Keynotes:
Pauline Oliveros, Key Cage Notes
"Through Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening
I finally know what harmony is...It's about the pleasure of making music."
--John Cage 1989
PAULINE OLIVEROS is a senior figure in contemporary American music. Her career spans 50 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. Recently awarded the 2012 John Cage award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, Oliveros is Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. Oliveros has been as interested in finding new sounds as in finding new uses for old ones — her primary instrument is the accordion, an unexpected visitor perhaps to the musical cutting edge, but one which she approaches in much the same way that a Zen musician might approach the Japanese shakuhachi.
Pauline Oliveros’ life as a composer, performer and humanitarian is about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Since the 1960s she has influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. She is the founder of the Deep Listening Institute, formerly the Pauline Oliveros Foundation. The concept comes from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in
concert music with composition, improvisation and electroacoustics. Oliveros describes 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,” she explains, simply.
"Through Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening
I finally know what harmony is...It's about the pleasure of making music."
--John Cage 1989
PAULINE OLIVEROS is a senior figure in contemporary American music. Her career spans 50 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. Recently awarded the 2012 John Cage award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, Oliveros is Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. Oliveros has been as interested in finding new sounds as in finding new uses for old ones — her primary instrument is the accordion, an unexpected visitor perhaps to the musical cutting edge, but one which she approaches in much the same way that a Zen musician might approach the Japanese shakuhachi.
Pauline Oliveros’ life as a composer, performer and humanitarian is about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Since the 1960s she has influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. She is the founder of the Deep Listening Institute, formerly the Pauline Oliveros Foundation. The concept comes from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in
concert music with composition, improvisation and electroacoustics. Oliveros describes 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,” she explains, simply.
Allen S. Weiss “Ryōan-ji, Ryoanji, Where R = Ryoanji : On the Limits of Representation”
ALLEN S. WEISS is a writer, editor, translator, curator and playwright, and is the author and editor of 40 books in the fields of performance theory, landscape architecture, gastronomy, sound art and experimental theatre, including Phantasmic Radio (Duke); Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia (Wesleyan); Varieties of Audio Mimesis: Musical Evocations of Landscape (Errant Bodies). He directed Theater of the Ears (a play for electronic marionette and the taped voice of Gregory Whitehead, based on the writings of Valère Novarina) and Danse Macabre (a marionette theater for the dolls of Michel Nedjar). He recently published his first novel, Le Livre bouffon (Le Seuil) and the gastronomic treatise Autobiographie dans un chou farci (Mercure de France). He is now completing the second volume of his culinary autobiography, Métaphysique de la miette, as well as a book on zen gardens, pottery and cuisine. He teaches in the Departments of Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at New York University.
ALLEN S. WEISS is a writer, editor, translator, curator and playwright, and is the author and editor of 40 books in the fields of performance theory, landscape architecture, gastronomy, sound art and experimental theatre, including Phantasmic Radio (Duke); Breathless: Sound Recording, Disembodiment, and the Transformation of Lyrical Nostalgia (Wesleyan); Varieties of Audio Mimesis: Musical Evocations of Landscape (Errant Bodies). He directed Theater of the Ears (a play for electronic marionette and the taped voice of Gregory Whitehead, based on the writings of Valère Novarina) and Danse Macabre (a marionette theater for the dolls of Michel Nedjar). He recently published his first novel, Le Livre bouffon (Le Seuil) and the gastronomic treatise Autobiographie dans un chou farci (Mercure de France). He is now completing the second volume of his culinary autobiography, Métaphysique de la miette, as well as a book on zen gardens, pottery and cuisine. He teaches in the Departments of Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at New York University.