Read an Excerpt
Pink Noises
Women on Electronic Music and Sound
By Tara Rodgers DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4673-9
Chapter One
Time and Memory
For the artists in part 1, electronic music and sound art practices reveal time as a flexible and manifold medium, a labyrinthine structure, an influential partner in the creative process. Pauline Oliveros uses delay effects as "a time machine"-collapsing past, present, and future in her storage, generation, and anticipation of sounds in improvisation. Her choice of tools joins together music technologies that are out of time, so to speak, with each other. The accordion, a nineteenth-century instrument, and twenty-first-century software gain new leases on life in interaction. And her trajectory of musical exploration, a time span of several decades, has included many turning points as she adapted to new technologies, "going with the flow."
Kaffe Matthews narrates her musical history as a series of fortuitous events where "good old timing came along" and presented chance opportunities for her to change course and explore new creative realms. She builds her music from such "once-off moments," using electronics to transform the sounds of unique gatherings of people, place, and atmosphere. Matthews discusses the varying time-scales and memory capacities of humans and machines, and the interfacing of these in performance situations. When improvising with electronics, a performer must negotiate "this business about a delay"-the latency between gesture and machine response in real-time systems. In Matthews's account, composer and instrument find middle ground: computer technologies have evolved toward greater memory capacities, but Matthews limits her program's RAM to one minute, which is most compatible with her brain's capacity to remember information.
For Carla Scaletti, the relationship of electronic music to human experiences of time and memory is metaphoric. Object-oriented programming offers ways to transform sounds at multiple time-scales simultaneously, much like the biological and chemical processes that comprise human bodies. She also sees parallels between brain functions and programming: human memory, like an audio filtering technology, takes an inputted signal and transmits it back into the world with subjective coloration.
Eliane Radigue's slowly evolving compositions are shaped by the duration of individual sounds within them, and by the evoked temporalities of death and rebirth in Buddhist philosophies that inspire her work. The embodied time of her musical performance is constituted by spontaneous gestures to adjust the ARP's potentiometers, as well as the months she waits between initial recording and final mixdown. Her meticulous use of the same synthesizer for thirty years slows the march of progress in a music culture that valorizes brand-new technologies. Overall, Radigue's music promotes patience, and openness to disorientation, within experiences of time and memory: "This slow changing where we don't even know that it is changing, and when we hear that it has changed, in fact it has taken place long before."
Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros was born in 1932 in Houston, Texas. She became the first director of the Tape Music Center (now the Center for Contemporary Music) at Mills College in 1966 (see Bernstein 2008); was professor of music at the University of California, San Diego for fourteen years; and is now Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Darius Milhaud Composer-in-Residence at Mills. Her extensive body of work includes early recordings of tape delay systems (I of IV, 1966), some of which also incorporate synthesized sounds of the Buchla (Beautiful Soop, 1966; Alien Bog, 1967). She performs with an accordion tuned in two different systems of just intonation and often plays it in combination with the Expanded Instrument System, a processing scheme she designed with digital delays and reverb effects controlled by foot pedals (see Gamper 1998). She has also composed for soloists and ensembles in music, dance, theater, and multimedia.
Oliveros is a prolific writer and philosopher of music, feminist, and humanitarian issues. Some of her classic writings include the article "And Don't Call Them Lady Composers," originally published in the New York Times in 1970, in which she critiques cultural factors that work against the recognition of "great" women composers; and "The Contribution of Women as Composers," in which she compares analytical and intuitive modes of thought and argues against devaluation of the latter, which has been culturally coded as feminine (see Oliveros 1984, 47-51, 132-37; Taylor 1993; Mockus 2008). She also developed Deep Listening, a meditative practice that advocates mindfulness of sound to motivate personal and social consciousness, and founded the Deep Listening Institute, a nonprofit arts organization, in 1985. I interviewed Pauline in Oakland, California, in November 2003, when I was a student in her Deep Listening seminar at Mills.
* * *
Tara Rodgers: How did you become fascinated with sounds?
Pauline Oliveros: I was always. I remember it always being very fascinating for me, from childhood. As far back as I can remember I was always listening to what was happening around me. I lived in a rich environment of sound. In the Texas wetlands, there were lots of insects-it was like a really thick canopy that changed through the seasons: tree frogs, cicadas, crickets, all these wonderful sounding critters. It wasn't quite as droney as the sound of the freeway that we've got here. In those days, mechanical sounds were more exceptional.
Over time, it's been a project for technology to conquer nature. Although nature fights back, like with the earthquake last night.
Over the years, you've worked with quite a range of tools for making and manipulating sounds. You've explored a lot. Well, I'm just going with the flow, so to speak. The whole history of recording and reproduction of sound is something that has a huge trajectory, and I've experienced that for seventy-one years now. I remember having a phonograph, a Victrola that you'd wind up. The thing that was interesting to me was that it wound down. I used to like to listen to the sound winding down! [Laughs]
When did you develop an interest in working with electronics?
I was always fooling around with the radio listening in between stations, with the shortwave whistles and pops and clicks. So I guess I was always interested, it was about gaining access to the tools so that you could play with them. In the '40s, I had a wire recorder, where you'd record sounds on a wire, and by 1953 I had a tape recorder, which was new on the market for consumers. As soon as I had the tape recorder, I started recording and listening; and eventually I had a tape recorder that had two speeds and you could record variable speed by hand-winding the tape. There weren't any synthesizers or anything like that, so it was a slow process of gaining access to equipment that would allow you to do things.
The Tape Music Center, which later became the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills, got started in 1960 and had a collection of stuff. The Buchla synthesizer was invented and demonstrated in 1965 at the Tape Music Center in San Francisco, but I didn't work on it until the next year, when I was first director here in 1966-67.
It's a long history of how things change from analog to digital. I still work with a hybrid kind of thing. I'm using Max, I'm using the computer as a programming and processing environment, but I'm still playing the accordion, which is a nineteenth-century instrument. All the sound is derived from acoustics rather than from electronics, but I use the computer system to process the sound. There's still plenty of places for me to go, even.
Tell me about your Expanded Instrument System.
Let me explain what that means. I think about using all these delays as a time machine. Because when I play something in the present, then it's delayed and comes back in the future. But when it comes back in the future, I'm dealing with the past, and also playing again in the present, anticipating the future. So that's expanding time. That's the idea there. It's not about just one delay, it's about a whole lot of them. I've got it up to the point now where I can actually use about twenty delays. If you're in a space, you're hearing delays all the time, different time-scales. What I got interested in, long ago, was the coloration of sound that happens in a space. This happens because of delays, so I wanted to work with that.
I started working on this in a piece called The Bath [1966], which was based on the distance between the record head and the playback head of an analog tape recorder. I was recording a dance piece, recording the sound of the dancers, and eventually opening up the delay to change the shape of the room, the feeling of the room. I would play back what I recorded, and play back much later what had been recorded into the whole piece, so that eventually it was a very complex texture but it was all made of sounds that they had already made and were making. So I've worked that idea over a long period of time into some fairly complex things [see Oliveros 1984, 36-46].
The most recent version of this system uses Max/MSP as the interface. I have a program running which can improvise with me so when I play, whatever I play gets taken up, but then it's treated algorithmically, and I don't know what's gonna come back. So not only am I doing what I said with the expansion of time, but also the expansion of the material. It's transformed, and I have to be open to that as it comes back. The algorithms are based on my own ideas of what could happen to the material, but it's really unpredictable. I enjoy that situation of just listening and taking it in and responding. And the thing is, there's a half-second delay in the brain, so if you're going to do something, the brain knows before you know consciously, so there are evoked potentials already a half-second before you do things, but the brain remembers it as the present, which is a very interesting phenomenon. What it tells me is that the body knows what to do without the conscious mind intervening. Things get messed up when we think we have to control by our consciousness, or what we call consciousness.
That's what I think is going on in this work that I've been doing all this time, with Deep Listening. It has to do with understanding that, feeling that, trusting that you do know what to do. For example, I play with my feet. I have accelerator pedals that control the clock time of the delay so I can bend pitches and do transformations as I'm playing. And my feet know what to do, but if I tried to tell my feet what to do, it would be too late and I would lose the moment. It's almost as if there's somebody else there doing this. I know my feet are moving and I'm moving them, but they're moving-the feet are moving.
Over many years you've written about the status of women composers and the roles of gender in musical expression. What are some of your thoughts on this now?
Well, I've done a lot of work towards raising consciousness, and I have an article on my website called "Breaking the Silence" [Oliveros 1998]. I talk a lot about these issues and I give nine points of how to change things. And you're doing some of it by doing this project, but I feel that change has to go across the boards. Everyone has to be involved in changing it, or else it doesn't get changed. It means that music has to be taught differently; it has to be inclusive. If children learn to play music, they have to learn to play music written by women as well as by men, so there isn't a separation. And if a performer is playing a program, they need to play music by women as well as by men. And if an audience goes to a concert and there's no music by women, they have to confront the management about it. If that doesn't happen, the change is not going to take place. Especially in traditional, establishment music, people are educated to the music of the European masters, who are all men. As long as they're educated to that, that's what they're going to elevate. If there's no change at the root, at the very basic level, it's not going to change very quickly.
It's interesting that there's been an effort to make some of these changes, for instance, in literature departments, but I don't know that the same is true in most music departments.
I guarantee you it is not. I've had to bang my head against the wall to raise consciousness: You've got to start programming music by women, and you've got to fill the library with music by women. But it's hard to get that to happen, because the canon is so entrenched in all the educational institutions, and in music teachers, who don't give it a thought.
Recently I saw a photograph of you at the Tape Music Center in the 1960s with some of your colleagues, and you were the only woman in a group of men. I can't help but feel that not much has changed, since my graduate classes have had a similar ratio. I know you've been involved in an initiative to recruit more women here at Mills; tell me about this.
We did get more women, but we haven't gotten enough yet. It turns out that women are not so interested in composition; across a lot of different schools, I sent out a message to a lot of different schools that also said: that's the way it is here too. Annea Lockwood was teaching at Vassar, another women's college, and the women would sign up for harmony but they wouldn't sign up for composition. So why is this? One of the answers for me is that they don't see any future in it, for them, because what future do you see? You see all male programs, performances, you see all male faculties, music by men, you don't see any place for yourself. I was very determined that what I wanted to do was to compose music, so I just did it. Mills is different than it was when I was here in 1966, but it's not different enough.
I've done some workshops for women and girls different places around the country, teaching the basics of recording, and there never seems to be a shortage of interest, it's more that they haven't been encouraged to work with the tools.
They haven't been encouraged. They haven't been supported to do it. And that just continues, that boys are much more supported to do tech-y stuff than girls. And girls quickly learn to restrain themselves from being interested in things like that. So, it's a problem which I've grappled with, trying to raise consciousness and try to change things, but it's not easy. Because you run up against the canon of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms. How can you not recognize this masterful music? [Laughs] Millions of people are educated to that. So there's a very strong force field. In the orchestra repertoire they play that stuff over and over again.
So being a composer in this time is not easy, no matter what the gender. Because there's not a place for composers, really, to be nurtured and developed and to have the excitement of creative music being as interesting as traditional music. The art market is a big market and a lot of money is put into that; some artists can make a lot of money that way. But profit being the driver in the culture, when you come up with some nice weird something-juicy, especially new-but it doesn't sell, then you're not part of the game. These are big issues, and they're there. The main hope is that people need to be nourished spiritually so that there's the understanding that creative work is of the spirit. If you don't nourish that creative part of the human being then you get what you've got in Iraq right now, and Israel and Palestine. You have death and destruction instead of creative energy. The energy's gone amok. All those things are embedded in what we've talked about. So you've got to just keep on keepin' on. Be subversive, very subversive.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pink Noises by Tara Rodgers Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
