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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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Pauline Oliveros
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: May 30
Died: 2016
Died: November 24
Accordionist
Composer
Music Theorist
Musician
University Teacher
Houston
Texas
Ensemble
Weren
Missing
Students
Listening
Playing
Environment

More quotes by 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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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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Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening
Pauline Oliveros
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Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.
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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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 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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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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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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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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[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 I am composing, the sounds are leading me to the way I want them to organize.
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.
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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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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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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[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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Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music.
Pauline Oliveros