A Sounding Happens: Pauline Oliveros, Expanded Consciousness, and Healing” by Edward Shanken and Yolande Harris Santa Cruz, July 2017
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volume 16 | 2017 Sounds Emergent: Diverse Ecologies Part II Te Journal of Acoustic Ecology “A Sounding Happens: Pauline Oliveros, Expanded Consciousness, and Healing” by Edward Shanken and Yolande Harris Santa Cruz, July 2017 A sounding happens. The sound continues or is followed or joined by another sound. The trajectory of sounding gradually constitutes a long line of soundings that is perceived as a shape or form that is music. Within that trajectory are myriad decisions that are intuited and join to refer back to the initial sounding and forward to the ending sound. – Pauline Oliveros 1 ur essay is written with the deepest (pun intended) respect Te proper relationship of attention and awareness can be for the life and work of Pauline Oliveros. We draw on symbolized by a circle with a dot in the center. –Pauline her performances, recordings and writings, those of her Oliveros 6 Onumerous collaborators and others who write so well about her, It is 1997, I am 21 years old and I am walking alone for four days and on our own experiences. By writing together, by generating a and nights along the Devon coast and Dartmoor, leaving sound dialogue, or, perhaps better, by performing an improvisation around sculptures for an ‘absent public’ with found materials along the Pauline’s infuence “a sounding happens.” Our metalogue of multiple way. As a music student, I am absorbing the American experi- voices, fragments of situations, and historical resonances parallels mental composers and trying to fgure out how my music and art and reveals the subjective, experiential and embodied modes of making relates to the environment. It is the frst day of my journey. knowing and healing that Oliveros’ work ultimately achieves and Crossing a feld with my dog Mungo, we are chased and encircled teaches. As in publications by Oliveros and her collaborator Ione, by a herd of aggressive young female cows. Tis occurs at the height we blend methods of analysis and intuition through diferent modes of the BSE ‘Mad Cow Disease’ epidemic and millions of cattle are of writing.2 Tis format is designed to encourage the reader to allow being slaughtered. I know that people have recently been trampled connections and continuities to emerge. 3 Mirroring the participa- to death by herds like this. Tey come in close and push us with tory role of the audience in many of Oliveros’ compositions, your their heads, rolling their eyes, stamping their feet, pushing Mungo performance as a reader plays an integral role in producing meaning over, cow saliva covering us. My dog is crouching on the ground out of our words. Please listen and sound with us! shaking but I hold him on the leash so that he doesn’t run and get Listening to this space I sound the space. Listening to the trampled when he gets caught at the edge of the feld. I am shouting energy of all who are present I sound this energy. Listening and lunging at the cows, throwing my arms at them, stamping my to my listening and your listening I make music here and feet, swaying around in circles to ward of the cows coming at my now with the assistance of all that there is. I dedicate this back, trying not to be knocked over with the big pack on my back. music to a world where peace is more exciting than war. We are encircled and there is no one around to help. I see a gate at –Pauline Oliveros 4 the edge of the feld, but we are in the middle. I steadily work my way towards it, somehow keeping my feet, dragging Mungo along Our process led us repeatedly to Oliveros’ goal of expanding with me. Nearly there, I see a very large bull appear behind me. consciousness. Our meditations converged on exploring what that We make it to the gate, I throw myself over it, Mungo squeezes actually means and where it may take us in the future. It is no small underneath, we are both lying in a shaking heap, lost but safe from feat to bridge such apparently contradictory worlds as technology death by trampling. and intuition, what we call “techno-intuition”. Allowing rational and supra-rational forms of knowledge to occupy the same space is by “Listen to everything, all the time and remind yourself its very nature open to criticism from one side or the other. Yet, as a when you are not listening.”–Pauline Oliveros7 musician, Oliveros grounds these ideas and apparent contradictions Tis of-quoted imperative statement by Oliveros is actually two in practical work, the practice of making music in the moment and statements in one. Te frst part, “Listen to everything, all the time,” the importance of the body in this process. She writes: instructs us to be constantly attentive to sound, the sounds inside us I consider my task to be to increase my conscious aware- and those outside, the interactions among those sounds, how they ness as much as possible each day of my life and respect afect us and the environment in infnite feedback loops. Although what the body signals to me through sensations and the two parts are joined by the conjunction “and” suggesting “a + feelings just as much as what my verbal mind tells me b,” the second part, “remind yourself when you are not listening,” is through thoughts and intuitions. Synthesis and integration more than additive; it is also contingent. Te second part functions of all of these modes of perception and knowing empowers like a conditional construct in a computer program, e.g., “if not my musical being in the world. –Pauline Oliveros 5 x, then y.” Here the conditional construct takes the logical form, “if not a, then a” or in narrative form, “if you are not listening to Following her lead, we embrace her synthetic and integrated model everything, all the time, then remind yourself to listen to everything, of creating knowledge. Doing so provoked us to seriously investigate all the time.” In other words, it is a recursive loop with a redundant the following topics: altered states of consciousness, telepathy and safeguard designed to lock the practitioner into the desired behavior. telematics, the artist as shaman, healing, and deep listening for Te frst part is itself a mantra: a self-programmed guiding principle environmental transformation. that reminds us to refocus on what is important. Te second part is 4 subterranean constellation Photo by Todd Birdsong. Sounds attack, decay and fold – their latency enveloping and possessing you like a spirit. 5 a meta-mantra; as a reminder to perform the frst mantra, it loops of self, environment, and the relationship between them. To listen us back to it if we should happen to stray. In cybernetic terms, the to everything all the time must incorporate both “focal attention” second part functions as negative feedback that helps us maintain and “global attention” to use her terms and, ideally, one simultane- our mantric self-programming, to regain our own inner balance and ously tunes-in to both. Te performer must listen in a global mode preserve homeostasis. Te meta-mantra implicitly acknowledges in order to respond meaningfully but must shif to focal mode in that the task is highly challenging and perhaps impossible to achieve order to “verify that the response was correct.” Te performer must in the ultimate sense, short of becoming divine. remove intentionality from the equation, for if she is focused on her I am listening again to Oliveros’ most well-known recording, Deep own intentions she will be distracted from listening to everything all Listening (1989), performed with Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis in the time. “Te best state is for the player to have nothing in mind,” a two million gallon underground cistern, precipitating the birth of Oliveros instructs. In improvised music performance, only by listen- Deep Listening as a practice. Listening to the recording takes me ing to everything all of the time—other performers, the audience, into this place deep underground and immerses me in a liquidity of the environment, oneself, and the interactions between them as a sounds let loose by the musicians in collaboration with the cavern- temporal-spatial phenomenon—can one participate in the sort of ous space. Te long forty-fve second reverberation makes these musically meaningful exchange to which Oliveros aspired. To this sounds hang in the space, flling it as if with water, like adding a drop end, she thought that her role as a composer was to create an “atten- of pigment into a bowl of water. Anthropologist Michael Taussig tional strategy” that structured how performers play and develop a illustrates how color is not simply a quantitative characteristic piece as it unfolds through collective improvisation. added to an existing object, but rather a “polymorphous magical Oliveros’ mantra/koan “Listen to everything…” applied not only substance” that has the ability to transform states of consciousness.8 to her composition and performance practice but to her life and Tis sense of color resonates with the sonic palette of Deep Listening: to life in general. As vital as it was to music, she believed that this trombone, accordion, didgeridoo, voice, all sounds of the breath method was equally vital to human interactions and to interactions and air. Te musicians are pushing the air around them, mixing and between humans and non-humans on global and cosmic scales. stirring these polymorphic magical substances. I imagine inhabiting Artist Cory Arcangel, a former Oliveros student at Oberlin College, a three-dimensional liquid space, being free from gravity, in outer- recounted that, space or underwater, and at the same time deeply grounded.