Learning to Listen: Pauline Oliveros
The more I think about it, the more it seems as though listening seriously might be an especially good way to meet the universe halfway, as Barad puts it, that is, to understand oneself in intra-action with matter. The composer Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) tried very hard, all her life, to listen, and to encourage others to listen. She left music and writing about music that invite us all to listen. In fact it seems to me that she understood listening as an ongoing experiment in which we can use ourselves, our own auditory perception, to learn more — to get past assumptions and habits and think, feel, hear something new.
She summarised and shared her way of composing in an early book called Sonic Meditations, a series of exercises that suggest ways of making, sharing, imagining and remembering sounds to groups of players. In collaboration with the theoretical physicist Lester Ingber, she focussed on defining how people pay attention to sound. One phrase of hers in particular stays with me: “the universe improvises.”
The image is from https://iawm.wordpress.com.
