On May 30, 1932, composer, accordionist, and theorist Pauline Oliveros was born in Houston.<\/p>\n
At age 16, she acquired her first accordion and decided she wanted to be a composer. She relocated to San Francisco in 1952 where she studied with early innovators of avant-garde electronic music like La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich.<\/p>\n
For her 21st birthday in 1953, Oliveros received a gift from her mother that proved a major inspiration in her work: A tape recorder. Throughout the decade, Oliveros established her practices with tape and electronic music, and in 1959 she co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center.<\/p>\n
In 1974, Oliveros began her pursuit of Sonic Meditations, focusing on \u201cthe introspective and meditative nature of hearing and listening.\u201d Oliveros continued these efforts with what she called the practice, which would become the core of her work and life.<\/p>\n
She once said, \u201cListening is a lifetime practice that depends on accumulated experiences with sound.\u201d Composer John Cage sung her praises along the same lines, writing that \u201cthrough Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening, I finally know what harmony is\u2026 It\u2019s about the pleasure of making music.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the 1980s, Oliveros was exploring the phenomena of performance in large resonant spaces, and in 1988, she crawled into a 2-million-gallon cistern located below a decommissioned Army base in Washington state with fellow composer Stuart Dempster to play with the 45-second-long reverberations of sound.<\/p>\n
Oliveros was a prolific performer, teacher, composer, and experimentalist until her death in 2016.<\/p>\n
Her music and theoretical output continues to inspire musicians and artists worldwide, including generations of students such as Texans Ned Sublette and Bill Baird. It fits for an artist who said \u201cI have never tried to have a career. I have only tried to build a community.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2019, Oliveros acolytes performed the first-ever concert at Houston\u2019s Buffalo Bayou Cistern Park under the title \u201cSounding the Cistern for Pauline Oliveros,\u201d cementing her reputation as a pioneer of experimental sound and a coordinator of likeminded musicians and listeners.<\/p>\n
Sources<\/p>\n