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Pauline Oliveros

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Cat,
Not my cup of tea but exactly the sort of thing the Arts Council will give you a grant for here in the UK...
 
Oliveros, of Deep Listening fame? I assume these are meant to be appreciated in a high fidelity format, with nice headphones, in the dark. I'll try it and report back.

I do like Steve Reich, and Brian Eno. And I think they'd like this..ergo..?
 
Maybe if I lived in a different state....?? Seriously, I admire her musicality and groundbreaking technical achievements but not my cup of tea in general.
 
Well that was to be expected. Fwiw, "new" music is my area of interest (I also play a bit of accordion).
 
Cat,
IMO, music in general is an acquired taste, like tomatoes, bananas or surstromming (Finnish fermented fish) ?.
Some take to a genre, some don't, some need a lot of persuasion .
A lot has to do with early exposure.?
Often, one listener's music is another listener's noise!?
To paraphrase: beauty is in the ear of the listener!??
 
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I'm accustomed to being an outsider - the music I love the most is typically what people hate most. But I was curious if any would appreciate Ms Oliveros (being an accordionist).
 
I'm accustomed to being an outsider - the music I love the most is typically what people hate most. But I was curious if any would appreciate Ms Oliveros (being an accordionist).
Good to have your tastes represented here, Cat. I wouldn't say I hate her music. As I said, I admire her sense of exploration and ingenuity, but find her music difficult to appreciate, being that it outside my ordinary realm of experience.
 
Yes of course. I wasn't necessarily referring to PO's music as that typically inspiring antipathy - I like really outre stuff (my musical tastes changed a lot when I heard Coltrane's Sun Ship when I was 25). But I play a lot of traditional music too..
 
Always good to have an open mind musically... I don't mind a bit of odd but I'm open to a bit of popular too...
PO reminded me a bit of the Cocteau Twins who i still adore...
Perhaps check out Yann Tiersens album with Shannon Wright if you want to 'art' 'avant garde' up your accordion...
Art is great... Art for arts sake is questionable...
Coltrane can be cool..but Sun Ra's the monster... ?
 
Coltrane was more than cool. Sonny is my all-time favorite - I have most all of his Chicago and New York stuff on CD. I'm glad he's beginning to be recognized as the giant he was (personally I've been online for almost 20 years spreading the word!) But I went through Mingus and Taylor and everbody before I just started listening to Sonny all the time :)

 
Haven't heard of her before.
I like it. I must research more.
Is it accordion or harmonica.
godgi
 
sorry for my ignorance. I had not heard of her before.
Intersting concepts
Godgi
 
Do folks here enjoy music such as Ms Oliveros' ?

I love Pauline's work. It functions differently than other music. You can find interesting details in there but have to kind of slow down to perceive them. And it's not trying to do the same things because it's not about technique or formal songs. It's like listening to nature, valuing the background sounds of a forest, rather than some music named after a forest. I think her work is about preparing listeners to carry their listening attention after a performance, listening to the sounds around us all the time. She thought that was something worth working to attend to. Kind of mystical, but the practice of listening, really hard, is probably valuable for any musician.

She got her start as a student of Will Palmer (of Palmer & Hughes books). Working with him she started hearing the idiosyncratic "other" noises that accordion reeds make. Overtones and such, created by the layering of the acoustic waves. The accordion was really the foundation of that search, which is pretty cool. She did tons of work pioneering electronic music, but the ideas started with "where are these other sounds my accordion is making coming from?" Kind of neat that the characteristic layering of accordion reeds led to all this high-falutin art music. If an accordion tuner took that attention and ear, and went "off book" to see what other noises the reeds could make. For everybody who's sat there for a minute and felt the reeds rattling and combining in different registers, she made that feeling her life's work. Fun.

But it's definitely a different thing than listening to traditional tunes and songs. I interviewed her once and never thought to ask if she listened to other music. Like did she apply that focus to "normal" music? That would have been a fun question to ask: What was it like for Pauline Oliveros to listen to pop radio?

Trees and rocks dance probably to her music like it's the latest hits. ?
 
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