Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California Pauline Oliveros IMPROVISATION, DEEP LISTENING AND FLUMMOXING THE HIERACHY Interviews conducted by Caroline Crawford in 2000 Copyright © 2006 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ********************************* All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Pauline Oliveros, dated October 26, 2000. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Pauline Oliveros, “Improvisation, Deep Listening and Flummoxing The Hierarchy” conducted by Caroline Crawford, 2000, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2006. Copy no. ___ Pauline Oliveros in her faculty office at Mills College, 2002 Photo by Caroline Crawford v TABLE OF CONTENTS--PAULINE OLIVEROS: IMPROVISATION, DEEP LISTENING AND FLUMMOXING THE HIERACHY TABLE OF CONTENTS v PREFACE vii BIOGRAPHIES viii Date of interview 1: October 26, 2000 [Tape 1] I Early Years: 1932-1961 1 Deep Listening: A Childhood in Houston, Texas Parents and Grandparents The Accordion and School Bands II Coming to California, The 1960s and the San Francisco Tape Music Center 7 Founding the Tape Music Center: Morton Subotnick, Loren Rush and Ramon Sender Equipping the Tape Music Center Thoughts about Improvisation and the Critics The Buchla Synthesizer Significant Collaborations and Community Support Moving the Tape Music Center and Operating at Mills College [Tape 2] III Teaching and Composing at UC San Diego, 1967-1981 19 A Sixties Environment for Music Setting up an Electronic Music Program Composing in the Native American Community Women and Technophobia The Lack of Diversity in Academia Thoughts about Teaching A 1965 Tape Music Center Tour vi Date of interview 2: November 10, 2000 [Tape 3] IV Compositions, Connections and Collaborations 27 The Poetry Center at San Francisco State: Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer About Composing, Improvisation and Jazz Collaborating with John Cage and Others Music and Patriarchy: The SCUM Manifesto The Expanded Instrument System and The Deep Listening Band Nanotechnology and the Human Brain The Climate for New Music at the Turn of the Century A Heart Chant for September 11 and Other New Works vii PREFACE The American Composers series of oral histories, a project of the Regional Oral History Office, was initiated in 1998 to document the lives and careers of a number of contemporary composers with significant California connections, the composers chosen to represent a cross-section of musical philosophies, cultural backgrounds and education. The twentieth century in this country produced an extraordinary disparity of musical styles and languages, and with those controversy and even alienation between composers and audiences, as composers sought to find a path between contemporary and traditional musical languages: serialism, minimalism, neoclassicism, and back to some extent to neo-romanticism in the last decades. The battle of styles was perhaps inevitable, as well as the reverse pendulum swing that has followed, but as the New York Times stated in a recent article, “the polemics on both sides were dismaying.” The composers were selected with the help of University of California faculty and musicians from the greater community and asked to discuss their musical philosophies, the development of their musical language, their processes of composing, ideas about the nineteenth-century European heritage, and experiences studying with such signal teachers as Nadia Boulanger, Roger Sessions, Arnold Schoenberg, Darius Milhaud, Luigi Dallapiccola and others; university associations (Andrew Imbrie) or orchestral ones (David Sheinfeld); and forays into fields as different as jazz (Dave Brubeck), electronic music (Pauline Oliveros), and blues (Jimmy McCracklin). Also interviewed as part of this series was David Harrington of Kronos Quartet, which has a remarkable record of commissioning new work over the last three decades. Various library collections served as research resources for the project, among them those of the UC Berkeley and UCLA Music Libraries, The Bancroft Library, and the Yale School of Music Library. Oral history techniques have rarely been applied in the field of music, the study of music having focused until now largely on structural and historical developments in the field. It is hoped that these oral histories, besides being vivid cultural portraits, will promote understanding of the composer's work, the musical climate in the times we live in, the range of choices the composer has, the obstacles he or she faces, and the avenues for writing and exposure. Funding for the American Composers series of oral histories came in the form of a large grant from San Francisco art patroness Phyllis Wattis, to whom the Regional Oral History Office is greatly indebted. Mrs. Wattis has supported several other of the office's projects, including the histories of Kurt Herbert Adler and the San Francisco Opera and Milton Salkind and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to tape record autobiographical interviews with persons who have contributed significantly to California history. The office is headed by Richard Cándida Smith and is under the administrative supervision of The Bancroft Library. Caroline C. Crawford Music Historian December 2005 Regional Oral History Office The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley viii PAULINE OLIVEROS BIOGRAPHY Through Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening I finally know what harmony is. It’s about the pleasure of making music. John Cage, 1989 Composer Pauline Oliveros’s history as a new music pioneer dates to the early 1960s when she and Morton Subotnick and others organized the San Francisco Tape Music Center. She was born in 1932 and raised in a musical family in Houston, Texas, and learned the rudiments of music from her mother and grandmother, who were piano teachers. In her early years she studied French horn with J.M. Brandsetter, violin, and the accordion, her principal instrument. From 1949 to 1952 Oliveros worked with composer Paul Koepke at the University of Houston, and in 1954 with Robert Erickson at San Francisco State College, where she earned a B.A. In 1960 she won the Pacifica Foundation National Prize for her piano sextet. In 1967 she presented a 12-hour marathon of electronic music at the Tape Music Center, and later that year she joined the music faculty of UC San Diego, where she remained until 1981. Since that time she has taught at several colleges and universities, including Oberlin and Mills College, and performed worldwide as a soloist on her just tuned accordion and with the Deep Listening Band. Her Deep Listening seminars are popular all over the world. Works of Oliveros discussed in the oral history are Duo for Accordion and Bandoneon (with possible mynah bird obbligato), Bye Bye Butterfly (for oscillators, amplifiers, and tapes) Theater Piece for Trombone Player, To Valerie Solanis and Marilyn Monroe, in Recognition of Their Desperation, and Crow Two, a ceremonial opera based on native American traditions. Caroline Crawford Biography Caroline Crawford has degrees in linguistics from Stanford University and the University of Geneva and a keyboard degree from the Royal College of Musicians, London. She worked as a copy editor for Saturday Review in 1973, served as staff writer for San Francisco Opera, 1973-1979, and has been the interviewer-editor in music for the Regional Oral History Office since 1986. She writes about music for the Opera Journal and Bay City News and plays piano with Bread and Roses. 1 I EARLY YEARS: 1932-1961 Deep Listening: A Childhood in Houston, Texas Parents and Grandparents The Accordion and School Bands [Interview 1; October 26, 2000] [Begin Tape 1] Crawford: This interview is taking place in Pauline Oliveros’ office at Mills College, where she is teaching this term. I want to start by asking you about what you call deep listening, something central to your work. You said, "From childhood, I have practiced listening." Oliveros: Right. As a child I was fascinated listening to the soundscape which I grew up in. In Houston's lowlands, wetlands, and in my childhood, beginning in 1932, it was still a very, very thick canopy of sound coming from insects and birds and animals and what have you.