Heres another composer: Pauline Oliveros.

Name of composer: Pauline Oliveros

Brief History of a composer, Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros was born on 30^th May 1932. She is an accordionist and composer who has a central figure in the development of post-war electronic art music.

Pauline Olvieros has written books,formulated new music theories and investigated new ways to focus attention on music including her concepts of “Deep Listening" and “sonic awareness”.

Oliveros was born in Houston, Texas She earned degrees from Moores School of Music at the University of Houston and San Francisco State College.

Oliveros is one of the original members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which was the resource on the U.S. west coast for electronic music during the 1960s. The Center later moved to Mills College, where she was its first director, and is now called the Center for Contemporary Music. Oliveros often improvises with the Expanded Instrument System, an electronic signal processing system she designed, in her performances and recordings.

Her contributions

Deep Listening

Oliveros coined the term "Deep Listening Bandep Listening" in 1991,[1] a term which she then applied to her group and to the Deep Listening program of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd. (formerly The Pauline Oliveros Foundation, founded in 1985). The Deep Listening program includes annual listening retreats in Europe, New Mexico and in upstate New York, as well as apprenticeship and certification programs. The Deep Listening Band, which includes Oliveros, David Gamper, and Stuart Dempster, specializes in performing and recording in resonant or reverberant spaces such as caves, cathedrals and huge underground cisterns. They have collaborated with Ellen Fullman and her Long String Instrument, as well as countless other musicians, dancers, and performers.

Sonic Awareness

Von Gunden

describes and names a new musical theory, developed by Oliveros in the "Introductions" to her Sonic Meditations and in articles, called "sonic awareness." Sonic awareness is the ability to consciously focus attention upon environmental and musical sound, requiring continual alertness and an inclination towards always listening, and comparable to John Berger's concept of visual consciousness (as in his Ways of Seeing). "Sonic awareness is a synthesis of the psychology of consciousness, the physiology of the martial arts, and the sociology of the feminist movement" and describes two ways of processing information, focal attention and global attention, which may be represented by the dot and circle, respectively, of the mandala Oliveros commonly employs in composition. Later this representation was expanded, with the mandala quartered and the quarters representing actively making sound, imagining sound, listening to present sound, and remembering past sound. This model was used in the composition of her Sonic Meditations. Practice of the theory creates "complex sound masses possessing a strong tonal center", as focal attention creates tonality and the global attention creates masses of sound, flexible timbre, attack, duration, intensity, and sometimes pitch, as well as untraditional times and spaces for performance such as requiring extended hours or environmental settings. The theory promotes easily created sounds such as vocal ones, and "says that music should be for everyone anywhere."

Pauline Oliveros work

Sound Patterns(1961) is a musical piece or composition for a capella mixed chorus by Pauline Oliveros. She won the Gaudeamus International Composers Award in 1962 with this work.

Rather than a traditional text, the work is constructed of phonetic sounds chosen on the basis of their timbre. The piece is entirely notated, lasts about 4 minutes and features an exposition(measures of which 1-12),development)12-46) and recapitulation(47-59).

The sounds may be understood to reflect Oliveros interest in electronic music,which she recently begun to work with, Heidi Van Gunden,(1983) illustrates this point by highlighting 4 types of sounds that correspond to the basic electronic music techniques:

1. White noise.

2. Ring-modulated sounds.

3. Percussive envelopes.

4. Filtered techniques.

It is Oliveros' “most carefully composed piece” and features only only one measure of controlled improvisation linking the development to the recapitulation.