Pauline Oliveros ranks among the most innovative composers of the last 40 years. Her creative exploration of improvisation and acoustic properties, along with her theatrical pieces and studies of meditation, have influenced an entire generation of musicians, and not just those within the academic/art music world with which she is usually associated. Her work with interfering waves and reverberant spaces exploits physical properties that most musicians and recordists seek help avoiding. She remains active today — running the Pauline Oliveros Foundation and Deep Listening record label, performing and recording new compositions and releasing her unheard earlier works.
"I'm a radio kid, listening to phonographs in my childhood. I was fascinated with the sound that came from the radio — not the programs, but the static and whistles. It fascinated me. We had a Victrola, which you had to wind up to play the records. My interest was in when the Victrola started winding down. I was already into processing and variable speeds. I also was interested in the background noises of the shellac records. I always had a way of listening to the sound where you were not supposed to be listening. I liked all the artifacts, and those artifacts became my material."
Oliveros moved to San Francisco in 1952 and in 1954 began studying with composer and music writer Robert Erickson. "I had a lot of friends, we went to school together — Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick, Steve Reich, La Monte Young — we were all there. We were aware of all the new developments in the studios in Europe. We were in touch through the radio — the most influential source of information was KPFA in Berkeley." She helped found the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1959. At the concerts they organized, "it was still a thing to play tape music. We would include our work and the work of others," like James Tenney, Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, and Henri Pousseur.
"I made my own way of making electronic music in the late-'50s, early-'60s, using test equipment — oscillators and patchbays and tape recorders. While everybody else was cutting and splicing materials, I was finding a way to improvise with the electronics. That improvisation system was using difference tones between oscillators. Setting oscillators above the range of hearing and using the difference tones between the oscillators in a tape delay system caused a lot of beat frequencies with the bias of the tape recorder. That's how I made my early electronic music, like I of IV, Bye Bye Butterfly. I made many more that just now have recently been released," including the 2001 CD reissue no mo on Pogus. "These were in the studio in real time, not in front of the public." Later, Oliveros "began to do live performance things using tape delay." In 1969, she published an essay entitled "Tape Delay Techniques for Electronic Music Composition."
"I used large tape recorders with big reels. I'd take the supply reel and run it through the deck and over to another machine, several feet away. Sometimes I think I even ran it through three machines. They would all record, and feed the resulting sound back to the first machine, and the second machine." She did not use loops, "just the tape running for the time it had, with 7 1/2 ips it would be a half- hour. Fifteen ips would be 15 minutes."
While she initially worked with surplus Hewlett Packard oscillators, she gradually began using Donald Buchla's newly developed synthesizer. "The Buchla Box was developed at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, on the advice of Mort Subotnick and Ramon Sender. I didn't really like it at first, because I didn't think the sound quality was as interesting as the quality I got from the HP oscillators. They were tube oscillators, and the sound of tubes was different from transistors." She did not use the synthesizer's filters. "I got all of my sounds from the modulation of the interference. I learned how to make sounds out of standing waves that became new waves. There are sum and difference tones. The sum tones were above the range of hearing, but the difference tones, the difference between the frequencies that are sounding at the same time, are in the range of hearing."
"I had the oscillators set around 30 k, and then I would move the sound. The oscillators have dials. I would use the dial as my performance interface, but the movements had to be very slow. Once you were working with difference tones, if you moved the dial, you could sweep the whole audio range in an instant. I was working very carefully with those dials to create the sounds that I wanted to hear. It was an improvisation in a very unstable environment. The sounds would be delayed and played back, and I would already be playing with what came back. The difference tones that I was getting from the oscillators would also mix up with the bias of the tape recorder itself. I would never know what I was going to get. You're part of the interface and you have to respond instantaneously to what is being heard."
As Oliveros' pieces grew more theatric in the late '60s, they de-emphasized the purely sonic and acoustic properties of her earlier work. By 1974, with Sonic Meditations, Oliveros began to focus on the introspective and meditative nature of music and hearing. The piece explores the difference between hearing and listening.
Sonic Meditations includes directions on how to listen. "I think about listening with my feet. Hearing is involuntary. The ear is collecting the waveform that is coming in, which is a complex waveform. It consists of millions of parts. Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions. If you're listening with your feet, you're taking in through the sole of the feet what you're experiencing. There are sensations that are there. Listening means listening to sense data."
She began her work in large resonant spaces in 1984 by performing in a cistern in Cologne, Germany. This recording appears on both a German release called Vor der Flut and the Hat Hut album The Well and the Gentle. In 1988, she recorded a piece "in a large cistern in Washington state, Fort Worden Cistern. The reverberation time was 45 seconds, so it was a very amazing experience, sort of like looking at a hall of mirrors, with sound coming back from all directions. The only thing I knew in advance was this was a reverberant space. We went into the cistern and started playing. There were four microphones, two for the players and two for the walls. They were a few feet from the walls, and they were aimed directly at the walls. The sound traveled around, because it was an oval space. You hear it moving around." Al Swanson recorded this performance, which is on CD as Deep Listening (New Albion), and Bob Bielecki recorded a similar performance in Tarpaper Cave, in Rosendale, NY, for 1990's Troglodyte's Delight (?What Next?). "I'm always interested in the space the sounds occur in. The space is as much a part of the sound as the vibration that causes the sound, that causes us to experience sound. You cannot separate sound from space."
To create related effects in more conventional spaces, Oliveros employs an electronic system that she has developed called the Expanded Instrument System, or EIS (pronounced "ice"). "The Expanded Instrument System is really an elaboration of my old tape delay systems from the '60s. I knew that it had incredible potential as computers became involved — you could work with more delays." It initially involved outboard Lexicon delays, but now runs as computer software. "I have a new MAX patch which allows me to perform with my accordion." She's been using MAX for ten years, and this patch "is something I've been wanting for a long time. I had a piece that was done in Brussels in March. It used the EIS and 13 instruments. The instrumentalists didn't control the patch, but it was scored for them. When they played, their sounds were taken into the buffers and processed by the computers, the EIS. This piece was called Sound Geometries. There were ten different geometric patterns, which would take a sound and travel it around a 7.1 system. The sound could describe a circle, or it could be a triangle or a square, ten different patterns. Of the properties of the pattern, there was the speed of the pattern, how fast it would go. There was the radius, whether it was describing a small, four- meter pattern or a 200-meter pattern. These properties were composed. If the violin player played a solo that solo could come back up to a minute later in orbit through the space. It could come back in the form that it was delivered, or it could come back modified, spatialized. You have this 13-piece chamber orchestra, and the sound is moving from the location of the players out into space, into the geometric pattern. That's why it's called Sound Geometries. The end of it was improvisations, not only on the part of the players but also on the part of the patch. The patch through algorithms selected what patterns and what modulations and what time delays and so on and so forth. It was really fun — it sounded terrific."
"Now what I have is a solo version of that part of the patch, an improvising MAX patch. The improvisation or the algorithms are my design. When I'm playing, the patch is constantly fluctuating. That fluctuation may be very subtle, or it may be not-so-subtle. It keeps changing the delay time and the spatialization and so on, according to ranges that I can change during my performance. It makes it possible for me to do things that I couldn't do before, because I simply don't have enough arms and legs to do it." MIDI control pedals enable her to vary parameters of the patch, including pitch bending, modulation depth, and reverb amount. Stephan Moore, whose duo Evidence recently released a CD on Oliveros' Deep Listening label, helps with her MAX programming.
Oliveros performs primarily on the accordion. "I've tuned my accordion in just-intonation since about 1985." Western instruments are conventionally tuned in equal temperament, so that a performer can play them in any key, but it requires a compromise in the perfect consonant ratios of intervals. Just intonation maintains these consonant intervals, but limits the keys in which an instrument can perform. "In the right hand is a seven limit tuning, which is more interesting for melodic passages, and then the left hand is a five limit tuning." Five limit means the scale's fifths conform to their exact ratio, 3:2. "Between the hands, there are six common tones and then six that are not common. It gives me a total of about 19 tones altogether, but the differences are what interest me, because I can get a lot of beat frequencies." The player's left hand controls "single tones that are activated by buttons instead of keys. Your standard Myron Floren/Lawrence Welk accordion has bass chords — it's called the stradella system. The system I'm using is three-bass, three octaves." Sennheiser microphones pick up the sound of the accordion. "The caps are positioned appropriately in the accordion for left and right separation and for maximum capture of the reeds."
Distance collaboration interests Oliveros, and she has explored its creative possibilities and technical challenges "since 1990, about 14 years now. I recently had a project with students at RPI and Mills, on the Internet too. On the RPI side, there was a computer musician, laptop player, and on the Mill side the same. There were two singers, one on each side, and a dancer on our side and three dancers on the other side, and two design architects on the RPI side. They designed a virtual environment. The design was projected on the Internet to California, and it came back with the dancers composited. The recording can take place at either end. It was streamed out onto the Internet. It has documentation of the streaming, but we also have documentation of what went on in the studio."
In addition to composing, Oliveros heads the nonprofit Pauline Oliveros Foundation. "We have a building called Deep Listening Space. We have a gallery where we have concerts and also exhibitions. There's a studio that was designed by Russell Frehling. He's the director of the studio and recording engineer. The studio is a digital recording studio. It runs Digital Performer. We have a rehearsal/recording space adjoining the control room that can accommodate about a nine-piece group. We're all set up to do acoustic recording as well as electronic."
After 50 years of composition, Oliveros continues to explore the bounds of acoustics, performance and technology. Her work, old and new alike, remains relevant both musically and in pushing technical boundaries.
