"Through Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening I now know what harmony is. It's about the pleasure of making music." - John Cage
With about 10 other people, mostly strangers, I reclined on the floor of an international hand-drum emporium and closed my eyes. We were all trying to cross the internal divide between "the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary selective nature of listening," which
seemed like it could mean a lot of different things. To me, it was
about trying to experience sounds for what they were, not what they
meant. The hum of a refrigerator and the whoosh of traffic gradually
drifted away from their mundane contexts, revealing the variety and
interconnection of what I was conditioned to hear as generic and
separate. It was harder to detach the clock's tick from turning gears
and passing time. In the moments when I could, I felt very free.
The occasion was a Deep Listening session with certified instructor Shannon Morrow.
Deep Listening is less of a thing you do than a way to do all kinds of
things-- perform, meditate, communicate, compose, or just be in the
world. It's hard to summarize but easy to grasp: a set of broadly
accessible philosophies and practices for heightening your awareness of
total sound. It's useful for anyone who wants to develop a musical
practice or unlearn conventional sonic hierarchies.
It's also the core of the art of its creator, Pauline Oliveros,
the 80-year-old composer, accordionist, teacher, and electronic music
pioneer who easily ranks among the most innovative and influential
musicians of the mid-20th-century avant-garde, which still strongly
governs experimental music today. She wasn't the first to become
entranced by the pops and whistles in the nether regions of the radio
band. But she was one of the first to do something about it, focusing on
frequencies instead of melodies, motions instead of rhythms, processes
instead of outcomes.
Oliveros only formalized Deep Listening a
couple of decades ago, but her curiosity to hear sound out to its very
edges-- plus the ingenuity to pull it off-- has been apparent since she
made her earliest works on a new frontier cluttered with magnetic tape,
hulking computer rigs, tone oscillators, and primitive modular
synthesizers. These are collected for the first time on Reverberations: Tape and Electronic Music 1961-1970, a monumental box set from Important Records.
One
advantageous thing about tape music is that the performance is also the
recording, so there was no shortage of material for this retrospective,
which fills a dozen discs in almost as many hours. While any massive
tape music collection will have its share of desultory windshear, the
vision and variety of Reverberations are incredible, and feel
surprisingly untarnished by 50 years of imitation. In the music, two
distinct intelligences, one human and one mechanical, circle each other
cautiously but inquisitively. We hear unpredictable occurrences,
captured in the moment of discovery, becoming first principles for a new
generation.
During the 1960s, in the musically thriving Bay Area,
Oliveros counted the likes of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Loren Rush
as her compatriots. She played accordion in the premiere of In C.
She founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center with Morton Subotnick.
She was in the thick of the pure electronic phase predating her seminal
electro-acoustic work, using natural sounds and raw test signals as
fodder for processing systems of her own design, which could be played
almost like instruments.
This distinguished her from her
contemporaries, most of whom were meticulous cutters and splicers. Her
reel-to-reel delay system predicted Brian Eno's, but instead of dreamy
melodies, she stuffed it full of splintering tones, working with
magisterial patience through the kaleidoscope of possibilities in the
particular control system. The music comes off as incidentally
imagistic, but the answerless fact of sound is paramount. It's an
elaborate magic show of competing frequencies, which apparently can do
very weird things if you know what you're doing, as when a harmony
swallows its own root notes so that we hear two absences ringing in
tune.
- Pauline Oliveros - Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music 1961 - 1970 (2012)
Ask for download links in comments.
hello,all the links expired only part 3 rapidgator mp3 is still there but not of much use like this...
ОтветитьУдалитьCould you please reup this gem?
Greetings from Germany
Reverberations pt. 1, pt. 2, pt. 3, pt. 4, pt. 5, pt. 6, pt. 7, pt. 8, pt. 9
УдалитьThank you very much!Could post Music for Merce as well?
ОтветитьУдалить