2017-01-29
Entry tags:
Steppin' Out in Style
Much milder,a bit windier, and occasional sunshine with slight intermittent overcasting and rain.
So decided to go all colourful with recent charity finds except for the trainers.
Socks by Paul Smith
Trainers by Asics
Khaki chinos by M&S
Grey T shirt by Next
Sweater by John Rocha,
So decided to go all colourful with recent charity finds except for the trainers.
Socks by Paul Smith
Trainers by Asics
Khaki chinos by M&S
Grey T shirt by Next
Sweater by John Rocha,
Entry tags:
Pauline Oliveros, Beethoven and Brahms
Wire is full of fascinating articles - here is one from December 2016.
Beethoven Was A Lesbian: Louise Gray traces an alternative history of music mapped by Pauline Oliveros and Alison Knowles
December 2016.
Oliveros at the Zoo. Image taken from postcard Mozart Is Black Irish Washerwoman. Photo by Becky Cohen
A series of playful postcards makes for a serious rethinking of women’s place in history
Here’s composeress Pauline Oliveros sitting in her garden reading a book. It’s All Hallows’ Eve by Charles Williams, a 1945 novel in which two women roam an unfamiliar London. They’re dead, they just don’t know it. Oliveros is frowning and so, half-hidden in the dense foliage, is Ludwig van Beethoven. You need to look closely to see him, but he’s there (or rather a papier-mâché bust of him is), brooding away in the bush, the epitome of the struggling hero of a composer, the kind of rugged action hero who can thunder out symphonies, concertos, sonatas even if he can’t hear a single note of them. What a guy!
Beethoven, composers and composeresses, hearing and listening: these themes were constants in the diverse range of work by Pauline Oliveros, who died on 24 November 2016, at her home in Kingston, New York. She was 84, and, through the development of her Deep Listening practice, she had changed the world of experimental and Improv music.
To be clear, Oliveros never had any animus against Beethoven, the man or the music. She wasn’t Beethoven bashing. The academic Martha Mockus, in her indispensable book Sounding Out, quotes a 1977 interview Oliveros did for the New Performance journal, in which she had told the art historian Moira Roth about how deeply she had analysed Beethoven’s compositional form as a student. She’d studied his music, played his music, loved his music. “I remember the first time that I ever talked with John Cage,” she tells Roth. “I talked to him a long time about how much I liked Beethoven.” It was, however, Beethoven the symbol that Oliveros reacted against – and she did it with wit and a precise aim.
So, what did Beethoven symbolise exactly? Tragic genius, certainly, and a kind of gendered genius that reinforced the canon of male composers, the idea that to make art (of all types) was to struggle at the cliff face of endeavour. It was common for a swathe of time, when talking about the absence of women in the top ranks of visual art or music, to say that they weren’t capable of such virtuosity. Where is the female Michelangelo? Where is the female Beethoven? Oliveros said, succinctly, that these were the wrong questions to ask. Ask rather about the social, cultural, economic and political conditions in which art is created and then think about the reasons.
Which brings us to Beethoven Was A Lesbian, one in a series of five acts in a postcard theatre that the Fluxus-influenced artist Alison Knowles and Oliveros produced in the early 1970s. Beethoven was not the only representative of the heroic male composers who was gleefully feminised by the duo, who layered on the weaponised vocabulary of gendered (and racist) denigration. Mozart was turned into a “black Irish Washerwoman”; Chopin was domesticated with “dishpan hands”; Bach was a mother; and Brahms was a “two-penny harlot”. This last postcard is a kick in the camera-eye to demure femininity. Its split image depicts, first, a young Oliveros playing out a game; she has a toy dagger at her belt; and secondly, a holiday snap of Knowles as a toddler; she is scowling furiously.
Beethoven wasn’t a lesbian, of course, but he could have been in an alternative history, in a parallel universe. It was the unwritten history of women’s endeavours, this non-history that Oliveros and Knowles were exposing: by writing fake history you say something about reality. Both artists, in separate ways, were attuned to the lack of female representation in the arts, and these cards were a way of feminising, of queering, compositional space and compositional possibility. They were deeply aspirational cards. For Knowles, the postcards were a link to Womens [sic] Work, a text-score collaboration that she made with the composer Annea Lockwood, a few years later. For Oliveros, this listening – perhaps a kind of under-listening – was codified into her far-reaching practice of Deep Listening.
Oliveros will be remembered for many things: her music; her deeply humane listening practice; her gifts for friendship, for educating and communicating. But let her also be remembered as a writer, a polemicist, who continually brought to the fore the way that women were not represented in the arts. Her 1970 article in the New York Times – “And Don’t Call Them ‘Lady’ Composers” – is still germane. She wrote:
“Why have there been no ‘great’ women composers? The question is often asked. The answer is no mystery. In the past, talent, education, ability, interests, motivation were irrelevant because being female was a unique qualification for domestic work and for continual obedience to and dependence upon men. This is no less true today.”
The article spoke out against the cutie-fication that the appending of ‘lady’ made, when used as a qualifier to any other professional noun. That she describes herself as a “composeress” is a joke, but her humour still stabs – for that Beethoven question never goes away completely. In 1973, Oliveros wrote an article entitled “Divisions Underground” for Numus West. It started as a riposte to another article, this one for High Fidelity/ Musical America (1973), which had asked: “Why Haven’t Women Become Great Composers?” A photo of a bust of Ludwig, lipsticked and with a jaunty beret on his head, accompanied it. Oliveros took the “Why Haven’t…” headline and added her own subheading: “Why do men continue to ask stupid questions?”
Personally, I have a “Where’s the female Beethoven?” tally. It comes up regularly all over the place. The last one I found was about a year ago in Radio Times. The tediousness of it. But Oliveros figured that you had to ask the right questions and she did – over and over and over. Crucially, she listened, just as she asks us to listen. What a legacy she leaves us.
By Louise Gray
Three pieces by Pauline Oliveros - an early electronic piece,and the second and third items are part of her deep listening minimalism.
Pauline Oliveros - Bye Bye Butterfly (for magnetic tape) (1967)
Pauline Oliveros - Horse Sings from Cloud (Part 1)
Pauline Oliveros - A Love Song
RIP Pauline. She passed away last November aged 84.
Oliveros in Oakland 2010.
Beethoven Was A Lesbian: Louise Gray traces an alternative history of music mapped by Pauline Oliveros and Alison Knowles
December 2016.
Oliveros at the Zoo. Image taken from postcard Mozart Is Black Irish Washerwoman. Photo by Becky Cohen
A series of playful postcards makes for a serious rethinking of women’s place in history
Here’s composeress Pauline Oliveros sitting in her garden reading a book. It’s All Hallows’ Eve by Charles Williams, a 1945 novel in which two women roam an unfamiliar London. They’re dead, they just don’t know it. Oliveros is frowning and so, half-hidden in the dense foliage, is Ludwig van Beethoven. You need to look closely to see him, but he’s there (or rather a papier-mâché bust of him is), brooding away in the bush, the epitome of the struggling hero of a composer, the kind of rugged action hero who can thunder out symphonies, concertos, sonatas even if he can’t hear a single note of them. What a guy!
Beethoven, composers and composeresses, hearing and listening: these themes were constants in the diverse range of work by Pauline Oliveros, who died on 24 November 2016, at her home in Kingston, New York. She was 84, and, through the development of her Deep Listening practice, she had changed the world of experimental and Improv music.
To be clear, Oliveros never had any animus against Beethoven, the man or the music. She wasn’t Beethoven bashing. The academic Martha Mockus, in her indispensable book Sounding Out, quotes a 1977 interview Oliveros did for the New Performance journal, in which she had told the art historian Moira Roth about how deeply she had analysed Beethoven’s compositional form as a student. She’d studied his music, played his music, loved his music. “I remember the first time that I ever talked with John Cage,” she tells Roth. “I talked to him a long time about how much I liked Beethoven.” It was, however, Beethoven the symbol that Oliveros reacted against – and she did it with wit and a precise aim.
So, what did Beethoven symbolise exactly? Tragic genius, certainly, and a kind of gendered genius that reinforced the canon of male composers, the idea that to make art (of all types) was to struggle at the cliff face of endeavour. It was common for a swathe of time, when talking about the absence of women in the top ranks of visual art or music, to say that they weren’t capable of such virtuosity. Where is the female Michelangelo? Where is the female Beethoven? Oliveros said, succinctly, that these were the wrong questions to ask. Ask rather about the social, cultural, economic and political conditions in which art is created and then think about the reasons.
Which brings us to Beethoven Was A Lesbian, one in a series of five acts in a postcard theatre that the Fluxus-influenced artist Alison Knowles and Oliveros produced in the early 1970s. Beethoven was not the only representative of the heroic male composers who was gleefully feminised by the duo, who layered on the weaponised vocabulary of gendered (and racist) denigration. Mozart was turned into a “black Irish Washerwoman”; Chopin was domesticated with “dishpan hands”; Bach was a mother; and Brahms was a “two-penny harlot”. This last postcard is a kick in the camera-eye to demure femininity. Its split image depicts, first, a young Oliveros playing out a game; she has a toy dagger at her belt; and secondly, a holiday snap of Knowles as a toddler; she is scowling furiously.
Beethoven wasn’t a lesbian, of course, but he could have been in an alternative history, in a parallel universe. It was the unwritten history of women’s endeavours, this non-history that Oliveros and Knowles were exposing: by writing fake history you say something about reality. Both artists, in separate ways, were attuned to the lack of female representation in the arts, and these cards were a way of feminising, of queering, compositional space and compositional possibility. They were deeply aspirational cards. For Knowles, the postcards were a link to Womens [sic] Work, a text-score collaboration that she made with the composer Annea Lockwood, a few years later. For Oliveros, this listening – perhaps a kind of under-listening – was codified into her far-reaching practice of Deep Listening.
Oliveros will be remembered for many things: her music; her deeply humane listening practice; her gifts for friendship, for educating and communicating. But let her also be remembered as a writer, a polemicist, who continually brought to the fore the way that women were not represented in the arts. Her 1970 article in the New York Times – “And Don’t Call Them ‘Lady’ Composers” – is still germane. She wrote:
“Why have there been no ‘great’ women composers? The question is often asked. The answer is no mystery. In the past, talent, education, ability, interests, motivation were irrelevant because being female was a unique qualification for domestic work and for continual obedience to and dependence upon men. This is no less true today.”
The article spoke out against the cutie-fication that the appending of ‘lady’ made, when used as a qualifier to any other professional noun. That she describes herself as a “composeress” is a joke, but her humour still stabs – for that Beethoven question never goes away completely. In 1973, Oliveros wrote an article entitled “Divisions Underground” for Numus West. It started as a riposte to another article, this one for High Fidelity/ Musical America (1973), which had asked: “Why Haven’t Women Become Great Composers?” A photo of a bust of Ludwig, lipsticked and with a jaunty beret on his head, accompanied it. Oliveros took the “Why Haven’t…” headline and added her own subheading: “Why do men continue to ask stupid questions?”
Personally, I have a “Where’s the female Beethoven?” tally. It comes up regularly all over the place. The last one I found was about a year ago in Radio Times. The tediousness of it. But Oliveros figured that you had to ask the right questions and she did – over and over and over. Crucially, she listened, just as she asks us to listen. What a legacy she leaves us.
By Louise Gray
Three pieces by Pauline Oliveros - an early electronic piece,and the second and third items are part of her deep listening minimalism.
Pauline Oliveros - Bye Bye Butterfly (for magnetic tape) (1967)
Pauline Oliveros - Horse Sings from Cloud (Part 1)
Pauline Oliveros - A Love Song
RIP Pauline. She passed away last November aged 84.
Oliveros in Oakland 2010.
Entry tags:
Pauline Oliveros and Her early Electronic Music
Another Wire article
Diffuse, open and non-judgmental: Frances Morgan on Pauline Oliveros’s early electronic music
What’s to be learnt from Pauline Oliveros’s contribution to 1960s electronic music? Frances Morgan finds as many answers as questions in Important’s 2012 box set Reverberations
In 2012 the Important label released Reverberations, a 12 CD set of electronic music made between 1961–70 by Pauline Oliveros. The CDs contain around 12 hours of music in total; each consists of two or three long compositions. I bought Reverberations when it came out but it took me many months to listen to the whole collection and even now I feel as if I’m still discovering it. It may be that this feeling will continue indefinitely, because this music constantly makes and remakes itself.
Reverberations suddenly put into circulation many more hours of Oliveros’s early electronic music than had been available before. This fact alone had, or should have, implications for those documenting the history of postwar electronic music, for whom Oliveros is recognised as an important figure, but one known more for her subsequent achievements. Oliveros’s focus, from the early 1970s, on the practice of Deep Listening, with her Sonic Meditations series, the Deep Listening Band, and the development of interactive environments for performers and digital media, has somewhat eclipsed this period of studio-based experimentation. Yet her interactive work, which she termed her Expanded Instrument System, has its roots in Reverberations’ 1960s pieces, in which she, as composer and performer, documented her own conversations with sound and technology, and theirs with her. Her electronic works also helped to define the philosophy of deep listening that would inform all her work. In her 1977 essay “Software For People”, she writes about how working with electronic sound enabled her to “give equal attention to all the entered the sound field”. She continues, “This kind of attention is diffuse, open and non-judgmental as compared to focused, selective attention which is narrow, clear and discriminatory but limited in capacity.”
It’s interesting that Oliveros uses the word discriminatory rather than discriminating. Today, the first word carries strong connotations of prejudice and marginalisation, of determining in advance, based on certain criteria, what has value not only in the sonic field but also the cultural and social sphere. According to Oliveros, the spontaneous aspects of her electronic music did not fulfil some of the expectations people had of the form: she recalled, in 1990, a critic of her 1966 tape piece I Of IV (which had appeared on the 1967 compilation New Sounds In Electronic Music) dismissing it because it had been “thrown together in real time”. But although the structure of the piece had not been pre-composed in any traditional sense, Oliveros pointed out that its complexity lay in her setting up of the instrument – the studio itself – which guided the direction the music would take. “The design of how [the pieces] would come into existence was what I mapped, not the content at all,” she told interviewer Cole Gagne. “It was a kind of performance architecture using tape machines and understanding certain operations in the circuitry which was non-linear… I didn’t have time to think about it in rational terms, but had to act in the moment.”
I of IV was composed at the Electronic Music Studio of the University of Toronto where Oliveros had gone to work with composer and instrument builder Hugh Le Caine in 1966. The piece’s counterparts, named II, III, IV and, playfully, V of IV are included on Reverberations. The series was apparently made in just a few days, and it teems with strange but precisely rendered sonic life-forms. Oliveros made the pieces using the studio’s 12 sine-wave generators connected to a keyboard, a spring reverb unit and two tape recorders. The keyboard is a means of control rather than a melodic instrument: it’s used as a switch for the tone generators, most of which are tuned to frequencies outside of normal hearing range, but when combined with one another and the tape recorders produce new tones – the same kind of ghostly, unintentional ‘combination’ tones that Oliveros first discovered when playing her accordion. On II, the spectral sine tones are at turns sombre, almost horn-like, and unruly, swooping through the volatile space opened up by the reverb. IV develops from uncompromising mid-range drones into something restless and a little rough and tumble, as if Oliveros is playing an intricate game with the studio, provoking it into a sharp-toothed response.
The music’s austerity makes it sonically demanding – there are no overdubs, and the only layering is that created by the delay and reverb. The same goes for Oliveros’s synth works on Reverberations: on tracks such as Big Slow Bog (1967) a companion to the better known Alien Bog, she limits herself to what she can do in real time on the Buchla 100, building up a glacial call and response between bubbly low end swells and those ghostly overtones again. The piece is speckled with tiny silences that feel like breaths, moments in which you picture Oliveros sitting back for a just a second, listening for – not thinking about – what she should do next, listening to where her hands should go, listening to the decay on that one pitch, listening for what the room tone says to her. I think these moments, which you could say are of reflection or indecision or humility, make these pieces uncomfortable, or just ephemeral, somehow incomplete for some listeners, but I also think that they are part of what I love about Reverberations. We – she and I and the machines – are discovering the sounds together. The sounds are discovering us.
Sometimes when I listen to Oliveros’s early electronic works, I think about how I can only explain certain audio phenomena or functions on a synthesizer by gesture – by demonstrating on a machine or, in the absence of something with dials and knobs, by waving my hands around, drawing shapes in the air. This is not to say that Oliveros could not verbally articulate what she was doing when she created heterodynes with sine-wave generators or made sticky waves of white noise on a Moog system – her facility as a writer and teacher proves that she clearly could. It’s more that Reverberations reminds me that there are many ways in which electronic music and sound can be understood, and that some of them prioritise giving one’s attention to the hand and the body and the energy coursing between human and instrument – the “air in the waves” as Oliveros once wrote to a younger female composer, neatly reversing the correspondent’s “the waves in the air”. And that this – although not always useful for a writer – is not such a bad thing.
I’m also reminded of the ways in which some electronic music has not been understood, to the point where its makers’ work is less widely heard, or even not heard at all, because there have not been the tools to talk about it – or no one has bothered to look for the tools. Much of the analysis of Oliveros’s electronic music has so far come from feminist musicologists such as Martha Mockus, Linda Dusman and Heidi Von Gunden. When people talk about Oliveros’s music as feminist, they tend to mean her more polemically titled pieces, such as To Valerie Solanas And Marilyn Monroe, or the Sonic Meditations, which were developed initially with an all-female ensemble. But if we view all her art – as, indeed, I think we can view all art by all people – as potentially political, it might be easier to understand how certain aspects of it have been given less attention than others. While something like I Of IV sounds abstract on first listen, its commitment to honouring physical experience, its welcoming of ‘hidden’, unruly frequencies, its commitment to collaboration – with the studio – and its disruption, through those aspects, of the idea of the autonomous musical work position it alongside the feminist and queer art emerging at the same time in other media. It’s easy to make those ideas clear in representational forms such as film, photography and performance art, but in music we have to listen closer for them: Reverberations provides a wealth of resources for anyone who wants to do so, and to add to what should be a much bigger body of thinking and writing about the politics of electronic music.
In her book Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros And Lesbian Musicality, Martha Mockus quotes a letter to Oliveros from Annea Lockwood, written in 1970. Lockwood writes, “Seems possible to me that however intensively we compose with them and process them, sounds process us much more deeply.” I don’t know how Oliveros replied to her friend, but I am grateful that, so many years later, on Reverberations, I am able to hear for myself these systems of communication between sounds and bodies that Lockwood describes so well, and that these were collected and released in Oliveros’s lifetime. I am grateful, too, for having heard what must be one of Oliveros’s last works, The Mystery Beyond Matter, performed in London earlier this year. I am grateful to her for opening these spaces, this air in the waves, for us to think with our hands and ears about how we make sound and how sound makes us.
Pauline Oliveros - Mnemonics III
Diffuse, open and non-judgmental: Frances Morgan on Pauline Oliveros’s early electronic music
What’s to be learnt from Pauline Oliveros’s contribution to 1960s electronic music? Frances Morgan finds as many answers as questions in Important’s 2012 box set Reverberations
In 2012 the Important label released Reverberations, a 12 CD set of electronic music made between 1961–70 by Pauline Oliveros. The CDs contain around 12 hours of music in total; each consists of two or three long compositions. I bought Reverberations when it came out but it took me many months to listen to the whole collection and even now I feel as if I’m still discovering it. It may be that this feeling will continue indefinitely, because this music constantly makes and remakes itself.
Reverberations suddenly put into circulation many more hours of Oliveros’s early electronic music than had been available before. This fact alone had, or should have, implications for those documenting the history of postwar electronic music, for whom Oliveros is recognised as an important figure, but one known more for her subsequent achievements. Oliveros’s focus, from the early 1970s, on the practice of Deep Listening, with her Sonic Meditations series, the Deep Listening Band, and the development of interactive environments for performers and digital media, has somewhat eclipsed this period of studio-based experimentation. Yet her interactive work, which she termed her Expanded Instrument System, has its roots in Reverberations’ 1960s pieces, in which she, as composer and performer, documented her own conversations with sound and technology, and theirs with her. Her electronic works also helped to define the philosophy of deep listening that would inform all her work. In her 1977 essay “Software For People”, she writes about how working with electronic sound enabled her to “give equal attention to all the entered the sound field”. She continues, “This kind of attention is diffuse, open and non-judgmental as compared to focused, selective attention which is narrow, clear and discriminatory but limited in capacity.”
It’s interesting that Oliveros uses the word discriminatory rather than discriminating. Today, the first word carries strong connotations of prejudice and marginalisation, of determining in advance, based on certain criteria, what has value not only in the sonic field but also the cultural and social sphere. According to Oliveros, the spontaneous aspects of her electronic music did not fulfil some of the expectations people had of the form: she recalled, in 1990, a critic of her 1966 tape piece I Of IV (which had appeared on the 1967 compilation New Sounds In Electronic Music) dismissing it because it had been “thrown together in real time”. But although the structure of the piece had not been pre-composed in any traditional sense, Oliveros pointed out that its complexity lay in her setting up of the instrument – the studio itself – which guided the direction the music would take. “The design of how [the pieces] would come into existence was what I mapped, not the content at all,” she told interviewer Cole Gagne. “It was a kind of performance architecture using tape machines and understanding certain operations in the circuitry which was non-linear… I didn’t have time to think about it in rational terms, but had to act in the moment.”
I of IV was composed at the Electronic Music Studio of the University of Toronto where Oliveros had gone to work with composer and instrument builder Hugh Le Caine in 1966. The piece’s counterparts, named II, III, IV and, playfully, V of IV are included on Reverberations. The series was apparently made in just a few days, and it teems with strange but precisely rendered sonic life-forms. Oliveros made the pieces using the studio’s 12 sine-wave generators connected to a keyboard, a spring reverb unit and two tape recorders. The keyboard is a means of control rather than a melodic instrument: it’s used as a switch for the tone generators, most of which are tuned to frequencies outside of normal hearing range, but when combined with one another and the tape recorders produce new tones – the same kind of ghostly, unintentional ‘combination’ tones that Oliveros first discovered when playing her accordion. On II, the spectral sine tones are at turns sombre, almost horn-like, and unruly, swooping through the volatile space opened up by the reverb. IV develops from uncompromising mid-range drones into something restless and a little rough and tumble, as if Oliveros is playing an intricate game with the studio, provoking it into a sharp-toothed response.
The music’s austerity makes it sonically demanding – there are no overdubs, and the only layering is that created by the delay and reverb. The same goes for Oliveros’s synth works on Reverberations: on tracks such as Big Slow Bog (1967) a companion to the better known Alien Bog, she limits herself to what she can do in real time on the Buchla 100, building up a glacial call and response between bubbly low end swells and those ghostly overtones again. The piece is speckled with tiny silences that feel like breaths, moments in which you picture Oliveros sitting back for a just a second, listening for – not thinking about – what she should do next, listening to where her hands should go, listening to the decay on that one pitch, listening for what the room tone says to her. I think these moments, which you could say are of reflection or indecision or humility, make these pieces uncomfortable, or just ephemeral, somehow incomplete for some listeners, but I also think that they are part of what I love about Reverberations. We – she and I and the machines – are discovering the sounds together. The sounds are discovering us.
Sometimes when I listen to Oliveros’s early electronic works, I think about how I can only explain certain audio phenomena or functions on a synthesizer by gesture – by demonstrating on a machine or, in the absence of something with dials and knobs, by waving my hands around, drawing shapes in the air. This is not to say that Oliveros could not verbally articulate what she was doing when she created heterodynes with sine-wave generators or made sticky waves of white noise on a Moog system – her facility as a writer and teacher proves that she clearly could. It’s more that Reverberations reminds me that there are many ways in which electronic music and sound can be understood, and that some of them prioritise giving one’s attention to the hand and the body and the energy coursing between human and instrument – the “air in the waves” as Oliveros once wrote to a younger female composer, neatly reversing the correspondent’s “the waves in the air”. And that this – although not always useful for a writer – is not such a bad thing.
I’m also reminded of the ways in which some electronic music has not been understood, to the point where its makers’ work is less widely heard, or even not heard at all, because there have not been the tools to talk about it – or no one has bothered to look for the tools. Much of the analysis of Oliveros’s electronic music has so far come from feminist musicologists such as Martha Mockus, Linda Dusman and Heidi Von Gunden. When people talk about Oliveros’s music as feminist, they tend to mean her more polemically titled pieces, such as To Valerie Solanas And Marilyn Monroe, or the Sonic Meditations, which were developed initially with an all-female ensemble. But if we view all her art – as, indeed, I think we can view all art by all people – as potentially political, it might be easier to understand how certain aspects of it have been given less attention than others. While something like I Of IV sounds abstract on first listen, its commitment to honouring physical experience, its welcoming of ‘hidden’, unruly frequencies, its commitment to collaboration – with the studio – and its disruption, through those aspects, of the idea of the autonomous musical work position it alongside the feminist and queer art emerging at the same time in other media. It’s easy to make those ideas clear in representational forms such as film, photography and performance art, but in music we have to listen closer for them: Reverberations provides a wealth of resources for anyone who wants to do so, and to add to what should be a much bigger body of thinking and writing about the politics of electronic music.
In her book Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros And Lesbian Musicality, Martha Mockus quotes a letter to Oliveros from Annea Lockwood, written in 1970. Lockwood writes, “Seems possible to me that however intensively we compose with them and process them, sounds process us much more deeply.” I don’t know how Oliveros replied to her friend, but I am grateful that, so many years later, on Reverberations, I am able to hear for myself these systems of communication between sounds and bodies that Lockwood describes so well, and that these were collected and released in Oliveros’s lifetime. I am grateful, too, for having heard what must be one of Oliveros’s last works, The Mystery Beyond Matter, performed in London earlier this year. I am grateful to her for opening these spaces, this air in the waves, for us to think with our hands and ears about how we make sound and how sound makes us.
Pauline Oliveros - Mnemonics III
Entry tags:
Just Wondering
What is your strongest sense? Which would be the hardest for you to lose?
What was your favourite cartoon growing up? Do you have one now?
What was your favourite cartoon growing up? Do you have one now?
Trump and Refugees
Trump executive order prompts Google to recall staff
Trump is really the pits. Evil...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38781420
Trump is really the pits. Evil...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38781420
Entry tags:
Listen to him, he's The Doctor! ♥
Originally posted by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
milly_gal at Listen to him, he's The Doctor! ♥
Had to share this -
Thank you toamberdreams and jj1564 for posting this, I missed the last leg (despite jj1564 texting me and reminding me it was on! The damned Sky DVR was mucking about) so I missed the episode and I'm so sad I did because this is what came out of it ♥
Great message, good man! ♥
milly_gal at Listen to him, he's The Doctor! ♥ Had to share this -
Thank you to
amberdreams and jj1564 for posting this, I missed the last leg (despite jj1564 texting me and reminding me it was on! The damned Sky DVR was mucking about) so I missed the episode and I'm so sad I did because this is what came out of it ♥Great message, good man! ♥
Bits n'Bobs
Most of the afternoon was spent listening to some of my recent CD buys such as Solange, a Patti Austin CD, and of course Avocet. I then listened to the radio for the book programme on Radio 4 followed by Poetry Please with Roger McGough.
That reminds me,i have nit posted a poem entry for awhile. I shall sort one out soon.
After my coffee morning i noticed that the weather was turning and the evening was heavily drenched in rain. It has now stopped, so i hope Monday will be dry as i am doing the cinema visit in Ashford. I have no idea what i am going to watch as yet, I shall check the website to see what they are showing.
My colourful socks got alot of praise. Brightens up any day.
Anyway, let's find some poems.
That reminds me,i have nit posted a poem entry for awhile. I shall sort one out soon.
After my coffee morning i noticed that the weather was turning and the evening was heavily drenched in rain. It has now stopped, so i hope Monday will be dry as i am doing the cinema visit in Ashford. I have no idea what i am going to watch as yet, I shall check the website to see what they are showing.
My colourful socks got alot of praise. Brightens up any day.
Anyway, let's find some poems.
Entry tags:
Poems Of The Week
A couple of poems for these darktimes.
“Motto,” by Bertolt Brecht,
translated by Michael Hofmann
This is all there is, and it’s not enough.
It might do to let you know I’m hanging on.
I’m like that man who carried a brick around with him
To show the world what his house used to look like.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers
BY EMILY DICKINSON
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
“Motto,” by Bertolt Brecht,
translated by Michael Hofmann
This is all there is, and it’s not enough.
It might do to let you know I’m hanging on.
I’m like that man who carried a brick around with him
To show the world what his house used to look like.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers
BY EMILY DICKINSON
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
Entry tags:
Faure Pavane
Before i sign off tonight a piece of quiescent classical music to end with.
Gabriel FAURE'- Pavane, Op. 50 - Paintings By "CLAUDE MONET"
I love this piece.
Gabriel FAURE'- Pavane, Op. 50 - Paintings By "CLAUDE MONET"
I love this piece.
