Sonic Meditations XIII (1974)

By Pauline Oliveros

                                                                                     -XIII-

Energy Changes

(For Elaine Summers’ Movement Mediation, Energy Changes)

Listen to the environment as a drone. Establish contact mentally with all of the continuous external sounds and include all of your own continuous internal sounds, such as blood pressure, heart beat and nervous system. When you feel prepared, or when you are triggered by a random or intermittent sound from the external or internal environment, make any sound you like in one breath, or a cycle of like sounds. When a sound or a cycle of sounds, is completed re-establish mental connection with the drone, which you first established before making another sound or cycle of like sounds.

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It begins with a light’s hum—a low C, soft and persistent. Pressure against stubble and skin, a shrug in wool, a cough, a yawn. I close my eyes and listen. A flushing drain fills the theater then merges with a distant train approaching from the right. The tracks heave under the weight—I hear them exhale into the bassoon’s pitchless sigh. A rasp, then rumble emerges from the ground; its crescendo seems to bend the space, calling more to dance. One by one, the clarinet, flute, piano, cello, guitar (and audience) take the call to weave. Moments of impulse and reception gradually meld into one sound, empathetically cohesive. When the train returns from the left, I hear nothing but its weight passing through that soft and persistent hum. The lights dim, and I hear a voice, “Thank you for coming tonight.” *

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The recent death of Pauline Oliveros, a highly celebrated, American composer and scholar, calls contemporary musicians and academics to reexamine a sore but particularly relevant question: how am I listening? Oliveros, founder of the innovative philosophy, deep listening, believed that how we listen determines the strength and shape of our connection to each other and our surroundings. In defining “deep listening,” Oliveros first and fundamentally separates an assumed slur between “hearing” and “listening.” “To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.” (Oliveros, Loc 262) Thus, “to hear” is but a vessel of potential information; it is innate, and passively given. “To listen,” on the other hand, is a practice of consciousness rooted in awareness, presence and memory;  it is chosen and actively pursued. From the late 1970s to early 1980s, Oliveros used this categorization to develop the deep listening philosophy and practice. “Deep Listening for me is learning to expand the perception of sounds to include the whole space/time continuum of sound—encountering the vastness and complexities as much as possible.” Thus, through “listening to others, to art and life,” deep listening is the fusion between “acoustic space” and an individual’s “bodymind continuum.” Deep listening is a process and product of symbiosis, it is a sonic give-and-take between internal consciousness and external other.

In approaching listening as a mutual dialogue, deep listening transcends, or at least sidesteps, the critical. In adding a binary to the purpose and practice of listening, deep listening questions and reshapes the traditionally assumed identities of: the listener, music/sound and the creator. In unpacking deep listening as a historically innovative medium of communication, I offer critical listening as a comparison to explore the contemporary shifts of creativity’s function.

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Ear Piece (1998)

By Pauline Oliveros

1. Are you listening now?
2. Are you listening to what you are now hearing?
3. Are you hearing while you listen?
4. Are you listening while you are hearing?
5. Do you remember the last sound you heard before this question?
6. What will you hear in the near future?
7. Can you hear now and also hear the memory of an old sound?
8. What causes you to listen?
9. Do you hear yourself in your daily life?
10. Do you have healthy ears?
11. If you could hear any sound you wanted, what would it be?
12. Are you listening to the sounds or just hearing them?
13. What sound is most meaningful to you?

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Before sitting down to try my first session of environmental, deep listening, I admit, my confidence was high and inflated. I generally consider myself a sonically observant person—I mean, I’m a musician after all. I should be pretty connected to the sonic world—right? Well, right. As the first, few minutes slipped away and the heater’s hum continued as it had, I found my listening’s direction floundering in uncertainty. While I could hear the tires on wet snow, the water dripping from the roof, the dovetailing drones of gas and electricity, the heater’s occasional spit, I didn’t know how or where to listen. When my alarm rang I flipped on a pop song and sighed. Thank God for pulse.

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“The depth of listening is related to the expansion of consciousness brought about by inclusive listening.  Inclusive listening is impartial, open and receiving and employs global attention. Deep listening has limitless dimensions.”  

The sounds of my room exist as sonic byproducts, without human organization or intent. While they are not not meant to be heard,  they are certainly not meant to be listened to. Therefore, environmental sounds cannot be reasonably critiqued; like embracing a twisted tree perfect in its autonomy, the sounds are as they are, impartial to the mind. My job as a listener is not to interpret and analyze, but to share in their existences as a fellow, sonic body. Within the context of a shared, acoustic space, my goal as a listener is not to examine and prod, but to connect—to fold the distance between the internal and external, to expand my consciousness into a larger soundscape. Thus, while critical listening augments the distance between listener and sound, deep listening dissolves it. While the critical listener is a protected object distinct and whole, the deep listener is a transparent participant, nearing and incomplete.

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To Oliveros, it is all sound. All sounds, whether coordinated or cacophonous, are equal in their relationships to a larger, sonic environment. A song played on the radio is but another set of vibrations within a specific, spatial context. It is no better or worse than the static. Thus, according to Oliveros, sound is not a thing but an acoustic space to engage with. Critical listening, on the other hand, requires fundamental definitions between ‘music’ and sound. The critical listener’s analytical distance approaches sound as an object—an object to be handled and categorized, repeatedly.

Is this music or sound?

Is this good or bad?

Is this authentic or commercial?
Thoughtful or pretentious?
Provocative or ridiculous?
Charming or banal?

Is this me?

 

But as an object, so must it be responded to. While deep listening passively embraces and reacts, critical listening actively guts and owns.

It would be unfair though to assert that deep listening transcends sonic categorization. Oliveros was, first, a composer. Therefore, her music is based in a specific and personal aesthetic—an aesthetic that sonically mirrors her philosophy. In the groundbreaking 1988 album, “The Deep Listening Band,” her ensemble recorded a series of long and spacious tones reverberating through the Fort Worden Cistern. The first track, “Balloon Payment,” is a 45 second long, sound decay. Hinging upon the space’s extreme reverberation, the album sonically manifests Oliveros’ theory, proposing sound as a means to space, and listening as a means to environmental connection. Thus, the approach to listening and creating cannot be separated; theory and aesthetics are of the same. Oliveros, a compatriot of the 20th century’s musical Avant-Garde, developed a relationship to sound not unlike that of others. Inspired by John Cage’s theory of chance music, Avant-Garde composers explored impartial ‘representation’ as an answer to the romantic precedent of meticulous self-expression. In a counter-culture that increasingly rejected musical direction, as defined by pulse and tonal polarity, the musical Avant-Garde bannered purgatorial space as the forefront of composition. Therefore, Oliveros’ relationship to spacial sound stems from, and compliments the music of her historical context. Deep listening corresponds to compositions that craft an aesthetic of space.

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Thirteen Changes (1986)

By Pauline Oliveros

1. Standing naked in the moonlight—Music washing the body.
2. Atomic imagery—Rotating molecules—Instantaneous particles dancing—Vanishing.
3. Solar winds scorching the returning comet’s tale.
4. Elephants mating in a secret grove.
5. Air borne carriers of transparent seedlings.
6. Songs of ancient mothers among awesome rocks.
7. A single egg motionless in the desert.
8. Rollicking monkeys landing on mars.
9. A singing bowl of steaming soup.
10. Tiny mites circling one hair in the coat of a polar bear.
11. A solitary worm in an empty coffin.
12. A sip of midnight well water.
13. Directionless motion—Unquiet stillness—A moment alone with millions of people—Calming the waters—The aura of a black bird.

https://vimeo.com/76627486

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Deep listening relinquishes the composer’s creative ego. To Oliveros, the composer is an initiator—a catalyst—offering nothing more than loose ideas of potential.  Oliveros’ “Thirteen Changes,” on its own, is but a painter’s sleeping pallet. The text is undoubtedly strange and alluring, but sonically defines little. Thus, the piece is simply a means to activate performers’ creative instincts. Like drawing a card from a stack of Charades, the excitement lies not in the card itself, but in the moment of a shared, ephemeral discovery. Oliveros asks that the sonic environment of people and things be greater than the individual’s autonomous narrative. Propelled by these tenets, composition no longer needs to be restricted to a structure of self-explanation; it can leave itself, and explore connection as the basis of significance.