Pauline Oliveros is a virtuoso at creating environments for musicians to explore. The legendary 84-year old composer, accordionist, and electronic pioneer is perhaps best known for her tape experiments from the ’60s, but her musical scores are just as innovative. Most of them contain text rather than musical notation, and eschew hard-and-fast directions in favor of poetic guidelines to be interpreted. In other words, she doesn’t tell people what to play, but how to play—and just as importantly, how to listen. Given this creative freedom, her collaborators often respond with something that’s less like music to passively listen to than spaces your mind can enter and probe.
The two lengthy pieces on *Four Meditations / Sound Geometries *are prime examples of how Oliveros conjures three-dimensional worlds from simple words on a page. In the case of “Sound Geometries,” the music is literally 3-D, as Oliveros filters the sounds of Belgian ensemble Musique Nouvelles through her surround-sound based Expanded Instrument System. “Four Meditations” is wide and deep, too, due in part to the liberty she grants the musicians. As Oliveros puts it in her score, “Since there is no written part to watch, all the performers’ attention can be given to sound and invention.”
The main focus of attention for listeners of “Four Meditations” will likely be the voice of Ione, Oliveros’ long-time collaborator. Though her fellow musicians all make vital contributions, Ione’s vocals are like a bright star around which all other sounds orbit. She’s adept at glossolalia-like stretches of abstract sound, improvising in the same league as expert voice experimenters such as Yoko Ono and C. Spencer Yeh. But her use of literal language is just as important.
At one point Ione slowly intones “I am who I am,” then flips that into “I am who you are,” seeming to comment on music that inverts definitions and blurs boundaries. In fact, much of “Four Meditations” is about convergence and divergence, as the musicians continually connect and separate. In that sense, Oliveros’ guidelines for a section called “The Tuning Meditation”*—*where she gives musicians the option of “playing a pitch that no one else is playing,” “just listening,” or “tuning in unison”—pretty well characterizes the entirety of “Four Meditations.”
A similar dynamic marks “Sound Geometries,” but its effects are subtler. Compared to “Four Mediations,” it’s more familiar sounding, at times evoking a well-honed jazz group. All the rolling horns, pointillist piano, and moaning strings are continually inventive, though sometimes easy to lose track of (one movement bears the apt title “Arriving Anywhere, Nowhere, Somewhere”). But that just means you have to listen closely to discover the riches of “Sound Geometries,” something that Oliveros—who, after all, created an entire institute called Deep Listening—surely intended.
It’s rather stunning that work this open and free of constraint can sound so calm. Though the tension that comes from loud, energetic improv can be thrilling, there’s something equally compelling about music that applies pressure while maintaining patience. The best word for it is probably “hypnotic,” but that doesn’t do justice to the way Oliveros puts a spell on your ears. She draws you so far into the environment of *Four Meditations / Sound Geometries *that you might forget you don’t actually live there.
