Darmstadt celebrates Pauline Oliveros’ 80th birthday with a program celebrating Oliveros’s diverse body of work and a handful of her valued collaborators, including swiss pianist Anmari Mëtsa Yabi Wili, Jason Hwang (violin), Alex Waterman (cello), Fast Forward (kitchen hardware), Jim Alteri (violinist), and multi-instrumentalist Miguel Frasconi. The program includes For Pauline, Tree Peace, Horse Sings from Cloud, Oliveros’s participatory Tuning Meditation, a rare live rendition of Oliveros' seminal early electronic piece I of IV (1966) performed by Suzanne Thorpe and Alex Chechile (reel-to-reel tape + oscillators), a performance of Sound Kitchen by Fast Forward and an invocation by Ione with Pauline Oliveros and Miguel Frasconi.
A visionary figure in the experimental tradition, Texas native Pauline Oliveros came of age during the 1950s in the Bay Area, forming the group Sonics with Ramón Sender and Morton Subotnick, which led to the creation of the San Francisco Tape Center. Oliveros directed the center in 1967, where she composed pioneering electronic music including the piece Bye Bye Butterfly (1965). Her body of subsequent work includes choral and instrumental scores, strategies for improvisation, ritual-theater, germinal writings, explorations of drone, and solo performance with her accordion. Her Sonic Meditations of the early 1970s are widely performed and taught internationally. In 1988 she formed the Deep Listening Band after an experience making music with trombonist Stuart Dempster and singer Panaiotis in a disused water tank with 45-second reverb. Her musical spirit continues to perpetuate through her ever-growing network of musical collaborators and students.
