1.
When I first met Pauline Oliveros in 1998 over the telephone, she said “Nice to meet you” and then laughed at the strangeness of it. This may have been before anyone first typed and sent the phrase “nice to e-meet you.” I had been contacted by Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo about playing in an ensemble premiering her new piece. They passed her my phone number, and suddenly here was Pauline on the line, at once efficient and precise, notably economical in her choice of words, but also warm and informal (“we’ll all have fun”), and with a voice that steadily rippled into laughter. She apologized that the score for the new piece wasn’t finished but promised that she’d fax it over the moment it was ready.
Several weeks later she called to say hello and that she was looking forward to meeting and was glad that we’d be playing together. She was sorry once again that she didn’t have the completed score. There was at least one more such phone call. We’d provisionally agreed that I’d play harmonium—a bit of a wildcard combination with Pauline’s accordion tuned in just intonation—but without seeing the score I couldn’t know how (or how much) I’d need to prepare for the performance. There was one more phone call from Pauline on the day before I was to leave for Buffalo to let me know that a fax was waiting for me.
The faxed score was two pages long and had two handwritten mandalas: “Primordial” and “Lift.” At the center of the Primordial mandala was an oval with the word “LISTEN.” Ringing it at regular intervals were eight points or stations, four of which described somatic processes: “nerve firing,” “cell dividing,” blood circulation,” and “muscle contraction/expansion.” Interspersed among these four ordinal points were four points designated with a question mark, and lines with arrows in both directions connecting the eight stations to the center of the mandala. On the second page, the Lift mandala had at its center a treble clef stave with a D4 whole note with fermata; eight points with the legends “pitch deviation,” “anti-gravity,” “timbre whirl,” “particles,” “dynamic transformation,” “black hole,” “harmony perception,” and “waves” were attached to the center by arrows pointing in both directions, as with the other mandala. The figure was encircled by a motto testing one’s ability to identify a beginning and ending: “listening all over to oneself and others everywhere in the whole of the universe all the time.” I packed my suitcase for April in Buffalo, where snow was predicted.
We gathered, quickly set up, and began to play at Hallwalls. Pauline was equipped with her accordion in just intonation. I sat on the ground playing a portable harmonium with both of its rear bellows unclasped so I could pump as slowly as possible while still activating its brass reeds (a harmonium repair expert in the Bronx would later ask me to never play the instrument this way again, given the wear and tear on the reeds). Anne Bourne played cello and sang. Alexandria Gelencser patiently bowed the open strings of an electric cello. Tony Conrad played violin and his own jerry-rigged chain of electronic processing. Scott Olson operated a low-frequency oscillator. And Andrew Deutsch provided additional processing to individual inputs from the ensemble and oversaw the live mix. We didn’t discuss the score or the composition itself apart from Pauline briefly explaining that in the book Awakening to the Zero Point, author Gregg Braden asserts that in 1960 the earth’s resonant frequency measured 7.8Hz, but that this number was predicted to rise to 13Hz by 2010.1 That seemed like a worrying thing—at least that was my takeaway. The shift in the earth’s frequency was represented in the piece by the extremely slow turning of the knob on an analog low-frequency oscillator whose output was raised from 7.8Hz to 13Hz over the course of the forty-five-minute Primordial section. This frequency range falls below that of human hearing, but the oscillator was routed to combine with the output of individual instruments in the ensemble for a subtle tremolo or beating effect whose speed gradually increases over the course of the first section, and held fast at the plateau of its uppermost speed for the Lift section, the final thirty minutes of the piece.
Pauline Oliveros. Courtesy: Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, San Francisco.
If a visitor had wandered into Hallwalls on the first day we played together, it’s not clear whether they could have identified the composer among us, or whether there was a composer, or even a composition. We followed Pauline’s lead in terms of the overall pacing—the macro tempo of our playing—but with little in the way of verbal instruction. The Primordial section came to be characterized by performers spending about as much time playing as silently listening. Rather than recognizable correlations between the sounds we produced and physical processes such as nerves firing or cells dividing, individual players would explore small variations within a particular gesture, technique, or repertoire for a given period of time before returning to the mandala’s central prompt to LISTEN and rest for a similar length of time. Following Pauline’s example, listening felt active and productive; one was equally engaged when silent or when making sounds. When it was time to play again—maybe to camouflage oneself by stealthily merging with something one had been listening closely to, maybe to engage with subtle details in another player’s sounds that would otherwise go unnoticed, maybe to produce a collage effect with a sharply contrasting contribution—all the performers understood that their next gesture should be distinct from their previous one. The result was that even as the patient exploration of certain gestures could seem to take place in slow motion, the listener—which in this case explicitly included the player—might suddenly sense that the material had shifted dramatically. In the Lift section, players took their time alternating between a sustained D and sonic gestures whose prompts were either drawn from physics or from generative descriptions of musical processes (e.g., “timbre whirl,” “pitch deviation,” and so forth). In that second and final section of the piece there was invariably more sound, as well as an unambiguous tonal center that made the lapidary play of the oscillator’s 13Hz tremolo that much more present.
The second day was that of the performance, so we played for perhaps half as long. We had come know one another sufficiently well to perform the piece, and everyone was ready.
Less than thirty minutes before the performance, Pauline gathered us backstage and finally asked, “Does anyone have any questions about the score?” I’m smiling just thinking about it. It was such a funny, quirky gesture, and one that I come back to periodically. We’d spent hours and hours working on the piece without reference to the score. The timing of her question struck me—who had worried unnecessarily about preparation time—as subversive, but subversive of what? To begin with, her nonchalance—I considered whether it was performative, but there was nothing calculated about it—wasn’t about ironizing a composition titled Primordial/Lift. It wasn’t about deflating the piece, because she hadn’t inflated it in the first place. Nor did I find her relation to the score in any way cynical. Pauline wasn’t mocking the general agreement by which she, as composer, produces a score to facilitate a composition and a concert, and completes a transaction that connects commission to premiere. (I’m thinking of Nelson Goodman’s argument in Languages of Art about a musical composition exhibiting compliance between score and performance; Primordial/Lift already operated outside this mode of agreement in that its score couldn’t have been derived from our performance.)2 It felt, rather, like the question had slipped her mind. But if it slipped her mind it was because we had all meditated upon her charming, challenging written instructions and then demonstrated by our playing together that we understood her piece—and that what unfolded over the two days had been acceptable to her. She hadn’t intervened. One ensemble member took up the invitation and asked a question about differentiating between two of the physical processes in the Primordial section. Pauline responded by asking how they had approached these processes as prompts for producing sound. She listened to the musician’s explanation, and then agreed that the solution made sense to her. That was the end of the conversation, or rather we resumed the conversation we had already been having, and shortly thereafter took the stage.
2.
Beyond Pauline’s impeccable sense of timing, what stuck with me about this brief backstage conversation was that although the score to Primordial/Lift offers its performers mental images as prompts—Pauline also referred to them as metaphors—she never insisted that we express any kind of commitment or allegiance to the specific images she had chosen. No one was asked to demonstrate to the ensemble their musical realization of “blood circulation” or “anti-gravity.” No one was asked to explain how they had approached translating verbal prompt to sonic gesture, nor as a group were we expected to reflect upon the theme of translation. No fealty was required beyond what we could demonstrate as musicians. No one was asked to pinpoint or weigh in on whether the prompts resonated faintly or strongly, although I did have the sense that each individual in the ensemble had their own distinct relationship to the score—how could it be otherwise? I imagined that for some the mental images were richly meaningful—objects to meditate upon during the performance—and that for others their primary significance was that they terminated in an action. The composition itself, but also Pauline’s manner of handling the rehearsal period and even of time spent together when we put down our instruments, allowed for a social and musical pluralism that went unremarked upon. Chalk it up to Pauline’s modesty.
I had the opportunity to perform Primordial/Lift twice more with Pauline and an ensemble of her choosing that shared Anne Bourne and Andrew Deutsch with the Buffalo premiere. Both concerts were presented by Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room, and both were in spaces with significantly different acoustics. The first took place in ISSUE’s temporary home at the Old American Can Factory in the Gowanus neighborhood, and the second in its cavernous, reverberant space in the Beaux Arts–style building at 110 Livingston in downtown Brooklyn. The Can Factory location was a long, narrow loft with the dimensions of a shoebox, and the performance of Primordial/Lift was the only concert I can recall out of the dozens that I saw there that rotated the performance space by 90 degrees so that the audience ringed the musicians on three sides, and the implied proscenium was neutralized. The marble-clad 110 Livingston space presented its own challenges regarding low-end feedback, but to no one’s surprise Primordial/Lift proved such a flexible, amenable composition that the ensemble was able not only to adapt to the exigencies of the space, but also to affirmatively incorporate its acoustics into the performance.
Pauline Oliveros. Courtesy: Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, San Francisco.
Once again, in none of the rehearsals for these later presentations of Primordial/Lift did Pauline particularly intervene into individual performer decisions. For the two Brooklyn performances, we had less time to rehearse or play together beforehand than in Buffalo, but some of us had the wind of a previous performance in our sails, and others who were new to the piece had experience working with Pauline. This is not to suggest that she was always so hands-off in coaching performers. I took part in a concert around this time that convened an ensemble to perform five or six pieces of hers with only an afternoon’s rehearsal, and I was fascinated to see Pauline not hesitate to jump in with instructions regarding dynamics, sound production, and especially tempo—perhaps better described as musical rate of change. I was curious to see her express unambiguous preferences about the contributions of individual performers, but also provide more detailed explanations of her beautifully economical scores. Rather than getting lost as we did in playing just prior to the first performance of Primordial/Lift—or maybe this was my own pleasurably oceanic experience—during that rehearsal Pauline was keenly attuned to clock time as it ticked toward the evening’s performance. It was a birthday concert for her, and afterward we sang what we hoped would be the world’s slowest rendition of “Happy Birthday,” each person dragging down the tempo of the whole sing-along until it sounded like a melting cake.
Between the two ISSUE Project Room performances of Primordial/Lift, I saw Pauline at a conference at the University of Toronto marking John Cage’s centennial. Pauline’s keynote address was full of unfamiliar insights and managed the neat trick of being sufficiently aloof from the topic of the conference—John Cage—to illuminate it obliquely, and thus memorably. A concert of Pauline’s music in Toronto that week saw one of her pieces conclude with a slow shade into silence and performer stillness, with the sounds from the stage eventually dipping beneath those of an audience seated in a hundred creaky wooden chairs trying to be as quiet as possible. As we approached the heaviest near-silence—the sonic correlative of darkest-before-dawn—the ding of an iPhone voicemail notification rang out. I didn’t expect the audience to turn into a mob and attack the offender who hadn’t silenced their phone, but I didn’t rule it out. As the audience’s anger rose, suddenly Pauline stood with her phone aloft and with a laugh declared, “It’s me!”
What has surprised me most about Primordial/Lift is the way it has come to resonate unambiguously as a composition. When we first performed it, I naively experienced it more fundamentally as a gently directed group improvisation. I did get lost in it, even while fulfilling a series of musical tasks, exploring variations within a particular gesture before returning to the center of the score’s two mandalas either by listening with renewed focus or by contributing my own timbral stamp to the ensemble’s drone on the pitch D4. I also understood the piece initially as an invitation to expand one’s sense of the categories of composition, improvisation, and score in ways inflected by Pauline’s humor and absence of bombast. The fact that she volunteered to field our questions about the score a mere thirty minutes before the premiere buttressed this line of thinking. And yet, the more we performed the piece, and the more I returned to the score—that two-page fax that arrived at the last moment, whose simplicity becomes lovelier over time—the more coherent I’ve found the overall shape of the piece as well as its component range of techniques. I value it more because of the time that it took to come into focus.
3.
I’ve observed Pauline Oliveros’s working methods from the position of a musician playing in groups she’s convened and directed, albeit with a distinctive range of approaches to coaching performers. Perhaps the more open approach in Primordial/Lift had to do with the fact that she herself performed on the piece, and she was able to guide us with a light touch because of her example as a musician. Although the social and interpersonal experience playing her music was especially thoughtful and invigorating, the concert settings were familiar.
My experience of working with Sonic Meditations, her 1974 collection of text scores, differs considerably from that of performing her music in a concert. In the various teaching and workshop situations where I’ve introduced Sonic Meditations, I often find myself intending to mix it up and sample more broadly from among its short texts, but instead I come back to my favorite: the sixteenth and final one in the series. Here are its instructions in their entirety:
Begin simultaneously with the others. Sing any pitch. The maximum length of the pitch is determined by the breath. Listen to the group. Locate the center of the group sound spectrum. Sing your pitch again and make a tiny adjustment upward or downward, but tuning toward the center of the sound spectrum. Continue to tune slowly, in tiny increments toward the center of the spectrum. Each time sing a long tone with a complete breath until the whole group is singing the same pitch. Continue to drone on that central pitch for about the same length of time it took to reach the unison. Then begin adjusting or tuning away from the center pitch as the original beginning pitch was.
Variation: Follow the same instructions but return to the original beginning pitch.3
Deep Listening retreats organized by Pauline Oliveros at Rose Mountain, June 1991. Photograph: David Felton. Special Collections, F. W. Olin Library, Mills College at Northeastern University. Courtesy of the Pauline Oliveros Trust.
I found myself thinking about “Sonic Meditation XVI” when describing the Lift section of Primordial/Lift, in which the ensemble members alternate between sounding one of the eight prompts that ring the mandala (“particles,” “dynamic transformation,” and so forth) and rejoining the drone at the center of the figure. That periodic return to unison—the droning away on D4 of all players inhabiting the center of the mandala—together with the similarly periodic attainment of escape velocity to freely choose one’s sonic gesture, at times floating by one’s lonesome way out there on the periphery, settles into a heterophonous game of fort-da for the ensemble.
Is unison so easy to discover? In the couple dozen times I’ve introduced and sung “Sonic Meditation XVI” with groups of largely nonprofessional singers—always in a workshop or classroom setting, usually with ten or more participants, and never as part of a concert—the most difficult challenge is the wordless negotiation by which everyone attempts to arrive at singing one and the same pitch. It seems that it shouldn’t be so difficult. What often happens is something like this: Pauline’s score asks that participants begin by singing any pitch of their choosing, but people often first sing a pitch near the upper- or lowermost limit of their range. It feels good to stretch the body with individual tones that last the entirety of a breath, particularly by testing how low or high one can comfortably sing. Starting with a wide pitch compass also relieves some anxiety singers may feel about executing very small pitch adjustments as the group moves toward a unison pitch. The idea of a central pitch—an intuited midpoint between the highest and lowest notes sounded at the beginning of the piece—toward which the group incrementally tunes is a lovely one. But as the sung pitches start to cluster around an imagined central point, the goal of unison can become elusive. Sometimes people arrive at octaves or fifths, feel the strong consonance and understand it as unison, and stay there. Some people adjust their tuning toward the central pitch much more slowly, and before they even arrive at their idea of unison other participants have begun their journey tuning away from the center. The idea of hanging out and singing in unison for approximately the same amount of time that it took to arrive at the central pitch—to be loosely aware of time passing but not get too hung up in the process—itself contributes to the texture of the meditation. Sometimes you sense that people are trying their hardest—the born negotiators in the group, those with a herding instinct—to facilitate everyone’s arrival at the unison. Other folks don’t seem so goal-oriented.
The two variations on the meditation can have distinct unfoldings. The version in which everyone returns to their starting pitch often yields a more conventionally musical result, owing to the palindrome-like itinerary of wending your way back through the same range of pitches and concluding where you began, often with individuals gaining greater confidence to really sing out. It can feel more like a strong ending, a homecoming. The version in which you resume the trajectory of tuning modifications—moving down, moving up—after tarrying for a time in unison (in theory) can have the quality of an experiment, particularly as people travel from one extreme of their vocal range to the other. And as with most group decisions, wordless or not, the concluding portion can have a habit of stretching on, and on, and …
In her introduction to Sonic Meditations, Pauline Oliveros writes that these exercises “are intended for group work over a long period of time with regular meetings,” noting with a puckish, desublimatory afterword, “music is a welcome by-product of this activity.”4 I can attest that a musical result hardly seems to be the purpose of the meditation. Oliveros underscores the healing power of these activities in terms of relaxation and an elevated awareness of one’s surroundings. Pleasure of a musical sort can seem serendipitous, happened upon. As she says in her interview with Robert Ashley in Music with Roots in the Aether, “I haven’t been working with musical ideas for a while. I’ve been working on my mode of consciousness. And the result of the mode is the music.”5
Conceiving of music as a by-product or unintended result can be a fruitful approach to a range of activities: music by other means, music as one outcome among many, music out of the corner of one’s eye. With the Sonic Meditations, it’s helpful not to be too eager for fortuitous beauty, not too preoccupied with fugitive glimmerings. Pauline’s thematizing of modes of attention is valuable in itself, and for me never registers as a boondoggle or workaround by which music remains the goal, whether disavowed or not. Its defamiliarization of the practice of making music—to begin with, by inviting participants who wouldn’t otherwise think of themselves as musicians—is among the most welcome of her gifts.
Musical labor is a category that hardly seems to describe the Sonic Meditations. My perspective owes to the fact that I’ve only ever engaged these pieces in a private setting, without an audience except for the occasional individual who might have happened upon a group of participants, usually gathered in a circle and facing inward. When participants have discussed their experience of the meditation, comments often have to do with the unfamiliar task of negotiating the tuning of the ensemble such that everyone arrives at a unison pitch, no matter how simple the instructions. In the absence of a concert setting, the closest thing to labor one finds in the piece is physical exercise (for many, singing works unfamiliar muscles), building community, and carving out time, however brief, to care for one’s self. It feels more apt to speak of Pauline Oliveros as the author of the Sonic Meditations rather than their composer. I’ve yet to take part in a group discussion that advocated for an audience.
By contrast, every time I’ve played Primordial/Lift it has been with an ensemble comprised of professional musicians, either in a rehearsal or concert setting, and unlike my experience of the Sonic Meditations, I’ve always played Primordial/Lift with Pauline as a performer. Even in my earliest brush with Primordial/Lift, when I had yet to step back and more fully appreciate it as a composition, it never had the whiff of alienated musical labor—musicians doing the work of improvising into existence another’s composition—largely because Pauline’s example as musician was so powerful to experience.
I was recently asked whether I thought that Primordial/Lift could be performed without Pauline, and unquestionably the answer is yes. The score provides future performers everything they need to know. In its economy—so much like Pauline’s habits of speech—it demonstrates that score and composition are distinct entities. The score to Primordial/Lift can be memorized in no time and set aside in order to better inhabit the composition. I don’t doubt that Primordial/Lift will be performed again, and hopefully by some of us who had the good fortune to perform it alongside Pauline. But it’s been easy to put off doing so—her absence will be felt anew.
Gregg Braden, Awakening to Zero Point: The Collection Initiation (Radio Bookstore Press, 1997).
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (1969; Hackett, 1976).
Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Meditations (Smith Publications, 1974), unpaginated.
Oliveros, Sonic Meditations.
Quoted in Robert Ashley, Music with Roots in the Aether: Interviews with Essays about Seven American Composers (MusikTexte, 2000), 129.
