‘Androgynous Music’: Pauline Oliveros’s Early Cybernetic Improvisation

Abstract

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pauline Oliveros developed new techniques for improvising with new electronic instruments, which she described using language and metaphors from cybernetics and information theory. First using just a tape recorder, and later using a series of tape recorders connected to an unstable pair of oscillators, Oliveros created what she later called a ‘very unstable nonlinear musicmaking system’ (Oliveros, Pauline. 2016a. “Improvising Composition: How to Listen to the Time Between.” In Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity, edited by Gillian H. Siddall, and Ellen Waterman, 75–90. Durham, NC: Duke University Press). By positioning herself as only one member of an instrumental system that facilitated the self-regulating flow of sound as signal—operating as air pressure waves, electrical waves, psychoacoustic phenomena, and even human consciousness—Oliveros began to reconceptualize the role of her body in musical performance. By the early 1970s, Oliveros began to embrace the new kinds of musical performance and musical subjectivities produced by this system as a part of her exploration of gender in music, positing the concept of ‘androgynous music’—defined as music that is simultaneously ‘linear’ and ‘nonlinear’. Oliveros thought of her performance practice as one that could destabilise socially constructed musical identities of composition, performance, and listening, and also integrate different modalities of interacting with musical ‘signal’. This article maps Oliveros’s cybernetic, improvisatory practices with her earliest electronic systems, showing how her performance within these systems laid the groundwork for her later theorisations of technology, gender, and the body.

Keywords:

• Pauline Oliveros
• Electronic Music
• Improvisation
• Cybernetics
• Gender Studies

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As Douglas Kahn notes, Oliveros would later theorize the existence of the ‘sonosphere’, the ‘sonic envelope of the earth’ (Oliveros 2006; Kahn 2013, 174); Oliveros also later posited the existence of ‘quantum sound’ as vibratory energy (Oliveros 1999; Juett 2010).

2 Oliveros’s ‘body-as-tape-recorder’ differs from the ‘postmodern/posthuman’ subjectivity described by N. Katherine Hayles; unlike the ‘fractured’ subjectivity ‘riven by disconcerting metamorphoses’ (1997, 75) Hayles describes, Oliveros finds a deeper expression of subjectivity through her body’s relationship with tape.

3 The Sonic Meditations were first published in Source in 1971 (‘Sonic Meditations’ 1971), and subsequently appended by additional works. Oliveros herself cites the Sonic Meditations as the ‘basis’ of her philosophy of Deep Listening™, which became concretized in the 1990s (Oliveros 2005, xvii). As John Kapusta (2021) has argued, Oliveros’s ‘somatic’ practices of the 1970s became widely celebrated within New Musicological circles in the early 1990s; much of this scholarship points back explicitly to the Sonic Meditations as an origin point (see Taylor 1993; Rycenga 1994, and more cited in Kapusta 2017; 25n3 and Kapusta 2021, 3n5).

4 Beyond the 1990s, recent scholarship on Oliveros has continued to explore her relationships with various expressions of feminism, such as Mockus (2008); McMullen (2010); Jensen-Moulton (2014); O’Brien (2016); Hiendl (2021).

5 See Oliveros (1984a, 1984b); Oliveros and Maus (1994); Oliveros (2010, 246).

6 Cybernetics, not originally written for a general audience, was followed up with Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), which was aimed at non-experts. Throughout the 1950s and early 1950s, many different cybernetic theories and even ‘schools’ began to characterize the discourse, although fundamental concepts such as information, signal, feedback, and black-boxing remained constant—and indeed filtered down to the general public. See Kline 2017.

7 As Andrew Pickering notes, Wiener coined the term cybernetics from the Greek kubernetes [‘steersman’ or ‘governor’], implying a ‘self-steering’ or ‘self-governing’ system (Pickering 2010, 7)

8 This model was popularized by Claude Shannon’s 1948 article ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, which later was adapted to a book with the definite article The Mathematical Theory of Communication in 1949.

9 The article in which Oliveros posed this question, ‘Rags and Patches’, was pulled from the journal, NuMus West, for being ‘too feminist’ (Mockus 2008, 72); it was later included in Oliveros’s 1984 collection Software for People.

10 As Taylor has argued, Oliveros has often invoked essentialized conceptions of femininity—sometimes informed by what she understood to be ‘Eastern’ or Native American concepts of femininity. Although Taylor concludes that this is ultimately an ‘unwitting participation’ in patriarchal culture (1993, 393), here I seek to recover Oliveros’s evolving understanding of gender, despite its problematic nods towards essentialism.

11 As Piekut (2011) and Dohoney (2014) have explored, Cage actively disliked performers of his work who seemed to revel in ‘nonlinear’ realizations of his scores, such as Charlotte Moorman and Julius Eastman. Like these two performers, Oliveros also approached Cage’s work from a historically- and socially-situated subject position that was very different from Cage’s. It is unknown what he thought about Oliveros’s performances of his work at the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1964.

12 Erickson’s appeal to improvisation as ‘natural’ has problematic racial implications; as George Lewis has argued, language surrounding improvisation in post-1950s America was often racially coded. However, as Lewis notes, ‘improvisation and non-white sensibility’ were often perceived as ‘objects to be avoided’ in many musical institutions (Lewis 1996, 100); Erickson and Oliveros’s unspoken implication is that they were transgressing against a racist ‘avoidance’ of improvised practices. See also Oliveros (1999).

13 Oliveros recalls: ‘We discovered that if we tried to plan it then it would fall flat, but if we just played and let the conversation develop spontaneously, we would always get something that was interesting’ (Oliveros 2016b). All five tapes of these improvisations are archived at Mills College (CCM CD 150 n.d.).

14 In 1960, Oliveros wrote to Erickson to ask if a musician could be trained to be a ‘concert performer’ if they were only taught to improvise. In his reply, Erickson supported the practice of improvisation as a means toward ‘security’ and ‘mastery and control’ of instruments, but he still insisted that proper technique for ‘concert performances’ was necessary (Oliveros 1960b).

15 This group suggests a much earlier starting point to the kind of gynocentric sociality that Oliveros would later develop in the ♀ Ensemble in San Diego, and suggests that Oliveros was cultivating queer spaces well before her public identification as a lesbian in 1971 (Mockus 2008, 76).

16 It is unclear if Cohen actually came to San Francisco to participate in the concert. Gordon Mumma recalls that Cohen had met Oliveros in 1961, however, and it was through Cohen that Mumma himself met Oliveros later in the decade (Mumma and Fillion 2015, 258)

17 Different versions of this anecdote also appear in Oliveros (2012b and 2015).

18 These oscillators used vacuum tubes, which meant that they needed time to ‘warm up’, were sensitive to temperature, and subject to ‘drift’ and other nonlinear behaviors; transistorized oscillators, which were available by 1964, were much more stable.

19 i.e. Oliveros thought that if one oscillator produced a sine wave at 100,000 Hz, and the other produced a sine wave at 100,500 Hz, signals would be produced both at their sum (200,500 Hz) and difference (500 Hz)—the latter falling within the range of human hearing when transduced into air.

20 ‘Combination Tones’ were first described by Georg Andreas Sorge in 1740 and were popularized by Giuseppe Tartini in 1754. Designers of acoustic instruments often exploit this psychoacoustic phenomenon to provide a ‘missing fundamental’, or low bass note, on instruments where it is not physically possible or practical produce them, such as small pipe organs or small loudspeakers (Tartini 1754; Howard and Angus 2017).

21 i.e., if Oliveros played a low A₂ with a fundamental frequency of 110Hz and a low A#₂ with a fundamental frequency of 116.5 Hz, she would perceive an acoustic ‘beat’ with a frequency of 6.5Hz

22 In the 1990s, Oliveros developed an understanding of sound informed by quantum physics (1999, 2010); as Juett observes, Oliveros’s theories of ‘quantum improvisation’ and ‘quantum listening’ synthesize the acoustic theories of Mantle Hood and the quantum-theoretical philosophy of David Bohm. Juett observes that ‘underlying Oliveros’s quantum theory of music is the unification of listening, composing, and performing’ (2010, 6). As mentioned earlier in this article, Oliveros also later posited the existence of the ‘sonosphere’, a ‘sonic envelope’ in which ‘sound’ operated across any imaginable domain. Both of these concepts emerge theoretically and historically from cybernetics and information theory.

23 This may have been due to the fact that the massive, floor-to-ceiling patch bay was built to military specifications, supposedly sourced from a B-12 bomber (Maginnis 1997).

24 The behavior of electrical ‘mixers’ in the frequency domain is almost always nonlinear, and depends on their design. The many variations and types of frequency domain mixers are described in Horowitz and Hill (1989, 885–87).

25 On the Ampex 350 tape machine, which had a distance of ∼2 in. between record and play heads, the delay time was 266 milliseconds if the tape ran at 7.5 ips (inches per second); if it ran at the more standard 15 ips, the delay time would be only 133 milliseconds (Oliveros 1969).

26 In this letter, Oliveros also lists a tape entitled ‘The Csssssss [rock & roll symphony]; this tape’s title is very close to ‘The C(s) for once’, a tape that is labelled as having been made in 1965 and which exists as CCM CD 152 at Mills College’s archives of the SFTMC. Unlike the Mnemonics tapes, this is a composed tape piece that uses elaborate splicing to combine instruments playing the note ‘c’, perhaps a direct reference to Terry Riley’s In C, which premiered at the SFTMC in 1964.

27 Many of Oliveros’s later performance systems were explicitly built around cybernetic principles, such as feedback, systematicity, black-boxing, and ‘cyborg’ prosthesis. These include the ‘Expanded Instrument System’, which in the 1990s was retroactively dated back to 1967 (Oliveros and Panaiotis 1991; Oliveros and Gamper, 1999), and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (AUMI) which began development in 2006.

28 See Oliveros (1999, 2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2006, 2016a, 2016b).

29 The phrase ‘access to resources’ also strongly recalls the slogan of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue: ‘access to tools’. See Turner (2006).

30 I use the term ‘integration’ intentionally: in Oliveros’s collection Sounding the Margins, she posed an idiosyncratic mathematical equation: ‘l + nl = i, where l is linear, nl is nonlinear, and i is integration’ (2010, 246). It is important to note that Oliveros does not use the term ‘integration’ in its mathematical definition from calculus, but rather appeals to its broad metaphoric meaning.

31 This letter perhaps foreshadows Oliveros’s Postcard Theater project with Alison Knowles, in which Oliveros is depicted reading a novel seated in front of an impending bust of Beethoven, captioned with the phrase ‘BEETHOVEN WAS A LESBIAN’ (capitalization in original). See Gray (2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Theodore Gordon

Theodore Gordon is a musicologist and musician whose work connects experimental music, critical organology, and science & technology studies. His research has been supported by the New York Public Library, and his writing has been published by Current Musicology, Portable Gray, the Library of Congress, the American Musicological Association and Cultural Anthropology. He has written program and liner notes for Unseen Worlds, and has contributed exhibition texts for the 2019 exhibition Sounding Circuits at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. He performs and improvises with the viola and the Buchla Music Easel. He is currently Assistant Professor of Music at Baruch College, City University of New York; previously, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Music and Visiting Researcher at the Computer Music Center at Columbia University.