There is no better time to listen than now. This collection of 365 instruction-based scores reminds us that listening is a form of activism, community-building, and democracy. A Year of Deep Listening: 365 Text Scores for Pauline Oliveros encourages us to participate in our rights to enact creative habits for connection, renewal, collective making, advocacy, action, and more. A Year of Deep Listening began as an online project, during which 365 text scores for listening were created by authors from around the world in celebration of the legacy of ground-breaking composer Pauline Oliveros. They were gathered by The Center for Deep Listening and published one per day, beginning on Oliveros’ 90th birthday: May 30, 2022.
Oliveros’ original published collection Anthology of Text Scores (Deep Listening), which covers one hundred scores she created from 1971 to 2013, continues to serve as a generative work, and one of the most important bodies of creative work in the twenty-first century. The borders of audience, practitioner, listener, and receiver dissolve in this non-hierarchical, and perhaps deeply feminist, practice of inclusivity and generosity, fostering creative ways to engage sound, voice, and body, and heal selves and communities.
In A Year of Deep Listening, Oliveros’ audiences and individuals are invited to connect with their environments, hear the present, remember past listening and histories, and dream future listings; to listen through play and move toward collective healing and gratitude.
Listening through love is central to this collection, which includes a wide variety of composers, artists, creatives, deep listening practitioners, students, soundmakers, technologists, and global citizens—deep listeners from different spaces, places, institutions, and global communities of practice. We encounter early adopters, together with emergent, growing, and disparate communities sharing and teaching integrative ways through which to experience the gift of listening.
Oliveros is still speaking to us. Once niche, her works are integrating into the larger contexts of twenty-first-century music. Long Beach Opera, for example, focused its 2024-2025 season solely on Pauline Oliveros’ operas. We also saw the film Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros, by Daniel Weintraub (2022); Michael Ned Holte’s 2024 book Good Listener: Meditations on Music and Pauline Oliveros; and the 2016 exhibition and performance Still Listening, which featured eighty-five scores and was co-directed by Eric Lewis and flutist Ellen Waterman, who both authored Deep Listening works in this new collection.
Rather than explore linearly, I took the advice of the Stephanie Loveless, the collection’s editor, and randomly opened the book ten times. My goal was to encounter diverse chapters, and discover voices and ideas for me to experience and surrender to. DISPATCH #1-3 by Candice Hopkins and Raven Chacon confronts the misuse of power structures that involve Indigenous peoples and land uses and abuses. It is a call to action. The coda traces how and when people work together to confront misuse, and how things can be revised, protected, and treated with respect. The series of questions in Dispatch #3 (The Aim) frames a response to heal, align, and help: “What are you willing to risk?”
In Civil Dusk, Anna Luyten writes a piece about listening to “the moment when the centre of the Sun is six degrees below the horizon in the evening.”
Stephanie Loveless’ “Prescriptions for Grieving (For Pauline)” and Eric Lewis’ “Pauline is Not Gone” come near the end of the book. Both ask us to think of Oliveros and our loss. I remember when she passed away, feeling like we had lost our “musical mother.” In her piece Choose a Favorite, Heloise Gold recalls Oliveros asking: “Are we having fun yet?” Thus, this collection reminds everyone that the invitation to deeply listen is ready whenever you are.
A Year of Deep Listening almost functions as an unfinished work by Oliveros. Not in the conventional way—where a composer dies leaving a musical work unfinished and others pen the dots to complete it—but rather through the nature of her magnum opus, Deep Listening, itself.
Engaging with this collection is analogous to observing tiny seedlings taking flight. Each work ventures forth, pollinating the imagination and inspiring those who seek to foster the emergent freedom and connectivity derived from the practice of Deep Listening. Finally, before randomly opening the collection one last time for this review, I posed the question: “What can this work teach us, now?” I landed on Jim Dalton’s entry “Mindful Ringing,” with its beginning instruction to “Focus on your own breath cycle…,” and with that, I invite you, dear reader, to do just that, and continue the sound-affirming practice of listening deeply.