Meditations in quiet harmony

Composer Pauline Oliveros, a pioneer of 'art music improvisation' who is in Ireland for the Quiet Music Festival in Cork, talks to Michael Dervan

PAULINE OLIVEROS IS a quiet Texan. She turned 76 at the end of May, and presents herself with a calm directness which suggest the satisfactions of a life fully lived.

Meeting her face-to-face in Cork on the day of her first visit to Ireland - on a reconnaissance mission in advance of her first Irish Deep Listening Retreat, as part of the Quiet MMusic Festival - she reminded me in many ways of that controversial giant of the 20th century avant-garde, John Cage. Cage, too, was a calm and quiet person. And the two have something in common in the quality of awareness they project. It seems to stem from a different attitude to listening, a monitoring alertness that sieves through the ambient noise surrounding talk, to make sure nothing of possible interest passes by unnoticed.

Oliveros was born in Houston into a musical family which boasted piano teachers (her mother and one of her grandmothers) and even an amateur composer. She never really took to the piano, but studied violin and accordion (her mother brought one home to increase her earning power as a teacher), and she took up the tuba and the French horn in order to play in a band at school, where accordions could not be accommodated.

She cites the natural soundscape of Houston, its birds, insects and animals, as a key influence. And her attitude to music seems to have been as open as her attitude to sounds in general.

"Gradually I became intrigued with all the forms of new music I hadn't encountered." This included hearing the Juilliard Quartet play Bartók, and she was also fired up by the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.

As a music student, however, she felt a bit of an outsider. Most of the other students in the composer workshops at San Francisco State College seemed to want to write romantic music. Her music was dissonant. The divide was serious enough, she says, that a lot of students would leave when her pieces were played in class. She did, however, also meet some soulmates, composers Terry Riley and Loren Rush (all three of them sharing the fact of Irish ancestry as well as an interest in new music, she says) and trombonist Stuart Dempster.

In the early 1960s herself and Riley were involved in the creation of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, an electronic music studio set up with composers pooling resources, receiving donated equipment and using war surplus. The technology may have been primitive, but the attraction was great at a time when the resources to create electronic music were very scarce. Steve Reich was among the composers who would be attracted to work there, and both Reich and Oliveros played in the première of Riley's minimalist classic, In C which took place at the Tape Music Center.

It was in 1963 that Oliveros first met David Tudor, then best known as a pianist, a leading advocate of contemporary music, and the performer most closely associated with the work of John Cage. Tudor wanted to meet her, because he had been given a present of a bandoneón by the Cologne-based Argentinian composer Mauricio Kagel. The immediate result was a piece for the two of them to play, Duo for Accordion and Bandoneón with Possible Mynah Bird Obligato.

The inclusion of the mynah bird is indicative of Oliveros's embracing attitude to sound. There was a mynah bird where she rehearsed with Tudor, and she found its imitations of their accordion sounds interesting enough to allow them a possible place in the piece. The duo also exists in a see-saw version, where a see-saw, designed by Elizabeth Harris to have the freedom of a mobile rather than just the up and down movement of a conventional see-saw. The free movement of the performers spatialises the distribution of the sound.

The première of the Duo was given before an influential, composer-rich audience, but more important for her in the long term was the experience of working with Tudor in the preparation of the piece. His meticulous approach, the concentration he brought to bear, the attention to fine detail, she says, were out of the ordinary.

"And out of that came an incredible sound." Working with Tudor, basically, brought about a major intensification in the listening habits of someone who had always regarded herself as a special and acute listener. She got her first tape recorder as early as 1953, and simply by making recordings of what could be heard through an open window, she had realised how much actually went on that usually passed by unheard. Working with Tudor, however, brought her up to a new level of listening awareness.

Oliveros was a pioneer in what she calls "art music improvisation". It came about because Terry Riley had been commissioned to write a five-minute film score, had run out of time and had reached the deadline for the delivery of the music. He called on Oliveros and Loren Rush and solved his problem by recording improvisations with them. They liked the experience so much that they decided to do more of it. "Improvisation," she says, "is always free for me. We did try discussing what we would do, but those performances usually fell flat. So we had the discussions in and through the actual performances.

"There is a guiding principle, but it has to do with listening. It's a heightened state of awareness to sound. There is no intellectual framework."

Not many composers have specialised in the accordion. Oliveros has declared that, "for me the accordion is a symbol of the outsider. Accordion music is associated with the working class and had no place in the establishment musical organisations representing the Western musical canon. As a composer I also felt like an outsider."

She parries a question about the limitations of the accordion by pointing out that every instrument has its limitations, and that "you have to try to work your way beyond them by the nature of your listening and your playing".

She has taken practical, technological steps in her own performances, with what she calls her "expanded instrument system", electronic processing which enables pitch bending and spatial distribution. She sees this as a natural development from the use of analogue tape delay back in the 1960s.

Like a lot of her fellow composers in the US, Oliveros landed an academic position, and was a professor of music at the University of California, San Diego from 1967 to 1981. She taught electronic music, musicianship and also a course on "the nature of music", which was intended to help students "to engage in the creative act of making music". She used to give students sound materials on tape for them to make their pieces from, encouraged them to improvise, to work with found instruments, to create graphic scores.

This led her to do research outside of the university, and, "in 1970 I began a body of work called Sonic Meditation. Sonic meditations are recipes for ways of listening and sounding and are scores transmitted orally without conventional musical notation. I found that I could involve all kinds of people in sonic meditations whether or not they had any musical training. What mattered was an interest in participation, the cultivation of listening strategies and willingness to explore sound."

The deep listening retreats - the one in Cork is the 18th - are essentially training sessions for the sonic meditations. It's over three decades since Oliveros brought her sexuality out into the open. She's been featured in CD anthologies of lesbian music, and is the subject of a study by Martha Mockus, Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality.

"I hear Oliveros's work as lesbian musicality," writes Mockus, "a musical enactment of mid-and late-century lesbian subjectivity, critique, and transformation on several levels."

The composer doesn't see her role as fathoming the relationship between her sexuality and her music. She just writes the music, and leaves those observations to others. Her openness, she says, "seems to help other people. It's not a focal point for me. But it does seem to help young people with a verification of who they are."

When it comes to the current state of music, Oliveros declares herself an optimist.

"There's more music being written, composed, performed and broadcast than ever before. I think it's healthy. And young people know my work, which is really exciting for me. Young people are really interested. I've had lots of conversations with them. It's largely due to the growth of the internet."

And now it's going to reach a whole new audience in concert in Ireland, at the heart of Cork's new Quiet Music Festival.

• The Quiet Music Festival runs from today to Sun, July 6. Pauline Oliveros will perform in Sssh!, a day of performances at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, UCC, on July 5, from 1pm. She also gives a free public lecture in the music department of UCC at 11am on July 6. www.tinyurl.com/5zfbqh