THE history of Western classical music is rife with forgotten side roads, populated by composers and styles overlooked, marginalized or otherwise neglected. The Propensity of Sound, a five-concert series that the Issue Project Room in Gowanus, Brooklyn, will mount in late September, follows one such unfamiliar path. Presented in collaboration with the British experimental-music magazine The Wire, the series will focus on three groundbreaking composers: Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue and Laurie Spiegel...
Teach Yourself To Fly, the first of Pauline Oliveros's many "Sonic Meditations" shows just what it is that sets Oliveros apart from dozens of superficially related American composers. The Sonic Meditations were largely developed in the early 70s, and explored many times in real musical situations before ever being written down. Some are simpler than others, such as Re Cognition, which reads only: "Listen to a sound until you no longer recognise it" ....
"Any number of persons sit in a circle facing the centre. Illuminate the space with dim blue light. Begin by simply observing your own breathing. Always be an observer. Gradually allow your breathing to become audible. Then gradually introduce your voice. Allow your vocal cords to vibrate in any mode which occurs naturally. Allow the intensity of the vibrations to increase very slowly. Continue as long as possible, naturally, and until all others are quiet, always observing your own breath cycle. Variation: translate voice to an instrument."
- Teach Yourself To Fly (dedicated to Amelia Earhart)
Teach Yourself To Fly, the first of Pauline Oliveros's many "Sonic Meditations" shows just what it is that sets Oliveros apart from dozens of superficially related American composers. The Sonic Meditations were largely developed in the early 70s, and explored many times in real musical situations before ever being written down. Some are simpler than others, such as Re Cognition, which reads only: "Listen to a sound until you no longer recognise it" ...
Throughout the month of February, Deep Listening Insitute presents a mini-festival featuring films that explore the deeper levels of the human experience with screenings and discussion by local filmmakers.
February 4 at 8 pm
Susan Pasternack's "Going All the Way; The Path of Enlightened Aging"
& "Nayelli's Journey"
February 11 at 8 pm
Jim de Seve's "Tying the Knot"
February 18 at 8 pm
Ione's “Dreams of the Jungfrau” & “IO and Her and the Trouble with Him”
Deep Listening Institute
77 Cornell St, Suite 303
Kingston NY
Pauline Oliveros has been a composer and musician for over 50 years. She is the founder of the Deep Listening Institute, in New York State. She describes how technology plays a role in her music, her impressions on the digital recording arts, and why it's so important to keep making music. Join me as we sit down with her at the Vistas Dining Hall at the Banff Centre, in Alberta, Canada, where we chat about her performance at the Banff Centre's Walter Phillips Gallery on June 16th 2009.
...I have avidly sought out all of Pauline Oliveros' "Sonic Meditation" scores and have found them deeply profound. I also instigated a chorus to rehearse and perform her amazing extended vocal score "Sound Patterns"...
Lion’s Eye for Gamelan was commissioned in 1985 by Barbara Benary for Gamelan Son of Lion. Lion’s Eye for Synthesizer was commissioned concurrently by Neil Rolnick for iEAR Presents at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Both versions were performed in 1985. The intention to combine both pieces in order to expand the tempo range of the Gamelan was first realized in May of 1989 in performances by the Berkeley Gamelan in Oakland and San Francisco, California under the direction of Daniel Schmidt.
Another crucial collection of early electronics, this comes from American female electronic pioneer Pauline Oliveros. Oliveros was a composer and accordion player who sculpted experimental electronic music in a totally unique manner - as meditations on a certain subject or other. Developing her own techniques of recording and processing electronic instruments and also building her own synthesizers, Oliveros managed to come up with a sound which was way ahead of her time. Indeed listening to these three pieces (recorded in 1965 and 1966) makes me think that they could have been recorded yesterday - the ideas and concepts are still being explored now and are totally relevant.
