Domestic Left #67: Stop, hey, what’s that sound?
Several weeks after the death of American composer Pauline Oliveros in November 2016, the New Yorker published an obituary of sorts by musicologist Kerry O’Brien. In ‘Listening as Activism: The “Sonic Meditations” of Pauline Oliveros’ O’Brien describes how, in the aftermath of the composer’s death, the ‘eccentric sound exercises—what she once called “recipes” for listening—briefly went viral.’
These exercises had a specific social history:
Like much of her work, Oliveros’s “Meditations” posited listening as a fully embodied pursuit—a posture of attending to sounds and to the world. But her “Meditations” are more than quotable texts. They began as sound and body experiments within a women’s group. Recounting their early history offers a look at the roots of Oliveros’s body-centered politics; in the midst of America’s current political chaos, her “Meditations” make a timely case for listening as a form of activism.
As O’Brien recounts, Oliveros, who started her career as an important pioneer of electronic music, began to turn towards this kind of intense listening practice during the late 60s, as “a respite from the traumatic news of the world.” Though it began as a solo endeavor, playing drones on her accordion, Oliveros soon began sharing and practicing her listening recipes with others. She connected her sonic practices to “body work” traditions such as Tai Chi and the “Kinetic Awareness” practice of dancer Elaine Summers, and eventually, explicitly to the women’s movement.
When some of those “recipes for listening” were first published in 1971, as “Sonic Meditations,” Oliveros wrote an introduction identifying herself publicly as a lesbian. As O’Brien writes:
She understood the specific force of this revelation: in 1974, she wrote, “How many of you out there think you are in the minority? If everyone came out of the closet the world would change overnight.” That same year, in her expanded “Sonic Meditations” score, she added, “Healing can occur ... when one’s inner experience is made manifest and accepted by others.”
About a month ago I deleted the Spotify app from my phone.
This is something I have been meaning to do for a while, for a couple of reasons. The first is that, although I don’t really believe in the efficacy of individual consumer activism — especially against such a corporate-cultural juggernaut as the streaming-entertainment industry — I did make a personal resolution at the beginning of the year to purchase more music, and I wanted to give myself a bit more incentive to do so. My hope is that by limiting my listening to the 1,000 or so songs I own in mp3 format, I will eventually get sufficiently bored that it will prompt me to actually go purchase something else.
The other reason, though, is that even with access to the unimaginably vast store of music available on Spotify, I still find myself listening, over and over again, to the same handful of songs, albums and playlists. While the music that is “on repeat” for me does change slowly over time, in any given week or month it consists of a pretty small, defined universe — usually a mix of new discoveries that for some reason or another spoke deeply to my emotional state when I first heard them, and old classics that have held a deep meaning for me throughout my life.
In other words, the listening practice that Spotify enables, at least for me, is a totally frictionless delivery of the exact musical-emotional content I crave, unthinkingly, in the moment. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.
I initially discovered Oliveros’s music at an exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Art. If memory serves, it was an exhibit in one of the Scaife galleries about the connection between sound and visual art. There was a photo (most likely an LP cover) of Oliveros with an accordion, reproductions of some of her scores, and a headset you could put on to listen to the accordion drones of some of her sonic experiments.
That exhibit also introduced me to Joe McPhee’s album Nation Time, which I took a more immediate liking to — or perhaps, more accurately, was more immediately able to comprehend. The LP cover mounted on the wall of the gallery displays a black and white photograph of McPhee with an afro, aviator sunglasses and beard, in front of what appears to be a nineteenth-century stone building. He stands, loose but confident, his tenor saxophone at the ready. The pose is equally that of a Black Panther with an automatic rifle and a player in a horn section about to launch into a coordinated dance routine behind a soul singer.
The title track, which takes up the whole first side of the LP, begins with McPhee trying to lead a call and response, asking “What time is it?” and being obviously disappointed with the lackluster nature of the “Nation time!” response he is soliciting. The tune proper begins with a repeated four-note phrase, which quickly turns into a fairly standard (to my largely untrained ears) jazz improvisation, albeit without the complex harmonic changes that characterize be-bop. The drums play a fast swing rhythm, there are solos and occasional restatements of the original melodic theme, and the music stays within a recognizable tonal key. It is music that would be easily recognizable to most anyone as “jazz.”
Then, around five minutes in, the drums, accompanied by vocal grunts from one or more of the musicians, switch from that fast swing rhythm to a midtempo 6/8, the kind of beat you hear in Ray Charles’s “(Night Time Is) The Right Time.” The music briefly resolves back into the fast swing of its first five minutes, but then kind of disassembles itself, eventually leaving the saxophone playing alone, breathily and perhaps desperately repeating and riffing off of the original four-note melody.
One by one, the rest of the instruments return, building up to a cacophonous free-jazz improvisation with no tonal center, no unifying beat. For a minute or two it seems like all hell is breaking loose.
Around the eight-minute mark, the saxophone returns to the four notes of the intro, and the piano and drums quickly join to reinforce the rhythm. It’s almost like a return to the first movement of the piece, a collective improvisation over a fast swing beat but wilder, more dangerous this time, the harmonies more complex or more chaotic, depending on your point of view.
At 10:30 or so, the band drops out again, and McPhee’s saxophone introduces a new riff, leading into the joyous, funky midtempo groove which closes out the piece, undergirding solos by saxophone, electric piano and bass. At the end, McPhee begins the call-and-response again, in time with the drums: “What time is it?” As the audience answers, more enthusiastically this time, “Nation Time!”, the drummer accentuates the three syllables of their response, and McPhee begins weaving in the four-note motif from the introduction, no less insistent but now looser, more confident, tying everything together.
O’Brien’s piece, published in the wake of the election of Trump, apparently received a fair amount of, shall we say, negative feedback online. “How could mere listening be activism?” I imagine the Twitter hordes, soon to proclaim themselves “The Resistance,” exclaiming.
But, of course, as anyone who has done real organizing knows, listening constitutes at least 80 percent, if not more, of the work that produces real change in the world. As the labor and community organizer Larry Stafford put it in an interview in
’s Substack recently:So many people want their hands on the megaphone whether in the streets or on social media. What if organizers had megaphone-sized ears so we could actually hear what people had to say.
McPhee met Oliveros in the 1980s, and became part of her “Deep Listening” project.
The music both of them made in the 70s arguably drew its “activist” credentials from movements that were on the march, confident of a future of liberation. By the 80s, those movements were in retreat before the Reagan-era backlash. While we’ve now had a Black President and a woman Vice President, who might soon become President, the liberatory visions of the movements of the 60s and 70s seem even more foreign and distant than they did in the 80s, as we struggle to maintain even their most quotidian achievements amidst all the yelling.
Unlike my Spotify library, my mp3 collection is mostly defined historically — albums I bought digitally and CDs I “ripped” during the early 2010s, after I had acquired an off-brand mp3 player but before the advent of Spotify. It is also sprinkled with a heavy dose of music made by bands from my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas — the Homestead Grays, Kill Creek, Kim Forehand — and musicians I have known — college friends John Coakley and Arlo Leach, my Grassroots Global Justice comrade Jen Soriano’s fantastic band Diskarte Namin.
And it also includes some of my own music, which, years ago, I digitized from cassette tapes; my Apple Music app now has a playlist of songs recorded or performed by the various bands and recording projects I played in from the late 80s through 2016: Still Thinking, Big Table, and Liggett (in Lawrence); Non Sequitur, The Rag & Bone Shop, and Electricity Connected to Itself (in college); Sweet Justice & the Wildcat Strikers and Secret Heliotropes (in Burlington); and a variety of homemade solo studio recordings and one-off, unnamed collaborations.
In a 2019 discussion of Oliveros’s life and work on the Weird Studies podcast, O’Brien and the hosts get to talking about different meanings of “practice.” They contrast its meaning in the classical-music tradition (one of the hosts is a professor of musicology, and a former classical pianist), in which one practices, in private, to perfect one’s skills for a performance of the piece in question, with its meaning in “bodywork” traditions like yoga — a tradition to which the practice of Oliveros’s “Sonic Meditations” in much closer. In the latter, the word “practice” is used, not to describe what you do in, say, a yoga class, but to describe what you hope to accomplish by attending that class — to deepen or improve your yoga practice. The practice is not a means to an end, it is the end itself.
As I was listening to this podcast episode a few weeks ago, I thought about playing in Big Table, the most “serious” band I have been in, the band on which I staked my hopes of rock-and-roll stardom during my “gap year” of 1990-91. There are no doubt rock bands whose members practice their instruments for several hours each day in private, to attain the kind of personal virtuosity that, say, Eddie Van Halen was known for. But for most, I imagine, practice only happens at band practice.
And band practice — especially as I remember it from Big Table — lies somewhere between the two meanings of “practice” described on the Weird Studies podcast. Or perhaps, more accurately, borrows elements from each of them. Yes, we were each, as individual musicians, practicing the songs, where the notes go, when the chords change, how many times to repeat that riff. But more importantly, we were practicing how to play together, how to be tight or loose as the music called for, how to give each other space in the groove and how to hit that one beat all together at exactly the same time to give it all the force we could. How to listen to each other.
Last weekend Ted Gioia published a fascinating piece about the health benefits of rhythm (even for non-drummers) over at The Honest Broker:
And The Guardian has an intense and moving interview with Alan Sparhawk, of the band Low, on the death of his wife and bandmate Mimi Parker:
‘If you fall in love, you know this could happen’
You can find a number of videos of people performing Oliveros’s “Sonic Meditations” on YouTube, which is both odd (as the “Meditations” were not meant for performance, but for practice) and in many cases kind of touching (as large swaths of YouTube are, in fact, videos of regular people just being exhibitionist about normal, everyday stuff.)
My favorite is this rendition of “Tuning Meditation,” a “recipe” in which each person alternately aligns their voice with and differentiates it from others, “performed” by over 100 people in the Fuentidueña Chapel at the Cloisters, in New York City. It is filmed in 360 video, so as you watch you can look around the space in a kind of virtual reality:
Big Table, of course, never made it big, but we did record most of our original songs to four-track. We recorded them in a variety of different ways, in some cases recording each of us separately to a drum-machine click track and using the technique of “bouncing” (mixing three recorded tracks onto the fourth) to get up to seven different instruments or voices on one song.
However, for the majority of songs we recorded the electric guitar, bass and drums live in stereo (in the bass player’s mother’s basement, which we dubbed the “Splendid Suburban Home Recording Lab”). We would then use the third track for the lead vocals and the fourth for something “extra” like a backing vocal track or a guitar solo.
Of these recordings, the one that best captures our live sound — and the way we practiced — is the song “The Sun Is Dead,” with which we often closed our sets:
Always enjoy seeing any reference to Pauline Oliveros! Came to know about her in college as a music major, mostly for her contributions to electronic music. I missed this obituary in the New Yorker - thanks for providing this additional piece of info as a woman artist. Her recipes for listening seem very timely.