Roulette TV - Pauline Oliveros (2000)
Pauline Oliveros is internationally renown for her innovative electronic music, meditative accordion solos, and visionary, breakthrough works that create new relationships among performers by means of attentional, consciousness-raising, group improvisation strategies (many of which are collected in her 1984 book "Software for People"). In this videotape, she offers "Pauline's Solo", a contemplative 20-minute accordion improvisation built of ethereal sustained harmonies and fleeting melodic gestures, like spontaneous thoughts suddenly flashing across quiescent synaptic networks. In an inspiring and instructive interview.

Found through Jim Barrett's blog Soul Sphincter
http://soulsphincter.blogspot.com/

Inquirer: What was the biggest difficulty you had to resolve to get your festival piece from idea to performance?

Leah Stein: Urban ECHO: Circle Told includes 70 performers. By far, the biggest difficulty has been getting everyone in the same space at the same time for rehearsal.

Q: Do you expect your work to have legs - is there life after LA/Fringe, or is most of what is created for the festival destined to be seen only on the Fringe circuit?

A: Urban ECHO is the first of a two-part collaboration and commissioning project between Leah Stein Dance Company and Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, directed by Alan Harler. For Part 1, Urban ECHO, LSDC and MC commissioned composer Pauline Oliveros to facilitate the score. This work is the precursor for a second project including the same performers with a different composer.

Both works feature the intersection between movement and sound where the singers are moving in space with the dancers and the dancers "sing" or sound with the singers. For Part 2, composer David Lang has been commissioned to write a score in this same vein - with singers moving and dancers sounding. While there are no plans for Urban ECHO to be performed again, the process of working with Pauline Oliveros' "tuning scores" has been enormously instructive, rewarding and will create a strong foundation toward the upcoming collaboration in 2009...

Fortunately life is a great leveller and the school of hard knocks helps to control the ego together with other practices such as meditation, service and, of course, deep listening.

The amazing thing about surrendering the self to listening is that it creates a crucible in which you are changed and can be changed. But rather than reading what I have to say, listen deeply to what Pauline Oliveros says about the subject.

A composer, humanitarian and pioneer in the field of sound, Oliveros says that listening can be quantum:

“Deep listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature or one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep listening represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is. As a composer I make my music through deep listening.

“Deep listening is active. What is heard is changed by listening and changes the listener. I call this the ‘listening effect’ or how we process what we hear. Two modes of listening are available — focal and global. When both modes are utilised and balanced there is connection with all that there is. Focal listening garners detail from any sound and global listening brings expansion through the whole field of sound.

“Listening shapes culture locally and universally. Listening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning, interpreting and deciding on action. Quantum listening is listening to more than one reality simultaneously. Listening for the least differences possible to perceive — perception at the edge of the new. Jumping like an atom out of orbit to a new orbit — creating a new orbit — as an atom occupies both spaces at once, one listens in both places at once. Mothers do this. One focuses to a point and changes that point by listening.

Electronic music might not be for everyone, but for those of us who dig it, this is the place to be. This year's festival unfolds over five nights of performance with a lineup that includes a wide array of electronic music pioneers (like Pauline Oliveros), modern innovators, and emerging artists. The music ranges in styles and methods including contemporary chamber music, glitch, industrial sounds, music concrete, sound design, drone music and more.

The Avant Garde Project is restoring old recordings of early electronic music, most of which are long out of print. Their collection includes compositions by some pretty famous composers ... or at least composers that you've read about in history books, even if you've never heard them. Reading down the list of composers, I see John Cage, Milton Babbitt, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Paul Hindemith and many others...