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Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music.

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
Everybody
Music
Every
Way

More quotes by Pauline Oliveros

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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
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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
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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'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
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Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening
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 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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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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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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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
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The mission [of institution] won't change. It will continue to be what it is: to spread the practice of deep listening and introduce it to people, to do workshops and retreats and certification programs and so on.
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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[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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I had to cope with attitudes that were not supportive all along. I mean, you still have that.
Pauline Oliveros
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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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Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.
Pauline Oliveros
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I used to go into the studio around midnight and stay all night.
Pauline Oliveros
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[My interest in music] is from my mother and my grandmother, who were pianists, and they taught.
Pauline Oliveros
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You run into stereotypes so that the stereotype filters who you are and what you do, and having to deal with that was the most frustrating thing for me.
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