Avant-garde Luminary Pauline Oliveros Listens Deeply to the Berkeley Art Museum

Last Monday, Pauline Oliveros and the Thingamajigs Performance Group convened inside the Berkeley Art Museum to begin plotting a one-time performance for that Friday. Oliveros, an 82-year-old composer and avant-garde luminary, settled on one of the brightly colored pieces of modular furniture scattered about as part of the Kaleidoscape installation. Without discussion, the Thingamajigs a local ensemble of instrument-makers, educators, and performers composed of Edward Schocker, Dylan Bolles, Keith Evans, and Suki O'Kane slowly navigated BAM's severe concrete ramps and platforms while running their moistened fingers over the lips of crystal glasses.

Intermittent water droplets plopped on the ground from a slowly leaking ceiling; a ballpoint pen scratched paper; fingernails bristled two days' stubble; and the sound of ringing glasses, which first seemed nearly inaudible, became a consummate series of quivering hums that zipped around the resonant structure.

After almost an hour, the Thingamajigs returned to Oliveros. She'd sat motionless, listening. "I'll tell you what was beautiful," she said, emerging from a reverie. "There was an engine sound, and the sound of a bell from outside." She gestured toward the window.

She continued, "Sound actually moves in this room and it turns." She suggested that the performers mind the "tail of the sound" and "listen to it from start to finish," and then posed a question: "Are you projecting, or are you reflecting?"

Schocker and Bolles studied under Oliveros at Mills College in the late 1990s. Oliveros became the first director of Mills music department in 1966, then known as the Mills Tape Music Center. She left the position the following year. Today, Oliveros teaches at Mills via Skype from her home in New York. Recalling Oliveros' teaching style, Schocker said, "I'd ask her questions, and she'd never really give answers."

Conversation with Oliveros was somewhat elliptical. When asked if parameters had been predetermined for the Berkeley Art Museum, Oliveros responded, "The instruments they play and the tunings." So, what instruments? "Well, I'm not sure," she said, smiling.

The creative process employed by Oliveros and the Thingamajigs play first, discuss after has roots in the late 1950s, when Oliveros and Terry Riley decided that imposing guidelines beforehand stifled the collaborative experience. Playing, recording, and then discussing the results critically afterward yielded better results. Their sessions are considered one of the first instances of "free improvisation" in the avant-garde.

In 1963, Oliveros became involved with the San Francisco Tape Music Center, a space that was dedicated to interdisciplinary work and relished institutional autonomy and community inclusiveness. Among the Tape Music Center's major contributions were the 1964 debut of Riley's groundbreaking minimalist piece, In C, for which Oliveros played accordion, and the commission of Donald Buchla's pioneering modular synthesizer, the Buchla Box.

In an essay for the book The San Francisco Tape Music Center, published in 2008 by the University of California Press, Oliveros recalled rehearsing a duo piece for accordion and bandoneon with David Tudor. Her housemate's mynah bird kept interrupting, so they wrote it into the score. The piece became Duo for Accordion and Bandoneon with Possible Mynah Bird Obligato. For a performance, they just played it on a seesaw, and brought the bird along.

In 1965, Oliveros improvised the tape and oscillator piece Bye Bye Butterfly, which incorporates a recording of Madame Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini. Listening to it next to an early track by hip 1980s industrial act Coil, or something new by electronic producers such as Vatican Shadow, illustrates the prescience of her 1960s work. In 2012, the label Important Records issued a twelve-disc box set of her recordings from the decade.

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Avant-garde Luminary Pauline Oliveros Listens Deeply to the Berkeley Art Museum