Afterwords: Pauline Oliveros

'Listen to everything all the time, and remind yourself when you’re not…'

For her 21st birthday, Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) was given a tape recorder. It changed her life. She recorded sounds outside her window, then played the tape back, and heard things she hadn’t previously noticed. Thus began her philosophy of listening and sonic exploration.

Pauline Oliveros became a virtuoso accordionist, ground-breaking composer and experimentalist, and pioneering member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, who went on to develop the practice of ‘Deep Listening’. She was, 'an artist, a thinker, whose life’s work was around opening up listening as an anti-hierarchical form of transformation for everyone'.

Archive interviews reveal her energy and creativity, her generosity, her self-confidence, her activism, her responses to sexism – all underpinned by her deep commitment to equity, and her playful humour.

Featuring reflections and observations from:
Annea Lockwood, composer and long-time friend,
Irene Revell, curator, writer and researcher,
Louise Gray, writer, and teacher of Sound Arts,
Maria Chávez, sound artist, abstract turntablist and DJ,
Stephanie Loveless, Director of the Center for Deep Listening

Archive courtesy of the Oral History of American Music (1983 and 1998 interviews) at Yale University, KPFA interviews (1972 and 1985) from the Other Minds archive, plus BBC interviews (1993, 2009, 2012, 2016).

Produced by Steve Urquhart
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 3