Quote

My mother brought home the accordion in 1942. I was fascinated and wanted to learn to play it. Some of my music has a relationship to dance styles - The Well and the Gentle or The Wanderer for example.

Pauline Oliveros

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Pauline Oliveros
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: May 30
Died: 2016
Died: November 24
Accordionist
Composer
Music Theorist
Musician
University Teacher
Houston
Texas
Well
Style
Wanderer
Play
Example
Wanderers
Learn
Styles
Mother
Fascinated
Home
Gentle
Music
Brought
Wanted
Dance
Accordions
Wells
Relationship
Accordion

More quotes by Pauline Oliveros

Image
Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
I had a lot of good times. I had a lot of fun. I liked what I was doing, so I just kept doing it. At the Tape Music Center, I was working from midnight to four in the morning. Because then it was quiet, nobody was there, and I could just do my work. I didn't have to fool around.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
I felt a challenge to compose music. That's where my challenge was, for the most part.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
Radio broadcasting was only 25 years old when I was born in 1932.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
I used to go into the studio around midnight and stay all night.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
I'm very interested in vertical space.I want the players to listen to their sound in such a way that they hear the complete sound they make before they make another one. So that means that they hear the tail of the sound. Because of the reverberation, there's always more to the sound than just the sound.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
[My interest in music] is from my mother and my grandmother, who were pianists, and they taught.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
You invent things like algorithms to take care of some of the changes you want to make. The changes aren't detectable. There's all kinds of things happening as I play.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
It takes time because the habitual response to that is very deep. It goes back to our earliest responses as babies. You have to feel safe, and if a sound is threatening, you're going to be upset. There are those early responses, depending on how and what kind of experiences you had.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
I got very interested in attention and awareness and how to achieve certain states through understanding this.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
Before that, an 8-bit recording was pixelated it was really bad. It didn't serve what I was doing, which was recording live sound and delaying it and feeding it back. This is essentially what the EIS system is: a bunch of delays.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
Deep listening is experiencing heightened awareness or expanded awareness of sound and of silence, of quiet, and of sounding - making sounds.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
When I am composing, the sounds are leading me to the way I want them to organize.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
In the '60s my friends were interested and we were hearing electronic music coming in on community radio from Europe, so that's where it started. And I had a tape recorder and started making things with it.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
When we had the San Francisco Tape Music Center, we had a couple of Ampex tape machines there, and I could string tape from one machine, past the heads, and over to the next machine to the supply-reel amp, and have another delay there.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
I have a commission to do a piece in a place in California, Oliver Ranch, which has an eight-storey structure called The Tower designed by the visual artist Ann Hamilton.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
It might be fun to have audience members wander up the ramps as well, so they can listen from different vantage points.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
Something that I did, and I developed out of that sonic meditations, which were pieces that I composed in the '70s that now are very well-known and used in many classrooms all over the world, but at the time were outrageous.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
[Students] they did the sonic meditations, I would observe them in their ensembles, and the ensembles improved incredibly. So I knew I had something to do and something to say.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
The sound and just the fact that it was different from the piano, yet it still had some familiarity [made my fascinated with accordion].
Pauline Oliveros