Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis - Deep Listening

Pauline Oliveros
May 30, 1932 - November 25, 2016
Deep Listening
for accordion, voice, conch shell, metal pieces, trombone,
didjeridu, garden hose, whistling, metal pipes

New Albion Records NAO22

1.	Lear - 24:48
2.	Suiren - 9:51
3.	Ione - 17:30
4.	Nike - 10:36

Pauline Oliveros - accordion, voice
Stuart Dempster - accordion, conch shell, metal pieces, trombone, didjeridu, garden hose, whistling, metal pipes
Panaiotis (Peter Ward) - voice

Recorded in the bottom of a cistern that once held two million gallons of water, the creators took full advantage of their environment's 45-second reverb time.

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As a musician, I am interested in the sensual nature of sound, its power of release and change. In my performances throughout the world I try to transmit to the audience the way I am experiencing sound as I hear it and play it in a style that I will call deep listening. Deep listening is 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.

— Pauline Oliveros

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A warden approached us as we prepared to descend 14 feet down into the 186 foot diameter cistern that once held 2 million gallons of water. The warden reproached us for parking a van on the dirt covered ceiling. Pot holes suggested that perhaps the ceiling was not so stable. Once we had made our decent and after my eyes had adjusted to the dim cavern, I realized almost at once that the warden had probably never been inside: the cavernous cylinder is made of reenforced concrete with more pillars per square yard than a skyscraper. The water tank, built in 1970 on an army base, was probably designed to withstand heavy bombing. Our van was the equivalent of a mosquito on a housetop.

The remarkable thing about the acoustic space is the long reverb, which could approach 45 seconds, and the lack of slap echoes and distinct early reflections that are often characteristic of large cathedrals; only pure, smooth reverb, the type that can be simulated electronically but is thought to be unrealistic and fantastical.

The space is real, and unique. A large cathedral will return slap echoes and uneven resonance characteristics. The cistern showed a very smooth frequency response and no echoes, only a smooth reverberation, the amplitude of which appears to begin at the same decibel level as the source. Consequently, it is impossible to tell where the performer stops and the reverberation takes over. One additional aspect of the reverberation field that does not seem to record easily and which makes simulation very difficult, is that it slowly moved from the sound source along the walls until it enveloped the listener: a most remarkable and beautiful phenomena.

--Panaiotis

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Pauline Oliveros, a composer whose life’s work aspired to enhance sensory perception through what she called “deep listening,” died on Thursday at her home in Kingston, N.Y. She was 84.

Pauline Oliveros was born on May 30, 1932, in Houston to John Oliveros and Edith Gutierrez. Her childhood was accompanied by the sounds of piano lessons taught by her mother and grandmother, bird song and buzzing cicadas, and the curious special effects used on favorite radio serials like “Buck Rogers” and “The Shadow.”

Taking up the accordion as her principal instrument, she also learned to play violin, piano, French horn and tuba.

At 20 Ms. Oliveros moved to California in search of a compositional mentor. She found one in Robert Erickson, a prominent composer, who as the music director of KPFA-FM, a Berkeley radio station, introduced Bay Area listeners to the latest trends in European avant-garde composition.

She explored free improvisation with colleagues like the composer Terry Riley and the bassist and koto player Loren Rush in the late 1950s, and joined Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick at the trailblazing San Francisco Tape Music Center, founded in 1962.

Early in her career in the 1960s, Ms. Oliveros avidly adopted cutting-edge technologies, working with magnetic tape and prototype synthesizers at the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

Already active as an improviser, she approached electronic music with a performer’s instincts; to make “Bye Bye Butterfly” (1965), which John Rockwell, The New York Times music critic, called “one of the most beautiful pieces of electronic music to emerge from the 60s,” she manipulated a recording of Puccini’s opera “Madama Butterfly” on a turntable, augmenting its sounds with oscillators and tape delay.

The resulting piece, Ms. Oliveros wrote, “bids farewell not only to the music of the 19th century but also to the system of polite morality of that age and its attendant institutionalized oppression of the female sex.”

One more turning point came in 1988, when Ms. Oliveros and two colleagues — the trombonist, didgeridoo player and composer Stuart Dempster and the vocalist and composer Panaiotis — descended into an extraordinarily resonant disused cistern in Port Townsend, Wash. Their drone-based improvisations were recorded, and selections issued on CD under the title “Deep Listening” in 1989.

Beyond a self-evident pun referring to music played 14 feet underground, “Deep Listening” signified Ms. Oliveros’s emerging aural discipline: a practice that compelled listening not just to the conventional details of a given musical performance — melody, harmony, rhythm, intonation — but also to sounds surrounding that performance, including acoustic space and extra-musical noise.