Pauline Oliveros: Ritualized Music, Bodily Immersion, a Queer Woman, and Female Liberation

After listening to the pieces of Alvin Lucier, I feel like my senses and attentiveness towards spatial tonality were sharpened, which is maybe a reason why I felt a certain spatiality to be present in Pauline Oliveros music, too. In the soundtrack “Lear,” vibrating, almost droning sounds, which I could not allocate to the exact respective instruments at first, gradually increase in volume and reverberations. The thus created heavy, ambient tonality allows for a very immersive listening experience, in my opinion. The longer the piece lasted, the more I felt drawn towards it, probably also due to a wave-like melody, that kept interchanging louder, swelling sounds with quieter, background tones, generating the sensual impression of approaching something - with louder sounds the closer one gets.

Therefore, this listening experience felt like it played out more on a bodily level, than on a rational one, with a visceral resonance instead of intentional hearing.

In a way, it also let my inner eye wonder about spatiality and nature, and somehow reminded me of the movie trilogy The Lord of the Rings and the depicted vast prairie in these films. The rhythm had a ritualistic connotation to it, by ongoingly repeating the same tones with gradually increasing volume, but also a meditative element to it, through its wavelike flowing, almost omnipresent sounds. Although deep drone instruments can have an intimidating, frightening effect, here, in the context of an undulating tonal development, they have something intrinsically earthy and trusting about them. To me, they serve as the basis of this musical unfolding, as a rhythmic but gentle foundation. Together with an ethereal-like voice, which becomes more and more present as the song progresses, they produce a peaceful and grounding effect on the listener. At the same time, due to the novel intensifying sounds, they have something alien, otherworldly about them, a kind of sublime emerging. I felt like the song strengthens the awareness of one's surroundings, whether internal or external, and makes one turn inward in a meditative, reflective state. This can be aligned with Pauline Olivero's general influence on avantgarde music, as we’ve learned that she coined the terms "deep listening" and "moment of attentiveness," paving the way for more performative music.

In that way, I can only imagine, how crucial these innovations must have been for US music culture at the time, much like for societal culture, for a queer woman like Oliveros paving the way and challenging a male-centric world of electronic music.

As John Kapusta has argued, Oliveros was not only a highly influential figure in experimental music, but also for the second-wave feminism movement, not by provoking listeners to protest patriarchal and misogynist norms through her pieces, but by connecting people, particularly women, back with their intuitive bodies, their “somas.” “And this transformation, for Oliveros, was liberation” (Kapusta 2021: 4).