P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

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2008 Spring

Pauline Oliveros: A Vision of Sound

P.S.1 Director of Public Programs David Weinstein interviews artist Pauline Oliveros in the Clocktower Studios of WPS1.org.

Pauline Oliveros

Photo by Gisella Gamper

David Weinstein: You are a composer and musician known currently for your work with the Deep Listening Band. What are you exhibiting in WACK!?

Pauline Oliveros: WACK! includes a score that I made in 1970 called To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation. Valerie Solanas was very important because she wrote the S.C.U.M. Manifesto and in it are the principles of feminism and a community that she details. I used this as a basis for this piece. It is structured in such a way that everyone has a non-hierarchical role. Every section of the piece is scored the same but the individual makes the differentiations. The community that is created in the piece absorbs any kind of outstanding action so that gets returned to the collective. Structurally it’s a feminist piece but for someone to recognize that they would have to study a little bit and read the S.C.U.M. Manifesto.

WACK! was also interested in my Sonic Meditations which is a body of work from that time. This used an ensemble known as the Women’s Ensemble. The title was impossible to say because we used the female symbol to name it. The circle with the kind of plus across it. It was an ensemble of women that I met with weekly at my home in California.

DW: What were the Women’s Ensemble sessions like?

PO: We would improvise music together. But the kind of exploratory work we were doing was mostly non-verbal. We would do various kinds of physical exercises, energy exercises I would say, and then we would share dreams from our dream journals. Then we would do one of my Sonic Meditations. It was vocal, we just used our voices. So I built a kind of body of work through that.

DW: You are also an influential innovator with electronics and technology in music and sound. Can you talk about that?

PO: Well, I actually started my electronic music with kind of a home studio. I had a Sears Roebuck tape recorder. It was an interesting machine because I could hand wind the tape in record mode so I could do variable speed by hand. And I didn’t have any other kind of electronic devices. I used cardboard tubes with microphones to filter sounds and I would use the bathtub for reverberation and I put small objects that vibrated either on an apple box or on the wall to amplify them a bit and record them in various ways. That’s how I made my first tape piece. It was called Time Perspectives and it was a four channel piece. Even though there wasn’t any four channel playback! You know you start with bigger dreams right? I synchronized the tapes by unwinding them and using the long halls at the conservatory to line them up.

DW: After your years at the San Francisco Tape Music Center and Mills Tape Music Center you took a position at the University of California at San Diego. What were those years like?

PO: When I accepted that position it had quite an impact because I had a struggle with joining what was the establishment for me.  When I got to UCSD I was hired as a lecturer because I didn’t have an MA or a PhD. But I had 15 years of experience that nobody else had. They wanted to have an electronic music program and so there I was.  Within a couple of years, you know this was during the Vietnam War, I became very introspective and started reflecting on what was happening and the work that I was doing. How did it play into what was needed in society at the time.  I would sit and sing long tones and listen and feel what affect it had on my body and my mind.  I found a way of meditation actually through sound.  And I started creating the Sonic Meditations. My colleagues were scratching their heads. They didn’t know what the heck I was doing.