Still Listening: Pauline Oliveros Commemoration
Still Listening, a three-day conference of talks and concerts, took place at the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas (IPLAI McGill) in Montreal from June 1-3, 2017. The conference was arranged in memory of Pauline Oliveros, the experimental American composer who was a central figure in new stances towards musical creation. She coined the term “Deep Listening.” “I feel that listening is the basis of creativity and culture,” Oliveros once said. “How you’re listening, is how you develop a culture and how a community of people listens, is what creates their culture.” An openly queer woman composer, Oliveros was a pioneer in many ways, and a key figure in contemporary American music.
Still Listening exhibition installation photo
The conference included talks and workshops by Jennifier Wilsey, I-Ying Wu, IONE and Friends, and Viv Corringham; performances by Tina Pearson, Ann Bourne, Elysha Poirier, Doug Van Nort, Curtis Bahn and Thomas Ciufo, the Catskill Mountain Gamelan Ensemble, James Harley and Gayle Young, and Novarumori directed by Amy Horvey, featuring Lori Freedman (clarinet), Jennifer Thiessen (viola), Emilie Girard-Charest (cello), Felix Del Tredici (trombone), Marianne Trudel (accordion), Isaiah Ceccarelli (percussion), Daniel Anez (piano), and Andrea Young (voice & electronics). There were also scholarly presentations by Ellen Waterman, Sara Ramshaw, Erik DeLuca, Thomas Ciufo, Renee T. Coulombe, David Bernstein, Jason Robinson, Kevin McNeilly, Sara Villa, Stephanie Khoury, Dan DiPiero, Rebecca Caines, Michelle Stewart, Jing Xia, Jesse Stewart, Doug Van Nort, Dana Reason, Kathy Kennedy, and Brenda Hutchinson. Rachel Elliott, Max Stein, and Jen Reimer took part in a Roundtable Discussion on the “Sounding the City” project and Site-Specific Improvisations in Urban and Virtual Environments. At the heart of the conference was an exhibition of Oliveros scores at McGill’s Marvin Duchow Music Library, which Lawrence Joseph discusses with IICSI researcher Eric Lewis in the current issue of Musicworks.
The eighty-five scores from the exhibition are also on view and for listening at http://stilllisteningoliveros.com/.
