Oliveros, Pauline

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OLIVEROS, Pauline

OLIVEROS, Pauline (b. 30 May 1932), composer, musician.

Pauline Oliveros is an out lesbian and avant-garde U.S. composer. She uses her musical compositions to challenge the prevailing stereotypes of sexuality that support the belief that only men can make music.

Born in Houston, Texas, into a musical family, Oliveros and her older brother grew up with two strong role models of women in music. Her father, John B. Oliveros Jr., abandoned the family in 1941. To make ends meet, Oliveros's mother and her maternal grandmother gave piano lessons. Her mother, Edith Oliveros Gutierrez, later became a composer of some note.

In light of her family background, it is not surprising that Oliveros displayed an early interest in music. She spent her childhood years mastering piano, French horn, and the accordion. The last instrument became Oliveros's lifelong passion, and it introduced her to a man who helped to shape her pioneering compositions.

Oliveros's accordion teacher taught the budding musician to listen to combination tones, the added sounds that are sometimes heard when two or more tones are played together. Both combination tones and the very act of listening later served as important elements of Oliveros's musical pioneering.

Oliveros's interest in the concept of deep listening, the practice of hearing everything possible as well as the sounds of music, grew out of a childhood experience.

In the 1940s, the teenage Oliveros played accordion in a polka band to earn extra income. One day, the group attempted to play German polkas in a Polish hall. Unfortunately for the band, the German invasion of Poland during World War II did not make German music a particularly popular choice among the Poles, and an angry audience forced the musicians to abandon the stage. The experience alerted Oliveros to the many ways in which music can affect people.

Determined to make a career as a musician, Oliveros entered the University of Houston as an accordion major in 1949. She became interested in composition and, dissatisfied with the conservative approach at Houston, decided to leave the university in 1952 for a more innovative program. Packing her accordion, Oliveros headed to San Francisco. From 1952 to 1960, she supported herself there as a composer and performer. In 1957, San Francisco State College awarded Oliveros a B.A in composition studies, an unusual achievement for a woman.

Few women composers existed in the 1950s and 1960s, making Oliveros acutely aware of sex-based discrimination within the field. Such prejudice limited her career trajectory and led her to design compositions that act as feminist statements about artistic freedom and self-expression. She subsequently listed the advancement of women in music alongside composition as her chief areas of professional focus.

In 1958, Oliveros began experimenting with digital delay and the expanded accordion, part of a form of music known as electronic music that subsequently became commonplace in academic and industrial circles. In the late 1960s, the faculty of the Music Department at the University of California at San Diego decided to establish a graduate course in electronic music, and Oliveros was one of the few people on the West Coast qualified to teach it. In 1967 she joined the department as a non-tenure-track lecturer. Her credentials included service at the San Francisco Tape Music Center as cofounder and codirector from 1961 to 1966 and work at the Mills College Tape Music Center in Oakland as inaugural director in 1966 and 1967. She eventually won tenure at San Diego but resigned her professorship in 1981. Exhausted by dealing with the politics of academia and frustrated by the academic preference for baroque and classical music, she decided to resume freelance composing and performing.

Of the more than one hundred diverse compositions Oliveros has produced, the most important include To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation (1970) and Sonic Meditations (1971). The first piece is one of the earliest attempts to relate music to feminism. Oliveros came out publicly as a lesbian upon releasing Sonic, a collection of twenty-five short guides for improvisation that require no formal musical training to perform. Like Sonic, many of Oliveros's works are developed collaboratively with lesbian and bisexual women artists. Her musical recordings include The Roots of the Moment (1988), Deep Listening (1989), and Crone Music (1989).

In 1985, Oliveros established in Kingston, New York, the Pauline Oliveros Foundation for research in art and technology. She remained with this organization while frequently accepting academic appointments as a composer in residence and visiting professor.