Deep Listening Intensive with Pauline Oliveros

Deep Listening® is experiencing heightened or expanded awareness of sound, silence and sounding.

In a meditative atmosphere we will explore core concepts of improvisation. Musicians and non-musicians of all abilities may participate in the Deep Listening exercises during the intensive. All styles and abilities will be welcomed in an open exploratory circle. There will be improvisations with and without instruments.

Some of the benefits of Deep Listening practice include expanded awareness of time and space, relaxation that supports musical activity, an expanding sense of humor, dissolution of old limits and opening to new patterns. There will be opportunities to work alone, in pairs, trios and in larger groups, drawing on Deep Listening practices explored in the open circle exercises.

Our goal will be to improvise from our meditative listening in solo, small ensemble and large group ensemble configurations with a creative musical finale of presentations.
This session is co-presented by the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice research project of the Department of Philosophy of McGill University and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology at McGill University
Date: Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Time: 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location: Naada Yoga Studio, 5540 Casgrain
Price:
General Public - $39.00
McGill students and alumni - $32.00
McGill staff - $20.00

Facilitator
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.