Photo by: Pieter Kers
Thursday May 10 2012 edition of Venus was entirely dedicated to the compositions of Pauline Oliveros, who will be celebrating her 80th birthday at the end of the month. “a senior figure in contemporary American music. Her career spans fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the ’50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. Recently awarded the John Cage award for 2012 from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, Oliveros is Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. Oliveros has been as interested in finding new sounds as in finding new uses for old ones –her primary instrument is the accordion, an unexpected visitor perhaps to musical cutting edge, but one which she approaches in much the same way that a Zen musician might approach the Japanese shakuhachi. Pauline Oliveros’ life as a composer, performer and humanitarian is about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Since the 1960’s she has influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. Pauline Oliveros is the founder of “Deep Listening,” which comes from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. Pauline Oliveros describes Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening is my life practice,” she explains, simply. Oliveros is founder of Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation.” – from http://www.paulineoliveros.us
An absolutely astounding and endlessly inspiring woman, happy birthday Pauline, may you continue to introduce people to the art of listening and composing with intuition over instruction.
Play List
Bye Bye Butterfly (1965)
Time Perspectives (1957) from four electronic pieces 1959-1966 (subrosa)
Mnemonics III (1965) from four electronic pieces 1959-1966 (subrosa)
The Tuning Meditation (1971) from the Kitchen Archives new music, new york 1979 Procession (1998) – Ghost dance (Deep Listening)
Striation (1987) – the roots of movement (hathut)
The Beauty of Sorrow (2004) – Tara’s Room: Two Meditations on Transition and Change (Deep Listening)
Listen to the show HERE
Pauline Oliveros will be in Montreal on June 13th giving a Deep Listening Intensive Workshop from 2 to 4 pm more info here
Elephants communicate through infrasound, and can pick up these low frequency vibrations over great expanses of space, sense their sense their listening is tied into feeling sound, since they receive the sonic information through their feet.
xaj
Venus Radio 