About Deep Listening
Deep Listening® is a three fold listening practice created by esteemed composer Pauline Oliveros 1932-2016. The practice engages Oliveros' intention of 'listening to everything it is possible to listen to all the time,' and it is embodied through a shared experience of listening and sounding the text scores.
“Pauline Oliveros has abandoned composition/performance as it is usually established today for sonic explorations which include everyone who wants to participate. She attempts to erase the subject/object or performer/audience relationship by returning to ancient forms which preclude spectators” - Sonic Meditations, Smith Publications, 1974.
Deep Listening at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity 2017-2019
2017-19 The Creative Gesture -Collective Composition Lab Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
Held in the Dance department, Director Emily Molnar with Stephan Laks aand Michael Schumacher. I was invited by Kyle Brenders to become co-faculty with Carla Kihlstedt and Michael Schumacher. We invited 9 improvising composers, 9 choreographers and 20 dancers to experience new ways of creating together in equanimity.
We began each morning with Deep Listening, Oliveros text scores for listening meditation and sounding, focussing on embodiment of creative expression, and the agency of sounding into relation with the ecosystem, the sonosphere.. and each other. Participants from all disciplines experienced equanimity and shared practices in movement, dance, improvisation and composition. Concurrently under the Artistic Direction of Steve Schick and Claire Chase, our program overlapped with two related programs. With Carla Kihlstedt, Tiffany Ayalik, and Sofia Jernberg, I was also faculty for An Improviser's View of Notated Music. Participants were able to investigate the relationship between the improviser and the choreographer with members and faculty of the Dance program Collective Composition Lab. Improviser's also dovetailed with Vijay Iyer and Tyshawn Sorey's Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music. The improvising jazz musicians and singers were welcome in our studios, just as our improvisers were welcome in Tyshawn Sorey's Conduction sessions This is how we received Ganavya , Rajna and Chris Williams. And spent time with JACK Quartet in high places. A space was held in protective harmonic resonance, for inclusion of all, within a creative process, located in remote mountainous natural environment, as an experience of mountain/ river attunement, collective creativity, relational diversity, and peace.
I am grateful to Claire Chase for receiving me in Pauline’s place and Kyle Brenders who managed this expansive vision.
Alumni includes:
Ganavya IN/US/ DE, Dr Rajna Swaminathan IN/ US, Germaine Liu CA, Laura Colomban IT/ UK, Philippe Melanson CA, Karen Kaeja CA, Matt Rogalsky CA, Terri Hron CA, Anna Atkinson CA,, Kimberley de Jong CA, Nyda Kasowosky CA, Susan Wolf CA, Henry McPherson SC/ UK, Jonathan Kawchuk CA, Casia Vengoechea SE, Jackson Carol CA, Phapbi Ngo FR/ NL, Helen Clare Kinney AT, Guido Dutilh NL, Chris Williams US, Joanna Mattrey US/ IR, Silvia Tarozzi IT
a day long mountain hike to Lake Agnes, Banff National Park
When you listen particles decide to be heard
Pauline Oliveros, Quantum Listening, IGNOTA press UK
Soundfield Memory Restoration Archive
I shared my idea of the Soundfield Memory Restoration Archive, that we can replicate the physiological response to a soundfield that we love through memory and that memory as an archive, allows for the possibility that just as we memorized books when books were being burned , we can memorize sound fields in defiance of extinction, with the quantum possibility that particles may migrate out of our memories into the environment when it is safe and seed the re-emergence of a vibrant multispecies environment. When I shared this recently with Allison Glenn, curator of Toronto Biennale 2026, she responded, embodied knowledge resists erasure.
Listening, I don't perceive hierarchy. Within the synchronicity of a field of pulses, I attune to a vibratory shimmer. Improvising I find my voice without censoring. Opening to musical traditions and tuning systems from the multiplicity, I become a citizen. Listening with other species, elements, in weather, I discover a way to essential being. In my experience, creative expression eases, suffering, mine/ others.
We have voice. In the city the edges of a sound field are pronounced, overlapping sonics complex and self-integrating. People stand for their songs. We brace against noise, embrace each other in the create against all odds climate we find ourselves waking up in. A community of many becomes culture.
I have been focussed on being present for the more than human sound field. Outsider to culture, belonging to the sea. I press footsteps as self-expression. Attending all the brackish tributaries, the basins, rivers and lakes, I submerge in the language of waves, listen with in each arrival, trace in sound the line where water meets land. I carry a sound field memory restoration archive into extinction. I compose field recordings of listening. Streams of sonics emerge through my cello, my voice and the electroacoustic processing of piano tones, chorales in spatial array. Offering listening walks, sounding gatherings for all voices, I explore equanimity, translation, microtones, embodied sonic archiving, collective creative expression. My contemplation is non-violence, a fluidity of reciprocal care at the bottom of the ocean, and time. I create with those who stand for the wild.
Anne Bourne sound artist/ composer, improvises parallel streams of extended cello and voice. Anne was introduced to Pauline Oliveros over distance in 1994 for a Telematic improvisation with ensembles from Toronto and Paris, joining Pauline's Deep Listening band, simultaneously heard by their audience at the Kitchen in New York. Anne travelled to the Rose Mountain retreats with Oliveros, in the sangre de Cristo mountain range in New Mexico to deepen her listening aand com position practice. Anne performed the premier of Pauline Oliveros’ composition ‘Primordial/Lift’ with David Grubbs and Tony Conrad NY, 1998, and on all subsequent performances and recordings of this piece. a listening experience based on infrasonics illuminating the resonant frequency of the earth. Anne organized a second XAvantXI Music Gallery concert, to perform with Pauline Oliveros, Doug van Nort and IONE, 2016. Oliveros passed away peacefully just over one month later. At the invitation of Ione and International Contemporary Orchestra, Anne led Oliveros' Tuning Meditation at a memorial at the Park Avenue Armory. Anne continues to carry the text scores of Pauline Oliveros, to offer an experience of collective creativity in a gesture of sonic peace.