Pauline Oliveros, famed composer, philosopher, educator and experimental music pioneer has passed away at the age of 84.
-from FACT magazine:
“As a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, Oliveros collaborated with Terry Riley, playing in the first performance of Riley’s ‘In C’, and modular synthesist Morton Subotnick. She later became director of the Center, where she developed a philosophy of listening as a ritual and healing process, an approach she described through her coinage “deep listening”. Her Deep Listening Band specialized in performing recording in resonant or reverberant spaces, and her touchstone album Deep Listening was recorded in 1989 in a disused cistern 14 feet beneath the ground.
Her practice emphasised the difference between hearing and listening, as she told an interviewer in 2003. “In hearing, the ears take in all the sound waves and particles and deliver them to the audio cortex where the listening takes place. We cannot turn off our ears–the ears are always taking in sound information–but we can turn off our listening. I feel that listening is the basis of creativity and culture. How you’re listening, is how you develop a culture and how a community of people listens, is what creates their culture.”
From the 1980s onwards Oliveros focused on improvisation, particularly as an accordionist. She continued to teach at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mills College, publishing five books and becoming the recipient of several awards, until the end of her life.”
The Incubator 