Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

November 24: Workshop

This workshop offers a collective exploration of the histories, materials, and social concerns that shaped Pauline Oliveros’ work with the Sonic Meditations and other facets of her practice. Our experience will illuminate the Meditations through archival materials and explore connections between sound and voice with ecology, embodiment, and justice in our contemporary historical moment. Participants can expect to create collective experiments with voice and sound in museum spaces.

No experience with music will be presumed! As Oliveros says herself in the introduction to the Meditations, “no special skills are necessary.”

RSVP also includes free admission to the Museum and our special exhibition, For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability. We encourage attendees to arrive early to get refreshments from The Kitchen before entering.

1 – 1:10PM: Doors Open

1:10 – 1:20PM: Introductions

1:20 – 1:40PM: First Performance

1:40 – 2:10PM: Breakout Time

2:10 – 2:30PM: Break

2:30 – 2:50PM: Second Performance

2:50 – 3:20PM: Breakout Time

3:20 – 3:30PM: Closing Remarks

In Pauline Oliveros’ manifesto Quantum Listening she asks, “Would you like to zoom into a waterfall to hear individual sounds of the falling drops? Would you like to hear the sound of a cell dividing in your own body? The sound of blood coursing through your veins as you monitor your own health?”

Oliveros was a prolific composer, devoted accordionist, electronic-­ music maverick, and a central figure in the history of experimental music. She is best known for her concept of Deep Listening, which developed out of her Sonic Meditations, a series of activities and text-­ based scores Oliveros created in the early 1970s collaboratively with the ♀ Ensemble, a group of women-­ identifying artists and composers. The Sonic Meditations emphasize somatic healing through integrative listening, and although the scores can be practiced alone, Oliveros’ proposal was fundamentally relational, a call to heal collectively. At the time, Oliveros was a professor in the music department at UC San Diego, an out lesbian in a male-dominated field.

The meditations were structured to raise participants’ attention; instructions such as “make your last audible breath a sung tone” were designed to encourage listening and responsiveness. Her distinct kinetic and embodied approach to music making was deeply rooted in a feminist politicizing of the body. The meditations were created in response to the 1960s social unrest and antiwar movements, motivating Oliveros to expand the way she made music.

Amy Cimini is musicologist, violist, teacher and Associate Professor of Music at UC San Diego. She works on questions of power, community and technology in 20th & 21st century experimental music, sound art and auditory culture. She is the author of Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life (Oxford University Press 2022) and co-editor of Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interview (Blank Forms Editions 2020) with composer and theorist Bill Dietz. In other articles, she explores race and digital art curation; debates about feminist music theory; listening and border militarization and other topics. As a violist, she plays with composer Katherine Young in the duo "Architeuthis Walks on Land" and in improvised ensembles and experimental rock bands. She also makes solo music that critically explores local music and sound recording archives and soundscapes in the San Diego / Tijuana borderlands.

For the last two years, she has been proud to co-organize free audio production courses for teens in collaboration with Media Arts Center San Diego with grant support from the Conrad Prebys Foundation. Amy serves on the editorial board of the journal Women and Music as well as the Graduate Education Committee in the American Musicological Society. She is a founding member of the Music and Philosophy Study Group of the AMS and serves on the board of the Maryanne Amacher Foundation.

A specialist in histories of US experimental music, Dr. Charissa Noble teaches music history, art history, and music criticism as an assistant professor at the University of San Diego. Her interdisciplinary research encompasses experimental music, critical voice studies, and music ethnographies of 20th-century California avant-garde scenes. Dr. Noble has presented her work at academic gatherings such as the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the International Society for Minimalist Music, and Music and the Moving Image at New York University. Her published work has been featured in journals such as The Journal of the Society for American Music, The Journal of Musicological Research, The Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies, and Sound American. In addition to her research, Dr. Noble co-directs local experimental vocal ensemble San Diego New Verbal Workshop, and currently serves as Executive Director of San Diego New Music.