Pauline Oliveiros – “Lear”: Now this is epic

 

This piece of music is my favorite encounter with avant-garde music so far. This is probably due to the fact that it featured only pleasant sounds without any crackling, screeching, shouting, etc. The composition of sounds is harmonic and so listening through the 25 minutes did not feel exhausting at all.

The exposition is very slow but steady. Every sound builds up noticeably slowly and besides the calm character they evoke some tension in my thoughts due to my association with something absolutely overwhelming in a movie. My imagination shows me a picture of a megastructure in space which slowly builds up as the camera zooms out making the observer feel smaller with every frame. It is like a scene from a Star Wars movie with these huge Star Destroyers (the big triangular-shaped spaceships for anyone who has not seen any of the movies) slowly floating across the screen without fitting in as a whole until the first cut occurs. “Lear” transports sublime imagery through the composition of sounds giving me as listener a sense of spatial perception besides the listening experience.

After 12 minutes, about half way through, the calming overall sound changes. The whole composition becomes louder while the vibrating sounds in the background keep the imagery alive. At this point, I felt the music building up excitement which I was able to feel with my whole body. I got goose bumps and was even more intrigued in what is going to happen next. I liked the journey and the image in my mind so far and would have been absolutely satisfied if it stayed like that for another 12 minutes, but Oliveiros took it a step further. The megastructure lost its sublime position and something even larger took over, in my mind a whole planet under the Star Destroyer was just like the already overwhelming sounds were pushed aside.

I wanted to know how to grasp that new overwhelming image and Oliveiros delivered: A didgeridoo is pretty rare in Western music but she was able to include it in a way that the level of imagery was raised once again in the last few minutes. I felt like watching the whole galaxy spin around its axis. The low-pitched vibrating sounds create these new level and apparently the didgeridoo is the instrument of choice if one wants to make the music send mind and body on a journey.