Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros was a pioneer in experimental techniques, particularly in electronic music. She was exploring ways of making music with electronics long before synthesizers were even invented. Born on May 30, 1932 in Houston, Texas, Oliveros learned how to play the accordion as a child, and she would go on to revolutionize the instrument by electronically adapting it for her excursions into the avant garde. After earning a degree in composition, Oliveros began experimenting with tape recorders as a tool for making music as opposed to merely recording it. In the early '60s she became a charter member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center founded by famed electronic composer Morton Subotnick. Oliveros became the director of the center after it moved its headquarters to Mills College. During her time there Oliveros explored multiple means of electronic composition and performance. She became part of the music faculty at UC San Diego in 1967, and in the '70s she became the director of the university's Center for Music Experiment. But in 1981, Oliveros decided to leave academia behind, moving to New York to pursue her own artistic path. In 1967 Oliveros appeared on the milestone recording New Sounds in Electronic Music, which featured one of her compositions alongside Steve Reich's legendary tape piece "Come Out" and a piece by Richard Maxwell. She had other pieces on numerous albums in the '60s and '70s, but her first full album of her own was 1982's Accordion and Voice, which focused on Oliveros's electronically altered accordion. Oliveros had long been interested in the science behind a listener's interaction with their environment, and in the late '80s she formed the Deep Listening Band to make a systematic exploration of such ideas. Working with trombonist Stuart Dempster and electronic musician Panaiotis (later replaced by David Gamper), Oliveros engaged in projects like recording inside a giant cistern to make the natural reverberations a part of the music. She spent the rest of her life working with the Deep Listening Band, recording a long, influential string of records. Oliveros died on November 24, 2016 at her home in Kingston, New York.