Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros’ (1932 – 2016) life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned 50 years of boundary dissolving music making. In the 1950s, she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960s, she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.

She was the recipient of four Honorary Doctorates and among her many recent awards were the William Schuman Award for Lifetime Achievement, Columbia University in New York, The Giga-Hertz-Award for Lifetime Achievement in Electronic Music from ZKM (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe and the John Cage Award from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts.

Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. She founded „Deep Listening®“,  which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. She described Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds.

„Deep Listening is my life practice,“ Oliveros explained, simply. Oliveros founded Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer. Her creative work is currently disseminated through The Pauline Oliveros Trust and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc.