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PAULINE OLIVEROS

Interviewed by Analog Tara at Mills College, Oakland, CA, November 2003.
Photo by Pieter Kers, 1999.

Over the last half-century, Pauline Oliveros has been one of the most influential figures in experimental music. She was a core member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, the first director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, a professor of music for 14 years at UC San Diego, and is now a distinguished professor at RPI and composer-in-residence at Mills College. As a composer and improviser, she has created definitive works on the Buchla and with her expanded instrument system, which combines the accordion with software processors in Max/MSP. She has also written extensively about music, consciousness, and humanitarian concerns. Her Deep Listening philosophy, a meditation practice, advocates expanding awareness and attentiveness by "listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing." I conducted this interview while I was a student in her Deep Listening seminar at Mills.

Q: How did you become fascinated with sounds?

A: I was always. I remember it always being very fascinating for me, from childhood. As far back as I can remember I was always listening to what was happening around me. I lived in a rich environment of sound. In the Texas wetlands, there were lots of insects - it was like a really thick canopy that changed through the seasons: tree frogs, cicadas, crickets, all these wonderful sounding critters. It wasn't quite as droney as the sound of the freeway that we've got here. In those days, mechanical sounds were more exceptional. Over time, it's been a project for technology to conquer nature. Although nature fights back, like with the earthquake last night, 5.7 on the Richter scale. You can measure it, but you don't necessarily know when it's gonna come, not yet!

Q: Over the years, you've worked with quite a range of tools for making and manipulating sounds. You've explored a lot.

A: Well, I'm just going with the flow, so to speak. I'm really fascinated with the microelectronics and the move toward what's called the singularity, meaning the hybridization of humans and computers. I have a friend who's alive on account of he's got an implant that kickstarts his heart, so if the heart stops, it kicks the heart back on. It's a computer that's inside his body; he has to get it changed once in awhile. But I was with him one day when he had a spell; he fell to the ground, screamed a little, and then his heart turned back on, and I realized that had he not had that device, that he wouldn't be alive. He's been alive ten more years than he would've been. That sort of turned my head toward listening to the kind of research that's going on all over the world for regeneration of paraplegics, or all kinds of very practical things that could help people a lot. There's always good use and bad use of tools. The current issue of Scientific American is about brains, and it also talks about the morality and ethics of brain enhancement, and who benefits from that. If you could have a pill that would enable you say to learn French overnight, would you like to take it or not?

Q: That's an interesting question; it would certainly change the process of learning, but then again, typing has affected our process of writing, for one example.

A: That's right, technology has already changed our process. The computer has changed our process; all of the technological advances have changed things. The stethoscope changed things; it was the beginning of the culture of listening in the medical profession that elevated the doctor as a specialist who listens to the human body and can make diagnoses from doing that, so the doctor would have special listening skills. Before that, they'd have to put their ear to the patient and if you think back to the different times it was considered something they wouldn't do, for instance, with women. And so the ability to distance themselves by having an instrument in between made a huge difference. But it also developed a kind of elitism in the profession. I passed a stethoscope around in Deep Listening class, so they could listen to their hearts; it's an interesting experience to do that, but people don't generally think of doing it.

There's a book that's been published recently called The Audible Past that's worth taking a look at - it's a history of recording. The first interest was in recording what sound looked like. There was an instrument called a phonautograph, made with a human ear, a tympanum connected to a mechanical graph, so when the sounds vibrated, it would write the sound. That was the interest, to make sound visible. Then there was the phonograph; the record was also a writing of sound, with the stylus used to make it audible. The whole history of recording and reproduction of sound is something that has a huge trajectory, and I've experienced that for 71 years now. I remember having a phonograph, a Victrola that you'd wind up. The thing about that, that was interesting to me, was that it wound down, so the sound would wind down. I used to like to listen to the sound winding down!

Q: When did you develop an interest in working with electronics?

A: I was always fooling around with the radio listening in between stations, with the shortwave whistles and pops and clicks. So I guess I was always interested, it was about gaining access to the tools so that you could play with them. In the '40s, I had a wire recorder, where you'd record sounds on a wire, and by 1953 I had a tape recorder, which was new on the market for consumers. And so as soon as I had the tape recorder, I started recording and listening; and eventually I had a tape recorder that had two speeds and you could record variable speed by hand-winding the tape. There weren't any synthesizers or anything like that, so it was a slow process of gaining access to equipment that would allow you to do things. The Tape Music Center, which later became the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills, got started in 1960 and had a collection of stuff. The Buchla synthesizer was invented and demonstrated in 1965 at the Tape Music Center in San Francisco, but I didn't work on it until the next year, when I was first director here in 1966-1967. It's a long history of how things change from analog to digital. I still work with a hybrid kind of thing. I'm using Max, I'm using the computer as a programming and processing environment, but I'm still playing the accordion, which is a 19th-century instrument. All the sound is derived from acoustics rather than from electronics, but using the system to process the sound. There's still plenty of places for me to go, even.

Q: Tell me about your expanded instrument system.

A: Let me explain what that means, expanded instrument system. I think about using all these delays as a time machine. Because when I play something in the present, then it's delayed, and comes back in the future. But when it comes back in the future, I'm dealing with the past, and also playing again in the present, anticipating the future. So that's expanding time. That's the idea there. It's not about just one delay, it's about a whole lot of them. I've got it up to the point now where I can actually use about 20 delays. If you're in a space, you're hearing delays all the time, different time scales. What I got interested in, long ago, was the coloration of sound that happens in a space. This happens because of delays, so I wanted to work with that. I started working on this in a piece called "The Bath" [1966], which was based on the distance between the record head and the playback head of an analog tape recorder. I was recording a dance piece, recording the sound of the dancers, and eventually opening up the delay that you could hear to change the shape of the room, the feeling of the room. I would play back what I would record, and play back much later what had been recorded into the whole piece, so that eventually it was a very complex texture but it was all made of sounds that they had already made and were making. So I've worked that idea over a long period of time into some fairly complex things.

The most recent version of this system uses Max/MSP as the interface. I have a program running which can improvise with me so when I play, whatever I play gets taken up, but then it's treated algorithmically, and I don't know what's gonna come back. So not only am I doing what I said with the expansion of time, but also the expansion of the material. It's transformed, and I have to be open to that as it comes back. The algorithms are based on my own ideas of what could happen to the material, but it's really unpredictable. I enjoy that situation of just listening and taking it in and responding. And the thing is, there's a half-second delay in the brain, so if you're going to do something, the brain knows before you know consciously, so there are evoked potentials already a half-second before you do things, but the brain remembers it as the present, which is a very interesting phenomenon. What it tells me is that the body knows what to do without the conscious mind intervening. Things get messed up when we think we have to control by our consciousness, or what we call consciousness.

Q: So the key is to tap into the root, before consciousness intervenes.

A: Yeah, and that's what I think is going on in this work that I've been doing all this time.

Q: The method and practice you've developed with Deep Listening.

A: Yeah, it has to do with understanding that, feeling that, trusting that you do know what to do. For example, I play with my feet. I have accelerator pedals that control the clock time of the delay so I can bend pitches and do transformations as I'm playing. And my feet know what to do, but if I tried to tell my feet what to do, it would be to late and I would lose the moment. It's almost as if thereÕs somebody else there doing this. I know my feet are moving and IÕm moving them, but they're moving - the feet are moving.

Q: What are your thoughts on women composers and the role of gender in musical expression?

A: Well, I've done a lot of work towards raising consciousness, and I have an article on my website called "Breaking the Silence". I talk a lot about these issues and I give nine points of how to change things. And you're doing some of it by doing this project, but I feel that change has to go across the boards. Everyone has to be involved in changing it, or else it doesn't get changed. It means that music has to be taught differently; it has to be inclusive. If children learn to play music, they have to learn to play music written by women as well as by men, so there isn't a separation. And if a performer is playing a program, they need to play music by women as well as by men. And if an audience goes to a concert and there's no music by women, they have to confront the management about it. It's all of that kind of stuff. But if that doesn't happen, the change is not going to take place. Especially in traditional, establishment music, people are educated to the music of the European masters, who are all men. As long as they're educated to that, that's what they're going to elevate. If there's no change at the root, at the very basic level, it's not going to change very quickly.

Q: It's interesting that there's been an effort to make that happen, for instance, in literature departments, to have more diversity represented on syllabi, but I don't know that the same is true in most music departments.

A: I guarantee you it is not. I've had to bang my head against the wall to raise consciousnes: you've gotta start programming music by women, and you've got to fill the library with music by women. But it's hard to get that to happen, because the canon is so entrenched in all the educational institutions, and in music teachers, who don't give it a thought.

Q: Recently I saw a photograph of you at the Tape Music Center in the '60s with some of your colleagues, and you were the only woman in a group of men. I can't help but feel that not much has changed, since the gender ratio in many of my graduate classes is not much different. I know you've been involved in an initiative to recruit more women graduate students in electronic music; tell me about this.

A: We did get more women, but we haven't gotten enough yet. It turns out that women are not so interested in composition; across a lot of different schools, I sent out a message to a lot of different schools that also said: that's the way it is here too. Annea Lockwood was teaching at Vassar, another women's college, and the women would sign up for harmony but they wouldn't sign up for composition. So why is this? One of the answers for me is that they don't see any future in it, for them, because what future do you see? You see all male programs, performances, you see all male faculties, music by men, you don't see any place for yourself. I was very determined that what I wanted to do was to compose music, so I just did it. [Mills is] different than it was when I was here in 1966, but it's not different enough. Men should be kind of tolerated in the graduate program as nice to have, but the majority should be women; the ratio should be reversed.

Q: I've done some workshops for women and girls different places around the country, teaching the basics of recording, and there never seems to be a shortage of interest, it's more that they haven't been encouraged to work with the tools.

A: They haven't been encouraged. They haven't been supported to do it. And that just continues, that boys are much more supported to do tech-y stuff than girls. And girls quickly learn to restrain themselves from being interested in things like that. So, it's a problem which I've grappled with and banged heads around trying to raise consciousness and try to change things, but it's not easy. Because you run up against the canon of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms. How can you not recognize this masterful music? (Laughs) Millions of people are educated to that. So there's a very strong force field. In the orchestra repertoire they play that stuff over and over again. So being a composer in this time is not easy, no matter what the gender. Because there's not a place for composers, really, to be nurtured and developed and to have the excitement of creative music being as interesting as traditional music. The art market is a big market and a lot of money is put into that; some artists can make a lot of money that way. But profit being the driver in the culture, when you come up with some nice weird something - juicy, especially new - but it doesn't sell, then you're not part of the game. These are big issues, and they're there. The main hope is that people need to be nourished spiritually so that there's the understanding that creative work is of the spirit. If you don't nourish that creative part of the human being then you get what you've got in Iraq right now, and Israel and Palestine. You have death and destruction instead of creative energy. The energy's gone amok.

Q: There are these perpetuating power structures as opposed to more equal opportunity.

A: All those things are embedded in what we've talked about. So you've got to just keep on keepin' on. Be subversive, very subversive.

More info at www.deeplistening.org.