Convergence







Deep Listening Convergence Report by Pauline Oliveros

Deep Listening Convergence: Report
August 1, 2007
Presented September 5, 2007 at the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium

“Deep Listening is experiencing heightened awareness of sound, silence and sounding”

After seventeen summers of Deep Listening Retreats1 and as many years of international Deep Listening workshops - musicians who at different times completed three year certificate training came together to collaborate under the auspices of the Deep Listening Institute, Ltd.2 These musicians in a variety of self selected ensembles made a distinctive musical contribution as improvisers using networking technology to create new pieces and concert programs in the project Deep Listening Convergence.

What happens in a Deep Listening Retreat? Participants spend a week living together in a beautiful natural environment with the intention of practicing listening 24/7. Twenty-two people practice nonverbal time together from ten in the evening until noon the next day. There is a morning listening walk with physical energy exercises, breakfast in silence then a Deep Listening meditation followed by sounding exercises. Silence is broken or continued during free time in the afternoon. Tai Chi and creative movement is practiced before dinner. After dinner Deep Listening Meditation is followed by Dream practice3 - the induction of listening for sound in dreams. The evening is adjourned to silence.

What relevance does Deep Listening have for the training of musicians? Listening is often neglected in favor of developing motor skills or technique. Attention to listening helps to integrate physical actions with mental awareness and alertness so that technique is never mechanical or unfeeling. Deep Listening opens a way for technique to emerge through listening. By the end of the retreat week creative music projects are initiated and presented in collaborations. Here is a comment from a composer participant:

“For the first time, I started to hear sounds in my dreams - a wonderful, high wind chime is one I remember. And of course starting and finishing my day doing Tai Chi was amazing. I have definitely been trying to keep up the listening practice since I've been back.” 4

How does Deep Listening enhance the artistic experience? If one experiences heightened or expanded awareness brought about by meditation on listening with balanced body/mind then the artistic experience may be enhanced. The intense creative activity of the participants at the Retreats and the subsequent integration of their experiences into their continuing activities as artists indicates enhancement.

The Deep Listening Convergence took place with a five-month virtual residency for forty five musicians from January 15 to June 10, 2007. All of the musicians were familiar with Deep Listening.5

Using SKYPE6, a VoIP application, the musicians were invited to form new ensembles in a kind of musical dating game to prepare for a private concert and three public concerts that took place in Upstate New York June 7, 8 ,9 and 10, 2007, in Troy, Hudson and High Falls.

Musicians from Switzerland, Canada and across the United States participated in SKYPE jams, discussions, rehearsals and creations of improvisational pieces. The majority of the musicians were holders of Deep Listening Certificates7 from 1998 – 2006 and the rest were artist associates and staff of the Deep Listening Institute, Ltd. Some musicians were already acquainted and others were not. They were encouraged to form new relationships.

The Deep Listening Convergence project was conceived and named by DLI staff member and certificate holder - Vonn New a drummer/composer/improviser and administrator. The project was made possible by a grant of $65,000 from the New York State Music Fund8. Govenor Eliot Spitzer - then attorney general of New York State - made available a pool of money gained from suits against record companies that used payola to get their music on the radio. As Attorney General Spitzer designated all of this $150 million dollars for non-profit organizations to use for alternative music.

The Deep Listening Convergence project was organized with Pauline Oliveros9 as artistic director and Scot Gresham-Lancaster10 as technical director. Administration was handled by DLI staff member Lisa Barnard.

Gresham-Lancaster and Oliveros have collaborated for many years on many projects and since 2002 on telematic11 music transmissions both low and high tech using public internet and private for fee internet212 (Canarie in Canada). In 2005 they began to work with iChat AV13 for three way transmissions between iEAR Studios14 at RPI in Troy NY, Mills College15 in Oakland, CA and Skalen Dance Company16 in Marseille, FR. Oliveros worked with her RPI ensemble Tintinnabulate17 in transmissions with Arizona State University in Tempe AZ, and Wesleyan University in Middletown CT with iChat AV and with California State University at Hayward and the Society for Arts and Technology in Montreal QC with Internet2/Canarie. Subsequently Tintinnabulate performs in a weekly transmission with SoundWire18, CCRMA at Stanford University with CD quality audio in eight channels and DV quality video.

iChat AV is a Macintosh application so SKYPE was selected for the Deep Listening Convergence project because it works cross platform for both Mac and PC. Although telephone transmission is readily available with speaker phones it would be costly to mount such a project using land-lines. With SKYPE there was no charge. Musicians with MACs or PCs could participate.

Most of the forty-five musicians were familiar with computers but not all were familiar with SKYPE and the other applications (discussed below) that were used with the project. Technical director Gresham-Lancaster created online tutorials and FAQs for the most technically challenged participants.19 All forty-five musicians participated in the virtual residency for at least one ensemble piece. Others were more or less present for many sessions and pieces. SKYPE sessions were recorded with Ecamm call recorder20 or Pamela and uploaded to an application called iMEEM21. iMEEM hosts profiles, sound and video files. The files are public but the group is private so that no one outside of the group could post files. All communications for the Deep Listening Convergence were posted in Basecamp22 so that they could be archived and read at anytime. Messages could go to the whole group or only to selected members of the group in Basecamp.

The virtual residency began with a low tech jam hosted by Monique Buzzarté - one of the participants. A time was posted and up to ten participants at a time could join for the audio conference on SKYPE. The host invited those appearing online in the SKYPE list to the audio conference and the jam began. As these jams continued others began to make appointments with one another until there were a number of ensembles in the works.

It was apparent that feedback could be a problem unless the participants wore headphones. To skirt this problem DLI purchased twenty remaindered Sony speakerphones23 and gave them to participants. The quality was good and the need for headphones was eliminated for some. Also more than one participant could play on the same connection if they happened to be in the same room. The rehearsal jams were more or less successful depending on the stability of the connection. All had so called high-speed connections with cable or DSL but not all were always stable. There were dropouts and lost connections. However such was not the norm and the virtual residency proceeded very well.

Latency is inherent in low tech transmissions. Latency on SKYPE varied from 32 to 84 ms. (Not necessarily better or worse than some concert halls. The music created took latency into consideration as part of the aesthetic.

During the residency with the help of the communications producer Anne Bourne four curators were appointed – one for each concert. Concert proposals were requested by the curators and limited to one per person. Before the Convergence on June 5 began there was more than enough material for the concerts. Each of the four programs curated was totally different. Altogether twenty five diverse pieces were created with unique ensembles to play each one.

All of the pieces were rehearsed during the virtual residency as there would only be time for sound checks at the venues. All technical arrangements were organized for each venue by the technical director and DLI staff and volunteers. All of the technical needs were communicated via Basecamp, email or SKYPE chat. Administration and provision for accommodations and venue at the beautiful Life Bridge Sanctuary24 was made by the DLI staff. The majority of the musicians25 who came from Switzerland, Canada and outside of NY state stayed at the LBS. Meals and transportation to the concert venues were provided.

Each concert was documented with audio26, video and photographs. A feature article - Meditative music mines the depths of listening by Joseph Dalton appeared in the Times Union in Albany NY.

Here are three brief excerpts from the concerts. (Will be available momentarily)

Gayle Young Toronto Ontario and Katharina von Ruette from Basel Switzerland met for the first time in a SKYPE jam. They continued to improvise together and formed a duo. This is a brief excerpt from their piece - Glyka – for Amaranth and Columbine- Young’s own invented instruments with special tuning and von Ruette’s voice.

Threads of Piece* for large ensemble by Julia White (Canada). White invited everyone to contribute “pieces of peace” - handwritten or online, fragments of dreams or stories from life that have the theme of peace – she scanned these writings and images and transferred them to fabric and sewed the panels together in one long piece to be scrolled, projected and read as a score for improvisation.

DLC-Go by Doug van Nort (Canada) and the DLC Genetic Orchestra. laptops and voices. Performers were invited to upload files of their own creation of less than 1 minute each to create a “gene pool” for DLC-GO. Each file was rated on a scale of 1-10. From the surviving files performers could choose files to mutate by splitting them, processing one half and recombining with another half and returning them to the gene pool. After several mutations and additions to the gene pool the surviving files were used for live group improvisation.

The musicians and audiences were very happy with the concerts and performed very well. The concerts were the proof of the concept that a virtual residency could work.

END NOTES:

References:

http://www.deeplistening.org/site/convergence

Deep Listening at Rose Mountain: Scores and writings from the first Deep Listening Retreat 1991, Edited by Marc Jensen, Deep Listening Publications 2007

Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, Pauline Oliveros, iUNIVERSE 2005

Listening in Dreams: A Compendium of Sound in Dreams, Rituals and Meditations plus This is a Dream: A Handbook for Deep Dreamers, Ione, iUniverse 2005

Notes:

1 http://www.deeplistening.org/site/retreats

2 http://www.deeplistening.org/

3 Listening in Dreams: A Compendium of Sound in Dreams, Rituals and Meditations plus This is a Dream: A Handbook for Deep Dreamers, Ione, iUniverse 2005

4 Julia White describes Threads of Peace:
I came home with the idea of the virtual residency on my mind.
It doesn't seem too possible at the moment to get high-speed
internet as you know.

I had an idea.

I imagine a project that starts now called Threads of Peace.
I was thinking about my own experience these days with chaos
and a desire for peace (that often comes from my creativity)
and how I feel I am coping by 'holding a thread'.
Ultimately, it is peace that I am holding and cherishing in this
thread. I thought about how the larger world peace begins
within each of our hearts.

I wish to invite the DL list and others in the wider community to
contribute any 'pieces of peace' that they would like. It could
be handwritten or online, fragments of dreams or stories from
life that have the theme of peace. I encourage drawings, images-
anything really that is inspired by Peace. I will scan these and
transfer to fabric or if it is a story, I may extract images from it
to add.

I will create from these contributions a long fabric piece of Peace
that will weave together all of these individual threads of peace.
It will become like a prayer flag of sorts that is imbued with
peace itself.

I imagine this long piece of peace to be used as a score for
vocal improvisation at the DL convergence. It would be improvised
upon in the moment, the score perhaps being draped on the
singers' laps. It could be opened to all participants in the audience
or a group decided upon in advance.
I am open to collaboration and ideas ....

In effect we will sing the peace prayers alive and activate them in
the world.

I can see it then becoming an outdoor piece here on my land,
strung up like a prayer flag string, woven through the landscape.

I am very excited about the possibilities and this brings me a great
sense of peace!

love and gratitude,
Julia

What is it like to play music via SKYPE on the INTERNET?
Anne Bourne posted this comment:
"I feel the technique of global listening became essential when for example, we rehearsed Julia White's Threads of Peace with 9 women. It expanded the consciousness of my imagination to locate each woman to sing with her. I looked at images of Julia's textile piece on-line, and saw her interpretation of my grandfather's WW2 British Army Issue silk scarf that said in 17 Asian languages 'Hello I am not your enemy.' and 'Please may I have a bowl of rice'. I began to hear explosive moments of SKYPE distortion that evoked in me the imagined sounds of war. This interspersed with the women's singing voices and a shakuhachi calling to each other. I also found the latency effect an
effective vocal processing delay sound. My performance listening techniques are not seeming changed yet but their usefulness is confirmed in a real way with this technology, much the way a sound that comes from outside a room's sound sources confirms the intersection of room tones and the voices of other listening souls."

Gayle Young posted this comment:
"I've found that the on-line playing is building a musical connection in spite of the technical issues. Last weekend I was part of a larger group that included two people I've played with quite a lot but don't know very well at the in-person level. I found that I was tending to play in response to those two players with a stronger sense of what sounds would work out well, and a few sub-duos developed within the context of the larger group. This indicates to me that there has been some musical familiarization taking place, that these sessions have had similar results as playing in person." Our far flung community of listening improvisers has found a new way of connecting and we are all very excited for this new dimension of communication. We will be able to work together in new ways with improvising, composing, teaching and publishing.”

5 “Deep Listening is a practice that is intended to heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible.

The source for Deep Listening as a practice comes from my background and experience as a composer of concert music, as a performer and improviser. Deep Listening comes from noticing my listening or listening to my listening and discerning the effects on my bodymind continuum, from listening to others, to art and to life.”
Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, Oliveros, P. iUNIVERSE 2005

6 http://www.skype.com/intl/en/download/
What is Skype?
Skype is a little piece of software that lets you make free calls to anyone else on Skype, anywhere in the world. And even though the calls are free, they are really excellent quality. If you and your friends, family or business contacts are using webcams, you can also make free video calls. You can even call landlines and mobile phones at http://www.skype.com/go/skypeout really cheap rates.

7 http://www.deeplistening.org/site/certificateprogram

8 http://rockpa.org/special_programs/the-new-york-state-music-fund/

9 http://www.paulineoliveros.us

10 http://www.o-art.org/Scot/

11 http://transition.turbulence.org/networked_music_review/2007/07/07/inter...

12 Internet2 http://www.internet2.edu/about/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2

13 http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/ichat/

14 http://www.arts.rpi.edu/

15 http://www.mills.edu/campus_life/center_for_contemporary_music/index.php

16 http://skalen.fr/anglais/artisticteam.html

17 http://www.myspace.com/tintinnabulate

18 http://ccrma.stanford.edu/groups/soundwire/

19 http://www.deeplistening.org/site/convergence

20 http://www.ecamm.com/

21 iMEEM http://groups.imeem.com/6H3SQa7R,dlconvergence

22 http://www.basecamphq.com/

23 "These are Sony-branded Polycom Soundpoint PC Speakerphones. They connect to the audio output, and microphone input on your computer's soundcard, and allow you to utilize your PC as a speakerphone. Perfect for people using their computers in a VoIP set-up. These Speakerphones utilize a built-in DSP (Digital Signal Processor) to ensure you have the clearest possible sound. The integrated neodymium loudspeaker offers crisp audio reproduction while the powerfull 74dB amplifier ensures that even in a large room the speakerphone is heard."

24

25 Artists participating in the Deep Listening Convergence include David Arner, Lisa Barnard, Seth Cluett, Stuart Dempster, Renko Dempster, Heloise Gold, Susie Ibarra, Al Margolis, Stephan Moore, Ikue Mori, Vonn New, Pauline Oliveros, Elizabeth Panzer, Zevin Polzin, Sarah Weaver, Tom Bickley, Nancy Beckman, Anne Bourne, Monique Buzzarté, Will Swofford, Raylene Campbell, Viv Corringham, Caterina De Re, Scot Greshman-Lancaster, Marc Jensen, Kathy Kennedy, Norman Lowery, Kim McCarthy, Brigitte Meyer, Kenta Nagai, Michelle Nagai, Uta Nagai, Kristin Norderval, Margrit Schenker, Scott Smallwood, Bill Stevens, Phala Tracy, Doug Van Nort, Stacy Denton, Katharina Von Rütte, Julia White, Gayle Young, Christine Zehnder-Probst, Andrew Kaluzynski, Filip Gilissen, Susie Ibarra, Roberto Rodriguez and Dominique Mazeaud.

Participating artists hail from more than ten international countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, Norway, Switzerland, Belgium, Philippines, Japan, Cuba, and France.
Learn more about Deep Listening Institute and Deep Listening Convergence artists-in-residence at the DLI website: http://www.deeplistening.org/

26 http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=596125

DEEPL, an elist – deep-l@googlegroups.com

Bodymind is used by Candace Pert in her Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine and James L. Oschman in Energy Medicine in Therapeutics and Human Performance, Bodymind expresses the continuum of the living matrix, that there is no separation between mind and body.

Convergence Artists
Muhal Richard Abrams
Muhal Richard Abrams

Mr. Abrams is one of the most highly respected musicians in the contemporary music scene. He is co-founder of The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), founder of The AACM School of Music, and the first recipient of the grand international jazz award, The JazzPar Prize, by the Danish Jazz Center (1990).

Except for a brief period of study at the Chicago Musical College and Governors State University in Chicago where he studied electronic music, Abrams is predominantly a self-taught musician who, as a result of many years of observation, analysis, and practice as a performing musician, has developed a command of a variety of musical styles both as a pianist and composer. Abrams and members of the AACM are responsible for some of the most original new music approaches of the last three decades.

Abram’s compositions have been commissioned and /or performed by New Band, The Rova Saxophone Quartet, The String Trio of New York, the Brooklyn Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra, the Kronos Quartet, Ursula Oppens, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Cassatt String Quartet, and countless others. He has recorded and toured the United States, Canada and Europe with his orchestra, sextet, quartet, duo and as a solo pianist. His musical affiliations include Max Roach, Dexter Gordon, Clifford Gordon, Sonny Stitt, Woody Shaw, Anthony Braxton, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Eddie Harris. His recordings are available on Delmark, Why Not, Black Saint, Arista Novus, UMO, and New World Records.


John Luther Adams
John Luther Adams

Adams has been called "one of the few important young American composers" by Lou Harrison and "one of Alaska's great artistic resources" by the Anchorage Daily News. He has received commissions, awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace Trust, the Rockerfeller Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, among others. He is currently composer-in-residence with the Anchorage Symphony, the Anchorage Opera and the Alaska Public Radio Network, as part of the Meet the Composer "New Residencies" program. About his work, Adams says: "My music has always been profoundly influenced by the natural world and a strong sense of place. Through sustained listening to the subtle resonances of the northern soundscape, I hope to explore the territory of 'sonic geography' - that region between place and culture...between environment and imaginatio


Michiko Akao

Born in Tokyo, Michiko Akao is a pioneering artist of the yokobue. She is recognized for establishing transverse bamboo flutes as solo instruments in contemporary music. Akao has commissioned an original repertory of over 100 compositions for the yokobue. She made her US debut in 1972 in Maki Ishii's Sogu II with Seiji Ozawa and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. She was awarded the Distinguished Artist Prize by the Japan Ministry of Education in 1982. She has performed widely in Japan and North America and participated in major music festivals in Europe and Asia.


Infinite
Ximena Alarcon Diaz

Born in Bogotá - Colombia, Lives in Leicester - United Kingdom

Art form:
Interactive Sonic Environments (on-line)
Sound compositions

As a woman, I use my non-linear thinking to travel through ideas about the creative use of technologies. This is represented in my digital multimedia scores. As an artist, my expression is inextricably linked to urban life and to the intangible presence of the "sublime" in its everyday routines. Sound has been my main resource for relating to the intimacy of the environment. Underground public transport systems have been the context of my recent work. They determine the paths for, and are catalysts of, real and symbolic migrations. Their powerful sounds and technological infrastructure involve us, changing both our perception of space and time and our memory in relation to place. I am interested in what is constructed in our memories by listening while travelling, and in our options for building collective memories using new media technologies, in the search for identity and place.

An Interactive Sonic Environment: London Underground
http://bartleby.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/~xalarcon/project/interactive.html

Linking Urban Soundscapes via commuters' memories (In progress)
http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/projects/ISE.html


Susan Alcorn
Susan Alcorn

Susan Alcorn began playing the pedal steel guitar over 25 years ago, and in that time has evolved into a musician/composer of such rare inspiration that her music has redefined, for many, the very perception of the instrument itself.

As a child in the 1950's and 1960's she was surrounded by the big-band music that her parents listened to as well as the pop music that blared on her radio. She picked up the guitar when she was thirteen, and soon began playing slide guitar (inspired in particular by Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and Son House) and dobro (her favorites were Mike Auldridge, Josh Graves, and Tut Taylor). A few years later, she began playing the pedal steel guitar and performed regularly with country-western bands in Texas.

Although Alcorn's initial work with pedal steel focused on the styles of the players usually associated with it - namely, country and western swing, she was at the same time profoundly influenced by John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and 20th Century classical composers such as Messaien, Penderecki, and Piazzolla. By the late 1980s, after performing straight-ahead jazz for ten years, she took the advice of Paul Bley, with whom she had been corresponding; she "threw away the real book" and began to develop a truly distinct approach to the instrument - one that incorporates jazz, minimalism, Gamelan Music, Indian Classical music, the folk music of Latin America, to name but a few of the catalysts.

Although Susan Alcorn typically plays solo, she has collaborated in performance with electronic composer Pauline Oliveros, German bassist Peter Kowald, and multi-instrumentalist Eugene Chadbourne. "Uma", her debut CD, was released on the US label Loveletter Recordings in the summer of 2000, and a CD of recordings with Chadbourne, "Texas Music", was released on Chadbourne's own imprint soon afterward. Ms. Alcorn currently resides in Houston, TX


Charles Amirkhanian

Amirkhanian is a leading proponent of text-sound composition in the United States. Most of his works are electroacoustic. In a radical departure from his earlier, more spare and minimal style, his recent works typically incorporate ambient and found sounds manipulated via Synclavier. He has served as Music Director of KPFA FM in Berkeley since 1969. In 1988 he co-founded the annual summer Composer-to-Composer summit conference on new music, sponsored by the Telluride Institute in Colorado.


Arner.jpg
David Arner

David Arner (piano, harpsichord, percussion) is a long time proponent of innovative music and spontaneous composition. While well known for his solo work, Arner is also actively working with bassists Michael Bisio and Adam Lane, saxophonist Avram Fefer, cellist Tomas Ulrich and percussionist Jay Rosen. He has also collaborated with poets Chuck Stein and Mikhail Horowitz, and choreographer Susan Osberg. Arner has performed throughout the country for more than 30 years, including many performances at the Knitting Factory (in the 1990s), and more recently at the Center for Performing Arts (Rhinebeck) and Deep Listening Space. He has also pioneered a re-vitalization of new music for silent film for many years.






Larry Austin

Larry Austin's music is composed for diverse combinations of instruments, voices, audio and/or video tape, film, computers and live electronics. His works have been widely performed, recorded, and published. His realization and completion of Charles Ives's Universe Symphony was premiered in 1994 by the Cincinnati Philharmonia. The compact disc recording on Centaur Records was acclaimed by the New York Times. Austin is Professor of Music and Chair, Division of Composition Studies, University of North Texas. Fellow composers know, too, his editorial and leadership roles as co-founder/editor of SOURCE: Music of the Avant Garde (1966-1974) and President of both the International Computer Music Association (1989-1994) and CDCM (1986-present), producer of the CDCM Computer Music Series on Centaur Records.


Joseph Bacon

Joseph Bacon is a native of San Francisco, son of the American composer Ernst Bacon. He studied guitar with Segovia, Ida Presti, Alexander Lagoya and Julian Bream. His background also includes degrees from Stanford and Harvard Universities, exhibitions of his own paintings and sculpture, and an extended study of Indian music with Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. He is a self-taught lutenist and an authority on the musical literature for the lute. He has taught on the faculties of the University of Oregon, Mills College in Oakland, California State College at Hayward, and Music and Arts Institute in San Francisco, and has performed in London, New York, Sand Francisco and many other cities in the United States, Canada, and Europe.


Christine Baczewska

As befits one who took her degree in English literature for fear of having too much sheer fun in the study of music, Baczewska's solo compositions derive essentially from an a capella sensibility, the voice as orchestra with consonants, pause and juncture, the click of affricatives as primary, if not sole, percussion. In 1974, she was co-founder of Care of the Cow, a cutting-edge performance group which developed quite a following through the early 1980s. During 1981's Like Feeding Pork to Pigs, Baczewska had a breakthrough: the home of the human voice is the brain. Ultimately, the expanding voice can be made to take any shape, fill any space, or convey any message. Her focus on the voice and solo performance evolves from this experience. She has concertized extensively and has recently worked on several important collaborations: with video artist Irit Batsry on vocals for video soundtracks; with Fritz Lang, to compose and perform the soundtrack for Lang's film Woman in the Moon: and, with dancer/choreographer Dennis O'Connor (with whose company she toured the United States and Europe in 1994.) She continues to explore the voice as instrument, sometimes performing with props like a weaving loom, and sometimes incorporating the multitrack capabilities of the recording studio as an added compositional tool.


Ellen Band
Ellen Band

Sound artist/performer Ellen Band teaches sound art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She is artistic director of Audible Visions, a new music/sound art performance venue in the greater Boston area. Her reviews on new music and sound art have been published by Pform and Boston Rock and her interview series with contemporary composers, "The Motivation Interviews," appear in issues 45 and 48 of Musicworks: The Canadian Journal of Sound Exploration. A Former new music educator (for 15 years), she wrote the newsletter set while teaching at the Eliot-Pearson lab school at Tufts University.


Barnard.jpg
Lisa Barnard

Lisa Barnard is a vocalist, writer and performance artist. She has honed her skills over the years in acting, movement, stage direction/design, puppetry, jazz/free improvisation and sound production which she experiments with in performances including elements of spoken work, vocalization, masks, music and movement. She dedicates her craft to exploring the open field of vocal expression from within and through the guidance of her mentors.

Barnard is a student of Deep Listening with Pauline Oliveros and studies dream work and Egyptian mythology/divination with Ione and Andrea Goodman, recently traveling in 2004 to Southern Italy to study the Black Madonna and ancient temples of Sicily. Recently, Barnard has completed projects with Pauline Oliveros for a commissioned film score Maquilapolis and participated as Kingston, NY Coordinator for Robert Whitman’s media project Local Report. Lisa performs frequently with Linda Montano and co-created the band Brothelkin with lyricist Bob Lavaggi and guitarist Ian Turner. Currently, Barnard is collaborating with Al Margolis developing a multi-media performance piece, MutaMYTHeatre’s Three Songs in Search of a Voice: a noh(t)opera.






Martin Bartlett

Born in Britain in 1939, Martin Bartlett came to Canada in 1952. He studied at the University of British Columbia and at Mills College. Important influences were: the music and writings of John Cage; electronic composers David Tudor, Pauline Oliveros and David Behrman; Indian musicians, the Dagar Brothers and Pandit Pran Nath; K.R.T. Wasitodipuro; and the music of the Javanese gamelan. He was one of the founders of the Western Front, an artist-run gallery, studio and performance space in Vancouver, and taught composition, electroacoustic music and world music at Simon Fraser University. Martin died of AIDS in 1993 in his home in Vancouver.


Nancy Beckman

Nancy Beckman began studying the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) at Meianji Zen temple in Kyoto where she learned the traditional solo Zen Buddhist repertoire and received her license to teach. She studied shakuhachi and ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University and later used photography, shakuhachi, and Japanese language in site-specific performance art pieces. Currently based in Berkeley, California, she teaches the solo shakuhachi repertoire as a spiritual practice. She is also a Certified Music Practitioner in the Music for Healing and Transition Program. She performs with Tom Bickley in the ensembles Cardew Choir, Gusty Winds May Exist, and Dream Down Duvet (also with Viv Corringham).






La Danza del Sole, 2008
Laura Biagi

Florence, Italy

Performance art

I was born in Siena, Italy and now live between Firenze and New York. Traveling is a great gift.
My research is a journey towards self-knowledge. My tools are foreign exchanges, music, dance, art, astrology. My training comes from academic traditions and from oral traditions. I teach Italian folk music and dance and Florentine Renaissance art (New York University in Florence and Vassar College, NY) and work as a licensed tour guide in Florence, Italy. Both my performance work and my teachings are the fruit and the seed of my spiritual quest whose direction is in the accommplishment of wholeness. RESIDENCY PROJECT: "The Dance of the Sun", a dance piece based on the symbology of numbers 3, 7, and 9, and on the motion of planets. This piece was first presented at opening of the art exhibit ASTRALIA in Venice, Italy, May 2008.


Tom Bickley
Tom Bickley

Tom Bickley (recorder + electronics + voice) listens to the world always hoping to hear more and more fully. He grew up in the semitropical soundscape of Houston, sojourned in Washington, DC
(studying music, religion, and information science) and came to California as a composer in residence at Mills College. In Berkeley he lives and sings at Incarnation Priory (an Episcopal Benedictine community), teaches privately, at the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training and on the library faculty at California State University East Bay. He plays with shakuhachi player Nancy Beckman as Gusty Winds May Exist and directs the Cornelius Cardew Choir.






Big Black
Big Black

Excerpt from Original Liner Notes from the 1982 lp – Philip Elwood

In a recording world nearly suffocating with the monotonous sounds of pre-fab electric "rock," 1750 Arch Records has been like a breath of fresh musical air. They have dared to record "live," and issue unedited renditions; they have presented new sounds, fascinating ensembles and esoteric instrumental experiments.

But even in the rarified audio world of 1750 Arch Records the microgroove disc contained herein must be considered as unusual. Unusual, in fact, that the recording session ever took place; unusual in the sounds that emerge, and unusual in the concept and instrumental collaboration that we hear.

Black phoned. He said "Phil, you write the notes for our record". "Yessir," I replied, "…what record?" Black is not only physically impressive (he is, after all, called "Big" Black) he is also very persuasive verbally.


John Bischoff
John Bischoff

John Bischoff ((b. 1949, San Francisco) is an early pioneer of live computer music. He is known for his solo constructions in real-time synthesis as well as his ground-breaking work in computer network bands. Bischoff's music is built from intrinsic features of the electronic medium: high definition noise components, tonal edges, imperfections, transitions, digital shading, and non-linear motion. Through empirical play and investigation he builds pieces that can be described as sonic sculptures, shaped in real-time and present for the duration of a performance. Recently, he has fashioned pieces that combine electronically-triggered bells with synthetic computer sounds. In such works bells are distributed around the performance space in a pattern distinct from the speaker locations. His idea is to disperse the sense of "source" in electronic music—to release the music from being trapped in the speaker enclosure—while highlighting the beauty of speaker-transmitted sound at the same time.

Bischoff studied composition with Robert Moran, James Tenney, and Robert Ashley. He has been
active in the experimental music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 25 year as a composer, performer, teacher, and grassroots activist. His performances around the US include NEW MUSIC AMERICA festivals in 1981 (SF) and 1989 (NYC), Experimental Intermedia (NYC), Roulette Intermedium (NYC), and the Beyond Music Festival (LA). He has performed in Europe at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, Akademie der Künst in Berlin, Fylkingen in Stockholm, and TUBE in Munich. He was a founding member of the League of Automatic Music Composers (1978), considered to be the world's first Computer Network Band, and he co-authored an article on the League's music that appears in "Foundations of Computer Music" (MIT Press 1985). He was also a founding member of the network band The Hub with whom he performed and recorded from 1985 to 1996. In 1999 he received a $25,000 award from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (NYC) in recognition of his music. Recordings of his work are available on Lovely Music, Frog Peak, and Artifact Recordings. A solo album, APERTURE, was released on 23FIVE INC in 2003. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at Mills College, in Oakland, California.


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David Borden

David Borden was educated at the Eastman School of Music and Harvard University. He was also a Fulbright student in Berlin Germany, where he studied at the Hochschule für Musik. He founded Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co. in 1969 with the generous support of Robert Moog. The group became the world's first synthesizer ensemble.

"Mother Mallard turns out some of the best synthesizer music around." - New York Times.

His 'The Continuing Story of Counterpoint,' a twelve-part cycle of pieces for synthesizers, acoustic instruments and voice has been called the 'Goldberg Variations of minimalism.' Four recent books have cited and discussed his work. In keeping with his interdisciplinary approach to his life and work, two of the books deal with American music history, one with music technology and one with the paintings of George Deem: "America's Music in the Twentieth Century" by Kyle Gann (Schirmer Books, New York, 1997); "America's Musical Life: A History" by Richard Crawford (W. W, Norton & Company, New York, London, 2001);"Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer" by Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 2002); "How to Paint a Vermeer" by George Deem (Thames & Hudson, N.Y., 2004). Borden's music is available on the Cuneiform, New World Records, Lameduck and Arbiter labels. He is currently the Director of the Digital Music Program at Cornell University.

"David Borden's music has always stood alone with its logic of motion, elegance of line and form, and deft use of state of the art technology." - Audio.


David Borden
David Borden

David Borden was educated at the Eastman School of Music and Harvard University. He was also a Fulbright student in Berlin Germany, where he studied at the Hochschule für Musik. He founded Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co. in 1969 with the generous support of Robert Moog. The group became the world's first synthesizer ensemble.

"Mother Mallard turns out some of the best synthesizer music around." - New York Times.

His 'The Continuing Story of Counterpoint,' a twelve-part cycle of pieces for synthesizers, acoustic instruments and voice has been called the 'Goldberg Variations of minimalism.' Four recent books have cited and discussed his work. In keeping with his interdisciplinary approach to his life and work, two of the books deal with American music history, one with music technology and one with the paintings of George Deem: "America's Music in the Twentieth Century" by Kyle Gann (Schirmer Books, New York, 1997); "America's Musical Life: A History" by Richard Crawford (W. W, Norton & Company, New York, London, 2001);"Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer" by Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 2002); "How to Paint a Vermeer" by George Deem (Thames & Hudson, N.Y., 2004). Borden's music is available on the Cuneiform, New World Records, Lameduck and Arbiter labels. He is currently the Director of the Digital Music Program at Cornell University.

"David Borden's music has always stood alone with its logic of motion, elegance of line and form, and deft use of state of the art technology." - Audio.


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Anne Bourne

Anne Bourne is a composer, cellist and vocalist. She has performed and recorded internationally with many artists in creative music genres including Jane Siberry, Fred Frith eric chenaux, Copyright, Tom Cora, Sarah MacLachlan, Susie Ibarra, and Joelle Leandre among others. Anne has created scores for film and dance with Peter Mettler, Atom Egoyan, Andrea Nann and Michael Ondaatje. Anne first met Pauline Oliveros when she was invited to perform a distance concert with The Deep Listening Band in New York and groups in Paris and Toronto, in 1994. She then participated in the Rose Mountain Retreats for the years that followed until the milleneum shift. Bourne performed Oliveros' Primordial Lift recorded for TotE with Oliveros, Tony Conrad and David Grubbs. Anne was a participant in the DL Opera at Lincoln Centre with her young daughter Willa. Current recording called dearness, with John Oswald and Fred Frith on Spool. Anne improvises with dwct, Quorum, and Eve Egoyan. Anne "is an earthy, unrestrained musical force, she accompanies her cello with otherwordly vocalizing" - CODA magazine






Iris Brooks

Iris Brooks specializes in contemporary and world flute music and has performed in Egypt, Iceland, Japan, Canada, Bali, and throughout Europe. Her articles on new music have been published in a variety of journals and she served as the editor of EAR Magazine


Bill & Mary Buchen

Since 1972, Bill and Mary Buchen have collaborated to integrate the sonic and visual arts as a multi-disciplinary form they define as Sonic Architecture. They have designed sound installations for museums, galleries and public sites throughout the United States. Large-scale public works include: Sound Parks and Science Playgrounds, Aoelian (wind) Harps and acoustic designs for urban and natural environments. Their pursuits center on the study of acoustic phenomena examined through its applications in science, architecture, ecology, and diverse world cultures. As composers they create metaphorical soundscapes for installation environments. Sound sources for their investigations utilize electronic technologies, computer-aided design and field recordings.


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Thomas Buckner

Tom is a baritone with a wide range of experience in a variety of musical genres. He is best known for his collaborations with contemporary composers and improvisers. He has commissioned and premiered over 100 new works. His most recent associations with composers include those with Robert Ashley, David First, David Behrman, Donald Knaack and Roscoe Mitchell. He is producer and curator of World Music Institute's Interpretations series in New York.


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Charlie Buel

Charlie Buel was born in San Francisco in 1943 and began studying piano and writing music at the age of seven. He majored in composition at San Francisco State University where he taught in the experimental college and helped to found the Collegium Musicum. Further studies at U.C. San Diego with Robert Erikson, Kenneth Gaburo and Pauline Oliveros resulted in Four Theatre Pieces , for which he received his M.A. He is perhaps best known for his piece for solo alto saxophone, Reflections on Gaga Todi (1972). In 1994, he made plans for the recording of Last Works , knowing it would be his last work. He died before the project was completed.


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Wendy Burch

Wendy Jeanne Burch is a poet and singer/performer, published internationally, with her Masters degree in Creative Writing. She has performed with poetry, movement, and voice in various venues with other artists, including her late husband composer/performer Joe Catalano, Pauline Oliveros, Marianne Tomita-McDonald, Toyoji Tomita, Erika Rogers, and others. Her most recent book is Traffic Prayers, with CD, and is available through the Deep Listening Catalog.

Wendy also is an animal and people psychic communicator, and a Reiki Master; she owns two pet related businesses, and is a sculptor/artist. She lives with her partner, Jon Steel, and her puppy, birds, fish and snake in the beautiful Oakland Hills of California.


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Warren Burt

Warren Burt attended the State University of New York, Albany (BA, 1971) and the University of California, San Diego (MA, 1975) before moving to Australia in 1975. In Australia he has worked in academia (La Trobe University, NSW Conservatorium, Victorian College of the Arts, Australian National University), education, and radio (freelance and commissioned productions for ABC and PBAA), and as a composer, film maker, video artist, and community arts organizer.


Monique Buzzarte
Monique Buzzarté

Monique Buzzarté is active in new music circles as a trombonist/composer. Honored as a "Soloist Champion" by Meet the Composer, she will be a featured performer in their 2007-08 season. Recent recordings include Zanana's Holding Patterns and the New Circle Five's Dreaming Wide
Awake (Deep Listening) along with John Cage's Five3 with the Arditti Quartet (Mode). She designed and developed a slide-mounted interactive live processing system for the trombone. Her advocacy work led to the admission of women into the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1997. 1999 DLI Certificate Recipient.


Raylene Campbell
Raylene Campbell

Raylene Campbell is an accordionist, improviser, composer, performance artist, audio/video artist, sound designer, teacher, and Deep Listening Instructor. Raylene is currently based out of Montreal, Canada and has a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, NY. Raylene’s creative process involves explorations of acoustic ecology, psychogeography, architecture (acoustic and social spaces), computer interactive technology, and audience interactivity in both performance and installation environments. Raylene often collaborates with other musicians, composers, performers, and artists of multitudinous disciplines.






Joe Catalano

In Memory 






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Joseph Celli

For the past 20 years, Joseph Celli has devoted his time to the premiering of over 35 inter-media works created for him by various artists; to the producing of contemporary artists activities; and to the study and performance of double reed instruments from around the world. He has commissioned and collaborated with an eclectic and diverse group of artists working in new sound technology, film, video, performance and inter-media events. Celli is one of a handful of American virtuosi recognized for developing a new instrumental syntax and a new performance repertoire for his instruments, the oboe and English horn. He co-directed the 1984 and 1988 New Music America Festivals, co-founded and directed Real Arts Ways, and served on the boards of many alternative organizations. Since 1991, he has worked as an independent, unaffiliated, itinerant composer and performer on five continents. He is the founder and director of O.O. Discs, Inc.


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Joel Chadabe

Joel Chadabe is an internationally recognized pioneer in the development of interactive music systems. As composer and performer, he has concertized worldwide since 1969 with Jan Williams, percussionist, and other musicians. He is listed in the International Who's Who of Musicians and the Who's Who in American Music. His articles on electronic music have appeared in Computer Music Journal, Contemporary Music Review, Electronic Musician, Perspectives of New Music, Electronic Music Review, Melos, Musique en Jeu, and many other journals and magazines. Several of his articles have been anthologized in books by the MIT Press and other publishers. His music is recorded on CDCM, Centaur, Lovely Music, Opus One, CP2, and Folkways labels. He has received awards, fellowships, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Fulbright Commission, SUNY Research Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. He has been President and Chairman of Composers' Forum, Inc., in New York City. He is currently on the faculties of the University at Albany and Bennington College; President of Intelligent Music, a research and development company; and founder and President of Electronic Music Foundation. Mr. Chadabe has a B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.M. degree from Yale University.


Seth Cluett

Seth Cluett (born 1976, Troy, New York) is a composer and visual artist whose work includes photography, drawing, video, sound installation, concert music, and performance. His pieces are an exploration of the role of sound in everyday life, engaging the boundary between the auditory and the other senses as an active field of experience for the audience.

His work has been shown/performed at the 10th Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Palais de Tokyo Museum, Théatre sur le Pavé, and GRM in Paris; the ICA, Mobius Artist Space, MassArt/nonpod in Boston; WPS1/MoMA, The Kitchen, Diapason, Engine 27, Tonic, and The Knitting Factory in New York; the Betty Rymer Gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago, Heaven, Artemisia, and Deadtech Galleries in Chicago; as well as the Deep Listening Space in Kingston, NY. Seth's work is documented on Errant Bodies Press, Sedimental, Crank Satori, BoxMedia, and Wavelet Records.


Abbie Conant
Abbie Conant

Abbie Conant received her Bachelor´s Degree (cum Laude) from Temple University in 1977. In 1976 she studied at Yale University, and in 1979 she received her Master´s Degree from the Juilliard School, followed by a Meister diploma from the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Cologne, Germany in 1984. From 1979 to 1980 she was solo trombonist of the Royal Opera of Turin, Italy. From 1980 to 1993 she was solo trombonist of the Munich Philharmonic.

The International Trombone Association Journal has featured Abbie Conant in a cover article and described her as "in the first rank of world class trombonists". She has recorded a highly acclaimed CD of trombone and organ music and performs internationally as a concerto soloist, recitalist, improviser and performance artist. This work has taken her to most of the large state theaters in Germany, where she hasperformed to great critical and public acclaim. In addition, in recent years she has performed as a soloist in over 60 American cities.

In 1992 the Baden-Würtenburg State Ministry for Education, in recognition of her international reputation as a trombonist, named her full tenured Professor of Trombone at the esteemed Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Trossingen, Germany. In 1996 the 4200 members of the International Trombone Association elected her as their President elect. In August of 1998 she was the first woman to serve as a judicator for the International Trombone Competition in Geneva, Switzerland.

Her involvement with Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening have supported her compositional talents and have resulted in a series of music theater works concerning the Holocaust which have been performed in Germany to large audiences with critical success. For her most recent project, entitled "The Wired Goddess and her Trombone", she is working with composers to create works for computer and trombone based on the theme of the goddess.






Jerome Cooper

"What is multi-dimensional drumming? After dealing with polyrhythms, I began to hear layers of sounds and rhythms. Divided into many parts and facets, the drum set and secondary instruments I use and play are all aspects of the drums. In the future, there will be many changes and developments in the area of the mind – so what we (humankind) think and hear, is what we shall see and hear. In order to play the drum set you must be able to manipulate four or five things at one time (i.e. bass drum, snare drum, high-hat, ride cymbals and maybe voice). So an instruments name and structure doesn’t stop me from playing them like a drum. You have instruments that are structurally different from the drum, but they have the same characteristic in the approach to the drum (i.e. piano, balaphone and shoes with taps). In order to find the music of the drums, I had to change my assumptions and beliefs about music in relation to the drums, which is sound in the creation of multi-rhythms." - Jerome Cooper


Viv Corringham
Viv Corringham

Viv Corringham is a British vocalist and sound artist, currently based in Minnesota, who has worked internationally since the early 1980s. Articles about her work can be found in Organised Sound (UK), Musicworks (Canada), and For Those Who Have Ears (Ireland). She received an MA Sonic Art with Distinction in 2001 from Middlesex University, England, and has had many awards, including a McKnight Composer Fellowship for 2006. Most recent works appeared in Art Colony, Grand Marais MN, Women in New Music Festival, Fullerton CA, Spark Electronic Music Festival Minneapolis MN, Rochester Art Center MN, Soundworks Festival, Cork, Ireland, and Midsummer Festival, Cobh, Ireland.


Henry Cowell

Henry Cowell may be best known as a creator of “tone cluster” compositions, which he began writing while in his early teens, but his infuence has been far broader and much deeper. As founder in 1925 of the New Music Society, he became a concert impresario for works by, among others, Carl Ruggles, Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Ives and Leo Ornstein; and publisher from 1927 to 1958 of New Music: A Quarterly of Musical Compositions. His many students included George Gershwin, John Cage, and Lou Harrison, but his interests extended beyond western classical traditions, and his radio program, “Music of the World’s Peoples,” introduced a large audience to world music long before it was fashionable. Just as Cowell’s groundbreaking book of 1930, New Musical Resources, continues to inspire successive generations of composers, Essential Cowell is key to understanding the origins and expanding dimensions of contemporary music.

Jacket photograph: Henry Cowell, 1914, age 17, reproduced courtesy of the Music Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts/Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.


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Alvin Curran

Curran is an American composer and performer of instrumental, electronic and environmental music familiar to new music audiences throughout Europe and the USA. Since co-founding the group Musica Elettronica Viva (with Rzewski and Teitelbaum) his musical activities include solo performances, large urban sound events, vocal improvisation groups and experimental radio works. Curran has collaborated with Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Cornelius Cardew, T. Kosugi, Pauline Oliveros, Charles Morrow, Clark Coolidge, Willem de Ridder, Simone Forti and many others.


Philip Dadson

Phil Dadson was born in New Zealand and now lives there in Aukland. He was a member of the foundating group for the Scratch Orchestra in London with Corneluis Cardew, Michael Parsons and others. In 1970, he founded the New Zealand Scratch Orchestra and later founded From Scratch.


Caterina De Re
Caterina De Re

In 2004 Caterina became Australia's first certified Deep Listener. Her eclectic artistic forte uses improvised vocals, pilgrimage field recordings, performance art, video and meditation.
Caterina has been noted for uncanny transformations of unique industrial spaces into aesthetically beautiful multimedia community events that were an unlikely fusion of Buddhist pilgrimages, local history and the Haudenosaunee teachings of peace. Given her extraordinary vocal range, she has a particular affinity with birdsong and performed at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh and at Central Park Tropical Aviary in Manhattan. She studies and performs Tibetan Buddhist sacred dance and ritual music in its traditional context. At Washington's largest correctional complex, she regularly visits one inmates' Buddhist group.






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Deep Listening Band

Pauline Oliveros, accordion, electronics
Stuart Dempster, trombone, didjeridu
Panaiotis (1988-1990), vocals, electronics
David Gamper, keyboards, electronics

The Deep Listening Band was founded in 1988 by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, and Panaiotis. David Gamper replaced Panaiotis in 1990.

The band is named after Oliveros' term, concept, program and registered servicemark of the Deep Listening Institute, Ltd., ''Deep Listening®'', and specializes in performing and recording in resonant or reverberant spaces such as cathedrals and huge underground cisterns including the two-million gallon Fort Worden Cistern, which has a 45 second reverberation time.

They have collaborated with Ellen Fullman and her Long String Instrument on "Suspended Music" released by Periplum Records; the Joe McPhee Quartet on "Unquenchable Fire" released by Deep Listening. They have also performed, recorded, and released a trope on John Cage's 4'33". "Non Stop Flight" released by Music&Arts is a 70 minute excerpt from the 4 hours and 33' trope.


Stuart Dempster
Stuart Dempster

Stuart Dempster, Sound Gatherer - composer/performer/author; University of Washington Professor Emeritus; various fellowships and grants including Fulbright and Guggenheim; numerous recordings including New Albion’s "Abbey", "Cistern Chapel"; landmark book “The Modern Trombone: A Definition of Its Idioms” published 1979; Merce Cunningham Dance Company commission in 1995. Besides Cathedral Band performances, he is founding member of Deep Listening Band. Dempster soothes aches, pains, and psychic sores with his meditative and playful “Sound Massage Parlor”; “Golden Ears Deep Listening Certificate” awarded in 2006.


Renko Dempster

Suiren’s (a.k.a. Renko Ishida Dempster) work includes visual improvisations with sound, movement, and visual arts collective ROOM; exhibitions of paintings in the northwest, including RAW Gallery, Jack Straw New Media Gallery (Seattle), Commencement Gallery (Tacoma), The Evergreen State College (Olympia); art performances with sound and visual arts collective ARTKOAMIA (2005 & 2006); visual performance with Deep Listening Band at Sound Symposium, St. Johns, Newfoundland (2002); Associate Artist-in-Residence with the Dome Project, Atlantic Center for the Arts (2005).






Lauri des Marais

Lauri des Marais's compositions are primarily synthesized stream between shape, mood, and pattern-texture construction; this she refers to as Classical Technology, which create Stories in SoundTM. Des Marais began playing piano in 1994. For live performance, she developed a form of movement she calls Movement So Still With Sound, which incorporates themes of traditional eastern movement, to translate the often subtle dimensional qualities of her music. She has studied the practice of Deep ListeningTM with Pauline Oliveros, Composer. Her repertoire includes a performance with Pauline Oliveros at Plan B Evolving Arts, in celebration of Deep Listening, and at the 1999 premier of the Big Sur Experimental Music Festival, hosted by the Henry Miller Library.


Andrew Deutsch

Andrew Deutsch (b.1968) is a sound, video and graphic artist who lives in Hornell, NY and teaches Sound & Video Art in the Division of Expanded Media at Alfred University. He received his BFA in Video Art and Printmaking from Alfred University in 1990 and his MFA in Integrated Electronic Art from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1994. He is a member of the Institute for Electronic Art at Alfred University and the Deep Listening Institute Board of Advisors and is a former member of the Deep Listening Institute Board of Directors (1999 - 2001). Since 1998 Deutsch has released over 14 CDRs of solo electronic music on his Magic If Recordings a label founded in part to keep in touch with the larger landscape of experimental music and to maintain consistent networking within that community by developing relationships with other composers through an exchange of works. Magic If is the primary vehicle for Deutsch¹s musical ideas with releases being developed and distributed in a very swift yet clearly considered manner. The pace at which the releases occur allows his work to inhabit contemporary culture in a way that is more productive and of lower cost than the traditional structures currently in place for the publication of sound works. Each Magic If edition showcases his experimental music and graphic art and is distributed exclusively in the United States by Anomalous Records. There have been 14 Magic If releases in since 1998 each being released in an edition of between 20 and 450 copies. In 1998 Deutsch formed Carrier Band with Peer Bode and Pauline Oliveros producing the recordings Carrier and Automatic Inscription of Speech Melody and has since collaborated with Pauline Oliveros on many other projects over the past 8 years. Deutsch is also a regular collaborator with Peer Bode and Jessie Shefrin on both sound and video projects and most recently Deutsch has collaborated with Stephen Vitiello and Tetsu Inoue on the CD Humming Bird Feed ver.02 and with Tetsu Inoue on the Cds Field Tracker and Object and Organic Code. In addition to these collaborations, his recording The First Line (Sounds for Drawing) a collaboration with Ann Hamilton, was recently exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the exhibition Bitsreams. This work and has also been exhibited in installation form at the Burchfield - Penny Art Center in Buffalo, New York, and at the Cornish School in Seattle,Washington. Further, an additional sixty minutes of The First Line are to be released soon by the Institute for Electronic Arts. Deutsch has released other CDs through Deep Listening Publications, Lucky Kitchen, Anomalous Records, Commune Disc (forthcoming), Elevator Bath (forthcoming) and JdK publications. Additionally, since 1994 Deutsch has produced over 26 recordings of experimental video many of which have been exhibited both nationally and internationally and he has participated regularly in the Artists Residency program at the Experimental Television Center in Owego New York. Approaching video from a position of experimentation, he has developed his own real time raster scan processing system based on a similar design by Nam June Paik. Deutsch used in this system in his 1996 recording Magnetic North, produced in part while he was a workshop instructor and facilities consultant at the Tariagsuk Video Center, Igloolik, Canada and in his collaborative piece Empty Words 4 with John Cage and Yvar Mikshoff which has been accepted into the limited archives of the John Cage Trust. His most recent video project Eye Piece, which incorporates hand rendered 16 mm film components, was exhibited at the 9th Biennial of the Moving Image, Center pour L'image, Contemporaine Saint - Gervais, Geneva. Deutsch is the recipient of an Artists Fellowship - in Video Art (1997) from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a Special Opportunity Stipend from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1999), and you can hear remixes of Deutsch¹s CD Garden Music on Oval¹s OvalProcess, and Microstoria¹s Improvisers.


Robert Dick

"In my life as a musician, which began with my first flute lesson in 1958, I have evolved a sort of "unified field" approach that embraces composing, improvising and concepts of the flute itself. The touchstone of this philosophy is that any musical vision I might have can be realized through the medium of the flute - and I have invented countless sounds in pursuit of this. = As a late 20th century creative artist who developed in the United States, it is not surprising that my music has many taproots: world musics, electric and electronic musics, natural sonic phenomena, other creative musicians. The ethos of transformation is in my bones. The creation of my pieces begins with emotional decisions, then sonic choices - and invention when necessary - are made. Musical architecture is developed and refined through improvisation and "sit -down" through-composition. = With the exception of A BLACK LAKE WITH A BLUE BOAT ON IT, all the music on this disc is acoustic. In the duo with Neil B. Rolnick, unification of the acoustic and electronic worlds is sought by using the flute as the sole sound source. Five samples and live processing are used along with the live flute and Ab piccolo."


Tom Dougherty

In Memory 






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David Dunn

Fusing the disciplines of bioacoustics, linguistics, chaos theory, deep ecology, computer technology and musical composition, Santa Fe resident David Dunn has spent the last fifteen years exploring the relationships between music, environmental sound and language. He brings to this endeavor a broad background: violinist (contemporary and early music), electronic designer (San Diego State University electronic music studio, Ars Electronics Exhibit), music theorist (assistant to Harry Partch), and composer.