Music with roots in the aether: Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros
By Carlos A. Inada / From São Paulo
Pauline Oliveros is an American accordionist and composer, and a central figure in the development of post-war electronic art music. In a text on John Cage, Oliveros and Eastern and Western philosophy in music, Tracy McMullen highlights Oliveros’s importance:

Oliveros’s work has often been overlooked by music historians, most pointedly after her turn to the body and improvisation. Her focus on embodiment, improvisation, and the dismantling of the mind/body dualism troubles the primacy of the individual and the universal over the contingent. As such, her work has been marginalized in discourses with a stake in maintaining a Western enlightenment view that demands a split between self and other, a split that improvisation calls into question.
[…] In my view, the most radical elements of Cage’s and Oliveros’s work involve their questioning of the artistic self or “ego” and can be traced to the influence of non-Western philosophies such as Buddhism.

In the interview below with composer Robert Ashley, for his program Music with Roots in the Aether (1975), Oliveros discusses her work and her view of listening:

I have been working on my consciousness, and the result is the music. I have a task to do, I have to give up my intentions as far as the sound is concerned. If intention arises, I have to wait until I have no intentions. Then the sound changes from there. It becomes involuntary. […]
I realized I wasn’t listening very much. So I gave myself the task of listening to everything all the time, from that point. And reminding myself when I wasn’t listening, I became more and more aware of not listening. Then I began to listen more inwardly as well as outwardly.

Landscape with Pauline Oliveros, from Music with Roots in the Aether (1975). Video via UbuWeb

“Bye Bye Butterfly” (1965), by Pauline Oliveros. An accomplished accordionist, Oliveros was also fascinated in her childhood “by the whistling noise found when searching for radio stations”. This excerpt “demonstrates her mastery of sonic texture ― impressively fluttering between a ‘found sound’ opera piece and a quivering electrical hum.” The video is adapted from a 1920 documentary called Heavenly.

Pauline Oliveros interprets “The Fool’s Circle”

http://blog.dharma.art.br/post/4972598525/music-with-roots-in-the-aether-pauline-oliveros