The Signature Meditation
1. Dwell on your name. Write it down as slowly as possible. 2. Visualize your name as you sign it mentally.
a. with eyes closed b. with eyes open
3. Visualize your name in different kinds of writing, script and printing. a. vary the sizes from microscopic to gigantic
b. vary the colors and backgrounds c. vary the dimensions from 2 to 3
4. Visualize or actually sign your name backwards, forwards, upside down, inside out.
a. with the right hand b. with the left hand
c. with both hands simultaneously mirroring each other The Tuning Meditation
Using any vowel sound, sing a tone that you hear in your imagination. After contributing your tone, listen for someone else’s tone and tune to its pitch as exactly as possible.
Continue by alternating between singing a tone of your own and tuning to the tone of another voice. Introduce new tones at will and tune to as many different voices as are present. Sing warmly.
APPENDIX B
Selected “Performances” of the Sonic Meditations, 1970–1981, 1986 1970: “Noon Meditation,” Expo ‘70, Japan.
March 2, 1971: “Noon Meditation,” Salk Institute, La Jolla, at the invitation of Shelly Hendler. Members of 씸 Ensemble: Bonnie Mara Barnett, Lin Barron, Joan George, Pauline Oliveros, Christine Voigt, Betty Wong, Shirley Wong.
March 1971: Sonic Meditations II and IV, Wesleyan University, at the invitation of Alvin Lucier.
April 30, 1971: Women’s Festival of the Arts, Center for Women’s Studies & Services, San Diego State College.
October 1971: “In Sonic Meditations” (lecture), Douglas College, Rutgers, NJ, at the invitation of Geoffrey Hendricks.
October 27, 1971: Metropolitan Community Church, San Diego.
February 19, 1972: “Perceptions of woman: festival of arts,” University of Oregon, Eugene.
June 3–4, 1972: History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz. October 1972: California Institute for Women (prison), Frontera, CA. March 12, 1973: Women in the Arts Festival, University of North Dakota,
Grand Forks.
February 22, 1974: Oberlin College. October 1974: Metamusik Festival, Berlin.
March 23–27, 1975: Conference on Performance Art, Los Angeles Woman’s Building.
April 1975: Los Angeles Woman’s Building. May 1975: Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri.
May 1975: Women’s Studies, Penn State, at the invitation of Joanne Feldman. June 1975: State University at Bellingham, Washington.
October 23, 1975: with Linda Montano, Northern Illinois University. February 1976: workshop, Woman’s Space, Los Angeles.
October 6–9, 1977: Women Artists Group of the Northwest (WAG), Seattle. July 28–30, 1978: Women in Classical Music Workshop, Immaculate Heart
College, Los Angeles.
October 21–22, 1978: College of Santa Fe, “Exploration in Music Series.” February 3, 1979: “Greeting Meditation,” “One Word,” and “+ Sound” with
members of the Graduate Experimental Performance Seminar, University of California, San Diego.
February 21, 1979: “The Greeting,” “Removing the Demon or Getting Your Rocks Off,” “Bowl Gong,” and “Zina’s Circle,” Bucknell University. April 8, 1979: Western Front Lodge, Vancouver, British Columbia.
June 8, 1979: New York City, The Kitchen, “New Music, New York” Festival. November 1979: Music Gallery, Toronto.
November 17, 1979: “An Evening of Sonic Meditations,” presented by The Avant Garden, a benefit for the Woman’s Building, San Francisco.
November 20, 1979: “An Evening of Sonic Meditations,” Music Department, Stanford University.
April 19, 1980: with Linda Montano and Meridel Le Sueur, Woodland Patterns, Milwaukee.
April 21–23, 1980: Bowdoin College. May 3, 1980: Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT.
May 17–19, 1980: Samaya Foundation, New York City. May 30–31, 1980: The Kitchen, New York City. October 21, 1980: Texas Tech University, Lubbock. October 23, 1980: PIE, Dallas.
March 26–29, 1981: New York University, First National Congress on Women in Music.
4 Respiration
expansion and contraction
The accordion occupies an odd, marginalized position in American musical culture. Perhaps more than any other instrument the accordion always sounds its connections to ethnicity, on the one hand, and schlocky kitsch on the other. Since the mid-1950s, the image of the accordion in popular culture has been dominated, even stereotyped, by Lawrence Welk and Myron Floren, whose work managed to combine folk tunes, popular songs, and transcriptions of European classical music. In more recent years, it is still in the peculiar corners of commercial popular music that one encounters the accordion. Weird Al Yankovic, for instance, builds on the Welk stereotype and lampoons Top 40 hits by rewriting the lyrics and accompanying himself on solo accordion, the ultimate musical insult. The Knack’s “My Sherona,” Michael Jackson’s “Beat It,” and Madonna’s “Into the Groove” became “My Bologna,” “Eat It,” and “Into the Nude,” all of which received considerable radio airplay in the 1980s. Nirvana’s melancholy ballad “Jesus Don’t Want Me For a Sunbeam” uses accordion as primary accompaniment, utterly without spoof, bestowing the instrument with an unusual dignity. The accordion as a sometime country & western instrument has been utilized with great gusto by k.d. lang and the reclines on her album
Angel With A Lariat (1987). lang and co-composer Ben Mink faintly recall the
accordion’s link to European cabaret on lang’s Ingenue (1992), her song cycle of unrequited lesbian love. The final track on this CD is “Constant Craving,” the Grammy Award-winning single that features a prominent musical “hook” on the accordion.
Pauline Oliveros began studying the accordion when she was 9 years old, and it has remained her primary instrument as a performer. In the realm of experimental music, her closest contemporaries on the accordion are William Schimmel and Guy Klucevsek; needless to say, Oliveros is one of the few women working with the accordion in new music. While her own work has moved the accordion toward a very different location on the cultural–musical grid, she professes a keen awareness of the stereotypes and ethnic histories associated with
this instrument. As a teenager in 1948 she remembers a highly charged incident in which she played German music in a polka band at a Polish dance hall. “Pretty soon people were standing around the hall with their arms folded. Finally they started screaming and cursing and stomping, threatening, telling us we had to pack up and leave. Which we did: we got out of there fast, we didn’t even get our money. . . . That was a real marker for me, in understanding that what you do, even in music, has consequences” (Tanner 1979, 7). In western art music, the accordion has achieved only minor status as a solo instrument, and it is not even a member of the traditional symphony orchestra.1Throughout her career
Oliveros often acknowledges her experiences of the accordion’s working-class associations, outcast status, stereotypical images, and its disfavor in the general public.2
In performance practice, many instruments are held in a certain position in relation to the body; others, like the piano or trap set, remain in place while the musician sits at them to play. The accordion interests me because it is worn on the body, almost like a big garment; it is second only to the voice as an incredibly embodied instrument. Like the voice and other wind instruments, it needs to “breathe” to make sound. In her interview with Oliveros, Ann Feldman remarks “[The accordion] seems to be an instrument that has a lot to do with breath and the body, because it’s on your body, and it breathes.” Oliveros replies: “And it’s huggable, you can hug it. . . . but it’s also kind of a protection, a little bit of armor that’s protecting your heart” (Feldman 1996, 4). Katherine Setar observes, while playing the accordion, that “the sound waves traveled through my upper torso, allowing me to easily experience the sound, not only through my ears, but throughout my body” and posits that this sensation probably appealed to Oliveros as accordionist (Setar 1997, 414). In several other essays and interviews Oliveros refers to the accordion as an amplification of her breath, and I will address this phenomenon later. But first, what else besides breath does the accordion “amplify”?
E. Annie Proulx’s novel, Accordion Crimes (1996), is actually a collection of eight short stories tied together by an accordion which functions as the main character in each story. Accordion Crimes is a powerful, complex critique of ethnic history in the United States as “told” by a green button accordion made with great care in the late nineteenth century by a peasant farmer in Sicily and haphazardly passes through the hands of German immigrants in Iowa, Mexican- Americans in Texas, Franco-Canadians in Maine, African-Creoles in Louisiana, Poles in Chicago, Scots-Irish ranchers in Montana, and present-day Norwegians in Minnesota. The accordion is a polyphonic emblem of cultural authenticity and the struggle for ethnic identity—lost, erased, reformed, and remembered. But in this novel it is also a living organism, often compared to parts of the body, and crudely sexualized by those who play it. Except for one woman virtuoso accordionist who runs away from home, it is only Proulx’s men who play the
accordion, and they play with possessive, competitive machismo. Gripping and devastating, the stories in Proulx’s Accordion Crimes stand in complete contrast to those created by Oliveros who wrests the instrument away from its male- dominated past—in her hands the accordion is subverted and queered. Tucked in the folds of her accordion lie a very different set of stories: intimate, erotic stories of lesbian passion.
* * *
In April 1975, Oliveros created Rose Mountain Slow Runner for accordion and voice. This piece marks an extremely important historical moment in Oliveros’s Figure 4 Pauline Oliveros at 16. Photo by Corwin Smith. Courtesy of Pauline
musical output, simply because it was her first accordion work since 1970 when she composed Music for T’ai Chi (for accordion, two cellos, and three voices), and her first work as solo accordionist since her Accordion from 1966 (for amplified accordion with tape-delay system).3 Generally speaking, Rose Mountain Slow
Runner is characterized by unusually long tones both played on the accordion and
sung by Oliveros. Of course, this combination was not new for her. Her interest in and work with synchronizing breath and accordion tones began in the late 1960s. She tells colleague and friend Moira Roth that her interest in long tones, listening to the environment, and expansive breathing coincided with the wide- spread social and political turmoil of the late 1960s. The Free Speech Movement, student protests (including one student who immolated himself at U.C. San Diego), the Vietnam War, the assassinations of both the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. were “very upsetting” to Oliveros. “I felt the temper of the times. I felt the tremendous fear and—what can I say—the opposite of calm. Everybody was in an uproar and I began to feel a tremendous need to find a way to calm myself. The pressures were too great. The social events were simply mirrors of what was inside. I began to retreat. I didn’t want to play concerts.”4
Playing long tones on her accordion and singing with them was, in a sense, Oliveros’s personal response to this unrest, her musical answer. However, her work with breath, meditation, and sound moved away from the personal to the communal in the formation of the 씸 Ensemble and later the Sonic Meditations (see chapter 3). In fact, most of Oliveros’s pieces from 1970–74 are for groups of musicians (trained and untrained), varied instruments and voices, and involve theatrical, meditative and/or ritual elements.5
What happened to the accordion? How and why did it re-emerge in 1975 as Oliveros’s major compositional and performance medium? She undoubtedly continued to play the accordion privately and deepened her practice of sonic meditation. But another cycle of turmoil erupted in her life, and this time it was just as political, yet far more personally devastating.
In January of 1974, Pauline Oliveros and Lin Barron, lovers since 1970, separated. Barron was a graduate student at U.C. San Diego (where Oliveros was professor of music and director of the Center for Music Experiment) and in 1972 completed her MA in composition. The separation was painfully difficult for Oliveros. The issues and struggles that concerned her are well documented in many of her letters from that time to Barron, as well as correspondence with friends Jill Johnston and Annea Lockwood to whom she turned for comfort and advice. In the following excerpt from a letter to Johnston (who had visited Oliveros and Barron in December 1973), Oliveros is desperately concerned with what might be termed “lesbian invisibility”—the oppressive distance between society at large and lesbians; the reality that most, if not all, of lesbian life remains entirely unheard and unseen by the rest of the world.
Jan 29, 1974 Dear Jill,
Your presence here is missed but also present. [. . .]
Jill! I continue to cut down trees, spindly trees growing unnoticed till now in the garden. The top is like the surface of the ocean and it has risen considerably since living here. It accompanies the hot and cold grief of separation from Lin. As you say only love breaks the heart or the art. But we are only on vacation I keep telling myself as all my broken memories keep trotting themselves out of the museum of veils. We are applying traction to the relationship according to Lin. Relationship. A system of balances imbalances. Tigers against tigers against elephants against elephants against grasshoppers and moles? and it gets heavier and heavier. The Lesbian relationship is one of tight solidarity, tight like a noose, I have noose for youse, we are bonded by lack of family and lack of community. How is marriage expressed? death? birth? Taxes? or any major event? Quietly and privately? out of sight buried in the relationshit?[sic] How can we have private life if we have no public life? We need a community or communities a nation a universe for reflective expressions of our needs. A way to relieve the total demand for tight bonded intimate solidarity a burden on the two too many so the light can filter through. [. . .] Is endurance a necessary factor? Posterity? Today is today not tomorrow or yesterday. What could make for a creative relationship? Creative economics, love making, house- holding, healing? Must we use the established vocabulary and its endless round of combinations or invent our own or both? HELP!
Love, Pauline6
During the Spring of 1974 Oliveros discussed her ideas with Johnston about a Weekend Lesbian Workout, a private gathering for some of their lesbian friends on the east coast to explore the interpersonal dynamics of lesbian relationships. “How about,” asked Oliveros, “an exploration of a model lesbian relationship? With a close examination of SECURITY, ECONOMICS, SEX, POWER, SPIRIT and whatever else belongs to a relationship.”7A week later, she continued, “Lin
and I are going to start writing descriptive statements of our relationship (non- evaluative) as an exercise toward the workshop and to help ourselves. Perhaps you have some suggestions to further the cause?”8 The Weekend Lesbian
Workout was set for May 26–27, 1974, but I am not certain if it actually took place. However, Oliveros clearly wanted to address the issues of her failing relationship with Lin in a communal setting to counteract her isolation and loneliness.
That summer Oliveros was scheduled to teach a summer school course at York University, attend the Metamusik Festival in Berlin, and present a brand new
piece in Buffalo (in October) commissioned by the Center for Creative and Performing Arts. She wondered if Barron would join her in Toronto or Buffalo, but understood Barron’s need to make her own decision. Barron ultimately decided to go to India where she stayed from August through December. Oliveros wrote her regularly with news updates about work and friends as well as her feelings of sadness, regret, loneliness, and the wish to repair their relation- ship. To complicate matters further, Oliveros felt attacked and betrayed by Johnston who had told her earlier in the year that Barron was in love with someone else, Geeta Mayor, the woman with whom Barron was staying in India. On October 12, 1974, Oliveros wrote to Barron:
I am glad that you feel like hearing news of home for it gives me a little more confidence to write to you. I was afraid to write much of anything—not knowing what would interest you.
[. . .] I feel sorry that I have such a distorted feeling about her [Geeta] when I have not even met her. But I have to say that Jill’s phone call to me in Buffalo when she told me of your “relationship” with “GRETA” (Geeta) was the heaviest thing I have ever experienced in my entire life. I have never experienced such emotional pain as that. And it was Jill who transmitted the trigger. However the decay of that nasty pulse has almost subsided. Naturally, though, I experienced some very tough demons (jealousy, hatred, envy etc) in the disguise of a woman I have never met. Even though you took great pains to “explain,” the fact that I had experienced the emotional/bodily reaction in the name of ‘Geeta’ could not be so easily removed. I fought with it very hard, telling myself how unreasonable it was endlessly—nevertheless the feeling remained and I found it difficult to feel any “openess” toward this phantom Geeta much less address letters to you “c/o Geeta Mayor.” That phantom Geeta came to my home while I was away and “stole” my loved one.9
Tensions between Johnston and Oliveros continued in November 1974, and Oliveros vented to Barron:
I had a letter from Jill yesterday. I think it was an attempt on her part to mend the fence. However it was full of accusations, analysis, ideology and confusion, all telling me how I think, feel and act. I wrote back saying, “if your letter is friendly why do you tell me how I think, feel and act? Why don’t you ask me how I think, feel and act? You might get to know me rather than your version or others’ versions of me. That is the basis for friendship.” I refuse to allow her to drag me back into the past, or have any more control.10
After Oliveros’s anger subsided, she wrote:
My experience of considering and feeling our relationship as over has left marks and some healing still must take place as my emotional state of the last two weeks indicates. There is still sorting out, + clarification to do. I still feel hot anger when I receive a letter from Jill. I’m going to take Patricia’s suggestion and return her letters unopened until I am able to cope again.
[. . .] One of my needs is to be strong—emotionally, physically etc. “Like a rock.” “Solid.” I was happy to know you want to come home—with all my heart and soul I want you to come home—but I need you to realize that I might have to lean on you. I’m vulnerable in some places. I think my worst fear is that you will not be able to accept my vulnerability. Clearly my anger at Jill is that she exposed my vulnerability. That would have been all right, but the motivation was incorrect and it was highly distorted. However right she may be in her analysis her motivation is wrong and destructive. Until I heal I will not be able to cope with her and what she represents to me at this point.
[. . .] New day—I feel much better! The discovery that I hate to admit any weakness seems to be returning my strength. Also the dawning realization that you do want to come home.11