements, colors, and motions were juxtaposed.
An excellent example of how these were incorporated into a composition is Pauline's Duo for Accordion and Bandoneon with Possible Mynah Bird Obbligato, which was commissioned by avant-garde pianist David Tudor in 1964. (A bandoneon is an old German instrument, a cousin of the concertina, which is all but out of use today.) A friend of Pauline's, the dancer, Elizabeth Harris, choreographed the piece. Harris designed and built a special see-saw for the performance, which, besides going up and down, turned around on a Lazy Susan and was fitted with swivel chairs. The mynah bird was in a mobile, suspended above the axis of this contraption, and was invited to make any contributions to the proceedings it felt like making. Pauline and David then took their places and were off! This arrangement provided for shifting stereo effects as they played. ... Pauline told me that her biggest obstacle in starting out "was finding those things that were compatible for me to do."She scrounged her living for the first fifteen years she was on her own, but usually managed to get jobs that were music-related. Besides teaching privately, "I did copywork, orchestration, all sorts of things." ... In 1969 Pauline began doing Tai Ch'i and other body work as a prelude to entering into the "meditational" phase of her career. Writing in the New York Times in 1970, she said: "It does not matter that not all composers are great composers. It matters that this activity be encouraged among all the population, that we communicate with each other in non-destructive ways."
-page 16, 17, 18, 20-
Typed by Cheryl Vega 3-21-95
Copyright 1987 by Ear, Inc. EAR Magazine, 325 Spring Street Rm 208, New York, NY 10012 (212) 807-7944 ISSN:07342128 periodical 702w
-page 26- excerpts from Meet the Composer: Pauline Oliveros Interview by Peggyann Wachtel
PO: Well, I turn to the resource that will give me the sound I want. Actually, when I started my work in electronic music in the late '50s, it was the accordion, or the understanding of what my accordion would do, that gave me an edge in making electronic sounds nobody else was doing. It was from understanding the phenomena of difference tones; you can hear them very clearly on the accordion. I noticed I was interested in hearing the difference tones without hearing the generating tones. I could do that in the electronic music studio by using signal generators that went above the range of hearing. A difference tone is the difference between any two frequencies, also the sum of any two frequencies. When you add them you'll get sums; when you subtract them you'll get differences. However, those sums and differences may be at very slight amplitudes, so you have to allow for that and amplify them.
...I don't play the accordion exclusively; it's one resource that I have as a performing composer. I play other things as well; I use electronics to extend the field for myself.
I was watching Tuyo this afternoon, enjoying the imagination that constructed the instruments and the meanings of that. And remembering the instruments I made in San Francisco at the end of the '50s and remembering I had a piece called "Apple Box." I had an old apple box I liked and I knew. It was like an old friend as well, because an apple box that has seasoned wood is a very resonant box. I used to amplify the box and put all kinds of things on the box to play: curb scrapers from automobiles, little implements from the kitchen -- anything, small little things -- and then amplify them, do things with them, make sounds.
There was a piece I played as a solo called "Apple Box," and I did a duet with David Tudor called "Apple Box Double." In 1965 I did a performance with ten players, so it was an apple box orchestra. It was an amazing scene, because here were all these ten apple box players, and the amplification was done with tube amplifiers, so all of this stuff had to be hauled out -- there were ten channels.
At that point, that was a very ambitious thing to do, because there weren't any 24-channel boards at the time. As a matter of fact, I had designed a board to use for performance built for my by Carl Countryman when he was a little kid. That board is now sold as a model 2A, as a Teac board. But it didn't exist at that time -- you had to jerry-rig everything to do something like that.
...When I made my first tape piece I had no circuits or filters or modulation or anything else. So I used a mike in the bathtub for reverb; I used cardboard tubes as resonators, as resonating filters. I would sing or talk or play through the tubes. I used the walls to amplify little sounds and record them, and I had a Silvertone tape recorder from Sears Roebuck, which for some reason or other would allow you to hand wind the tape in record mode; it was like a variable speed recorder.
That's how I did my early work. It was not with any of the things you buy off the shelf today. I worked a lot with tape delay by stringing tape across several machines. I did all that tape delay work in the early '60s. I wrote an article about it, which is in by book. Now I'm using digital delays which have been developed by companies which sell them to me. I would like them to give me a few so I could tell them what the next steps are. That's what I did in the tape delay article. -page 26-
Typed by Cheryl Vega 3-21-95