(1932-2016)
Portrait of the Quintet of the Americas (1996)
Quintet of the Americas worked with Pauline Oliveros before working on this piece. She explained her thoughts about Deep Listening and had us listen to the room and outside sounds to consider them part of the music as we worked with her on improvisation. Her concept stressed listening more than playing. The piece consists of 5 mandalas – one for each of us based on our birthday. Our recording is a version of the piece that happened in real time. The piece will never sound the same.
Pauline Oliveros’ life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the’50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets who gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960’s she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.
She was the recipient of four Honorary Doctorates and among her many recent awards were the William Schuman Award for Lifetime Achievement, Columbia University, New York, NY, The Giga-Hertz-Award for Lifetime Achievement in Electronic Music from ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany and The John Cage award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts.
Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. She founded “Deep Listening®,” which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. She described 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,” Oliveros explained, simply. Oliveros founded Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer, Troy, NY. Her creative work is currently disseminated through The Pauline Oliveros Trust and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc.
Deep listening is the foundation for a radically transformed social matrix in which compassion and love are the core motivating principles guiding creative decision making and our actions in the world –Pauline Oliveros
In addition to being a resident of Kingston, NY for over thirty years, Pauline was one of the world’s original electronic musicians, the only female amongst notable post-war American composers, a master accordion player, a teacher and mentor to musicians, a gateway to music and sound for non-musicians, and a technical innovator who helped develop everything from tools that allow musicians to play together while in different countries, to software that enables those with severe disabilities to create beautiful music. On the vanguard of contemporary American music for six decades, her story illuminates the pathway to how we got where we are and where the future will take us in the worlds of music, the philosophy of sound, and the art of listening.
for more information on Pauline Oliveros go to :
https://paulineoliveros.us/