Quote

[My interest in music] is from my mother and my grandmother, who were pianists, and they taught.

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
Pianist
Grandmother
Taught
Interest
Mother
Music
Pianists

More quotes by 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
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
Image
Those people who don't have any voluntary control, or hands, can work with the physical movement that they can do - whatever voluntary movement they have, even the slightest .
Pauline Oliveros
Image
I got very interested in attention and awareness and how to achieve certain states through understanding this.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
I felt a challenge to compose music. That's where my challenge was, for the most part.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
I'll just say that I made my own explorations of tone by listening to a tone for a long time until I began to understand what my sensations were, what my mind was doing with tone.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening
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
When I am composing, the sounds are leading me to the way I want them to organize.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music.
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
A mouse and a keyboard is not a good performance instrument.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
Radio broadcasting was only 25 years old when I was born in 1932.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
It's going to take about a year or two for the transfer to be completed. We have a certification program so professionals can teach deep listening.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
I thought that it would be interesting to have a mirror and grab a light and shine it around in different ways. It's an analog to the acoustic reflections that we're going to be trying to activate as well.
Pauline Oliveros
Image
There are these sounds that come from outside that work really well if you're listening. If you're not listening, if you're blocking them out, then you don't get it. You don't get the merger of what the players are doing with everything, listening to everything.
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
My writing has always been a rather non-linear process. I've found if I get something down, I can listen to it and other things start to come.
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
Image
We think about sitting in a space and hearing some music by having our ears pointed forward towards the musicians sitting opposite us. I'm really not following that paradigm at all.
Pauline Oliveros