Pauline Oliveros (1932-) - V1

After all music has always been contemporary to its contemporaries...

Pauline Oliveros
(b Houston, 30 May 1932). American composer. She studied at the University of Houston (1949/52) and San Francisco State College (BA 1957); she also took private lessons with Robert Erickson. A founding co-director of the San Francisco Tape Music Center (19615) with Subotnick and Ramon Sender, she taught, from 1967, at the University of California, San Diego. In 1981 she resigned her post to become a freelance composer and in 1985 she became director of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation in Kingston, New York. Among the rewards she has received are the Guggenheim Fellowship for Composition (1973) and the NEA Composer's Fellowship (1990). She has also served as composer-in-residence at Northwestern University (1996) and Mills College, Oakland, California (1999).

Oliveross earliest music was conventionally notated, in an abstract but idiosyncratic style. Following these notated compositions, she explored tape and electronic music techniques. The major and enduring shift in her work came in the mid-1970s when her studies of native American cultures and Eastern religions led to a kind of meditative improvisation as a way of teaching people to recognize their own musicality. Her compositions began to introduce meditation practices within larger ritualistic or ceremonial forms, as well as to explore concepts such as the self as a non-autonomous entity and to value as qualities such as intuition commonly thought to be feminine. These diverse elements can be seen in Crow Two (1974), a text score in which the performers are asked to communicate telepathically with the audience, members of which are invited to participate on stage. Subsequently Oliveros has occasionally returned to notation, the rigour of which is combined with the freedom of improvisation. Examples of this include Tree/Peace, though even in such works no system appears to underlie the composition process.

Many of Oliveross musical, social, and feminist concerns coalesce in Njinga the Queen King (1993), a music-theatre work to words by Ione. The piece centres on Njinga, the 17th-century regent of Ndongo (now Angola), who passed as a man and managed to keep marauders and slave-traffickers at bay through her skills as a warrior and diplomat. In this and other works, Oliveros has cultivated a music-making and perception which she calls deep listening, still rooted in the practices of improvisation and meditation, and with the aim of self-realization. Oliveros has also become interested in exploring the sonic properties of spaces employing acoustic instruments and digital delays.

(Grove dictionary of Music and Musicians)

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Music

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• Pauline
• Oliveros
• V1

[gunsanddrugs]

this is beautiful, i had no idea, i am at your feet! thanx for the insight and great upload!

[lovesubstance]

What album or compilation is this on?

[sortabli]

This lady is a piooner of the electronic music. She was with Sender and Subotnick at the san francisco Tape Music center.