Pauline Oliveros

Oliveros’s quantum improvisation is the result of listening deeply to the ethical co-emergence of improvising humans and intelligent machines. Pauline Oliveros’s Triple Point (with Doug van Nort and Jonas Braasch) consists of three human musicians performing live with a listening and improvising computer agent. Van Nort’s FILTER (Freely Improvising, Learning, and Transforming Evolutionary Recombination system) selectively listens and simultaneously plays with the musicians. This dissertation explores improvisation and contributes a cross-field definition of of this highly contested term: improvisation is the performance agency. The first of three movements provides a cross-field review of improvisation; the second movement employs autoethnography to study the sonic and social improvisations of Triple Point; the third movement explores quantum improvisation by employing writing as a performative tool to discover Oliveros’s ethical machine and human improvisation. The three interconnected types of improvisation are theorized as constraining and provoking improvisation: personal combinatory, social evolutionary, and ethical transcendent. This dissertation concludes with the claim that Oliveros’s quantum improvisation contributes to a theory of creativity that reverberates with socio-ethical connection and discovery.

Pauline Oliveros no necesita presentación. Es sin duda una de las figuras más importantes que dio la música en la segunda parte del siglo XX y en la primera del XXI. Una compositora con mayúsculas, que impuso su obra con todo lo que significaba ser mujer en un contexto dominado casi exclusivamente por hombres. Ante tanto machismo imperante, la contracara fue nada menos que John Cage, cuando manifestó que a través de la obra de Pauline-y habiendo dejado atrás sus diferencias con Schönberg-finalmente pudo comprender lo que era la armonía (1). Pauline fue una artista que desafió las categorías y los prejuicios sociales para desarrollar una trayectoria única. Desde su paso pionero por el San Francisco Tape Music Center hasta el desarrollo del concepto de Deep Listening. Desde la elección de un instrumento tan poco utilizado en la música contemporánea como el acordeón hasta la expansión que hizo de él con medios electrónicos. Desde sus Sonic Meditations hasta sus experimentos virtuales en internet con la Avatar Orchestra Metaverse. Desde el desarrollo de composiciones de texto hasta la exploración del potencial de la improvisación. Desde su activa crítica feminista hasta su trabajo como investigadora, docente y activista social. De ahí que resulte difícil catalogar su obra; esta se resiste a ser encasillada en cualquiera de los compartimientos estancos que la crítica musical convencional propone, precisamente porque trasciende las etiquetas con una fuerza y libertad que no sabe de limitaciones. Por eso, todas estas categorías toman una dimensión diferente. Para poner un ejemplo: su acercamiento a la espiritualidad hay que pensarlo en el contexto de una sociedad tan materialista como la norteamericana y, en ese sentido, tal vez resulte un gesto más cercano a la crítica ácida de la contracultura que a la mera complacencia del New Age. A la distancia, resulta claro que su obra es orgánica, fluida y consistente, y que tiene una vitalidad que resiste el paso del tiempo.

This paper focuses on the pieces that are gathered together under the name of Sonic Meditations, published in 1971. My work begins with a short biography about Oliveros, then I present the social and historical context in which the Sonic Meditations were created, before providing a brief explanation about the theory of Oliveros’s oeuvre. This is followed by a possible way of cataloguing and analysing the Sonic Meditations and, finally, I share my personal ideas as a mediator about the potential practical applications of these compositions nowadays.

There is increasing appreciation for the role that location plays in the experience of a musical event. This paper seeks to understand that role in terms of our habitual relationships to place. I ask how being musical somewhere can expand and transform our habituated comportment there, an inquiry sparked by the theory and practice of the late experimental music pioneer Pauline Oliveros. Grounded in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment, I argue that the site-specific improvised performances of Jen Reimer and Max Stein invite audiences into transformed relationships with places they habitually encounter. With sustained comparisons to the centrality of deep listening in Pauline Oliveros's lifetime of sonic innovation, and frequent reference to Alia Al-Saji's reception of Merleau-Ponty's account of the habit body, this paper contends that such site-specific improvised performances can elicit a sort of hesitation in our everyday style of sensory-motor conditioning, and, concomitantly, awaken a layer of sensory living amenable to radically new sonic and behavioural configurations.

To define/discuss improvisation/composition in music by gendering them would be wrongheaded as a “grand narrative.” Each can play yin to the other’s yang, contingent on context and conceit, and the conceit breaks down if hardened beyond context and the contingent.

Caveats thus in place, this presentation will live up to its title by suggesting a theoretical “riverrun” (both fluid and fixed). Drawing on the artists’ words in their own extensive writings and to many interviewers (including me), and on the details of these two multimedia, interdisciplinary productions, I will suggest them as evincing something like a “reset” of the now-well-underway (though still relatively recent) academic discourse on improvisation (on which I will also draw and summarily characterize), so: neither subservient to nor reactive against the systematically composed or traditional in music-cum-culture, nor merely atomized among “a thousand” idiosyncratic flowers blooming, improvisation is seen here not only in its fullest flower as the creative agent of balance and integrative holism of all possible (and possibly conflicting) aspects of said musiculture but is also therein suggesting an emergently visible global garden.

On the way to this home run, I will touch these three bases:
• a comparison/contrast of the global, transhistorical feminism infusing both works, and my comparison of that to the seeds of afrocentrism in early jazz that shaped its mature identity;
• a comparison/contrast of the relationship to the patriarchy each work suggests, both as problem to be solved and consort to be integrated (in both);
• a glance at two representative (among a growing chorus of) resonant interdisciplinary voicings of the “grand dame narrative” (physicist Janna Levin’s theory of a finite universe, and Swedish novelist’s Stieg Larsson’s portrait of a male-female crime-fighting duo).

I’ll close with a glance at the also-growing host of Asian women in international improvised music.

These speaker’s notes to a Power Point presentation convey the substance; most of the slides are simply complementary visuals. When the slide text adds to the substance, I’ve included it.

This article evaluates the theoretical and practical grounds of recent debates around Christoph Cox's realist project of a 'sonic materialism' by returning to Gilles Deleuze, a key theoretical resource for Cox. It argues that a close engagement with Deleuze's work in fact challenges many of the precepts of Cox's sonic materialism, and suggests a rethinking of materialism in the context of music. Turning to some aspects of Deleuze's work neglected by Cox, the 'realist' ontological inquiry Cox affirms is challenged through the 'onto-ethology' that Deleuze and Félix Guattari develop in their A Thousand Plateaus, with this diversely constructive theory of relations explicated through musical examples from John Cage and Pauline Oliveros. To conclude, this article suggests that Deleuze can indeed be understood as subscribing to a materialism, but a materialism that is practical rather than doctrinal.

This is a phenomenological analysis of Pauline Oliverosʼ “Rose Moon” based on an audio recording of the 1978 performance at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.  The paper details how the matrices of interaction spawned from Oliveros' structure play out in this performance.

[English below]
Współcześnie można zauważyć rosnące zainteresowanie radiem internetowym w Polsce. Stanowi ono alternatywę dla rozgłośni publicznych i komercyjnych. Przeniesienie radia do Internetu ma również duże znaczenie dla wolności wypowiedzi i poszukiwania nowych form ekspresji. Powstałe w ostatnim okresie rozgłośnie, tworzone oddolnie i społecznie, budują nowe rozumienie radiofonii. Przedstawiona praca bada wymienione konwencje radiowe i stara się wskazać podstawowe, etyczne dążenia, jakie może wypełniać radio w XXI wieku. Ważnym aspektem staje się eksploracja koncepcji Radio Utopii, a także jej opozycji - Radia Thanatos. Praca jest również inspirowana filozofią Martina Heideggera i jego rozważaniami wokół języka. Celem przedsięwziętych refleksji jest ochrona medium przed nadużyciami władzy, propagandy, a także przed zagrożeniem cenzury.

Nowadays, internet radio is getting more popular in Poland. It is an alternative to public and commercial broadcasting. Moving radio to the Internet has also a great importance, because of the freedom of expression and the search for new ways of expression. Radio stations established recently, created indepedently and socially, provide a new understanding of radio broadcasting. The presented work examines the above-mentioned radio conventions and tries to indicate the basic, ethical aspirations that can be fulfilled by radio in the 21st century. Exploration of the concept of Radio Utopia, as well as its opposition - Radio Thanatos, it is important then. The text is also inspired by Martin Heidegger's philosophy and his reflections on language. The purpose of the considerations is to protect the medium against abuses of power, propaganda, as well as against the threat of censorship.

En el interior de una metodología historiográfica del arte y teniendo como paradigma el drag nuestra búsqueda nos ayudará a paliar la violencia de la Historia a través de la creación como investigación de la propia visualidad de los cuerpos. Dragging the History se revelaría como una acción para comprender la emergencia de la performance radical y su insistencia en activar nuevos imaginarios sociales, así como paliar los traumas de la historia. A través de los trabajos performativos cronopolíticos de Boudry & Lorenz alcanzamos la posibilidad de una performance reparadora en la propia producción de la historia

“To hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it.” 

-Rebecca Solnit
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t
“Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” 

– Pauline Oliveros

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Silence is often interpreted as a lack of sound. An imagined internalised summit of solitude within ourselves that isolates us from the world and humanity. Mute of character, anechoic and sinister – a space in which to find something lost or to amplify the abundance of our own voice. If John Cage’s 4’ 33”, four minutes and thirty-three seconds of performative tacet silence is the absolution of the awareness that silence, beyond modern intervention, does not exist, then Pauline Oliveros explores silence beyond passive listening and into a space of active, deep listening.

¿Cuál es la música más avanzada de nuestro tiempo? ¿Qué la hace ser avanzada? ¿Es la música electrónica música avanzada per se? ¿De dónde viene esta idea? ¿Acaso de las ficciones de la historia de la música occidental, de sus obsesiones de progreso y sus decadencias? ¿Cuántas voces de fantasmas (volviendo a Didi-Huberman y Warburg), podemos escuchar en la música avanzada de hoy?, ¿cuánta persistencia espectral en su experimentalismo? ¿Cómo podemos pensar sus ideas y procesos desde esta perspectiva?

An excerpt from my book-in-progress's chapter on musician Randy Raine-Reusch, reviewing his collaborative recordings with Pauline Oliveros, who just passed away. See more on her from me here and here. There are many ways to measure greatness and quantify genius. My own chosen/fated mode is how an artist stimulates my imagination in the medium of words—especially an artist of music, which is famous for being the thing one can't write about unless one can dance (more, want to dance) about architecture. This excerpt, for me, is testament to the greatness and genius of both R 3 and his late great collaborator on these two CDs, Pauline Oliveros. I share it as their/her music channeled… perhaps best received as transmitted, read with a bottle of wine while the CDs play… Humor me now as I imagine Raine-Reusch coming to the last car on this particular train only to discover it to be uroboric: going through its last leads him back to its first car. As the horror of the situation creeps to dawn, he looks out the window…and sees not the tropical lush life he stepped in from, but only… BLACK, STARRY SPACE! Before he can get his head around this science fiction, Stuart Dempster suddenly appears, sees R-R's shock, and leads him gently but firmly back to the car they shared. There he opens a door to a stairway Raine-Reusch had not seen before, leading to a second story. Gathered up there are several new (though no strangers) to this disoriented express. Pauline Oliveros has the aura (though not the air) of the group's central personage, as its most youthful elder; a headphoned David Gamper is fiddling with some electronic devices, and Joe McPhee blows some soft, low long tones through his pocket trumpet while gazing out into the black. Raine-Reusch looks back to Dempster with all questions in his face; the latter responds by pointing upward. Raine-Reusch tracks the pointing finger to see that the ceiling is a skylight, and the vista beyond it not empty space but the sunlit half of the big blue marble Earth. They are moving toward it. Pauline moves to one end of the car, Stuart to the other, both to identical levers in the up position. They lock eyes, cock their heads back slightly and in sync, then bring them back in a simultaneous nod accompanied by a pull of their levers. As they do so, everyone in the car looks up, there to see what looks like a gigantic leathery-rubbery ballonet inflating to fill an even bigger metal egg, or what will be one once its two separate halves finish meeting in the middle after their rise from the left and right sides of the car. When both full ballonet and closed metal egg are in place, blocking all view of the space above the car, Stuart and Pauline return their levers to the upright, again in sync, which causes a loud CLICK and a feeling in the gut like when an elevator starts to rise. All eyes turn to the side windows, as it quickly shows that their car's upper level is detaching and floating away from its lower. Soon the earth is in the view of one side, still growing larger; receding on the other is what they now can see to be a spinning disk, not unlike the classic UFO…except this one sports the yin-yang symbol on both sides, in opposite schemes of black and white. A ring of windows around its rim reveals the train they'd been on, circling its inner perimeter, apparently held there by the simulated gravity of the disk's centrifugal spin. Pauline then beckons to Raine-Reusch to follow her, and leads him to a dual apparatus on the forward end of the car-cum-gondola. Standing inert next to each other, they look like a pair of conventional Segways, only attached to the floor. Pauline steps onto one and it instantly transforms into the…more malleable such device described as the process of free improvisation, above; here, however, it stays connected to the blimp to function as one of its controls. Raine-Reusch steps onto the other one, and the two take control of the airship to pilot it through the atmosphere and safely back to earth.

An excerpt from my book-in-progress's chapter on musician Randy Raine-Reusch (http://asiamartists.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_2103.html), reviewing his collaborative recordings with Pauline Oliveros, who just passed away. See more on her from me at https://www.academia.edu/2327406/Improvisation_as_Grand_Dame_Narrative_in_Jin_Hi_Kim_s_Touching_the_Moons_and_Pauline_Oliveros_s_and_Ione_s_IO_and_HER_and_the_Trouble_with_Him and https://www.academia.edu/2353184/Miya_Masaoka_and_Pauline_Oliveros.