Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality

Martha Mockus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781135871239
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality examines the musical career of the avant-garde composer, accordionist, whose radical innovations of the 1960s, 70s and 80s have redefined the aesthetic and formal parameters of American experimental music. While other scholars have studied Oliveros as a disciple of John Cage and a contemporary of composers Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, Gordon Mumma, and Robert Ashley, Sounding Out resituates Pauline Oliveros in a gynecentric network of feminist activists, writers, artists and musicians. This book shows how the women in Oliveros's life were central sources of creative energy and exchange during a crucial moment in feminist and queer cultural history. Crafting a dynamic relationship between feminism and music-making, this book offers a queerly original analysis of Oliveros's work as a musical form of feminist activism and argues for the productive role of experimental music in lesbian feminist theory.

Sounding Out combines key elements of feminist theories of lesbian sexuality with Oliveros's major compositions, performances, critical essays, and interviews. It also includes previously unpublished correspondence between Oliveros and Edith Guttierez, Jill Johnston, Annea Lockwood, Kate Millett, and Jane Rule.

1
Intonation

I figured out a practical use for the overtone series. As you know tones consist of not one but many overtones. If you listen carefully you can hear them. The tone quality of any instrument depends on the prominence of these overtones. For instance, the sound of the flute, the octave overtone is most prominent but not the higher overtones. On the clarinet the octave but mainly the 12th is prominent and etc. The human voice though has the most complex overtone series. What I’ve been doing is simply this: I sing a tone—if I am using my voice properly I hear the overtones. If you want a weird sensation, try it. I can hear the octave, 12th and 2nd octave above the fundamental very easily. This enables me to sing wide intervals with great accuracy. I have transferred this to my horn playing and it has really helped my intonation. It’s really funny to listen this way because you hear all kinds of harmony going on when you play a single note passage. Pretty far out, huh?

Pauline Oliveros¹

Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932, Houston) stands as one of the most important and provocative figures in contemporary music. She studied composition and accordion at the University of Houston (1949–52), and earned her BA in music from San Francisco State College in 1957 where she studied composition with Robert Erickson. She remained in the Bay Area and from 1961–65 worked as co-director with composers Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick of the San Francisco Tape Music Center. From 1966–67 she was director of the Center which moved to Oakland in 1966 and became the Mills Tape Music Center. In 1967 she moved to San Diego where she taught in the Department of Music at the University of California, San Diego; she earned tenure in 1976 and was appointed director of the Center for Music Experiment and Related Research. Oliveros resigned from the university in 1981 to pursue an independent career as composer, performer, and teacher. Since 1985 she has been the artistic director of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation Inc., which supports artists internationally in the creation and dissemination of new works in musical, literary, and performing arts. In 2005 its name changed to the Deep Listening Institute, Ltd.

Among her vast output, Oliveros’s compositions include works for chamber ensembles, chorus, numerous electronic tapes, pieces for herself as accordionist, works for dancers (including collaborative projects with Merce Cunningham, Elizabeth Harris, Deborah Hay, and Paula Josa-Jones), film scores; theatrical works (with Ione), and improvisational multi-media works for musicians, dancers, and actors. Oliveros is widely commissioned as a composer and collaborative performer (on accordion), and is highly regarded both nationally and internationally. She has won dozens of awards and prizes, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Maryland and Mills College. Her musical career spans the formative decades before and during the gay liberation and “second wave” women’s movements. As a feminist and lesbian, both of these movements were important to Oliveros, and informed some of the foundations of her musical innovations that are still apparent in her work today.

tuning in

This book selects important compositions by Oliveros from 1960 to 1985 and listens to them sounding out lesbian messages of creativity, community, love, and sexuality within Oliveros’s specific social and conceptual milieu. I am inspired by her observation, quoted on page 1, that “it’s funny to listen this way” precisely because it enables a closer engagement with the material and ideological conditions of Oliveros’s music. With each piece I seek to get inside the sounds—how they are produced and their guiding aesthetics—and articulate how I hear them within North American feminist and lesbian contexts of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Work in lesbian theory by Terry Castle, Audre Lorde, Sue-Ellen Case, and Teresa de Lauretis as well as lesbian fiction by Dorothy Allison, Jane Rule, and Monique Wittig provide the reverberant spaces within which my listening takes place.

I hear Oliveros’s work as lesbian musicality—a musical enactment of mid- and late-century lesbian subjectivity, critique, and transformation on several levels. For Oliveros, music is not an object but a process engaging bodies, time, and space. She creates pieces committed to challenging sexism and classism in western classical music and democratizing music-making for women of all abilities. Music also functions as a sonic articulation of lesbian subjectivity for Oliveros (and her collaborators). As a theoretical project, her music exposes and transforms some of the structural underpinnings of how music is made, who makes it, why, and whose interests are served. Her lesbian musicality embodies many of the same principles of radical feminism operative in much feminist art, literature, film, and dance of the 1970s and 1980s interested in rethinking the fundamentals of form. However, at times her musical experiments sounded an awkward dissonance with other well-known feminist musicians of this period. Unlike “women’s music” of this era—often associated with radical and cultural feminism—Oliveros’s work does not make use of “folk” or vernacular musical styles. Rather, she not only asks musicians to think about what counts as “music” but also urges feminists to question what counts as feminist theory.

Previous scholarship on Pauline Oliveros invests in a different series of overtones by locating her life and work as a disciple of John Cage and a lesser contemporary of composers Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, Gordon Mumma, and Robert Ashley. While she is often discussed in music histories of the twentieth century, she is positioned as the only woman working in experimental music. Furthermore, because most musicological narratives focus on the male-dominated field of composition, too many scholarly accounts of Oliveros’s work perpetuate sexist and heterosexist assumptions, trivializing her commitment to feminism and her life as a lesbian. Sounding Out recontextualizes Oliveros’s music by placing her female colleagues, friends, and lovers at the center of her musicality. I argue that the women in Oliveros’s life were far more important sources of creative energy and exchange than her male colleagues. These women inspired and challenged Oliveros’s radical aesthetic innovations during a crucial moment in women’s history. Resituating Oliveros in a gynecentric network of feminist activists, writers, artists, and musicians critiques the masculinist musicological narrative that would confine her to the margins of twentieth-century music, and deepens our knowledge of the second wave of the feminist movement, especially its internal discontinuities. One of the central aims of this book is to respond to Oliveros’s practice of listening carefully by conceptually restoring the overtones to those pitches that produce “all kinds of harmony going on” in all their queer complexity. Pretty far out, huh?

sounding out and sounding together

One day during the early stages of my work, I was rereading Oliveros’s essay in Software for People entitled “Divisions Underground” which begins by naming 271 terms for a woman (Oliveros 1984, 98). As disturbing as this list is, I loved the dramatic effect of reciting it out loud (which takes me almost six minutes to do). I was most moved by the fact that the catalog ends with the term “dyke,” a word I find so wonderfully direct, percussive, dangerous, and even a bit glamorous. This strengthened my commitment to place lesbianism—as sexuality, musicality, politics, history, worldview—at the center of my work on Oliveros. Such a commitment meant listening to Oliveros’s own voice and tuning in to her self-understanding of her sexual identity in Houston in the 1940s and San Francisco in the 1950s:

How did you know you were a lesbian?

It came to me early in my childhood. In grade school I was interested in some of the other girls and would have certain fantasies about them. Yes, it happened very early.

Some people know when they’re 4, and some people don’t know until they’re 44.

That’s right.

For you it was grade school—

Yes. At least.

Your nickname was Buster—a very impressive nickname!

[laughter] Yes, well I gave it to myself. I thought I’d like to have that name. What was the name of that movie star who played Flash Gordon? Buster Crabbe. I guess I wanted to be tough. Tough in that I could take care of myself.

Who was your first lover?

[big sigh] Oh—it was in Girl Scout Camp. [laughter] I can’t remember her name right now. I was Buster by then. In Girl Scout Camp they called me that. There was this girl I was attracted to, and we were sort of lovers at Camp.

What age were you?

I must have been 12 or 13.

What kind of girls were you attracted to?

Well, more feminine girls, I’d say. I was the “butchy” one, the tomboyish one.

Well, with a name like Buster—

—what can you say?

It says it all, doesn’t it?

[laughter]

Did you have a group of lesbian friends in Houston? How did you find each other?

I only began to find others in Junior High School. I met these women in school, so to speak. Actually it was probably through playing softball, because playing softball attracted women who were more interested in expressing themselves in that way. So the softball leagues were full of lesbians.

They still are!

Yes, I’m sure they are. I mean, I never felt that I belonged anywhere. I really didn’t—not until San Francisco days when I began to find a group of people who shared certain values and intellectual interests. Because I had lots on my mind and I couldn’t find that level of connection, and that’s probably [another reason] why I stopped playing softball really. There was a lot of unpleasant social interaction.

Really?

Yes, there really was, because there were lots of pettiness and hurtfulness that didn’t need to happen. I think I bailed out of that. Although I had been involved with lots of different women who were my age, you know, this was still High School, actually. I had a lot of girlfriends in that group, but then there was …

You had some fun, but there was some tension—

Tensions, yes. It just didn’t feel right. I did the best I could. I was a joker [giggle]. I joked a lot, but I never lost my sense of outsiderness.

Yes, until San Francisco.

I had wanted to go to San Francisco to try to catch up with Suzon Small. By the time I got to San Francisco she had left. So, I never did find her! [laughter] But I also felt San Francisco would be the place for me to pursue my music. I had hoped to connect with her, but she left there. I think that she was frightened, because I was still under 21. I left when I was 20, so she didn’t want to be caught with jail bait, so to speak. [laughter] So, I lost track of her and I have never been able to find her ever since. I would like to, because I would like to thank her. That was a very important connection for me in my life.

I want to read you a quote from an essay by Dorothy Allison, who is one of my favorite writers. She says, “What was it like to be a lesbian before the women’s movement? It was to have the most dangerous addiction, risk the greatest loss, defy the most terrible consequences. The moon was not sufficient, and too many of us hated ourselves and feared our desire. But when we found each other, we made miracles—miracles of hope and defiance and love.”² How do you feel about what she’s s...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Incantation
• 1 Intonation
• 2 Amplification
• 3 Meditation
• 4 Respiration
• 5 Conversation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index