Please see below for a recording of Still Listening: A Concert for Pauline. The concert, produced by IONE and Lisa B. Kelley, offered attendees a chance to experience the sonic expressions of Pauline Oliveros, her contemporaries, and students of Deep Listening. A PDF of the concert program is available for download here.
Live Stream was generously provided by Radio Kingston.
Pauline Oliveros: Still Listening in Kingston
Still Listening in Kingston is an exhibition of Visual and Sonic Arts dedicated to the life’s work of Pauline Oliveros, a Kingston pioneer in the arts. The exhibit, encompassing video installations, and visual scores that can be performed, welcomes community participation from visitors of all ages and walks of life. This exhibition includes selected works from Still Listening-An Exhibit of Works in Honor of Pauline Oliveros presented by McGill University in Montréal Canada, 2017. Curated by Eric Lewis and Ellen Waterman. For the full catalog of the exhibit, please visit: http://stilllisteningoliveros.com
The artwork exhibited is on loan from the collection of the Pauline Oliveros Trust and IONE.
Pauline's Life & Legacy
Oliveros at her TEDTALK in 2015.
Pauline Oliveros' 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 '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960's she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.
She was the recipient of four Honorary Doctorates and among her many recent awards were 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.
Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. She founded Deep Listening ®, which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. 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.
Oliveros founded Deep Listening Institute in Kingston, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer, Troy, NY. Her creative work is currently disseminated through The Pauline Oliveros Trust and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc. both organizations in Kingston, NY.
"Deep Listening is experiencing heightened awareness or expanded awareness of sound and of silence, of quiet, and of sounding." Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros passing in November 2016, leaves the world with a rich legacy of compositions, improvisations, theory, activism, community building, design, and a wide network of individuals and institutions that were influenced in many ways by her example, thoughts, sounds and actions.
Text Scores: An Exploration of Notation
A foundational part of Oliveros' work was her reinvention of scores and musical notation. There are many different types of notation, with methods varying from culture to culture. Most are familiar with the Western style of sheet music, which uses staves and note heads to represent sound. Oliveros chose to use a wide array of methods to document sound & silence. The visual cues change from piece to piece, often using written text to explain the progression of the piece. Oliveros challenged the idea that notation existed only as reference, transforming the scores into individual works of art and expression. Two artists could express the same work in very different ways, making the practice of text scores a personal and exciting art medium.
Participating Artists
The artist's featured in the Still Listening exhibit were encouraged to embrace Oliveros' method, and created their own visual text scores. Please see below for more information on the artist's and their work.
Al Margolis, “LXXXV for Doc PO”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/lxxxv-doc-po/
AL MARGOLIS: DEEP LISTENING SPACE on the RONDOUT FOR 15 years and current catalog manager in Kingston, was an activist in the 1980s American cassette underground through his cassette label Sound of Pig Music and is co-founder of the experimental music label Pogus Productions, which he continues to run. Active under the name If, Bwana since 1984, making music that has swung between fairly spontaneous studio constructions and more process-oriented composition, he has been described as “some sort of evil genius.”
Peter Wetzler, “First Love (in Memoriam of Pauline Oliveros)”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/first-love/
PETER WETZLER is an award winning composer-musician and music-director with a uniquely diverse musical background, who writes scores for film, theatre, and television. The strong rhythmic drive of his music blended with the raw experimental influence of the “downtown” New York City music scene makes his style much sought after for unique film and television scoring ranging from animation and films featured at The Museum Of Modern Art and PBS Great Performances to National Geographic’s permanent multimedia installation in Washington DC. Peter scored his first feature film, The Warboy, in Toronto in 1984 and performed at the Music Gallery, Gladstone Hotel and Arraymusic while living in Toronto. His ensemble The Repeatos opened the 2007 Baltimore Jazz Festival and played in Toronto’s Ambient Ping series. Wetzler continues to perform solo piano improvisations, music for poetry, film and multimedia installations and with The Catskill Mountain Gamelan Ensemble, for which he has written First Love for accordion and gamelan dedicated to Pauline Oliveros.
Annea Lockwood, “Bayou—Borne (for Pauline)”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/annea-lockwood/
ANNEA LOCKWOOD Long term Hudson Valley Resident and acclaimed artist, is known for her explorations of natural acoustic sounds and environments. Recent work includes Wild Energy, a collaboration with Bob Bielecki, a site-specific multi-channel installation focused on geophysical, atmospheric and mammalian infra and ultra sound sources, created for the sound art exhibition, A Garden of Sonic Delights, at Caramoor, New York. She met Pauline Oliveros in the early 1970s on-air at KPFA, San Francisco, after a year or so of exchanging scores and letters, and it was through Pauline and the composer Ruth Anderson that she came to the US, where she has lived and worked since 1973. She is a Professor Emerita, Vassar College.
Norman Lowrey, “Mini Jaguar Beat Box”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/mini-jaguar-beat-box/
NORMAN LOWREY is a mask maker/composer and Professor of Music at Drew University, Madison, NJ. He holds a PhD in composition from the Eastman School of Music. He is the originator of Singing Masks. The masks – ceramic, carved wood, leather, virtual – incorporate flutes, reeds, ratchets and other sounding devices. Each mask has a unique voice. Lowrey has presented Singing Mask ceremony/performances in such diverse locations as Plan B and Site Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Roulette and Lincoln Center in New York City, The Deep Listening Space in Kingston, New York, The New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, and at the site of pictograph caves outside Billings, Montana. He is a long-time student/colleague of composer Pauline Oliveros, is certified in her Deep Listening practice, and was a member of the Board of Directors of the former Deep Listening Institute.
IONE, “This Day/That Day
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/this-daythat-day/
IONE is a writer/director and an improvising text-sound artist. A specialist in dreams and the creative process, she has taught and performed throughout the world. She is the author of Pride of Family, Four Generations of American Women of Color, Nile Night, Remembered Texts from The Deep, Listening in Dreams & This is a Dream! , and Spell Breaking; Remembered Ways of Being. She was playwright and director of Njinga the Queen King, the Dance Opera Io and Her and the Trouble with Him, The Lunar Opera; Deep Listening For Tunes, and the experimental narrative film Dreams of the Jungfrau—all with music by Oliveros. The Nubian Word for Flowers, A Phantom Opera, by Oliveros and IONE, premiered at Roulette on November 30, 2017 and will have new presentations at Mount Tremper Arts and in Kingston, NY. IONE and Pauline Oliveros have been partners in marriage and art for 30 years.
Stephanie Loveless, “Prescription for grieving (for Pauline)”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/prescription-for-grieving/
STEPHANIE LOVELESS is a Montréal-born artist living in Albany NY whose research centers on listening and vocal embodiment. She makes softspeakers out of paper cups, performance prescriptions for audience-identified ailments, and sound works that channel the voices of plants, animals, and musical divas. Her sound, video, and performance work has been presented in festivals, galleries, museums and artist-run centers worldwide. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and el Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. She has received awards from Kodak, the International Festival of Cinema and Technology, and the Malcolm S. Morse Foundation, and has completed residencies at el Centro Mexicano para la Musica y las Artes Sonoras (Morelia, Mexico), the Coleman Center for the Arts (York, Alabama), and Studio XX (Montréal, Québec). She holds MFAs from both Bard College and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a certification in Deep Listening.
Maria Chavez, “Sonic Shards”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/sonic-shards/
Born in Lima, Peru and based in NYC, MARIA CHÁVEZ is best known as an abstract turntablist, sound artist, and DJ. Accidents, coincidence, and failures are themes that unite her sound sculptures, installations and other works with her improvised solo turntable performance practice.
She is currently a research fellow with the Sound Practice Research Department of Goldsmiths University of London until fall of 2017, a 2016 composer fellow with the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbertide, Italy and an arts fellow with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2017.
Her work is widely published and is featured at art museums, festivals and on radio world-wide including previously at MoMA, MoMA PS1, the Villa Romana Festival (Italy), and Museo Centre de Carmen (Valencia, Spain). She was an artist in residence with CEC Artslink Back Apartment Residency in St. Petersburg, Russia, has presented sound installation/ performance works for the JUDD Foundation (Marfa, Texas) and will present a new radio sonic art piece along with performing solo turntable for the opening of DOCUMENTA 14 in Kassel, Germany this year.
Suzanne Thorpe, “Sounding Time”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/sounding-time-po-85/
SUZANNE THORPE is a performer/composer whose work is fixed and improvised, performed, installed and recorded. Her compositions tend to be site-specific sound pieces that speak of, and with, their environment. As an improviser she has enjoyed performing with Pauline Oliveros, Zeena Parkins, Chris Brown, Zbigniew Karkowski, Nate Wooley, and Anti-matter, among others. She has released over 20 recordings on labels such as Sony, V2, Beggars Banquet, and Tape Drift, and while living in KINGSTON was a founding member of critically acclaimed Mercury Rev, with whom she performed, recorded and toured from 1989 – 2001, earning a gold record for 1998’s Deserter’s Songs. Thorpe has received residencies and fellowships from Harvestworks Digital Media Foundation, Meet the Composer, New Music USA, and the MAP Foundation. She was awarded the Frog Peak Collective Award for innovative research in 2008, and has been a certified Deep Listening instructor since 2011. Currently she is a PhD candidate in Music/Integrative Studies at University of California San Diego, and serves as Co-Founder/Director of TECHNE, an organization that introduces young women and girls to technology-focused art making, musical improvisation, and listening.
Reinhardt Reitzenstein, “TREE”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/reinhardt-reitzenstein/
REINHARD REITZENSTEIN was born in Uelzen, Germany in 1949. He studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, Canada. He is based in Grimsby, Ontario, Canada and Buffalo, NY, USA.
Reitzenstein’s work has consistently taken him into processes exploring ways to interconnect nature, culture, science and technology. His work crosses several disciplines: indoor installation and sculpture, photography, digitally processed images; large-scale drawings; outdoor tree-based installations and sound art. Reitzenstein has held over one hundred solo exhibitions and participated in some 300 group exhibitions in North America and abroad. He has completed more than twenty public art commissions along with numerous private commissions.
His work is represented in over 50 public and corporate collections internationally, like the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the University of Toronto. He is currently an Associate Professor at SUNY Buffalo, where he has been the Director of the Sculpture Program since 2000.
He is represented by the Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto, Canada and Indigo Art, in Buffalo, NY
Gayle Young, “Pauline’s Rainbow”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/paulines-rainbow/
GAYLE YOUNG was an early participant in the improv community that formed around the Music Gallery in 1970s Toronto. She studied contemporary music at Toronto’s York University and attended several Deep Listening Retreats with Pauline Oliveros, IONE, and Heloise Gold. In addition to her pieces for orchestral instruments she presents concerts as a composer and performer of microtonal music on acoustic instruments of her own design. Many of her concert pieces and sound installations incorporate pre-recorded soundscapes. Her outdoor installations integrate pre-existing soundscapes with the invitation to the public to activate sound through found materials. Young has written extensively on contemporary music and sound arts. Young is the publisher (and former editor) of Musicworks Magazine.
Raylene Campbell, “Dream Mandala”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/dream-mandala/
RAYLENE CAMPBELL is a sound artist who embraces various creative practices including improvisation, composition, performance art, sound and image, public intervention, and Deep Listening. She studied/worked as a freelance artist in New York and Montreal from 2000 to 2009, has a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, and taught in the Department of Music at Concordia University. The focus of Raylene’s creative process involves explorations of acoustic ecology, psychogeography, computer interactive technology, and audience interactivity in both performance and installation environments. Raylene is currently based in Edmonton.
Raylene’s improvised performances are built on a search for subtle sound textures, mixing instrumental samples and found sound, performed with Ableton Live and Therevox. Raylene gently moves into chosen sonic spaces and takes time exploring and experimenting with the emerging materials of the improvisational moment.
China Blue and Seth Horowitz, “Theta for Pauline”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/theta-for-pauline/
CHINA BLUE is an art pioneer who is an artist-in-residence with the Norman Prince Neurosciences Institute at the Rhode Island Hospital. China Blue has received two NASA/RI Space Grants. Her current work focuses on the strengths and limits of our brains.
SETH S. HOROWITZ, PhD is a neuroscientist and the author of The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind (Bloomsbury 2012). His current work focuses on how sound perception affects emotion, cognition, pain perception and motion sickness, and how it can be applied to enhance real and virtual environments.
Viv Corringham, “85 Footsteps”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/85-footsteps/
VIV CORRINGHAM (voice, improvisation, field recordings) is a British vocalist living in New York, frequently in residence at Deep Listening Space in Kingston who created ARRIVALS- APP that focuses international attention on a SOUND walk along the Rondout and interviews with and other Kingston City residents.
She has worked internationally since the late 1970s. Her work includes performance, installations, radio and soundwalks. She is a 2012 and 2006 McKnight Composer Fellow through American Composers Forum, 2015 resident artist at Harvestworks Media Arts, NYC, and was certified to teach Deep Listening by Pauline Oliveros.
Anne Bourne, “Meridians”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/meridians/
Composer ANNE BOURNE creates emergent sound work from streams of cello and voice. Anne is influenced deeply by composer Pauline Oliveros and is a facilitator of her works Deep Listening Pieces and Primordial/Lift. With Ione, Anne has a writing practice of perceptions. Anne believes each creative expression is an opportunity for the resolution of difference tones through listening.
Issui Minegishi, “85 Cells for Ichigenkin: Dedicated to Pauline”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/85-cells-ichigenkin/
There are 85 boxes. Thinking about Pauline, I shredded Inchigenkin’s traditional music score, a score about celebrating a long-life, and scatter them above those boxes. I take out only the pieces that sat in those boxes and rearrange them neatly. Although accidentally, the pieces are chosen by falling into the boxes, and I play the score wholeheartedly. In this music, one box represents one year, i.e., eighty-five boxes connote each year Pauline had lived. To play Japanese Ichigenkin is to recognize that a sound at the very moment is precious; it is not to regret the sound just uttered, not to concern about the sound to be uttered, but to focus on the sound at the very moment. As such, I feel playing Ichigenkin music is exactly like living a beautiful life. One box is one year. Eighty five boxes for eighty five years. I tried to express the moment Pauline might have lived focusing on every moment. The score created by decomposing into pieces can be fixed by gluing it back together, but if one lets them be separated, we can create new songs repeatedly by this approach and we can play new sets of sound lines.
Malcolm Goldstein, “this full breath/gesture sounding”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/unknown/
MALCOLM GOLDSTEIN, a composer/violinist, has been active in the presentation of new music and dance since the early 1960s, in New York City, as co-founder of the Tone Roads Ensemble and as participant in the Judson Dance Theater, the New York Festival of the Avant Garde and the Experimental Intermedia Foundation. Since then he has toured extensively throughout North America and Europe, presenting solo violin concerts and appearing as soloist with new music and dance ensembles. His “soundings” improvisations have received international acclaim for “reinventing violin playing,” extending the range of tonal/sound-texture possibilities of the instrument and revealing new dimensions of expressivity. Since the mid-1960s Goldstein has integrated structured improvisation elements into his compositions, exploring the rich sound-textures of new performance techniques within a variety of instrumental and vocal frameworks. He has written extensively on improvisation and is the author of the book: Sounding the Full Circle.
Jay Kreimer, “I Heard it through the Window”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/i-heard-it-through-the-window/
JAY KREIMER is a maker with some range. He is currently creating an inventory of the books and tools lost in a fire that took his workshop and library on New Years Eve, 2016. He is also working on a sound score for a collaboration with Carolyn Kallenborn, to be shown at the Rufino Tamayo museum in Oaxaca, July 2017.
Bun-Ching Lam, “ Ling - for P.O.”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/unknown-2/
Described as “alluringly exotic” (The New York Times), and “hauntingly attractive” (San Francisco Chronicle), the music of BUN-CHING LAM has been performed worldwide by such ensembles as the Macao Orchestra, American Composer’s Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, The Vienna Radio Orchestra, Hong Kong Sinfonietta and the Albany Symphony. Born in Macao, Lam has served as the composer-in-residence of the Macao Orchestra from 2008 to 2016. She began her piano study in her native city, then further pursued her music education in Hong Kong and the United States. She holds a B.A. degree in Piano Performance from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a PhD in Music Composition from the University of California at San Diego, where she met Pauline Oliveros, who would be her mentor for the next forty years. She has taught at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, and served as Visiting Professor at the Yale University School of Music and at Bennington College.
Pamela Z, “Amplified Silence
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/amplified-silence-85/
Pamela Z is a composer/performer and media artist who makes solo works combining a wide range of vocal techniques with electronic processing, samples, gesture activated MIDI controllers, and video. She has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her work has been presented at venues and exhibitions including Bang on a Can (NY), the Japan Interlink Festival, Other Minds (SF), the Venice Biennale, and the Dakar Biennale. She’s created installations and has composed scores for dance, film, and chamber ensembles. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Doris Duke Artist Impact Award, Creative Capital, the Herb Alpert Award, MAP, the ASCAP Award, an Ars Electronica honorable mention, the NEA/Japan-US Fellowship, and a Djerrassi Resident Artist Program residency.
Olivia Robinson, “Resonance in Gratitude”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/resonance-in-gratitude/
OLIVIA ROBINSON is a multimedia artist whose work spans video, installation, research, and community engagement. Robinson’s diverse body of work, which ranges in scale from hand-built textile circuits to architectural-scale inflatable structures, investigates issues of justice, identity, community, and transformation. She cofounded the performance troupe Little Big Bang which performed at the American Visionary Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Mermaid Parade, and the WPA/Corcoran Museum. She also worked in the Community Arts Partnerships office during its first four years. Robinson holds an MFA in Electronic Art from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she studied under legendary composer/performer Pauline Oliveros, for whom she currently serves as board member for the Deep Listening Institute.
Seth Cluett - Ether Music (For Pairs Of Spatially Displaced Sounds)
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/to-pauline/
This past September, Pauline and I were preparing to perform Apple Box Double for the 9 evenings + 50 events at Fridman Gallery celebrating the 50th anniver-sary of the eponymous program for Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Pauline had an evening dedicated to her work at Bard College performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). The same night, at Abrons Art Center in Manhattan, a subset of the same group was performing a piece of mine. I was in residence at Wave Farm in the Catskills without a car and wrote Pauline to apologize for missing the event that was so close to me at Bard, her email response was simple: “Life is complicated, we’ll meet in the ether.”
American artist and composer SETH CLUETT explores everyday actions at extreme magnification, examines minutiae by amplifying impossible tasks, and explores the working of memory in forms that rethink the role of the senses in an increasingly technologized society. Creating work ranging from photography and drawing to installation, concert music, and critical writing, his “subtle…seductive, immersive” (Artforum) sound work has been characterized as “rigorously focused and full of detail.” Cluett holds a joint-appointment in Visual Arts and Music & Technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ.
Website: www.onelonelypixel.org
Margaret Schedel, “Turns, Trills, Mordents”
http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/turns-trills-mordents/
MARGARET ANNE SCHEDEL is a composer and cellist specializing in the creation and performance of ferociously interactive media whose works have been performed throughout the United States and abroad. As an Associate Professor of Music at Stony Brook University, she serves as Co-Director of Computer Music and is the Director of cDACT, the Consortium for Digital Arts, Culture, and Technology. She ran SUNY’s first Coursera Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), an introduction to computational arts. Schedel holds a certificate in Deep Listening and is a joint author of Cambridge Press’ Electronic Music. She has been commissioned by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra, the percussion ensemble Ictus, and the reACT duo. Her research focuses on gesture in music, the sustainability of technology in art, and sonification/gamification of data. She sits on the boards of 60×60 and the International Computer Music Association, is a regional editor for Organised Sound, and an editor for Cogent Arts and Humanities. In her spare time she curates exhibitions focusing on the intersection of art, science, new media, and sound.
Press:
Daily Freeman- Reception for City Hall Exhibition Honoring Pauline Oliveros
https://www.dailyfreeman.com/news/local-news/reception-for-city-hall-exhibition-honoring-pauline-oliveros-on-april/article_4a449044-4a80-11e9-a5cd-b32110ccbbc7.html
Radio Kingston - Mondays with the Mayor
https://radiokingston.org/en/broadcast/jimmy-buff-loves-you/episodes/mondays-with-the-mayor-19
Radio Kingston - O+ Radio Hour
https://radiokingston.org/en/broadcast/o-positive-radio-hour/episodes/24-hour-drones-sarah-van-buren-matthew-cullen-lisa-b-kelley