An Introduction to the Music and Legacy of Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016)
Paul Christopher, Faculty
Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) was a composer, teacher, performer, researcher and writer, who was a central figure in the development of experimental and electronic music. From her early work as one of the first female composers of electronic music, to her performances as an accordionist utilizing electronic media and improvisation, and finally with her commitment to "Deep Listening", Oliveros remained at the forefront of musical thought.
8:40-9:00 AM, 146 Morrison
Carl Sandberg printed
the folk song "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" in his 1927 anthology The American Sandberg, a touchstone of the
First American Folk Revival of the
1930s. The identity of its author
is uncertain; it was first
recorded commercially by Harry McClintock, a
singer-songwriter who was a member of
the International Workers of the World (the "Wobblies"), a group whose radicalism and militant stance in favor of workers' rights led to its
persecution by anti-Communist crusaders. Wolff references the Wobblies in another
work, Wobbly Music (1975). The lyrics to the first of the song's six verses in Sandberg are, "Oh,
why won't you work like other men do? How the hell can I work when there's
no work to do? Hallelujah, I'm a bum, Hallelujah, bum again, Hallelujah, give us a hand-out, to revive us again!"
Wolff
observes, "The tune (and its text, in the I.W.W.
version)-cheerful, mocking and threatening-is point of reference
for the expressive character of playing:' Cello Song Variations begins a simple statement
of the melody, followed by increasingly freer paraphrases
and distorted fragments of the tune. Wolff specifies free breaks in the tempo that the performer
is allowed
to realize
as they choose; microtonal inflections are specified
in various places but different technical and expressive
choices (dynamics, arco vs. pizzicato playing, bowing, etc.) are left to the performer as well. Wolff's curvy, "wobbly" beaming of the work's
many sixteenth-note passages invites free interpretation of tempo, although the composer instructs cellists to preserve
(or at least imply) a sense of the original tempo and beat.
The model for this three-movement work is J.S. Bach's Suite in G major for Violoncello Solo BWV 1007, specifically the Prelude, Sarabande, and Gigue of Bach's suite. Wolff confronts his model using two main techniques: erasure of portions of Bach's continuously flowing rhythmic surface, and substitution of notes of tension that negate Bach's harmonic syntax. Fragmentation and negation here are a form of commentary, homage, and critical engagement; they result in an engaging new work that dialogues with the music of the past while insisting, like the Zen practice with which Wolff and Cage were well acquainted, that we as listeners engage primarily to the sonic here and now.
The essential characteristic of Wolff's compositional indeterminacy is that the score presented to the performer is an open text-just as no two readers will have the same experience with a given novel (or one reader with the same novel, read at two different periods of their life) it is impossible, and undesirable, for any two performances to be the same. Here Wolff combines exact notational fragments with indeterminate passages. Some of the latter are to be performed twice, giving the cellist the opportunity to realize them differently each time. Paul Christopher chooses to interpret Wolff's indeterminate notation now with calm, quiet reverence, now as if quizzically interrogating the composer's intent, now giving full rein to a sort of fury. The through-line connecting the work's many fragmentary gestures is a saturation of the sonic picture plane; there is a sense that the piece is over when it has explored every corner and cranny of the cello's range of expression. In this regard the work comes closest to the music of Feldman, who made explicit connections between the sonic plane of his own works and the picture plane of the Abstract Expressionist painters from which he took so much inspiration.
The "Anton" of Wolff's title is cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, who premiered the work in 2018. These five unaccompanied cello pieces by Wolff present a mix of specific and indeterminate notational instructions to the player. Piece 1 alternates conventionally notated gestures with indeterminate passages - in the first such passage, the player is asked to pluck each individual note pizzicato, wait until it decays to silence, and then move on to the next note. In another passage, Wolff provides a series of dynamic - f, p, pp - and instructs the player to play "any sounds, one sound for each dynamic, anywhere within 2 second time space. Sustain beyond time space ad lib." A similar dialog between specific and indeterminate "time spaces" continues throughout the subsequent movements. In places Wolff specifies dynamics or rhythms but permits them to be realized with any sounds. Piece 3 invites the cellist to shuffle brief musical segments as desired; piece 4 is notated on an 8 x8 square grid reminiscent of a chess board (and of tables that Cage was using circa 1950-51 as a first step into chance procedures); the performer navigates around the grid as desired and may play the notes in squares of the "chessboard" either one after another or simultaneously, as double or triple stops. In three of the pieces the composer interjects pauses of freely variable duration, suggesting that the performer join the listener in experiencing Wolff's music in terms of both the sounds he invites the cellist to play and the silence that surrounds them.
