• The Fools’s Circle
• “A Woman Sees how the World Goes with no Eyes”
• “Reason in Madness Mixed”
• “This Great Fool’s Stage”
• “Let It Be so”
• “Let Me not Be Mad”
• Lear on the Road

Commissioned by Mabou Mines, the experimental theater group from New York, for their interpretation of “King Lear,” Oliveros’ Crone Music is a subtle and haunting electronic music endeavor. Interfacing an abundance of digital delay processors, reverb effects and foot pedals to bend pitches from piercing to twisted, sonorous tones, with her one-of-a-kind expanded accordion, Oliveros produces rich, eerie textures.

• In Memoriam Mr. Whitney (1991)
• St. George and the Dragon (1991)

Pauline Oliveros is internationally acclaimed as a composer, accordionist, teacher and innovator of the technique called Deep Listening. "Deep Listening" unfolds through the interaction of the performers as they are influenced by special tunings and the space around them.
In 1991, Oliveros was invited by Neely Bruce, director of American Voices, to conduct Deep Listening training sessions with them in the chapel of the Pomfret School in Connec-ticut. This chapel was specially chosen for the sessions because of its rich and reverberant acoustics. After two weekends of workshops, Oliveros and American Voices recorded several Deep Listening/Sonic Meditations in the Chapel.
A special solo performance by Pauline Oliveros on her "just-intonation" accordion was titled St. George and the Dragon, an interaction with the the chapel’s acoustics, which included a noisy squirrel who joined in! Oliveros is again featured on the accordion with American Voices for In Memoriam, Mr. Whitney, a moving meditation for those departed.

Reviews:

“Oliveros’s bold use of dissonance in her improvisations brings to mind the solo organ meditations of Olivier Messiaen ...” – Bill Tilland, Option

“The three-quarter hour solo accordion improvisation, St. George and the Dragon comes as a bit of a shock after other recent Oliveros recordings; cavernous reverberation in a light, poignant tone, are replaced by much more brittle, shriller sounds, which penetrate rather than embrace.” – BD, EST

“Surrounded by the rough stone walls of a chapel at the Pomfret school in Connecticut, Pauline Oliveros improvised the forty-seven-minute solo piece St. George and the Dragon by listening to the her accordion in this space, and reacting to its reverberations. Oliveros plays her accordion much the way rock guitarists play their amp; responding to the subtle changes in the noise, building the feedback to acheive a wall of sound.” – Damon Krukowski, Fanfare

• Off the Beaten Tracker
• Renko’s Birthday
• Dempster Oliveros Duet
• Gamper Dempster Duet
• Oliveros Gamper Duet
• Coming Together
• Epigraphs in Times of Aids
• Dream Time
• Not Very Deep Hackets
• The Saucer’s Apprentice
• Ten Ears Celebration
• From Now On

A tasty variety of free improvisations excerpted from recordings of Deep Listening Band rehearsals and of the Band in concert. Band members Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and David Gamper are featured exploiting the sonoric and spatial palette of the Expanded Instrument System. Performers Julie Lyon Rose, Fritz Hauser, Urs Leimgruber, Ben Neill, Joe McPhee, Joe Giardullo, Ellen Fullman, Nigel Jacobs and Elise Gould appear as guest artists. A wonderful chronological acoustic essay of the Band's work over the last two years. (1995)

• Procession
• Greetings Ghostings
• Fragments
• In the Houses of My Families
• Reverberations
• Duet
• Body Stories
• Monkey
• Wolf
• Private Journies
• River of the Folk Dance
• The Last Time
• Pauline Oliveros – accordion/EIS
• David Gamper – djembe/EIS
• Julie Lyon Rose – voice/EIS
• Sound Engineer David Gamper

"The Ghostdance collaboration with choreographer Paula Josa Jones began in Monterrey Mexico supported in turn by two month US/Mexico Exchange Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and FONCA. Together with our host—composer/ ethnomusicologist Arturo Salinas—we attended El Dia de los muertos in Chalco to help inform our work. The beauty and depth of the ceremonies, ritual dancing and music honoring the dead touched me deeply as did the dancers we worked with in Monterrey. I am grateful for the experience that was shared with me so graciously by the Nahuatl-speaking families of Chalco and the dancers of Monterrey. The Ghostdance soundscape begins with my recording of a flock of grackles who were roosting in the trees by my hotel in Chalco. I imagined the music to emanate from the voices of those birds with a transformation to a spirit voice created and sung by Julie Lyon Rose. The collaborative process with Jones was a wonderful interchange of two years to bring Ghostdance to it's premiere performances at Lincoln Center and in Radcliffe Yard in Cambridge." – Pauline Oliveros

"The theme of Ghostdance centers on our relationship to the spirit world—to 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. Drawing upon the cultural palettes of Mexico and the United States, the work evokes this mysterious middle world through movement, sound, text, music and visual design, creating a landscape of inter­actions, collisions and revelations.
Ghostdance is designed for the outdoors, with audience members seated on all sides. The dance is visually lush, the space decorated with brightly colored baskets, flowers, bones, musical instruments, and other objects gathered to evoke both a Mexican cem­etery during El Dia de los Muertos, and a lavish carnival. The space also contains long swaths of textured paper, which evoke a landscape of enormous fallen bodies.
My experiences in Mexico were life-transforming, as was the opportunity to work deep and long with Pauline" – Paula Josa Jones

The Expanded Instrument System (EIS) used in this recording is an evolving electronic ! sound processing environment dedicated to providing improvising musicians control over various interesting parameters of electronic transformation of their acoustic performances. Performers each have their own setup which includes their delay and ambiance processors, microphones, signal routing and mixing, and a computer which translates and displays control information from foot pedals and switches. In addition, they have access to shared processing resources, such as a special digital signal processing; computer. The musicians and their instruments are the sources of all the sounds, which they pick up by their microphones and subject to several kinds of pitch, time and spatial ambiance transformations and manipulations. No electronic sounds are used. The sources , of all the resulting sounds are acoustic instruments and voices. Software for the EIS was partially developed by Panaiotis of PanDigital Corporation and by David Gamper tech­nical director of Pauline Oliveros Foundation. EIS is a program of the Foundation.

• Lucille’s Violin
• Pigeon
• Carrier
• Lucille’s Violin (Algorithmic Remix)

Carrier includes samples and loops from material recorded for demo tapes by Harald Bode, inventor of the Bode Vocoder and owner/operator of Bode Sound company. These loops included historic recordings by musician/artist Steina Vasulka playing her violin through the Bode Vocoder in the early nineteen seventies. The loops were mixed live during performances and used to modulate the voice of Peer Bode, son of Harald. Peer was reading an original text that he wrote based on parts of his father’s technical notebooks. For me the piece was like floating on an ocean of memory. During most of the performance I sat with my eyes closed making very small adjustments to the mix and changing loops. Peer’s reading was hypnotic, pure sound shifting and drifting. Pauline’s playing was amazing, so sensitive and in tune with the other sounds. We had very little rehearsing time. Yet, following Pauline’s score/life practice "to listen to verything all the time and remind yourself to listen" we were able to pull together a remarkable recording. Pauline was the catalyst for this concert. Her willingness to take chances and her spirit of cooperation lead Peer and I to the decision to perform the piece. Pauline has helped countless people and she deserves endless thanks.

Njinga the Queen King is a collaborative effort between writer/director Ione and composer Pauline Oliveros, which they refer to as “a play with music and pageantry.” It is based on historical facts.

This fully staged “pageantry” with a large cast weaves the plot around singing, acting, music — including ethnic music and percussion, electronics and dance.

Njinga ruled 17th century Ndongo — now Angola — as a “king” because tribal custom forbade her to rule as a woman. A skilled diplomat and fierce warrior, Njinga kept the Portuguese at bay from Ndongo for the 40 years of her rule.

Flowing freely between time periods, Njinga traces the diaspora of Njinga’s people to Brazil and the United States, linking the ancient warrior’s life to that of a contemporary African-American woman who has lost touch with her heritage.

As storytelling is a deeply-rooted element of African culture, Njinga features two Kilunda (spirit) characters who step in and out of the action, leading the viewers through the play. The final element in the mix is capoeira, the liquid, hybrid movement form of self-defense as dance — which has its roots in Angola and flourishes today in Brazil.

Oliveros’ score, and the use of electronics and spatialization, provides an environment for the extensive use of traditional African music, heightening the drama.

This recording is based on the BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) Next Wave Festival performances of 1993. In addition to Oliveros’ music and sound design, Njinga incorporates traditional Kongolese music arranged by Titos Sompas, and Brazilian music arranged by Nego Gato. 

„Desert Plants“ war in den Siebzigerjahren ein Kultbuch, weil es die ersten Informationen über die US-amerikanische Composer-Performer-Szene nach Europa brachte. Zahlreiche Notenbeispiele und ganze Partituren bereichern diesen Einblick in eine Zeit des Experimentierens, die es nun gilt, wieder ins Bewusstsein zu holen.

Das unverändert nachgedruckte Buch ist Carol Byl gewidmet, die damals die Tonbänder weitgehend wörtlich transkribiert hat, um den „stream of consciousness“ beizubehalten. Das Titelbild hat Michael von Biel gezeichnet.

Der Ausgabe liegt eine CD bei, die alle erhaltenen Tondokumente in restaurierter Form als mp3-Dateien zugänglich macht, darunter auch das berühmt gewordene Telefonat mit La Monte Young. So sind die Originalstimmen aus dem Jahre 1975 zu hören – ein Zeitdokument.

Gesprächspartner von Walter Zimmermann sind Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, John Cage, Philip Corner, Jim Burton, Phil Glass, Steve Reich, Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, Joan La Barbara, Pauline Oliveros, David Rosenboom, Richard Teitelbaum, Larry Austin, James Tenney, J. B. Floyd (über Conlon Nancarrow), La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Charles Morrow, Garrett List, John Mc Guire und Ben Johnston (über Harry Partch).

23 Sätze aus DESERT PLANTS

MORTON FELDMAN: Something that is beautiful is made in isolation.

CHRISTIAN WOLFF: I try wherever possible to discourage competitive sort of careerism.

JOHN CAGE: So that it takes an old fogey like myself to suggest again as Thoreau did all of his life, revolution.

PHILIP CORNER: A lot of people hang up to restrictions which are not only in the external institutions. They are in your own mind.

PHIL GLASS: The quintessence of harmonic music is in cadence for me.

STEVE REICH: You must love music or be a duck.

ROBERT ASHLEY: If you record a conversation with fifty people in the United States about their ideas, and if you get into each conversation really deeply, that when you get to the end, you will have one of me, one of Steve Reich, but you will have fifty of yourself.

ALVIN LUCIER: But when you stutter, you scan the language. You are scanning your past.

JOAN LA BARBARA: You know, instead of trying to direct the voice, I try to let the voice direct me.

PAULINE OLIVEROS: I’m aware of my own physiology. And then I’m hearing it as a whole, and I’m aware of the various rates that are going on, the kinds of breaks in concentration that occur and how they are corrected.

DAVID ROSENBOOM: What I’m looking at really is the existence of regularly pulsing energy.

RICHARD TEITELBAUM: I played the same synthesizer for ten years. Me and it are very close to each other.

LARRY AUSTIN: Ives’ main thing, I feel, was the concept of layering and getting us out of the idea that the sounds always had to come from the same place; that is, right in front of you.

JAMES TENNEY: I realized in writing these pieces that this was one way to avoid drama, which I’m still trying to find ways to avoid.

J. B. FLOYD about NANCARROW: Somebody actually brought up what was going to happen to the piano roles after he died; and he said, “Why? Do you want one?”

LA MONTE YOUNG: You can always say that you wanted La Monte Young, but it was impossible. He was so mercenary, he wanted money.

CHARLEMAGNE PALESTINE: I’m searching for sort of this golden sonority.

CHARLES MORROW: The high art itself is a form of power consciousness, that in a way one listens to the high art in the same way that one walks around being a flirt.

GARRETT LIST: The only way for a one-world kind of feeling is where each nationality, each locality, has its own strength; so that people don’t need to have to take from another place.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI: It’s still true that most Americans care more about the price of meat than they do about the exploitation of Bolivian miners.

JOHN MC GUIRE: But sooner or later I am sure that I will return to America.

BEN JOHNSTON about HARRY PARTCH: He was really willing to be as direct and as simple and as corny as you like, as people are when they aren’t trying to be concert artists.