For Everyone Who Is Not Pauline Oliveros
What the rest of us can learn from the electronic music pioneer
If you’ve never heard of Pauline Oliveros, don’t worry. Unless you have a niche interest in early electronic or experimental music, she probably won’t have crossed your radar.
In that world, though, her importance is almost unmatched. She was born in Texas in 1932, at a time when there were vanishingly few women composers much less out gay experimental women composers.
And then she just stormed the castles.
One of her first productions inspired the famous San Francisco Tape Music Center. Her early electronic music overflows an eight-box set. She published a book of DIY experimental compositions before John Cage had the idea. She bounced her music off the surface of the fricking moon. From the 1950s on until she died in 2016 she was exploring the cutting edge, teaching and collaborating and making music.
As someone who has literally made it my business to help people get full access to their talents, I look at Oliveros and see the absolute gold standard of what ‘full access’ looks like.
Trace her career across the years, and you’ll find an entire life lived from a place that is notoriously hard to locate: the point where play and curiosity…
