The mythos of Pauline Oliveros begins, in many tellings, underground.
In the fall of 1988, the Houston-born composer and accordionist crawled with her friend, composer Stuart Dempster, into a 2-million-gallon cistern below a decommissioned U.S. Army base in Washington state. What was so special about this particular cistern? It had a 45-second reverb time, which meant that it took nearly a minute for sound to fade away. Oliveros and Dempster, along with two other musicians, carried their instruments 14 feet down a manhole to play. The result was the project that was, in many ways, the culmination of her life’s work: “Deep Listening.”
Oliveros was a pioneer of experimental and electronic music, influencing artists like John Cage and Philip Glass. She died on November 24, 2016, but her legacy—something she herself was never especially concerned about—lives on, particularly through the practice she called deep listening. This practice explores the difference between hearing and listening: “learning to expand the perception of sounds to include the whole space-time continuum of sound,” Oliveros said in a 2015 TED Talk.
