Quote

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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Pauline Oliveros
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: May 30
Died: 2016
Died: November 24
Accordionist
Composer
Music Theorist
Musician
University Teacher
Houston
Texas
Four
Center
Working
Liked
Times
Kept
Didn
Quiet
Around
Fool
Music
Nobody
Work
Fun
Midnight
Good
Morning
Tape

More quotes by 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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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 had to cope with attitudes that were not supportive all along. I mean, you still have that.
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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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Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music.
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 .
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A mouse and a keyboard is not a good performance instrument.
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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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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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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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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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 got very interested in attention and awareness and how to achieve certain states through understanding this.
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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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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I used to go into the studio around midnight and stay all night.
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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When I composed the first sonic meditation, I realized that I was composing the direction of attention.
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