Pauline Oliveros — early tape and electronic composition

1961

Artists: Pauline Oliveros · Year: 1961 · Medium: Tape composition and electronic music — delay-based and reel-to-reel layered compositions · Substrate: Magnetic tape, reel-to-reel decks, variable-speed tape delay, accordion and instruments processed through electronics · Place: San Francisco, California, USA · Institution: San Francisco Tape Music Center (co-founder, 1962) Pauline Oliveros arrived in San Francisco in the late 1950s, and by 1961 she was among the small circle of composers who would found the San Francisco Tape Music Center — an informal studio in a two-room flat at 321 Divisadero Street, equipped with oscillators, a few tape machines, and whatever signal-processing gear could be hand-built or borrowed. Her earliest tape pieces, composed there between 1961 and 1963, were studies in what the machines themselves did to sound when you pushed them: the howl of an oscillator that had run too long and drifted, the bright phantom pitches that emerged from intermodulation when two tones were fed through a guitar amplifier, the ghost voices you could coax out of a Hammond B-3 by manipulating the tone wheels at the edge of their specification. This work matters in this archive for a specific reason. Oliveros was not treating electronic sound as a palette of new timbres to be deployed in service of composition. She was treating the studio as an instrument whose internal behavior — feedback, resonance, saturation, slow electrical drift — was itself the composer. A piece was a set of conditions under which the equipment would reveal, over time, what it had been doing all along. The score was the listening. That stance is the seed of what, a few years later, she would name Deep Listening, and a decade after that, what she would instrumentalize in the I of IV (1966) — a piece made in a single unedited take in Toronto, using delay loops whose slow phasing between her tones built up a dense harmonic cloud that no composition could have specified in advance. The 1961–63 tape experiments are where the method was first tried. The Tape Music Center itself is a node this archive keeps returning to: Morton Subotnick was there, Ramon Sender was there, Terry Riley was there, and the Buchla 100 modular system was built specifically for them in 1965. Oliveros was its first serious long-form composer, and her willingness to let the equipment misbehave is the reason the center's output never sounded like anyone else's. Lore Oliveros once described her early years at the Tape Music Center as "asking the machines what they wanted to do." She kept a journal of studio incidents — an oscillator that had drifted overnight, a tape head that ran hot and added a third harmonic, an amplifier whose capacitors whined at 60 Hz — and composed pieces around those particular electrical anomalies. She would later say that she never thought of herself as using the equipment; she thought of herself as in collaboration with it. She continued this practice, in different form and on different equipment, for the next fifty years, founding the Deep Listening Institute in 1985 and working until her death in 2016. Sources • Oliveros, Pauline — Software for People (Printed Editions, 1984). • Bernstein, David W. (ed.) — The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde (UC Press, 2008). • Mills College Library — Pauline Oliveros Papers.