Episode 42: On Pauline Oliveros, with Kerry O'Brien

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 13 March 2019

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the mid-1960s, Pauline Oliveros was a composer of experimental electronic music. But at the end of the 1960s, shocked by the political violence around her, she turned away from electronic technology and towards to a different kind of experimentation, which Dr. Kerry O'Brien calls "experimentalisms of the self." The immediate result of this turn was Oliveros's Sonic Meditations, a series of instructions for group bodymind practice. This work became the seed of Deep Listening, a sort of musical yoga Oliveros developed throughout the rest of her long career. Dr. O'Brien joins JF and Phil for a conversation on practice, "gaining mind," the ritual value of art, the wisdom of the body, and whether Deep Listening is really best understood as art at all. REFERENCES Kerry O'Brien, "Listening as Activism: The 'Sonic Meditations' of Pauline Oliveros" Pauline Oliveros, American composer John Cage, 4'33" Dead Territory performing Cage's 4'33" Alvin Lucier, "Music for a Solo Performer" Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees Special Guest: Kerry O'Brien. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:20.0	For more episodes or to support the podcast,
0:23.3	go to weirdst, J.F. and I are talking to Dr. Carrie O'Brien, a brilliant young musician and scholar of the post-war American avant-garde.
1:02.0	I was fortunate enough to work as Carrie's advisor when she was a graduate student at Indiana University,
1:07.4	and I got a chance to see her develop ideas on 1960s and 70s experimentalism
1:13.2	that change our understanding of what was really at stake in the music of such composers
1:18.6	as John Cage and Pauline Oliverus. Oliverus' music and bodywork practices are part of what
1:25.4	Kerry calls experimentalisms of the self.
1:28.3	That is, experimental music whose materials include the bodies and minds of its performers,
1:33.3	and the experience of which, likewise, primarily belongs to those performers' body minds.
1:39.3	From this point of view, Oliverus' sonic meditations bear more similarities to yoga or meditation
1:46.3	than to, say, the violin sonatas of Johannes Brahms. In those violin sonatas, a performer is
1:53.3	realizing a composer's musical ideas for the deletation of an audience. In a meditation hall,
1:59.8	there are no performers, and there is no audience. Concert audiences
2:04.1	and meditators alike are having a special experience, but one is a good deal more private,
2:10.3	more inner than the other. In the conversation that follows, you'll hear us talk about how well
2:16.1	the label music really fits Oliverus'
2:19.3	sonic meditations.
2:21.3	But first, I should probably say a little about the sonic meditations.
2:25.3	As you'll hear in our conversation, these originated as exercises for an all-woman group
2:31.3	that started meeting in the early 1970s. These were as much bodywork exercises as musical ones,
	...

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