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Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros’, a “female John Cage”, pieces really make me think of deep listening and connecting inner states with what I hear. The idea behind her art that we can connect to some sort of a common sisterhood is transmitted through her pieces which carry the sounds of nature (as to my view) and call out to our connection with all the things and sounds in the world. It is very noticeable in the cistern performance where the sound merges with something that you’ve described as “shamanistic” in class right after I thought about it too. It’s all about looking back at our roots and creation in Oliveros’s art.

“Lear” and “Lone” sound like wandering in the woods to me. There’s mystery, but I wouldn’t describe it as a typical kind. It’s a soothing comforting mystery of the nature, wind, dawn and dusk, wilderness. It is not disturbing with everything undiscovered and unpredictable that this forest mystery keeps secret yet, but it is inviting to join the discovery and to unite with the song of a fast creek running its marathon through the curvy terrain among the trees. You can hear frosty winter mornings, crackling of burning branches in the hot summer forest fires... And you can hear silence that is embracing everything around itself, it absorbs the melody of the woods and plays it over and over again. I think that everyone will hear different things in those two pieces but at the same time while realizing that I’m pretty sure it also gives listeners the feeling of understanding and hearing something that is so universal and familiar to everyone, that they indeed make you feel like a part of a common knowledge. There are thousands of stories and millions of voices behind the melodies, they gain their power to sing from the silence and from the nature of sound.

“Lear” would be perfectly described as the divine power in shape of a song, calming with its boundless existence and relentless with its unsparing unpredictability, it’s the power nurtured by everything and dependent on nothing, it’s the energy of things and their creation, roaming in the depths of silence.

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