Pauline Oliveros | Into the Depths of Spirituality Through Its Sound
By Garrett Stephens
“Through Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening I finally know what harmony is…It’s about the pleasure of making music.”
— John Cage 1989
With November 2016 comes the passing of a music great. Pauline Oliveros was a composer and a champion of “Deep Listening” and founded the Deep Listening Institute, which has since merged with The Center For Deep Listening.
For an introduction to what Deep Listening is, here’s a hauntingly beautiful “Tuning Meditation” led by Oliveros:
“Cool”… “That was very cool”, you can hear one of the participants remark towards the end of the video.
There is not a sufficient way to describe in words what exactly one can look to gain from deep listening. The idea is, if we listen closely, we can unlock some secret beauty, some sacred truth within the sounds that relentlessly engulf us throughout our daily lives, at home, at work and through listening to music. This idea is quite cool.
First, let’s get to know Pauline.
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History
Oliveros was a jack-of-all-trades within the music and humanitarian realms. As stated in her website biography, “through improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation she has created a body of work with such breadth of vision that it profoundly effects those who experience it and eludes many who try to write about it.” She built her career not only around being a female composer, mastering a role that is largely populated by males (a vast understatement), but also around the benefits that a deeply attentive audio-focused experience can bring.
Oliveros was interested in music from a very young age. She started with the accordion at age nine, and later advanced to the tuba and then the french horn.
Closer to her twenties, she supported herself with a day job and further supplemented her income by offering accordion lessons. She attended the University of Houston’s School of Music. One of her teachers at U of H included Robert Erickson, a composer who gave her private lessons and mentored her for 5–6 years.
Oliveros was one of the initial members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which was a pioneering group within the electronic music scene on the West Coast in the ‘60’s.
Later on, she took on a position within the music faculty at UCSD. From there, Oliveros took the logical next step and became a black belt in karate. Her immersion in karate began via her collaboration with Theoretical Physicist/Karate Master, Lester Ingber.
This collaboration involved diving into the attentional processes that are used during music listening, and would help facilitate Oliveros’s engagement with the concept and the experience involved with Deep Listening.
“In 1988 as a result of descending 14 feet into an underground cistern to make a recording Oliveros coined the term ‘Deep Listening’[7] a pun that has blossomed into, ‘an aesthetic based upon principles of improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation.’” [via Wikipedia]
…most of the information in this section is derived from Oliveros’s Wikipedia page
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Deep Listening’s Birth
Oliveros’s engagement with a driven ephemeral exploration into sound as an experimental composer, branched naturally into an intense spiritual curiosity with auditory cognition. She partnered with Stuart Dempster and David Gamper to explore listening and listening response within performance for musicians. The trio would soon become the Deep Listening Band.
Above is a piece of music by the Deep Listening Band. If your experience listening to this piece is anything like mine is, especially with headphones on, you seep into immersion in this airy transient soundtrack; it becomes nearly impossible not to reach some level of meditative state while actively listening.
The eerie background choir noise fades in fluidly with the undertones of synchronous accordion, paired with an electronic symphony tone. The pitch is patient and slow. It ambles as if carried along a series of large rolling waves and takes you along for the ride. This seems to be the active immersive aspect of the experience “Phantom” provides its listener with. As you naturally tune in to follow the melody of the piece, you are engaging with a source of sound that is both spontaneous, yet carefully drawn and purposefully lingered.
Oliveros continued composing and exploring this new wave of sound and composition, and created what Heidi Von Gunden regards as an entirely new musical theory altogether, which Oliveros explores in her book, Sonic Meditations.
Here’s a quote from the introduction to Sonic Meditations:
“Sonic Meditations are intended for group work over a long period of time with regular meetings. No special skills are necessary. Any persons who are willing to commit themselves can participate. The [f] Ensemble to whom these meditations are dedicated has found that non-verbal meetings intensify the results of these meditations and help provide an atmosphere which is conducive to such activity. With continuous work some of the following becomes possible with Sonic Meditations: Heightened states of awareness or expanded consciousness, changes in physiology and psychology from known and unknown tensions to relaxations which gradually become permanent. These changes may represent a tuning of mind and body. The group may develop positive energy which can influence others who are less experienced. Members of the Group may achieve greater awareness and sensitivity to each other. Music is a welcome by-product of this activity.”
We can see a bit beyond the music in the passage, a bit beyond the sounds themselves and into the potential experience that one can unlock via Sonic Meditation in Oliveros’s eyes. She clearly had a vision for her work beyond the way music is normally perceived. With Sonic Meditations or Deep Listening, Oliveros looked to engage listeners in an immersive listening experience, one that might shake a listener down to the very core of her existence. In this practice, we don’t simply hear; we are involved in a sort of “tuning of mind and body”, an exercise that may lead to some form of enhanced awareness, or possibly permanent relaxation.
To look into the scope by which Oliveros views this practice, in reference to this spiritual practice, music itself becomes simply a consequence, a side effect, “a welcome by-product”. Oliveros’s journey clearly led her beyond the surface of her profession and into and through the relationship sound has with its listener.
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Into to Depths of Deep Listening
While I write this article, I listen to the DLB’s Deep Listening album. I attempt a deep listening meditation on my own, sitting in a close-to-empty Denny’s in King City, California. This actually feels like the exact sort of space Oliveros would recommend for a Sonic Meditative Practice, minus the group meditation aspect.
A sonic meditation can act as a special procedure for:
1. Actively making sounds
2. Actively imagining sounds
3. Listening to present sounds
4. Remembering sounds
[Oliveros, Introduction II, “Sonic Meditations”]
With these four principles, we can infer our ability to practice this style of meditation, regardless of our current circumstance. I definitely recommend trying this.
On 1, I can hear the quiet and high pitched tapping beneath the undertones of the DLB album. I listen closely beyond the apparent sounds, in order to appreciate the subtleties of the licks of my laptop’s keys as they spring and bounce of the movement of my fingers. I actively make this sound.
On 2, I am brought back to about a month ago. I am sleeping in a tent in the woods in Ocala, FL. As I hear a co-mingled choir of insect and animal around my primitive campsite I listen as closely as possible, imaging the sounds around me in some paranoid reference I am making to the sounds that a predator would make. At points, I even convince myself I hear a large creature wandering through the brush. Through a relaxed and attentive state, I eventually fold softly out of my on-edge paranoid practice, and back into a pragmatic state of listening to what is actually there, though I have actively imagined these sounds.
On 3, I push my focus into this moment, this moment alone. I turn off my memory. To be purely transfixed in the moment, there is no place for memory. The choir howl currently coming from the DLB fades slowly up and down in volume. The rolling waves again. Softly, and with a careful resonance. I type, but devote close to zero attention to my actions or the feelings in my fingers. In my current attention, there is only room for one sense’s input, my hearing. I listen to the present sounds.
On 4, I reactivate my memory and try to hear the sounds of Ocala. I hear the crickets beyond the symphony currently crooning to my ears. I can hear only the sounds that were there. No bears this time. I feel tired as I recall my meditation lingering, bringing me finally into sleep. I remember these sounds though I am over a thousand miles and 30 days away from their source.
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Reflection
Cool. Very cool. Seriously though. There is something intense and earnest about really focusing on one sense. At any moment, we take in a vast series of impulses through our eyes, the touch of our skin, through the filtering response of smell and the taste on our tongues. But often it is hard to recognize that we are actively participating in experiencing these senses.
When I focus specifically on sound, I am allowed a deeper and more direct look into the subtleties I perceive on any moment-to-moment bases. I am taking in these subtleties at all times, but only with focus and attentiveness can I tap into the richness this patchwork symphony provides to my ears.
When not engaged in a Sonic Meditation, I take in a lot of these sounds subconsciously. I’m sure this degree of activity, really within any sense, can have deeper effects on my psychological and physiological states.
The purpose of the practice isn’t necessarily to tune anything out, but to take it all in, to dissect it, to transform it, to connect with it. To connect with all that we hear.
Olivera certainly discovered something.
Pioneering and coining the Deep Listening practice was only part of what made Oliveros into a major sonic contributor, whose innovations should trickle forward beyond her life or her physical ability to directly perform and communicate them. I’ve certainly found in Deep Listening a new spiritual and mental practice thanks to her obsession, her life’s work.
Oliveros’s work reverberates with an airy glow of new/classic brilliance. Casting off any paradigmatic barriers in her way on what music is, in order to dive deep into the depths of listening, Oliveros has brought something back. And she’s shared it with anyone who’s willing to listen. Though she has passed from this life, just like in one of her compositions, the echoes of her music will reverberate onward.
Onward, into the depths of spirituality through its sound.
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P.S. If you want to go really deep, here’s a tool to do exactly that.
Remember to listen, imagine, remember and possibly even make noise of your own.
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Pauline Oliveros was a legendary innovator and music virtuoso [May 30, 1932 — November 24, 2016]
Garrett Stephens has a PhD in nothing and knows a lot about nothing. He is the Founder of Radiance Collective, which really isn’t anything in particular.
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The Whole Point of this endeavor is to be inspired, to think smarter, not harder and to engage with other people who push the limits. So here’s the content that’s kept me on my toes from some other thought leaders and innovators recently:
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