Introduction

Pauline Oliveros was born in 1932 in Houston, Texas, where her mother and grandmother were piano teachers. As a child she preferred noises to concerts, but she came into her own playing the accordion. She attended the University of Houston and San Francisco State College and was a cofounder of the San Francisco Tape Music Center. In 1966 she became director of the Tape Music Center when it moved to Mills College, but the following year she moved to the University of California, San Diego. In 1985, having left the academic world, she became director of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation. She is now Distinguished Research Professor at Rensselar Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. Initially, she investigated tape and electronic music; but in the 1970s, feeling the need for calming activities, she became involved with meditation, ceremony, and ritual using a technique she developed called Deep Listening. In 1989 Cage said: “Through Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening I finally know what harmony is… . It's about the pleasure of making music.” Like Cage, she has been concerned to integrate music with the spiritual and social needs of mankind, as John Rockwell recognized: “On some level, music, sound consciousness and religion are all one, and she would seem to be very close to that level.”

Interview

Approved by Pauline Oliveros

PD When did you first come across Cage?

PO I was aware of John's work by the mid-fifties through the grapevine, so to speak, and through Radio KPFA-FM. I was living in San Francisco at the time—from 1952—and there was a lot of controversy in the Music Department at the University of California at Berkeley, with a polarity between Cage and Schoenberg. In 1960 La Monte Young, a friend of mine who was in a seminar at Berkeley, went to Darmstadt. He was very interested at that time in Stockhausen, and when he came back he could only talk about John [laughs], and so a lot of Cage's ideas became apparent through La Monte's interest. In 1963 I met David Tudor in San Francisco and within a year we had planned a festival, which I organized at the San Francisco Tape Center where I was. In that festival we performed a number of John's works as well as others by Lucier, Ichiyanagi, and so on.