Underground Sound. Pauline Oliveros. Deep Listening_Lear
For what is labeled as an unknown genre by I-tunes, the work Deep Learning, Lear by Pauline Oliveros is more familiar than it is defined here. Sight-specific might be a better description.
In Oliveros Lear, there are instruments: an accordion, a horn—a French horn possibly, or a trombone and a didgeridoo. There are other soundscapes too. When I listen to this piece, I immediately visualize space and breathing. I even associate personal experiences to the first time actually being aware of those instruments, as they do not have the familiar everydayness of a guitar, piano or drum. I hear the apparati and I am transferred to another place and time: accordion, Europe 1930s – 1950s; the horn, my sister practicing her French horn in the middle of a cow field because it was loud; the didgeridoo – a song-line partner trip. The instruments are also imperceptible through intensified methods of recording and playback. Through the electronification the music makes a sinuous path: strides give way to sultry interludes and epic singing winds of the frontier. The title reminds us also of Shakespeare’s work about among other things family, trust and endurance.
The sonic experience of Lear, made in 1988/89 integrates the human artistry of performing with the instruments, electronic technology, and space and place as sound changer all together to create something. You might think well, isn’t that what the 1969 Muscle-Shoals Sound Studio was also about: recorded sound which had a unique sound due to its space and walls? Although the Alabama building was a former caretaker’s coffin showroom, IT was not 14 feet underground. The Dan Harpole cistern in Port Townsend, Washington state IS is deep and underground and THIS is the PLACE where Lear was recorded and Deep Listening was officially inaugurated. A hollow holobiome is present with water, columns and helps form impressive soundwaves. By calling her compositions here “Deep Listening” Oliveros reflects that the music could not be made otherwise, but she begins to connect this extraordinary way of making music as a theme for life.
On the Pauline Oliveros Trust website introduction we get an understanding why this term was so important for her to use and teach: “She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way, to everything possible, to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds.”[i] This reveals also why her work was so influential to the many avant-garde artists that came after her, such as Steve Reich and David Rothenberg who embrace blending recording, feedback, playback into their own compositions or performances
Some say this work is “meditation” music. Nothing against that term. Oliveros has been known to describe her music this way, but Oliveros compositions, such as Lear, embody many more layers and modulations of objects and reflected spaces than a generic mind-fullness training.
We could call her genre mixed-media installation, after all she did make a “Deep Listening Room” at the Whitney Biennale in 2014. She remained innovative until her later years, ever more devising the space and room for her works, making them original works of performative art, like as in Lear, which allowed for improvisation. Through her taping, digital processing and use of the elements in a room, be it echoes, people’s movement or speech, she created what she called an ”Expanded Instrument System”. A constant flux of past and present loops or something of time-fullness.[ii]
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