Upcoming Events in Canada

UPCOMING EVENTS WITH PAULINE & IONE IN CANADA

ALL EVENT TIMES LISTED ARE PACIFIC STANDARD TIME

Saturday, November 22, 8 PM PST
CONCERT: Pauline Oliveros, solo accordion, electronics and voice
Grace Lutheran Church, 1273 Fort Street at Moss
Tickets $18 / $15 students/seniors/members. Presented by Open Space, Victoria British Columbia Canada. www.openspace.ca

Sunday, November 23, 1 - 4 PM
3hr Deep Listening Workshop
Open Space, 510 Fort Street, Victoria, British Columbia Canada
Tickets $15 / $12 Students, Seniors, Members. Presented by Open Space, Victoria British Columbia Canada.
www.openspace.ca

Monday, November 24, 1 PM
Pauline Oliveros Lecture at University of Victoria
Philip T Young Recital Hall
Victoria, British Columbia Canada
Free.
www.uvic.ca/

Thursday November 27, 1:30PM
Pauline Oliveros lecture at Simon Frasier University
Burnaby British Columbia Canada.
www.sfu.ca

Thursday, November 27, 7 PM.
Artist Talk with Pauline Oliveros.
Charles Scott Gallery, Emily Carr University
Vancouver, British Columbia Canada.
Presented by Western Front New Music Programme and Charles H. Scott Gallery.
website: chscott.ecuad.ca

Friday November 28, 8 pm
Stand Alone II - Concert with Pauline Oliveros and Ione.
FUSE @ Vancouver Art Gallery
750 Hornby Street
Vancouver British Columbia Canada.
ph: 604 662 4719.
Presented by Western Front New Music Programme, Vancouver Art Gallery (FUSE performance series, and WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution exhibition).
website: front.bc.ca

Saturday November 29, 10 am-12 pm
Deep Listening workshop with Pauline Oliveros.
Western Front, 303 East 8th Avenue
Vancouver, British Columbia.
$25 / $20 WF Members/Students
Space is Limited – Pre-Registration Required –
contact: Ben Wilson newmusicadmin@front.bc.ca
Presented by Western Front
website: front.bc.ca


Deep Listening Band Digital Download - By Donation

Deep Listening Band
Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, David Gamper

Celebrating

Deep Listening Band's 20th Anniversary
Then & Now Now & Then

Digital Download ~ By Donation
Support the Deep Listening Institute, Ltd.
Download an exclusive DLB track online - Trinity: Deep Exchange
when you make a donation of any amount to the Deep Listening Institute, Ltd.

Suggested minimum donation $10
For a list of all donor levels

The Deep Listening Band is a project of Deep Listening Institute.
Since 1985, Deep Listening Institute supports many projects that have contributed
to the arts, arts advocacy and community initiatives.
We need your support to help the projects of Deep Listening Institute continue.

For a list of 20th Anniversary events

Check out the Deep Listening Catalog for more DLB recordings and publications.

Through Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening I now know what harmony is. It's about the pleasure of making music. -- John Cage

Deep Listening Band worships in a cistern chapel (and) explores the mysterious spaces between notes, where all is sweet dissonance and beading microtones… -- Marc Weidenbaum - Pulse!

restorative -- Tim Page - NY Newsday


An Earful of Art - By Pauline Oliveros

As a musician, I am interested in the sensual nature of sound, its power of synchronization, coordination, release, and change. Hearing represents the primary sense organ—hearing happens involuntarily. Our ears are always receiving, whether or not we are aware of it. Listening is a voluntary process that occurs after the process of hearing takes place. Listening is delayed and comes after evoked potentials in the brain. We can choose to listen or not. Listening takes place in the audio cortex and develops throughout our lifetime through experience and training. It takes many listeners and consensus to produce musical culture. All cultures or communities develop and change through ways of listening.

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® is the experience of heightening awareness through full-bodied and complete attention. Deep Listening® connects to all that there is. As a composer I want to make my music through Deep Listening®.

I remind myself to listen so that I may be here now even though now has already gone.


Singers, dancers, generations: Breaking the city's boundaries

By JONATHAN M. STEIN

Perhaps the most inspiring and transfixing of a very solid array of 2008 Live Arts Festival/Philly Fringe performances was Urban Echo: Circle Told, the result of an unusual collaboration between Leah Stein and her dance company, Alan Harler directing 60 singers of his Mendelssohn Club, and the great experimental music composer and theorist of the last half-century, Pauline Oliveros.

The setting was the almost surreal classical interior expanse of the octagonal Rotunda building at 40th and Walnut, a 1911 design by Carrere and Hastings, which presented a unique venue for sonic and visual improvisation. This was the same space that Headlong Dance Theater used so imaginatively in its 2007 Festival work, "Explanatorium" to explore the extra-terrestrial and inexplicable.

Harler's marriage brokering of Stein in her early 40s (and no relation to this writer, although I've danced with her in other groups) and Oliveros, in her late 70s, was a brilliant bridging of two different generations of artists who share defining commitments to improvisation as well as a spiritual connection between their creative souls and their external environments. Stein and Oliveros would likely concur in director Peter Sellars’s observation that "Art is about re-energizing spirituality in a secular context." Thanks to Harler’s gutsy openness to experimentation, the Mendelssohn cohort of 60 classical singers were tossed into the hands of these consummate improvisers of sound and movement.


Review: Urban Echo-Leah Stein Dance Company and Pauline Oliveros composer

Sometimes, through chance and awareness, life presents us with a perfect experience that is completely individual and unplanned. Choreographer Leah Stein began with one such aesthetic experience of life, the simultaneous crescendo of sirens in the street and choral voices on the car radio, as the starting place for her grand collaboration with the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia for the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. Throughout Urban ECHO: Circle Told, we are reminded of this porous relationship between living life and appreciating art that has as much to do with the quality of attention that we bring to the spaces and people around us, as with any idea about what these places and people might represent.

Stein and composer Pauline Oliveros, demanded a large amount of concentrated awareness from the one hundred or so performers as they shared and shifted gestures and sounds across the large Rotunda Space.


If Only Briefly, in ‘68 We Raised the Bar

...Electronic music, both in the pop and classical fields, came overground in 1968, with albums like Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon, not to mention the band Silver Apples. The coming out party for minimalism was “Come Out” by Steve Reich, which first appeared on the Odyssey LP New Sounds in Electronic Music with “I of IV” by Pauline Oliveros and “Night Music” by ill-fated composer Richard Maxfield, who allegedly defenestrated himself during a bad acid trip the following year. These pieces are legally such separate entities in 2008 that the LP is unlikely to make a comeback on disc...


Now is the Time: Political Performance for the Art of Democracy

In conjunction with the exhibition, Art of Democracy: War and Empire, which is currently on view at the Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, I’ll be performing on Wednesday, September 17th, at 7:30 p.m., with The Cornelius Cardew Choir, as part of the Meridian Music series. The Cornelius Cardew Choir sings at the intersection of community and experimental music, strongly influenced by composer Cornelius Cardew and his circle in the 1960s, in England. Inspired by the experimental music tradition, and contemporary composers Pauline Oliveros, John Cage and others, the Cardew Choir intends their work to be compassionate, joyful and liberating political action.


Buffet of good, bad and weird

Urban Echo: Circle Told. This is inveterate space-invader Leah Stein's 2008 venue takeover. The choreographer takes on some mighty, if little known, buildings around the city to make her site-specific dance. Together with the Mendelssohn Club, she tackled the Girard College Chapel for their Carmina Burana two years ago. Teamed up again, as well as with composer/accordionist Pauline Oliveros, she created a stirring sound and movement-scape at West Philly's Rotunda.

Philadelphia audiences have known Oliveros' music since the 1980s, when she composed her landmark piece The Well for the Relâche Ensemble. In large group work, her style is to give the performers a cue and let them do what they will.

Though Stein used only seven dancers, Mendelssohn music director Alan Harler had his nearly 100 singers to help fill the large space. Milling around the center, sometimes like sleepwalkers, sometimes more purposefully, they eventually perched around the perimeter, vocalizing in rounds.


Community to remember music professor in song

Mills College and the Deep Listening Institute are sponsoring a concert in honor of Toyoji Tomita Sept. 10 in Lisser Theatre. Tomita taught trombone at Mills and graduated Mills with a Masters in electronic music in 1986.

"When you get such good musicians dedicated to doing something beautiful for someone they love, it should be very nice," Mills College concert coordinator Steed Cowart said.

The concert will begin with a tree planting at 7:30 p.m. outside of the music building. The Mills College didjeridu ensemble, which Tomita founded, will perform and a Japanese maple will be planted for him.

"It sort of represents the fine details," Mills graduate student Andy Strain said. "It's a smaller tree, but it's jam-packed with detail. He definitely had a lot of great details about him, a lot of style."

Tomita also owned T.P.T. Gardener, Inc., a sustainable company that planted trees for the city of Oakland. He collected data from the trees he planted, which were wirelessly connected to the Internet. The data was used to shape sound.

At 8 p.m. the concert will move to Lisser Theatre where the Deep Listening Institute will present Tomita's wife, Marianne Tomita McDonald, with the Golden Ear award in Tomita's honor. It is the second Golden Ear the Institute has ever given.

"He listened as a performer, as an improviser," said Pauline Oliveros, president of the Deep Listening Institute and a Mills visiting professor. "I think he was listening to the trees too."


Pauline Oliveros on uBu Web film

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 Q&A with ... Leah Stein, Choreographer of 'Urban ECHO: Circle Told'

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...


The power of deep listening

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.


The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival 2008

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 Restores Lost Early 20th Century Electronic Music

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...


aworks doesn't have much left to say tonight :: elgar etc.

By Robert Gable
The aworks playlist lately has added Pauline Oliveros, includes as always Sarah Cahill and can't stop listening to Carl Stone. Finally, I'm now listening to Ventilator Blues by the Rolling Stones from the album Exile on Main Street ...


The New Music Scene Comes to Me

By Kyle Gann

I have never had so many old friends converge in my home territory as this week for the New Albion festival at Bard - and it's only half over! The pic below is a poor-quality cell-phone photo (I'll bring my camera this next weekend), but it gives some idea of the festivities outside the Spiegeltent where everyone's performing. From left to right: pianist Joe Kubera, mystic poet Ione, composers Pauline Oliveros and Larry Polansky, pianist Sarah Cahill, and electronic sampling maven Carl Stone:


our ears are / now / in excellent condition

By Vance Maverick

On August 29, 1952, at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York, David Tudor gave the first performance of John Cage’s composition 4′33″ — consisting, notoriously, of nothing but silence. It remains Cage’s best-known piece: many more people have been provoked by it (take our own Dave Noon) than have ever attended a performance....

...The only performance of 4′33″ I’ve attended myself was in a Cage tribute concert at Mills College in Oakland, a year or two after his death in 1992. The concert was four hours thirty-three minutes long, a kind of continuous variety show, with many Bay Area avant-gardists (including Pauline Oliveros and Terry Riley) performing in groups. It began and ended with 4′33″ itself. The audience was warm, and well in tune with Cage (and one another), and the silences were rich. The first rendition felt a little long, but the second rang with all the sounds of the evening, and with the history of all the experimental music Cage inspired...


On the fringe

By SALLY FRIEDMAN
Burlington County Times

...Other works that are part of the festival include such offbeat offerings as “Urban Echo: Circle Told,” a production by the Leah Stein Dance Company and the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia.

“Urban Echo” is a world premiere featuring 100 singers and eight dancers in a continuum of movement and sound. It's to be performed within what has been called the “crumbling grandeur” of The Rotunda at 4014 Walnut St. in West Philadelphia, and includes an original score by Pauline Oliveros, who is known internationally for her music...


Dr. Chicago Returns

...the most significant film appearance by a composer is that of Alvin Lucier who, in addition to appearing as Prof. Alvin Lucier, a role based in part on himself, in Nam June Paik's A Tribute to John Cage, (1973, 29 min. Color) had a starring, title role in George Manupelli's trilogy of full-length Dr. Chicago films: DR. CHICAGO (1968 118 min. Black & White), RIDE DR. CHICAGO RIDE (1970 109 min. Black & White) and CRY DR. CHICAGO (1971 96 min. Color).

In the series, Lucier plays Dr. Alvin Chicago, an outlaw surgeon on the lam with a, shall we say, gift for seriously incorrect and punning wordplay, accompanied by his sidekicks Sheila Marie (Mary Ashley) and Steve (Steve Paxton), the latter of whom is mute and dies, dancingly, in each episode. It's hard to choose a favorite part of the trilogy, but for me it's either one of Dr. Chicago's monologues — reciting The Raven or the MLK, Jr. I Have a Dream speech, or the sequence in RIDE DR. CHICAGO RIDE in which the good doctor separates the counter-villain's (Pauline Oliveros) conjoined twin daughters (played by the multi-cultural musical virtuosi Betty and Shirley Wong)....


The Pragmatic American Composer

Saturday, August 23, 2008
By Daniel Wolf

"i put a cheap microphone in front of a cheap instrument and press record on a cheaper recording thing" — composer Dan Stearns, in response to a question about hard- and software

I've mentioned Stearns here before; he just might be the most honest Ivesian of us all.

*****

I've been reading, with great pleasure, the new David Bernstein-edited book The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960's Counterculture and the Avant-Garde. It's full of amazing little things, like this from Morton Subotnick, in a conversation describing the creation of the Buchla 100:

"We wanted to be able to control amplitude and frequency, etc. I used the Boulez, Le marteau san maitre [1953-55], first page as an example. I would imagine patching the Boulez and see something was missing and we would add another knob."

The book is also quite touching at times, for example in Pauline Olivero's appreciation of her teacher, Robert Erickson, and in Subotnick's tender memories of his, Darius Milhaud....


City Dance program notes

By Ron Blessinger, Artistic Director(Ron Blessinger, Artistic Director)
Pauline is the founder of the Deep Listening Institute, dedicated to promoting innovation among artists and audience in creating, performing, recording and educating with a global perspective. "Listening to this space I sound the space. ...


Possibility of Action: the Life of the Score at MACBA

The authors represented in this sample are Robert Ashley, Yasunao Tone, Pauline Oliveros, Lee Ranaldo, Eugènia Balcells, Peter Bosch and Simone Simons, ...


News from DLI - Upcoming Events - Call for Volunteers & Dreamers!! Week of Sept 8

NEWS FROM DEEP LISTENING INSTITUTE

CALL FOR NYC VOLUNTEERS!!

We need assistance with our events on Thursday, September 18.

Volunteer to take admission at the door
Load In/Load Out

We just need about 2-3 volunteers for these simple tasks
AND you get to see the concert for FREE!!

DEEP LISTENING WORKSHOP with Sarah Weaver
Thursday, September 18 at 3 pm
Emily Harvey Foundation
537 Broadway (at Spring Street), NYC
Admission $25/$30 with concert admission
For directions: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=1066048487142245

An Innocent (Re-Ducks)
Thursday, September 18 at 8 pm
Concert with Al Margolis, prerecorded tracks and live sounds
Lisa Barnard, voice
Monique Buzzarte, trombone
Tom Hamilton, synthesizer
Jacqueline Martelle, flute
Emily Harvey Foundation
537 Broadway (at Spring Street), NYC
Admission $15 Adults/$10 Students & Seniors
For directions: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=1066048487142245

WEST COAST EVENTS
September 19 at 8 pm PST
Concert with
Pauline Oliveros
Ian Power
Jesse Olsen
Tom Djll
Music for People and Thingamajigs
21 Grand Gallery and Performance Space
416 25th St at Broadway
Oakland, CA
$15 General $10 Students/Seniors $25 Festival Pass
Reservations: (510) 444-1322 or reserve@thingamajigs.org
www.thingamajigs.org

September 20-21
Pauline Oliveros Workshop
California Institute of Integral Studies
San Francisco, CA
www.ciis.edu/publicprograms

DEEP LISTENING TRAINING PROGRAM
Many of you expressed interest in registering for the Deep Listening Certificate Program. The application is now available online:
http://www.deeplistening.org/site/certificate

We would be delighted to receive your application for the Certificate Program. Please let me know if you have any questions.

19th Annual Deep Listening Retreat at Rose Mountain
Las Vegas, New Mexico
Dates TBA

IONE’S 13TH ANNUAL DREAM FESTIVAL
OCTOBER 1-31, 2008

CALL FOR DREAM BOXES!!

EVERYONE (especially kids) IS INVITED TO CREATE A DREAM BOX. IF YOU'RE INTERESTED, PLEASE CREATE!!

THERE ARE ONLY TWO REQUIREMENTS, EVERYTHING ELSE IS UP TO YOU: MAKE SURE YOUR DREAM BOX HAS A SLOT TO INSERT DREAMS IN TO AND A WAY TO TAKE THE DREAMS OUT.

WHAT ARE DREAM BOXES?
Traditionally Dream Boxes- fanciful containers that are receptacles for dreams-are placed at Dream Depots (café’s, galleries, and other public locations throughout the city.) The boxes are created by dreamers of all ages from pre-schoolers to High School students to mature artists. Dreamers are encouraged to contribute a dream to the boxes. These can be contributed anonymously or with a special Dream Name depending on the dreamer’s wishes. Prior to the Dream Marathon, the Dream boxes are brought to the Deep Listening Institute where the dreams are handled gently. Some are picked at random and read or performed during the month’s events. Eventually the dreams are posted on Ione’s Website.

If you have questions, would like to become a Dream Depot or
want to drop a box off, please call Lisa at 845-338-5984


Pauline Oliveros article in Music Quarterly

The Gendered Construction of the Musical Self: The Music of Pauline Oliveros
Taylor Musical Quarterly.1993; 77: 385-396


Write Soon and Tell All

Out now through DECOMPOSITION:
Interrobang?! Anthology on Music and Family
published July 31, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9818706-6-3
ISSN: 1943-3751
76 pages, 6"x9"
perfect bound, color cover
www.banginterro.com

Interrobang?! Anthology on Music and Family captures late 20th century culture, history and relationships as it weaves interviews, stories, poems, essays and memoirs. Featured participants offer their personal and critical perspectives on the theme of music and family in this engrossing book.

Contributors: Liz Alibi, Erika Anderson, Bill Berkson, Sharon Cheslow, Cynthia Connolly, Shaila Dewan, Alan Licht, Ian MacKaye, Kevin Mattson, Pauline Oliveros, Anna Oxygen, Janet Sarbanes, Jean Smith, Matthew Wascovich, Sara Wintz.

press/wholesale inquiries: decomposition@mindspring.com


Pauline Oliveros on Kenny G- July 30, 2008

Join Kenny G as he welcomes the 76-year-old experimental music legend Pauline Oliveros back to Intelligent Design, today (July 30th) from Noon - 3pm. Pauline will be sharing the pop music of her youth with us which directly influenced her later experiments.

We'll be listening to everything from Spike Jones and the Harmonicats to Les Paul & Mary Ford, as well as some recent compositions and improvisations from her.

You can listen to an mp3 archive of the show....


BOOK REVIEW: 'The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde' edited by David W. Bernstein

By Colin Fleming
July 27, 2008
The San Francisco

Tape Music Center

1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde

Edited by David W. Bernstein

University of California Press/Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: 336 pp., $65

THERE was a time when the zeitgeist used to get bashed about pretty thoroughly by classical music. New operas, ballets and symphonies would actually alter the cultural climate, chasing away old modes of thought and introducing new realities -- as in 1913, when Igor Stravinsky dropped his "Rite of Spring" on an ill-prepared Parisian public, or in 1952, when David Tudor sat down and closed his keyboard lid for the first live performance of John Cage's "4' 33"." And then there was a moment like the one we encounter in the middle of "The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde": the November 1964 world premiere of Terry Riley's "In C," when a new type of avant-garde association challenged the modes of classical music itself.


Pauline Oliveros - Electronic Works & Alien Bog/Beautiful Soop

The Electronic Works CD contains three more pieces from the same time period as Alien Bog / Beautiful Soop, the 1960s. “I of IV” (1966) was originally released on the New Sounds In Electronic Music LP, which also featured Richard Maxfield’s “Night Music” and Steve Reich’s infamous “Come Out.” It’s a heavy 25-minute dreamville of electric nightmare bleeps, buzzes and pulsations made at the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio. “It’s a real-time studio performance composition with no editing or tape-splicing, utilizing the techniques of amplifying combination tones and tape repetition. The combination tone technique was one that I developed at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. The equipment consisted of 12 sine tone square wave generators connected to an organ keyboard, two line amplifiers, mixer, Hammond spring-type reverb and two stereo tape recorders.”....


New Albion at Bard

Bard SummerScape is presenting the New Albion Festival, a celebration of the 25th anniversary of Foster Reed’s record label known as the “voice of West Coast new music,” at the Spiegeltent from this Friday until Sunday, August 10.

The New Albion story is a great one, told well here by Alex Ross and here by Steve Smith.

The nine programs feature works by John Adams, John Cage, Henry Cowell, The Deep Listening Band, Paul Dresher, Morton Feldman, Ellen Fullman, Kyle Gann, Ge Gan-ru, Peter Garland, Erik Griswold, Lou Harrison, Erdem Helvacioglu, Daniel Lentz, Ingram Marshall, Jeffrey Roden, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Somei Satoh, Stefano Scodanibbio, Stephen Scott, Carl Stone, Richard Teitelbaum, Stephen Vitiello, Miguel Frasconi, Virgil Thomson, Slow Six, and Evan Ziporyn.


Electronic Art Exhibit Tackles Disability

Disabilities are often a topic that makes people uncomfortable, and there are many social prejudices that still exist for people with them.

The exhibit ``thisAbility vs. Disability'' at the Total Museum of Contemporary Art tackles the topic of disability in society through 10 interactive electronic art works by Korean and foreign artists.

Curator Jeon Byeong-sam wanted to tackle the ``themes of human capability through creative transition of the senses.''

``Just as all people have distinct figures, appearances and characteristics, which we may call `disability' is only a difference, not a defect. This exhibition presents artworks that invite a reappraisal of disability. … I hope that the exhibition `thisAbility vs. Disability' helps roll back outdated notions of disability in society, that we may embrace our diversity and understand each other through the heart,'' Jeon said.

Visitors can try the interactive electronic artworks, such as bells that ring in time to your heartbeat and a digital musical instrument that can be played with facial gestures......

....``Adaptive Use Musical Instruments'' is a work by Pauline Oliveros, Leaf Miller, Zevin Polzin and Zane Van Dusen. The project uses motion-tracking software that allows one to create music through facial gestures or small movements in front of a camera.

``Visitors enjoy creative alterations of auditory, visual and tactile sensations that may cause them to question themselves; in the process, they may also re-examine bases of their social judgments. These artworks can spark revelations that break social prejudice and affirm difference,'' Jeon said.


Sonic Youth - SYR7 & SYR8

By Spencer Owen
... Christian Marclay, William Winant, Christian Wolff and soon-to-be-member Jim O'Rourke — as well as having the most inspiring concept, being comprised of their unconventional readings of compositions by John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, ...


Adaptive Use Project included in International Electronic Art Exhibition: thisAbility vs. Disability, Seoul Korea

Looking at Disability through Creative Senses

thisAbility vs. Disability is an international electronic art exhibition looking upon themes of disability through creative transition of the senses. You can experience and enjoy ten fascinating interactive electronic artworks, including: a painting seen through your hand by the touch of the wind, a digital musical instrument played by facial gestures, a robot responding to your voice, a table transmitting your hand's touch into light, a block transforming Braille into sound, a harmonic bell playing according to your heartbeat, and so on. We are very pleased to invite you to experience this unique electronic art show.

Invited Artists:
Mika Fukumori; Haru Ji & Graham Wakefield; Jae Min Lee; Mian Sheng Lim (Leon); Haemin Kim; Kichul Kim; Pauline Oliveros, Leaf Miller, Zevin Polzin, & Zane Van Dusen; David Parker; Jin Wan Park; Dmitry Strakovsky

Curator: Byeong Sam Jeon


Silver Apples of the Meem

...And, in fact, [Herb Blau] made the first season so uncompromisingly difficult from a social standpoint that he was fired after the first year.

BERNSTEIN: Oh, I didn't know that.

SUBOTNICK: We started with Danton's Death, which is almost impossible to do anyway.

A couple months ago, I was tagged by both Devin Hurd at HurdAudio and Peter Matthews at Feast of Music for the book meme that's been floating around for some time. In essence, pick up a book close at hand, open to page 123, find the fifth sentence, and post the subsequent three sentences. Appropriately enough, given the proclivities of the two gentlemen who tagged me, the book sitting at the top of the pile right now is The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde, edited by David W. Bernstein. (If you're unfamiliar with the history of the SF Tape Music Center, click here for a PDF of the Cliffs Notes version.)

The book release event two weeks ago couldn't have been more fitting. It was held in the basement of a public library a block off of Haight. I showed up about a half hour early, and nearly all the seats were already filled....


Professor Bernstein will lecture on his new book on the San Francisco Tape Music Center

Professor David Bernstein's new book on the composers who founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 60's, is now available here. It features interviews with Terry Riley, Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros, as well as essays by Tony Martin, William Maginnis, among others.....


Meditations in Quiet Harmony

Composer Pauline Oliveros, a pioneer of 'art music improvisation' who is in Ireland for the Quiet Music Festival in Cork, talks to Michael Dervan

PAULINE OLIVEROS IS a quiet Texan. She turned 76 at the end of May, and presents herself with a calm directness which suggest the satisfactions of a life fully lived.

Meeting her face-to-face in Cork on the day of her first visit to Ireland - on a reconnaissance mission in advance of her first Irish Deep Listening Retreat, as part of the Quiet MMusic Festival - she reminded me in many ways of that controversial giant of the 20th century avant-garde, John Cage. Cage, too, was a calm and quiet person. And the two have something in common in the quality of awareness they project. It seems to stem from a different attitude to listening, a monitoring alertness that sieves through the ambient noise surrounding talk, to make sure nothing of possible interest passes by unnoticed...


Pauline Oliveros/Miya Masaoka: Koto Accordion Review

By Erik Lawrence

Music responds to nature, music imitates nature; music pays tribute or defies nature, recreates it, ravages it, caresses its leaves. These two artists performed together during their tenures at Bard College, and Kingston’s Deep Listening Institute supported them in crystallizing these ideas. But before Miya Masaoka could perform the music that appears on this disc, she had to take time to give birth to a child. As a response artist myself, I can feel and hear the process of that growth and birth in this music.....


'Fluctuations' featured on KPFA

Discreet Music Sunday, June 1, 2008 feature of Ellen Fullman and Monique Buzzarte's latest Deep Listening release "Fluctuations" with an interview with Ellen Fullman....


New Sounds in Electronic Music review, June 8, 2008

Odyssey, 1967; out of print

3 tracks, 42:27

This early electronic compilation is mostly famous due to the presence of Steve Reich's "Come Out". That track was reviewed elsewhere on this blog, so I will attempt to describe the other two tracks. Richard Maxfield (1927-1969) was a visionary composer and artist who made the best out of pre-synthesizer electronics. His "Night Music" is only featured here (for now, anyway), and is a classic little piece of primitive squeals, bleeps, and whirs. The sounds gradually take on new and strange shapes, maintaining interest throughout. Pauline Oliveros' "I Of IV" sounds considerably less primitive...


The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde

The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde
by John Rockwell (Foreword), David W. Bernstein (Editor),
Johannes Goebel (Preface)

This book tells the story of the influential group of creative artists--Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, William Maginnis, and Tony Martin--who connected music to technology during a legendary era in California's cultural history. An integral part of the robust San Francisco "scene," the San Francisco Tape Music Center developed new art forms through collaborations with Terry Riley, Steve Reich, David Tudor, Ken Dewey, Lee Breuer, the San Francisco Actor's Workshop, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Ann Halprin Dancers' Workshop, Canyon Cinema, and others. Told through vivid personal accounts, interviews, and retrospective essays by leading scholars and artists, this work, capturing the heady experimental milieu of the sixties, is the first comprehensive history of the San Francisco Tape Music Center....


Avatar Orchestra Metaverse Performs June 20

Avatar Orchestra Metaverse
Concert in Second Life

Friday, June 20, 2008, 8 AM SLT / 11 AM EDT / 1700 CET

Location: Second Life at U21Global
http://slurl.com/secondlife/U21Global%20Campus/5/207/21

AOM's June 20 Second Life concert will include the second AOM performance of the beautiful work Heart of Tones (virtual reality version) by iconic American composer Pauline Oliveros (aka Free Noyes), the award-winning composition Rue Blanche by Swedish sound artist Bjorn Eriksson (aka Miulew Takahe), the dance-able Wee No Kresh by AOM instrument builder and German sound designer Andreas Mueller (aka Bingo Onomatopoeia), and PwrHm, a work by Canadian composer Tina Pearson (aka Humming Pera) with visuals by media artist Sachiko Hayachi (aka Goodwind Seiling) that was premiered by AOM at a mixed reality concert in New York City.


Larkin Announces Grants For Local Arts Programs

Senator Bill Larkin (R-C, Cornwall-on-Hudson) today announced that several area arts programs have been approved for state funding.

The Arts Society of Kingston, located at 97 Broadway, has been awarded $26,000 for information services and workshops.

Deep Listening Institute Ltd. on Cornell Street in Kingston has received $16,800 toward its music programs.


Book Release Party - "The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde"

This book tells the story of the influential group of creative artists—Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, William Maginnis, and Tony Martin—who connected music to technology during a legendary era in California's cultural history. An integral part of the robust San Francisco "scene," the San Francisco Tape Music Center developed new art forms through collaborations with Terry Riley, Steve Reich, David Tudor, Ken Dewey, Lee Breuer, the San Francisco Actor's Workshop, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Ann Halprin Dancers' Workshop, Canyon Cinema, and others. Told through vivid personal accounts, interviews, and retrospective essays by leading scholars and artists, this work, capturing the heady experimental milieu of the sixties, is the first comprehensive history of the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

at the Park Branch of the San Francisco Public Library,
1833 Page St., Wednesday, June 25, 7 PM - Free Admission.


Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster & Panaiotis - Deep Listening

By tom(longwayfromhome)

On this project, released by the progressive San Francisco label New Albion, accordionist Pauline Oliveros has teamed up with trombonist Stuart Dempster and vocalist Panaiotis to produce a remarkable album of atmospheric space music. ...


Laptop orchestras bridge the distance

A couple of dozen Stanford music students lie flat on their stomachs or kneel on cushions in a campus rehearsal space, eyes fixed on laptop computer screens.

The room fills with what sounds like a humming chorus of tuned water-bowls; actually, it's the computer-generated equivalent. Conductor Ge Wang, gesturing, seems to push the pulsing chorus from one side of the orchestra to the other, as the musicians stroke the keys of their MacBooks.

On Tuesday, they will perform - in real time, via the Internet, in front of a live audience at Stanford's Dinkelspiel Auditorium - with musicians from Beijing University, 6,000 miles distant. With the aid of giant video screens, both groups will hear, watch and play along with each other.


AL MARGOLIS / IF, BWANA - An innocent, abroad

Idiosyncratic as hell, Al Margolis’ music must have told something strange to the mind of some director at WDR Köln Radio, commissioners of the American composer in 2006. Upon hearing the material, the liners explain, they stated that it sounded too “new music-y”, deciding against broadcasting it. Did these people really believe that If, Bwana would supply them with a neo-classic score? As Mr. Wilson said, god only knows. The CD features two compositions, both based on Lisa Barnard’s utterances.


Pauline Oliveros Performs in NYC

So, Yoko and I took a trip the mid-January to NYC to see my professor Pauline Oliveros and Miya Masaoka perform.
I was delighted to see an old troy friend Susane Thorpe there.
It was a great performance and it was such a joy to see Pauline again after what seems like so long now.


The Adaptive Use Instruments Project

Recently I bumped into composer and performer Pauline Oliveros (PO) in San Diego. We got to talking about one of her current projects, the Adaptive Use Musical Instruments for the Physically Challenged. This project introduces software designed to be used in therapy sessions to give children with limited motor skills the opportunity to participate in music, and offer them an outlet for musical expression. I arranged for a follow-up interview by email so that we could learn more about what this project involves. Joining us is Zevin Polzin (ZP), the technical lead in the project.


Severely-disabled Students Making Music with Specialized Programs

POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. - Using subtle motions of her head and a newly developed computer program, 16-year-old Annemarie grinned with the realization that she was making music. The teenager is a student at the REHAB school in Poughkeepsie. Severely physically disabled, Annemarie can't walk or speak and has little control over the movements of her head and arms.


A Magical Keyboard

Oct. 15, 2007 issue - A college student's experimental keyboard may help unlock the musical ability trapped inside individuals lacking the physical mobility to play traditional instruments. The keyboard was created by a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute senior, Zane Van Dusen, to be easy to use and inexpensive to set up.


The Spirit of the '60s in the Internet Age

Greg Sandow
Wall Street Journal

Long ago, back in the early 1980s, I used to write about the outer edge of classical music -- events, often staged in lofts, in which music could be rapt and meditative, and was often improvised.

Sometimes it was dedicated to some higher cause, and one of the best composers doing that was Pauline Oliveros, who'd often ask her audience to sing, with magical results. You'd find yourself not just listening, but helping to create rich tapestries of sound, and you'd feel that you belonged to a wonderful community in which everybody felt a deep and soulful sense of peace.


Worldwide Collaborators, Both Listening and Playing

Many people are often uncertain which verb to apply to their experience of attending a concert. “I saw a concert,” one says, then catches himself: “No, I heard it.”

For the 75-year-old composer Pauline Oliveros, the best choice would be the more active “I listened to it.” The distinction between listening and mere passive hearing has been a focus of her activities for decades; in 1985 she founded something called the Deep Listening Institute.


Pauline Oliveros, Ione, Phil Dadson at the Herald Theatre

New Zealand Herald
5:00AM Monday July 09, 2007
By William Dart

Alt. Music 2007 was launched by the equivalent of what might have been described 30 years ago as a supergroup.

Composer and accordionist supremo Pauline Oliveros was centrestage in the Herald Theatre, flanked by American word-artist Ione and our own man-of-many-instruments Phil Dadson.