PAULINE OLIVEROS
Mar 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Laura Pallanck
One of the most important yet unsung innovators in the field of electronic and ambient music is Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932). As a young person, Oliveros was fascinated with the sounds of her grandfather's shortwave radio and the Morse-code rhythms produced by his telegraph key. Not surprisingly, after studying accordion and composition at San Francisco State University in the 1950s, she quickly moved away from traditional musical forms and into the direction of electronics, improvisation and performance art.
In the early '60s, Oliveros — with Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender — formed the San Francisco Tape Music Center, and, there, she began her pioneering work with electronics and tape. An important aspect of her music was the use of difference tones produced by the heterodyning (producing an electrical beat between two radio frequencies) of high-frequency oscillators. Those tones, which mixed with the ultrahigh bias frequencies on the tape, provided Oliveros with a rich palette of broadband sound. Her first attempts at processing included filtering the sounds using different-size cardboard tubes with mics stuck into one end, as well as using her bathtub as a reverb chamber.
However, Oliveros became most known for her virtuosic use of tape delay. By threading a reel of tape through two or three recorders and interconnecting the inputs and outputs to create feedback paths between the machines, Oliveros was able to get a variety of echo effects (including an impressive eight-second delay). Her best-known works with this system include I of IV and Bye Bye Butterfly. Oliveros created Alien Bog and Beautiful Soop during her year as director of Mills College's Mills Tape Music Center, where she combined the new Buchla modular synthesizer with her delay system. A chapter of her book Software for People (Smith) is devoted to her tape-delay setup.
What is notable about those early tape pieces is that they come from real-time performances. Oliveros' way of working — improvising with live electronics and using the studio as an instrument — stands in stark contrast to the standard methods of the day: collage forms and highly deterministic structures. As a result, her pieces have a freshness that has withstood the test of time.
Her study of T'ai Chi Chuan in the early '70s led her into new directions and ultimately to one of her most influential works. Sonic Meditations (1971) is a collection of verbal instructions designed to help people explore the relationship of attention and awareness in a variety of activities (although not necessarily in a concert setting). Oliveros created the pieces so that anyone could use them “regardless, or in spite of, musical training,” she says. “Music is a welcome byproduct of this activity.”
The instructions range from “Focus mentally on stopping or starting a sound at a particular time” to “Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” Although the connection to the text pieces of John Cage, La Monte Young and the Fluxus movement are clear, Oliveros' intentions are much different. “The enhancement and development of aural sensation is one of their goals,” she writes about her verbal scores. “Sound, both inner and outer, real and imaginary, is the stimulus of Sonic Meditations.”
To this day, improvisation, electronics and the accordion continue to play an important role in Oliveros' work. Throughout the years, she has developed the Extended Instrument System (EIS), a sophisticated setup of digital signal processors designed for use in live performances. Examples of her use of the system can be heard on recordings by the Deep Listening Band. Her early electronic works appear on a pair of essential CDs: Alien Bog/Beautiful Soop (Pogus, 1997) and Electronic Works (Paradigm, 1998). To read more about Oliveros, visit the Pauline Oliveros Foundation (www.pofinc.org) and Deep Listening (www.deeplistening.org).
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