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My mother brought accordion home. She was going to learn to play it so she could teach it and increase her income. And I got fascinated with it, so she backed off and let me do it.

Pauline Oliveros

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Pauline Oliveros
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: May 30
Died: 2016
Died: November 24
Accordionist
Composer
Music Theorist
Musician
University Teacher
Houston
Texas
Learn
Accordions
Mother
Accordion
Backed
Home
Fascinated
Play
Income
Going
Brought
Increase
Teach

More quotes by Pauline Oliveros

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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
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Deep listening is experiencing heightened awareness or expanded awareness of sound and of silence, of quiet, and of sounding - making sounds.
Pauline Oliveros
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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
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When I composed the first sonic meditation, I realized that I was composing the direction of attention.
Pauline Oliveros
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I wrote my sonic meditations and started using them with students. I took a bunch of UCSD students out to Joshua Tree and we did the sonic meditations on the boulders.
Pauline Oliveros
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The students were missing out a lot in their ensemble playing because they weren't listening to each other or the environment.
Pauline Oliveros
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I felt a challenge to compose music. That's where my challenge was, for the most part.
Pauline Oliveros
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I had to cope with attitudes that were not supportive all along. I mean, you still have that.
Pauline Oliveros
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Radio broadcasting was only 25 years old when I was born in 1932.
Pauline Oliveros
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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
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I can't really deal with buttons. And that's what I keep saying, Okay, I can't push buttons, because that means I have to take my hands off the keyboard or the buttons or whatever. Don't you understand! .
Pauline Oliveros
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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
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[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
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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
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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
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Deep Listening Institute is dissolving and is now the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). The legacy of the twenty or thirty years that we've been operating is now transferred to RPI.
Pauline Oliveros
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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
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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
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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
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It might be fun to have audience members wander up the ramps as well, so they can listen from different vantage points.
Pauline Oliveros