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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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Pauline Oliveros
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: May 30
Died: 2016
Died: November 24
Accordionist
Composer
Music Theorist
Musician
University Teacher
Houston
Texas
Realized
Direction
Meditation
Attention
Firsts
First
Sonic
Composing
Composed

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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I used to go into the studio around midnight and stay all night.
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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.
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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! .
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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
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Radio broadcasting was only 25 years old when I was born in 1932.
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I felt a challenge to compose music. That's where my challenge was, for the most part.
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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.
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Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.
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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.
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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 .
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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