This is a new feature for Feminatronic where each month I will be highlighting the music of women who create and produce electronic music in all its’ forms.

This month, I thought that I would start with one of the giants in electronic music creation, development and innovation –

PAULINE OLIVEROS

As her website says:

PAULINE OLIVEROS is a senior figure in contemporary American music.  Her career spans fifty years of boundary dissolving music making.  In the ’50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. Recently awarded the John Cage award for 2012 from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, Oliveros is Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College.  Oliveros has been as interested in finding new sounds as in finding new uses for old ones –her primary instrument is the accordion, an unexpected visitor perhaps to musical cutting edge, but one which she approaches in much the same way that a Zen musician might approach the Japanese shakuhachi.  Pauline Oliveros’ life as a composer, performer and humanitarian is about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds.  Since the 1960’s she has influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.  Pauline Oliveros is the founder of “Deep Listening,”  which comes from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics.  Pauline Oliveros describes Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing.  Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening is my life practice,” she explains, simply.  Oliveros is founder of Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation.

Album: Sanctuary (1995).The Deep Listening Band was founded in 1988 by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis. David Gamper replaced Panaiotis in 1990. The band is named after Oliveros’ term, concept, program and registered servicemark of the Deep Listening Institute, Ltd., Deep Listening, and specializes in performing and recording in resonant or reverberant spaces such as cathedrals and huge underground cisterns including the 2-million-US-gallon (7,600 m3) Fort Worden Cistern which has a 45 second reverberation time.