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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

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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
Music
Hearing
Really
Towards
Think
Following
Thinking
Ears
Paradigm
Musician
Pointed
Forward
Musicians
Sitting
Opposite
Space
Opposites

More quotes by 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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Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.
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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We have a very large constituency in the world from all of the years that we've done workshops, retreats, and talks. I would say there a few thousand people out there that have some relationship to what we do.
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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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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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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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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
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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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A mouse and a keyboard is not a good performance instrument.
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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[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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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
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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'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
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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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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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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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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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When I am composing, the sounds are leading me to the way I want them to organize.
Pauline Oliveros