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Composer
Pauline Oliveros was a maverick in the field of electronic music.
Oliveros' first instrument was the accordion; as a teenager in Texas she played in a 100-piece accordion group that appeared at the rodeo. In 1949 she entered the University of Houston, but in 1952 transferred to San Francisco State College.
Oliveros studied music privately with
Robert Erickson and began to associate with a loose confederation of like-minded composers,
Terry Riley,
Steve Reich, and
Morton Subotnick among them.
Oliveros was among the first composers to participate when
Subotnick and
Ramon Sender founded the San Francisco Tape Center in 1961, and served as the Center's director in the first year following its move to Mills College (1966-1967). Some of the pieces
Oliveros created in the 1960s, such as Bye Bye Butterfly (1965) and I of IV (1966; created at the University of Toronto) are acknowledged as classics of electronic music. From the beginning
Oliveros was not greatly interested in electronic tape and its manipulation, preferring to explore real-time electronics, interactivity, and the use of delays.
In the early '70s
Oliveros began to amplify the theatrical aspect of her works, in addition to incorporating elements of her growing interests in spirituality and meditation. This touched off a series of pieces that emphasized intuition and consciousness among large masses of people. During this time
Oliveros temporarily abandoned systems of notation, instruments, and even the use of electronics. By 1975, however,
Oliveros had rediscovered her accordion and began to compose drone pieces with voice, among the earliest being Horse Sings with Cloud. In the mid-'80s,
Oliveros began to develop EIS (the Expanded Instrument System) utilizing early digital electronic music technology. In 1988
Oliveros,
Stuart Dempster, and vocalist Panaoitis formed the
Deep Listening Band, which debuted playing in an empty two-million gallon water tank located at Fort Worden in Washington State; a year later composer David Gamper joined the group as the permanent third member. Among
Oliveros' major works after that was the multimedia theater piece Njinga the Queen King (1993), a collaboration with the writer Ione. In 1985
Oliveros founded the
Pauline Oliveros Foundation in Kingston, New York, a humanitarian organization that promotes the performance, practice, and technological developments associated with
Oliveros' concept of "deep listening."