Pauline Oliveros: a down-to-earth person who made some of the farthest-out music.
Pauline Oliveros: a down-to-earth person who made some of the farthest-out music. Pogus Productions

American experimental composer Pauline Oliveros passed away on Thanksgiving Day at the age of 84. One of the most important members of the groundbreaking San Francisco Tape Music Center during its 1960s origins—along with Morton Subotnick, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Ramon Sender—she had a long career as a composer, performer, and teacher of the Deep Listening concept.

Oliveros formed the Deep Listening Institute in order to "[foster] creative innovation across boundaries and across abilities, among artists and audience, musicians and non-musicians, healers and the physically or cognitively challenged, and children of all ages. [DLI] strives for a heightened consciousness of the world of sound and the sound of the world." Her seminars stressed the difference between hearing and listening, as she told Alan Baker in a 2003 interview.

In hearing, the ears take in all the sound waves and particles and deliver them to the audio cortex where the listening takes place. We cannot turn off our ears—the ears are always taking in sound information—but we can turn off our listening. I feel that listening is the basis of creativity and culture. How you’re listening, is how you develop a culture and how a community of people listens, is what creates their culture.

Oliveros was a master of both the Buchla synthesizer and the accordion, and also had the distinction of participating in the first performance of Terry Riley's minimalist classic, In C. In pieces such as "Bye Bye Butterfly," "Alien Bog," "Beautiful Soop," and "I Of IV," and in her collabs with Seattle trombonist Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis, and others in the Deep Listening Band at the Dan Harpole Cistern (Deep Listening and Octagonal Polyphony are exemplars), Oliveros generated some of the deepest and most enigmatically strange drones in which I've ever had the pleasure to immerse myself—and I've listened to a lot of such drones. She was a thoroughly compassionate and enlightened musician, magnanimous with her far-ranging knowledge, and an acute source of creativity.

This past summer, Oliveros appeared at Seattle's inaugural TUF Fest with her partner Ione to hold a Deep Listening workshop at the Northwest African American Museum. It's safe to say that everyone who attended—including this blogger—left feeling mentally and spiritually invigorated and inspired to create their own distinctive sound worlds, or to simply expand their capability to hear with greater acuity.

Oliveros's death is yet another painful blow in a year of major music-world losses. Rest in power, Pauline.