Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening. – Pauline Oliveros

Thanks to Pauline Oliveros and the practice of Deep Listening, I finally know what harmony is… It is the joy of making music. – John Cage (1989)

Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) was an American composer, accordionist, humanitarian, and one of the most significant figures in the history of experimental and electroacoustic music since the 1950s. In her life and work, she sought to refine her sensitivity, as well as that of others, to all the nuances of the world of sound.

As a pioneer of electronic music, she was one of the founders of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, where she also served as its director. She participated in the premiere of Terry Riley’s composition In C alongside Steve Reich and others, and composed one of her most famous early works, Bye Bye Butterfly (1965). From the 1970s onward, she devoted herself to composing sonic meditations and text scores.

In 1989, she recorded an album with Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis in an underground cistern (Fort Worden, Washington) with a 45-second reverberation time. The album was aptly titled Deep Listening, which soon became the name of the personal and group meditative and improvisational practice Oliveros had been developing since the 1970s.

Musicologist and sound artist Nina Jukić has dedicated the past few years to studying the practice of Deep Listening, completing the certification program offered by the Center for Deep Listening (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York). In her lecture, she will present the life and work of Pauline Oliveros, highlighting her visionary ideas on the impact of technological development on music (extending to the use of artificial intelligence), her feminist and humanistic values, and, most importantly, her life philosophy embodied in Deep Listening.

The session will include listening to some of Oliveros’ most important compositions in full, as well as performing her text scores with audience participation.