Sonic Meditations: an evening of Deep Listening
29 October 2021 | 7pm
Organised by and held at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge
Commemorating 50 years since the publication of electronic music pioneer Pauline Oliveros’ ‘Sonic Meditations’, King’s Chapel will host a discussion of her work with Dr Louise Marshall (UAL), followed by a communal practice of the meditations with certified Deep Listener Ed McKeown (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Pauline Oliveros (US, 1932-2016) was a composer, accordionist and pioneer of electronic music. She studied at the University of Houston and San Francisco State College and later joined the San Francisco Tape Music Center. A feminist sensibility infused early works but it is her formulation of Deep Listening – “listening to all things at all times” – for which she is best known. The Sonic Meditations are a set of 25 instructional scores Oliveros developed in the mid-1960s. The Sonic Meditations are social exercises, democratic in nature, that make the participant the centre of a sound world that they then join with the sounds of others.
Louise Gray (Louise Marshall) is a writer for The Wire, a member of the CRiSAP research centre and an associate lecturer in sound arts at the University of the Arts London. Her research uses an applied deep listening as a methodology to consider how female composers (and others) still need to fight for their places on stage and in the musicological historiography.https://www.crisap.org