Sonic Meditations
by Pauline Oliveros
2022 · PoP+MoM Publications · 52 pages
Pauline Oliveros’ (1932–2016) life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making.
In the 1950s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960s she influenced American music profoundly through her inclusive work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. The recipient of four Honorary Doctorates, and, among her many recent awards, the William Schuman Award for Lifetime Achievement, Columbia University, New York, NY; The Giga-Hertz-Award for Lifetime Achievement in Electronic Music from ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; and The John Cage award from from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts.
She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. “Deep Listening is my life practice,” Oliveros explained, simply. Oliveros founded Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer, NY. [Text Source: Pauline Oliveros Trust]
“The key to multi-level existence is Deep Listening — listening in as many ways as possible to everything that can possibly be heard all of the time. ”
