Pauline Oliveros

“In a hundred years there may be no clear distinction between humans and computers,” speculates Ray Kurzweil in his 1998 book “The Age Of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence.” “There will be enormous augmentation of human perceptual and cognitive abilities through neural implant technology. Humans who do not use such implants [will be] unable to participate in meaningful dialogue with those who do - knowledge [will be] understood instantaneously through assimilated knowledge protocols.”

The year after Kurzweil published this seminal text, Pauline Oliveros — the pioneering accordionist, composer, and key thinker about the relationship between humans and technology since at least the 1950s — reflected upon the implications of Kurzweil’s predictions for the future of music. “It's already evident that computers and human intelligence are merging. What would I want on a ‘musician chip’ if I were to receive the benefit of neural implant technology?” she asked in her keynote address at the 1999 Improvisation Across Borders conference. “What kind of a 21st century musician could I be? Humans, with the aid of technology, already see and hear far beyond the capability of the unaided senses…what would happen if a new musician chip were implanted in a human or machine?”

Pauline, whom I had the honor of working with on the music for several of my films (including "The Reach Of Resonance" and “Echoes of the Invisible”), was uniquely situated to address these questions. Having been a trailblazing explorer of the possibilities of technology since her work with wire recorders in the 1940s, and an early influence on the development of both electronic music and “free improvisation,” Pauline lived through nearly a century of profound technological changes, working tirelessly to repurpose them into connective tools that cultivate empathy.

Her role developing the artistic potential of electronic equipment from military surplus, science labs, and telephone companies in the 1960s, paved the way for the gradual accessibility of its hardware for public use, the merging of high-tech culture with the counterculture, and the increasing popularization of electronic music. In the process, Pauline became a driving force in the cultural paradigm shifts that transformed widespread perceptions of technology as a dehumanizing force serving Cold War technocracy into the optimistic zeitgeist of the early internet and personal computer revolutions (which tended to see technology as a tool of personal liberation, interconnectivity, and even spiritual communion). Long before the internet, Pauline pioneered ways to create long-distance “video calls” allowing musicians around the world to improvise together simultaneously. She developed software for children living with severe conditions that leave them physically immobile, enabling them to compose and perform music through subtle movements of their eyes. Pauline’s lifelong investigations into the nature of consciousness through music, and the transformative impact of listening on both individuals and societies, inspired several generations to cultivate a deeper understanding of how music connects us by transporting us beyond the limitations our own senses.

“All ranges would be increased,” Pauline speculated about the possibilities of a musician chip. “Processing would be possible beyond known present human capabilities. What could be heard? Could a new musical paradigm include a new spatial domain…the ability to detect locations from light years away - defining new interdimensional spatiality? What would a spatial melody sound like - a pitch beginning on Saturn moving to Aldeberon to Sirius to Earth? Space related frequency and amplitude - multidimensional melody - color / space / sound melody. Who would be playing this tune? Who would be listening and where? Melody across space stretched out and also happening everywhere simultaneously.”

Pauline had already devised a way to bounce her music off the surface of the moon during a concert in the 1980s, so that the sound wave would be reflected back into the concert hall after a slight delay, warped by the topography of the moon’s surface. Effectively, she had created a delay pedal of literally cosmic proportions that simultaneously generated a sonic map of the moon’s terrain, just as bats use echolocation to perceive the surroundings they would otherwise be blind to. Pauline’s exploration of the acoustics of increasingly vast spaces — remote caves, cisterns, and inter-planetary expanses — helped pave the way for entirely new approaches to music, which finds its echo in the work of another great musical maverick: Maryanne Amacher.

Amacher’s music was often composed specifically for massive spaces that listeners walk through, such as the six areas of the 13th century Austrian monastery known as the Kunsthalle-Krems Minoritenkirche (built during the lifetime of St. Francis of Assisi). She essentially transformed buildings into giant musical instruments, natural loudspeakers amplifying their own underlying structural design as her music travels through its walls, rooms, and corridors. Amacher referred to this as “structure-borne” music as opposed to “airborne” music, in which foyers and floors begin “producing sound which is felt throughout the body as well as heard.”

Maryanne Amacher Transformed A 13th Century Minorite Monastery Into A Giant Musical Instrument (Krems, Austria)

Some Of The Underground Particle Observatories Which Inspired Maryanne Amacher's "Structure-Borne" Compositions

Many of her “structure-borne” compositions were inspired by the spectacular architecture of underground observatories dedicated to subatomic particle research, several of which are of explored in “Echoes of the Invisible” (including those pictured above from Japan, China and Canada). After stumbling on a Reuters article titled “Remnants of Space Dust to Unlock Mexican Pyramid Secrets,” Amacher was granted permission to enter the clover-shaped Cave under the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacán, a gateway to the spiritual world called Xibalba by the Maya, where she devised ways to transform the walls, hardened lava and the obsidian stone structure of the Cave itself into a musical instrument. As an additional accompaniment, she tuned incoming showers of cosmic debris (known as cosmic ray muons), which physicists and archaeologists were using the Cave to detect, into an audible human range. She later projected them together as an immersive three-dimensional sound installation in the large outdoor plaza of the Palacio de las Bellas Artes in Mexico City, enabling listeners to experience within their bodies an aural map of an ancient underground architecture and the cosmic contents it enables us to perceive.

Maryanne Amacher Made Music From Cosmic Debris Entering The Cave Under The Pyramid of the Sun (Teotihuacán), Later Projected In The Palacio de las Bellas Artes Plaza (Mexico City)

Amacher was also interested in making the inner architecture of the human body audible. When scientists discovered that the human ear doesn’t just take in sound, but also emits a musical tone (often outside the range of human hearing), Amacher found a way to compose music that makes each listener’s “ear music” audible as part of the performance. She describes the effect this way: “In concert my audiences discover music streaming out from their head, popping out of their ears, growing inside of them and growing out of them, meeting and converging with the tones in the room. They discover they are producing a tonal dimension of the music which interacts melodically, rhythmically, and spatially.” Not content to stop there, Amacher went on to research methods to hear the tones that emerge from the interaction of neural signals in the brain.

Pauline Oliveros In Kingston, New York (Photos: Steve Elkins)

“There's a simple statement: ‘Observe your breath,’” Pauline told me during our first interview. “You're breathing all the time, but when do you notice your breathing? We learn from theoretical physics that whatever is being observed, there's an interaction at the subatomic level. I was interested in the idea that as an observer you're actually interacting. And so if you observe your breath and you're not using your will to change your breath, your breath WILL change. And you can observe it changing. But as you observe it, you are changing it. Nobody picks up on that immediately necessarily. And when you do that with a couple hundred people, it starts to sound like a bunch of airplanes. So that's why I call it ‘Teach Yourself To Fly.’”

The crucial factor that facilitates change is the act of listening. Pauline was always quick to point out the difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is involuntary. It’s what your ear is doing all the time, taking in sound constantly even when you’re asleep. Listening, on the other hand, is the quality of your attention to what you’re hearing, “and it is not well understood,” she added. This led Pauline to develop an entire body of work she called Sonic Meditations, starting in the late ‘60s, of which “Teach Yourself To Fly” was the first. “I was exploring consciousness,” Pauline later wrote, “a word that for years was not admissible in the scientific community. Consciousness had no location, could not be measured, and was considered an epiphenomenon. Now consciousness is a crucial part of scientific study. When I was beginning my study of consciousness in relation to music in 1970, I was looking for scientific evidence of various states of consciousness…which paralleled my work with Sonic Meditation.”

“Each Sonic Meditation has a different perspective as far as how you use your attention,” Pauline elaborated as we walked back to her home. Indeed, Pauline’s fascination with this aspect of music inspired several large scale collaborations with her fellow creatives at the San Francisco Tape Music Center — one of the first electronic music studios in the United States — including “City Scale” (1963). In this piece, all the framework in which we normally experience music was removed (sitting in a concert hall, for example, with a clear demarcation between the musicians and the audience). Instead, the entire city of San Francisco became the “stage” for a score that was essentially a blueprint for a journey across it, including the tempo at which the audience should move through certain areas. Along the way, a series of planned and unplanned events require each participant to develop a heightened sense of their own evolving perceptions of their environment, including what was “real” or part of the piece, blurring the boundary between what we perceive as “music” and the rhythms and melodies of the world.

Score For "City Scale" (Fragment 1)

Among the planned parts of the experience were an encounter with a trombone player (Stuart Dempster) in the Broadway Tunnel, a woman in a bathrobe singing Debussy in a storefront window, a surprise “car ballet” in North Beach involving the sudden emergence of cars with colored gels over their headlights synchronizing their movements, people visibly undressing in apartment windows, cars breaking down in the streets while couples argue loudly in them, a “book returning ceremony” at City Lights, and projections of liquid light shows suddenly appearing on the Wells Fargo building (performed by Tony Martin, who later went on to create the same spectacles as concert backdrops for The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane).

Among the unplanned events, Ramon Sender (one of the creators of City Scale) recalls: “The arrival of the audience in two trucks at a small park perched high on a hill overlooking the Mission coincided with [an unplanned] collision between two teenage gangs in the park. I had arrived early to inflate four seventeen foot weather balloons, and noticed the kids collecting. Just as the two groups started toward each other, our trucks full of excited participants roared up. Sixty people started running across the park toward the balloons, and the teenagers scattered to the periphery. I don’t know what went through their minds in the minutes that followed, as adults chased balloons and each other through the park.”

Score For "City Scale" (Fragment 2)

In this piece, as with others, the audience is brought face to face with changes in perception that accompany new modes of attention, which transforms their relationship to their surroundings. It could be thought of as an experimental test of John Cage's claim that "(music [imaginary separation of hearing from the other senses] does not exist)." By listening, we perceive the interconnectedness of phenomena that we normally compartmentalize, and recognize ourselves as participants in the evolution of our environment.

“I’ve written many more pieces that approach the use of listening and attention as the primary guiding force of the piece,” Pauline explained to me. “I sometimes describe it this way: Deep Listening involves going below the surface of what is heard and also expanding to the whole field of sound whatever one’s usual focus might be. It breaks up habitual patterns and cycles of thought by opening ourselves up to something we never noticed or focused on before. Such forms of listening are essential to the process of unlocking layer after layer of imagination, meaning and memory down to the cellular level of human experience.”

For Pauline, as for many thinkers ranging from Plato to the 18th century mathematician Jean-Baptiste le Rond d'Alembert, this had direct political implications. As d'Alembert once wrote, "Freedom in music implies freedom to feel, freedom to feel implies freedom to think, freedom to think implies freedom to act...If one wants to protect the state, it is important to keep music from changing."

Former Camps, Underground Tunnels, And A Clandestine Radio Station Used By Guerrillas In El Salvador (Photos: Steve Elkins)

This was certainly on my mind while making my first feature “The Reach Of Resonance," for which I had been filming Pauline. One scene explores Bob Ostertag’s musical composition “Sooner Or Later,” which is sculpted entirely from three sounds: a boy crying at his father’s funeral (who’d been killed in El Salvador’s guerrilla war), a shovel digging the hole in the ground where his father was to be buried, and a fly buzzing around the body. Bob’s capacity for deep, sensitive listening enabled him to perceive music precisely where others may never have, opening the door for new possibilities of historical memory and understanding.

In his own words: "The choice of sound source comes from my experiences during the 1980s, most of which I spent working in or around El Salvador. During that time I saw a lot of death. And in that culture, which is both Catholic and highly politicized, death gets surrounded with all kinds of trappings that are intended to make it heroic and purposeful. Death is explained as God's will, or as irrelevant since the dead 'live on in struggle.’ But most of the 70,000 who died were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. They didn't want to die. There was no plan, no glory. Of course, there are many Salvadorans who did die heroically fighting a brutal regime against overwhelming odds. But even for the heroes, there is a starker, more immediate side to their death. Sooner or Later is about that side. There is a boy and his father is dead. And no angels sang and no one was better because of it and all that is left is this kid and the shovel digging the hole in the ground and the fly. If we want to find beauty here, we must find it in what is really there: the boy, the shovel, the fly. If we look closely, despite the unbearable sadness, we will discover it.”

Pauline Oliveros Descending Into The Two Million Gallon Underground Dan Harpole Cistern (Port Townsend, Washington)

Reynols (Argentina), Featuring Miguel Tomasín Who Has Down Syndrome

This practice is poignantly embodied by one of Pauline’s frequent collaborators from Argentina, the utterly un-categorizable band known as Reynols. Their drummer and core leader Miguel Tomasín has Down’s Syndrome. His music often contains lyrics in a language he’s invented, which emanates from an alternate dimension he calls “Minecxio.” His bandmates Anla Courtis and Roberto Conlazo consider him to be their teacher, and Miguel’s unique way of listening to the world has led to countless otherworldly projects, including a symphony for 10,000 chickens, street gigs with guitars plugged into pumpkins, an album of music made from the sound of blank tapes, and concerts for dry ice and plants. They often perform with musical instruments they've invented, physical objects inspired by Miguel's mysterious sayings, such as: "We're more famous than a frozen glass of wool." One of Reynols’ spray painted CDs comes with a bag of sand, so that if you buy thousands of them, you can create a beach in your own home.

“Not all parents understand people with disabilities,” Courtis told me during a September 2020 interview. “Sometimes they need a context to realize they still have a lot to give to society. They don’t have many places where people treat them as having high value. We are trying to do that. They are connected to some kind of knowledge and vibration that in the modern world is somehow forgotten or not connected. Something that you find more often in musical traditions connected with a spiritual heritage, like native ethnic groups in South America and the United States as well. They make you change to understand them. So the effort is an important one to make.”

Pauline Oliveros And Reynols

Before forming Reynols, Miguel had first introduced himself to his future bandmates as a “famous drummer.” By taking Miguel seriously on his own terms, and allowing him to be their guide, these words turned out to be prophetic: in 1996, Pauline had begun improvising live with musicians over the internet, and she invited Miguel Tomasín and Reynols to perform with her in a “telematic” concert between New York and Buenos Aires. It was considered the first internet concert ever in Argentina. In 1998, Reynols became the first band ever in Argentina to have a person with Down Syndrome playing music on a TV show. Two years later, Pauline invited Reynols to perform in her Lunar Opera at the prestigious Lincoln Center. They began appearing in magazines alongside Britney Spears. Sonic Youth came to Argentina scouring record shops for their albums. Artists from around the globe began seeking out collaborations with Miguel, such as Acid Mothers Temple. Miguel inspired a rival band called "No Reynols", who likewise have a drummer with Down Syndrome (they recorded a split album together).

These experiences with Miguel have encouraged Courtis and Conlazo to develop workshops with other "special needs" creatives around the world. Pauline invited Reynols to Kingston, where they held music workshops for the local disabled and children at a nearby orphanage. I asked them more about this during our September 2020 interview.

Paulo Freire, Brazilian Philosopher of Education

ELKINS: Are you familiar with Paulo Freire?

COURTIS: Yes, the philosopher of eduction.

ELKINS: Exactly, he worked to revolutionize education for the illiterate poor in Brazil before he was exiled by the government for his ideas. One of which is to completely question the idea that education is something that only teachers do, and students just receive, as if they are empty vessels we need to fill. Freire referred to this as the “banking model of education.” He believed that students are teachers as well, and that “school” should be a place where both teachers and students mutually learn from each other. Because we all have valuable insights and perspectives to teach, regardless of age, class, income, or cognitive abilities. Is there a specific method you've developed for working with musicians who have special needs?

COURTIS: There’s no one way to do it. It’s all about finding the right connection with the individuals and the group. We once created an Orchestra For Invisible Instruments. But we use many things Pauline taught us. It's as if Pauline helped us remember something we already knew, but were not remembering at the time: like awakening forgotten memories from somewhere.

ELKINS: My mother used to teach special education for people with profound physical and mental challenges before I was born. One of her students was a boy with no arms who wanted so badly to play the drums, that he figured out how to work with his stubs and taught himself. Every year, he performed the drum parts of “Little Drummer Boy” at the school Christmas concert, and there was never a dry eye in the house. His memory inspired my mother to encourage me to begin playing drums when I was four years old. I also think of the deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who challenged conventional notions of what it means to be hearing impaired when she discovered that she could hear music more clearly only after taking her hearing aids out, because she could "hear" music more clearly through her body than her ears. To me, both of them are great teachers, and extraordinary embodiments of Joseph Campbell’s claim that "Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when YOU are the answer.”

“I think that culture is created by how you listen,” Pauline once told me. “That’s how culture comes about. If you think about the court of Louis the IVth in France, there was a great interest in synchronization of movements and sounds at that time. That's when the ballet came into being. The court of ballet, precision movements, moving together precisely, the orchestra playing together precisely. I mean, you should look into that. Because that is a military concept. And it's a controlling kind of concept. Because if you can get people to march together, and move together, and do precise things together, then you have control over the field of people.”

“In 1970 when I began to create my Sonic Meditations,” Pauline wrote in 2007, “my colleagues were very puzzled by what I was doing, because I had been brought to UCSD in 1967 to start the graduate program in electronic music, which I did. By 1970 though, I was beginning to change my ways of listening and responding. I was reacting, in a way, to the death of a student who immolated himself on the plaza at UCSD in a Vietnam War protest.

Those were very different times. So I began to center myself with the work I was doing with sonic meditation, feeling that people needed connections, interconnections, rather than separation in order to play together well for one thing (as musicians), but also to be together well as human beings on a planet that is shared by all. I could understand at that point whether people were listening inclusively or exclusively. Focusing hard on something sometimes makes you lose track of where you are because you are so focused. This experience happens often. And I am sure everyone has experienced someone not listening to them. I began to understand that many people felt that they were not being heard (something especially true today, both locally and globally). I recognized that being heard is a step toward being understood. Being understood is a step toward being healed. Understanding is a step toward building community.

I am trying to facilitate inward experience because people have to feel in their bodies what they have to do in order to create change. I don’t think one can create change just with words. One has to have a full body response that has total presence and impact.”

Which brings us back to Pauline's clarion call that “we need to know what constitutes a musician," in the face of our increasing entanglement with technology. While for some, the function and value of music will only be measured by the distance between the stage and the ground, Pauline’s legacy reminds us that the stage ought to be removed from any concept of what it means to be a musician. "Now for what I would want on my Musician Chip," Pauline tells us, "what skills should the 21st Century musician have? What could she know? On my musician chip I would like:

-The ability to perceive and comprehend the spiritual connection and interdependence of all beings and all creation as the basis and privilege of music making.

-The ability to create community and healing through music making.

-The ability to sound and perceive the far reaches of the universe much as whales sound and perceive the vastness of the oceans.”

Nahuatl Día de los Muertos (Mexico)

With this in mind, it seemed only fitting to use an excerpt from Pauline’s "Ghostdance" in “Echoes of the Invisible” during a scene about astronomers in Chile struggling to perceive light from nearly the beginning of time. The music — inspired in part by Día de los Muertos and the ceremonies honoring the dead by Nahuatl-speaking families of Chalco — is described as follows: “The theme of Ghostdance centers on our relationship to the spirit world - the voices and stories of our ancestors, both recent and ancient. The world of daylight and the senses confronts the realm of memory, dream and death.”

[Ghostdance can be heard here: https://paulineoliveros1.bandcamp.com/album/ghostdance]

In yet another scene of the film exploring the depths of time and space, we follow artist Rachel Sussman on her quest to find and photograph the world’s oldest living things. Here I chose to incorporate an excerpt from "The Roots Of The Moment", a piece of music made from Pauline LISTENING through layers of time to underscore Rachel's journey LOOKING through layers of time. Pauline recorded "The Roots Of The Moment" solo in Switzerland with a live processing system she developed for her accordion which she describes as a “time machine.” The system echoes her own playing back to her at unexpected intervals, but at different speeds and pitches, as if she were improvising with a warped version of herself. “The notion of a time machine is not unlike canonical forms,” Pauline says, “such as the inventions and fugues of J.S. Bach and the repetitions of motives and sequences in the classical forms of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven…present / past / future is occurring simultaneously with transformations. What I play in the present comes back in the future while I am still playing, is transformed and becomes a part of the past. This situation keeps you busy listening.”

“The musical heroine of the new millennium must discover her own inner voice and seek out her own path in music,” Pauline told an audience in Cologne in 1998. “She must avoid participating in the competitive and cutthroat careerism that often goes with her field. She must answer the call of the lost music of women across the ages. Out of the united inner voices of many women will come the music of the millennium - the music that we need to find balance and harmonious relationships in our society. To achieve balance and harmony, it will be necessary to gather together, learn and promote high-level teamwork and strategy, network with each other, support each other and move toward healing the separation that so blatantly continues to exist - the separation of women from each other, from men and from the creative process and power of music. If you are a composer, give priority to community building over career building.”

I had just returned from filming “Echoes of the Invisible” in the Indian Himalayas when I learned of Pauline’s passing in fall 2016. Anyone who has seen the film will recognize in her awe-inspiring life a deep parallel engagement with its themes. I hope my use of her music and this humble memoir will honor her legacy.

A Sample Of Pauline Oliveros Scores

For more on the music of ECHOES OF THE INVISIBLE: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/On-Making-ECHOES-OF-THE-INVISIBLE/The-Music/