The Importance of Attention in Music

In the mid-1960s, Pauline Oliveros was a composer of experimental electronic music. But at the end of the 1960s, shocked by the political violence around her, she turned away from electronic technology and towards to a different kind of experimentation, which Dr. Kerry O'Brien calls "experimentalisms of the self." The immediate result of this turn was Oliveros's Sonic Meditations, a series of instructions for group bodymind practice. This work became the seed of Deep Listening, a sort of musical yoga Oliveros developed throughout the rest of her long career. Dr. O'Brien joins JF and Phil for a conversation on practice, "gaining mind," the ritual value of art, the wisdom of the body, and whether Deep Listening is really best understood as art at all.

REFERENCES

Kerry O'Brien, "Listening as Activism: The 'Sonic Meditations' of Pauline Oliveros"
Pauline Oliveros, American composer
John Cage, 4'33"
Dead Territory performing Cage's 4'33"
Alvin Lucier, "Music for a Solo Performer"
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

Special Guest: Kerry O'Brien.

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