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Music

More than the ear can hear

A concert and a workshop introduce listeners to Deep Listening, an aesthetic in which music is not merely sound but a step toward broader understanding.

By JOHN FLEMING
Published June 23, 2005

For more than half a century, composer Pauline Oliveros has propounded a musical aesthetic that she calls Deep Listening.

"Deep Listening is a process, and it's really internal to each individual," Oliveros says.

"Listening is something we have to cultivate over a whole lifetime. It's different from hearing. Hearing is what happens to us involuntarily because we have ears that are designed to take in the sonic wave forms. Listening is discernment and experience and making intelligent decisions after understanding what you've heard. It has to come with practice."

Oliveros, who plays a specially designed accordion, gives a concert and holds a workshop this weekend at Studio@620. Vonn New, a St. Petersburg musician, will play percussion on Oliveros' The Fierce Urgency of Now, inspired by a Martin Luther King Jr. speech. In part, the performance will be improvised.

"You never know quite what will happen with the music," says New, who has studied six years with Oliveros.

"We really open up not just our ears but our spirits and listen inclusively, so ambient sounds, like traffic noise, become part of what we take in, rather than being a distraction or an unwelcome intrusion. It sometimes creates music that's not structured the way most listeners expect it to be structured, but if they let go of expectations of what music should be sounding like, they will hear enormous depth of expression. In that moment when it's created, it's a moment of real truth."

Oliveros, 73, has been an avant-garde and feminist pioneer since the 1950s and '60s in San Francisco, where she was part of an experimental music circle that included Morton Subotnick, Terry Riley and LaMonte Young. Electronic and computer music are central to her work, but it also has a spiritual dimension, which she discusses in a recent book, Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice. One of her signature CDs is Deep Listening, with the Deep Listening Band (accordion, trombone, didgeridoo, conch shell, garden hose and assorted other instruments) recorded in a cavernous underground cistern.

Every summer, Oliveros leads Deep Listening retreats in New Mexico and Switzerland that bring together about 25 musicians, artists and others for a week of meditation, Ta'i Chi and improvisation see www.deeplistening.org She lives in Kingston, N.Y., and teaches at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Oliveros has played the accordion since she was a 9-year-old in Houston. She likes the outsider status of the instrument, which, as she points out, wasn't invented until 1840 and therefore wasn't known to Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Her accordion is not quite the same as that of its most famous practitioner, Lawrence Welk.

"Well, Lawrence Welk would be a little upset with the tuning of my instrument," she says, laughing. "It's tuned in just intonation, which means you have perfect fifths for six of the notes, and the other six are intervals which are different. The just intonation is more in tune with the chords of nature, so it makes the instrument very resonant and interesting. I like the tone colors that I can get."

In Saturday's concert, Oliveros will perform a piece with her partner, Ione, a poet, dream therapist and author (as Carole Ione) of Pride of Family: Four Generations of American Women of Color, which the Washington Post called "an important contribution to both the literature of race and the literature of women in America."

"The piece we'll do is called Crossovers and has to do with the sound of words and making words out of sound," Oliveros says. "It entails a choice of a word to transform to sound. The title is apt because I cross over all the time from anywhere to anywhere."

After her St. Petersburg engagement, the composer will be artist in residence for three weeks at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach. She'll be doing a project called Dome Work, which involves visual artists' imagery projected on a 20-foot dome to music by Oliveros on accordion and the Expanded Instrument System, a computer-generated sound processor she has worked on since 1965. There will be a performance of the work July 16 at the center.

PREVIEW: Pauline Oliveros, Ione and Vonn New perform on the Emit series at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Studioat620, 620 First Ave. S, St. Petersburg. $8, $10. Oliveros holds a Deep Listening Workshop at 3 p.m. Sunday at Studioat620. $10. (727) 895-6620.

[Last modified June 23, 2005, 08:04:34]