You have to hand it to Daniel Weintraub. The intimidating résumé of composer, technological innovator, and activist creator Pauline Oliveros could intimidate even the most skilled documentary maker. Should you focus on her ground-breaking composition? Her technological wizardry? Her community activism? Her proud lesbian identity? What about her radical approach to the art of listening? Weintraub manages to rein it all in with his fascinating film Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros.
As a young child in Houston, Oliveros’ obsession with sound started in the car, listening to the radio or her parents talking, their breathing, their cadence, the space between words. The experience formed the basis of her musical philosophy: that every sound, whether from humans, nature, machinery, or anything else, can be perceived as music. Radio static was not noise for her, it was content.
Her first instrument was the accordion, but there was no chair for that in the junior high school orchestra, so she learned the tuba, then the notoriously demanding French horn. Playing instruments was easy. Performance, she said later in life, came from the outside in. Composing moved from the inside out. She yearned for something original that could embrace her idea that music was everywhere and could, if deployed creatively, create community.
Instinctively driven to break barriers, she became an innovator in the art of electronic music (decades before the rave craze), inspired by her fascination with any technology she could get her hands on. She worked with oscillators, designed the ground-breaking Expanded Instrument System that could create sounds out of a machine, and, much later in her life, created a computer program that could assist differently abled people unable to move anything but their heads to make music. Before COVID-19 made it necessary for musicians to play together via the internet while in different geographic locations, Oliveros had figured out a way for them to do it. And these are just of few of her startling innovations.
She saw all of it as a political exercise to empower people and create community. In the ’70s she led women’s groups in developing the art of what she called deep listening or sonic awareness, the ability to focus on environmental and musical sound. Listening was her spiritual path. She thought of music as a prayer, creating a feeling of a connection to all that is in the universe. She insisted you could hear with your entire body. “Try listening with your eyebrows,” she says puckishly in one of the film’s excellent interviews with her. But she wasn’t kidding.
Weintraub gathered a trove of archival footage that captures Oliveros in action: There she is, lying on the floor of the lobby of the Whitney Museum, capturing the sounds of the crowd. Watch her use telephone lines to send music to the moon and back. See her perform in a cistern in pieces created through spontaneous connection to her fellow musicians. She sits in her chair with her accordion, leaning back, blissing out on the sounds.
Footage of her composition classes at San Francisco State University in the ’50s makes vivid the extent to which she was an outsider among her peers, a woman in pants among her classmates clad in jackets and ties. Some of them dismissed her, but the smart ones could see the talent and happily began working with her. As a composer, she became a chronic collaborator with them but also with theatre artists, dancers, even architects, always generous and nourishing, as colleagues such as Laurie Anderson, Stuart Dempster, and Terry Riley (among many others) describe her in interviews.
Just as Oliveros promoted the art of deep listening, this film demands the art of deep watching. Don’t lose focus or you’ll miss the details describing another of Oliveros’ amazing gifts. You’ll want to stay attuned not just because this remarkable woman was a genius, but because she was also a beautiful person.