Below is found a list of composers and works which were used in this study in order to help audiences explore listening techniques in a concert setting. The focus required for this study resulted in pieces and composers chosen which help us explore our listening. The works were by Pauline Oliveros, James Tenney, and Cornelius Cardew.

Pieces named below were performed with active audience participation, unless otherwise noted.

Pauline Oliveros

Much of Oliveros' work centered around the Deep Listening practice she developed, and many of her musical scores are arguably intended for Deep Listening meditations at least as much as they were intended for concert performance. I was told by Sharon Stewart that the line between “meditations” and concert pieces is often unclear. Samuel Golter, editer of Oliveros' Anthology of Text Scores states as well, “Does a meditation with a variation that includes dancers count as a performance piece? This ambiguity highlights the beauty of Pauline Oliveros' output...As such, may of the performance scores can, and should be used as meditations, and many of the meditations are excellent in concert and for performance.” [Anthology page vii]

As mentioned in other parts of this exposition, Oliveros' work was developed with both musicians and non-musicians in mind, therefore her work was an obvious starting point for this study. However, when I reached out to members of the Deep Listening community about incorporating her works into concerts, there was understandably a certain level of caution about the possibility of corruption of Oliveros' ideas when they are not presented in a way true to her original intentions. Permissions are required to perform her works, and a certification from the Deep Listening Institute is a must in order to facilitate and lead a Deep Listening session, which may be a reason why access to and performances of her works are not common.

Many Oliveros scores could have been used for this study, including her original sonic meditations as well as countless others in the Anthology of Text Scores. Oliveros' text scores often explore one musical concept, and how that concept works itself out through our listening and in a group context. Examples include: Rock Piece (which explores rhythm), The Tuning Meditation (harmony - discussed in detail below), and Antiphonal Meditation (texture).

Different pieces also involve different listening techniques focusing on different modes of listening, and ways of community building.

Works of Pauline Oliveros:

From Unknown Silences – [INSERT SCORE INSTRUCTIONS]

This piece is also published as movement 2 of “Four Meditations for Orchestra”

• Since this piece invites the audience to make any vocal or non-vocal sound, at any time, it was chosen because I believed it would be an easy introduction to participation for the audience.

• One cannot make a “wrong” sound in this piece, one can only look for different sounds.

• Each sound happens one at a time, giving the audience an opportunity to give full attention to all characteristics of a sound (pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration)

• Since nothing has to happen collectively, members of the audience who are more shy can choose to listen entirely, or to “wait and see” how the piece develops before contributing. Indeed, in many performances of this piece with audience I have noticed the audience gaining courage throughout the performance.

When we worked on this piece in a Deep Listening session, I was surprised to hear from Sharon Stewart that she found it one of Oliveros' more complicated scores. But after discussing the score with a non-musician friend, I realized why this is the case. Many concepts of the score are completely new to non-musicians [CONTINUE WRITING]

Pauline Oliveros

The Tuning Meditation – [INSERT SCORE INSTRUCTIONS]

The Tuning Meditation is a simple score which is easy to understand for musicians and non-musicians alike. I was told by Kristin Norderval that Pauline Oliveros often used this piece as a first work to connect with a group. The piece explores Oliveros' “modes” of listening in the following ways:

Imagined listening – The group is asked to imagine their first tone before they sing it

Global and Focal listening – when choosing a tone from the group sound to match, one must listen to all tones being sung (“global” listening) and then pick one of those tones to sing next (“focal” listening).

Remembered listening – after choosing a tone from the group, one must remember the pitch in order to produce it on the next out-breath.

The piece is therefore a constant switch between all four modes of listening for participants, and an exercise in using these modes at different times, in different ways.

Oliveros writes that:

“If the instructions are followed carefully then a beautiful texture

arises with common tones threading through the cloud of sound.”

[Oliveros Four Meditations – page 3]

In my experience, a (usually atonal) harmonic progression is also created, which allows the listener to influence the tension and resolution in the harmonies created. By choosing to emphasize tones which clash or blend with the majority of sounds, the texture of the piece becomes alternately more or less dissonant. Participants who are not musically advanced enough to influence the progression in this way can still be invited to notice the changing musical texture and give their own aural interpretation to the harmonies created.

[EXPAND] After one performance, I was told by an audience member that it is good to say for Tuning Meditation – everyone in their own tempo

James Tenney – Postal Pieces

Tenney's works often focus on human perception. His “Postal Pieces” were written between 1965 and 1971, and are so-called because they were printed on postcards [Polansky 1]. The performance instructions are all very concise, although performances have no prescribed duration. Some pieces have no durational instructions, others consist only of the words “very long” (in Having Never Written a Note for Percussion), “very slow” (Koan), or “for a long time” (Swell Piece #3).

These pieces were chosen for this study for a few reasons. The three Swell Pieces are all text scores which have simple instructions that can be read to the audience. Some of them, such as the Swell Pieces and Having Never Written a Note for Percussion, are not technically demanding and can be performed immediately with audience members, even if they don't have any musical training.

Most importantly though, they were chosen because the works are an attempt to have us become more aware of the ways we listen. Tenney wrote the Postal Pieces with the hope that people would listen more deeply to the sounds themselves. In a 1978 interview with Gayle Young he says about the pieces:

Those pieces have a lot to do with this attitude toward sound, but also with something else, which is this notion of the avoidance of drama. They involve a very high degree of predictability. If the audience can just believe it, after they've heard the first twenty seconds of the piece, they can almost determine what's going to happen the whole rest of the time. When they know that's the case, they don't have to worry about it anymore – they don't have to sit on the edge of their seats...

What they can begin to do is really listen to the sounds, get inside them, notice the details, and consider or meditate on the overall shape of the piece, simple as it may be. It's often interesting how within a simple shape there can be relationships which are surprising....

It's sound for the sake of perceptual insight – some kind of perceptual revelation. [Polansky 2, 3]

Swell Piece #1 – [INSERT SCORE]

This piece creates a soundscape similar to Oliveros' The Tuning Meditation, in that it is a slowly evolving chord progression. However, the intention of the performers and prescribed ways of listening are very different in this piece. Oliveros is explicit in her instructions to listen externally and match a pitch, as well as to “listen” internally to imagine a pitch, thereby highlighting her different “modes of listening”. Tenney, on the other hand, leaves it entirely up to the performer to come up with a means to decide upon pitches, and gives no instructions for how to listen to this work. The swell motif from Tenney also gives dynamic instruction not present in Oliveros' work, which creates a slightly different texture of sounds overtaking each other.

This piece is very easy to perform with an audience that is willing to sing. Since there are no “wrong notes”, anyone can join, and the text of the score itself involves very little technical musical terminology.

In my experience, as with Oliveros' The Tuning Meditation, this work creates a constantly changing harmonic texture. The listener can be similarly invited to notice and interpret this progression. In addition, the swell motif provides an opportunity for the listener to explore the concept of dynamics, as the swells happen at different times. How tones come from, and resolve to, individual, or collective silence, is also a recurring motif of this piece, and can be highlighted in performance as well.

Swell Piece #2 – [INSERT SCORE]

While the concept of this piece is simple enough – one note which swells and ebbs independently form all performers – I quickly learned that it is technically a very demanding piece when sung by non-musicians. The instruction to play precisely A-440 is demanding enough for an untrained alto or soprano, and practically impossible for non-musicians with an untrained tenor or bass voice, making it perhaps a more difficult choice to perform with untrained and unrehearsed audience participation.

Study of color, of dynamics, swells (pacing), sound and silence

Koan – [INSERT SCORE]

This is a score which must be performed by one violin, and therefore cannot involve audience participation, as do many other works in this study.

Study of harmony – of intervals – how do we give meaning to consonance and dissonance?

Of registers on the violin – how does the sound change as it travels up the instrument?

Ponticello at end – how does color change?

Having Never Written a Note for Percussion – [INSERT SCORE]

Having Never Written a Note for Percussion was written for John Bergamo on 16 August 1971 [Polansky, 1, 8]. Although the piece is usually performed as a continuous roll on the tam-tam [Polansky, 10], there are no instructions for instrumentation or number of performers. The score is also simple enough that even non-musicians can read it, with simple instructions.

In this study I performed the piece with the Koninklijk Conservatorium's Ensemble Academy, with audience participation [see Case Study: KonCon and Deep Listening]. The audience was encouraged to use any means necessary to create percussive sounds, and to explore the ideas of collective crescendo, diminuendo, and blend of sound.

Cornelius Cardew

Cornelius Cardew wrote in a wide range of styles throughout career.

Often his work explores concept of music for the people

Later work tried to achieve a populism

Work with Scratch Orchestra involved people of all ranges of abilities and around idea of immediate connection with public

Because of his work with Scratch Orchestra I found him particularly important for study

The Great Learning – quintessential Scratch work – written for Scratch

7 movements

Some movements could be performed by musicians and non-musicians alike

Even 2^nd movement themes, written out, were taught via rote to non-musicians

Common to both Great Learning and Treatise (discussed below) is idea of common work – pieces cannot be sightread, must be worked on together and revisited over a period

Therefore impossible to integrate into a performance with audience participation, unless they have been studied before.

Treatise (excerpt) – [INSERT EXAMPLE]

Treatise is a 193 page, fully graphic score consisting of 67 symbols, only a few of which resemble traditional musical notation [Tony Harris 43-45]. Perhaps the most interesting and important thing about the score is that it has absolutely no notes or performance instructions. Cardew later wrote “I wrote Treatise with the definite intention that it should stand entirely on its own, without any form of introduction or instruction to mislead prospective performers into the slavish practice of 'doing what they are told'” [Cardew 97], emphasizing that there are “no rules of representation” in how it was composed [Cardew 102]. It can therefore be read as a search in how we transform sound into meaning, supported by Cardew's statement that “The idea – very widespread in the avant garde and implicit in the score of Treatise – that anything can be trasnformed into anything else” [Cardew-Stockhausen 83]

Cardew did write a Treatise Handbook, however this should not be taken as instructions for the performance of the piece. Cardew speaks of the handbook rather as a “fund of experience”, written so that “some errors or misconceptions may be avoided” by other performers [Cardew 97].

Because of its graphic nature, Treatise has infinite possibilities for its realization and can be performed by any group of musicians or non-musicians. [Tony Harris 45]. Performing excerpts of the score is also possible, and has been done many times before. Cardew wrote the piece in different sections between the years of 1963-1967 [Cardew 97-98], and before it was published, gave numerous performances of excerpts of the piece with different collaborators [Cardew 110-119].

The interest of the score for this study was in how we give meaning to symbols, whether those symbols are visual or auditory. Cardew writes of this as being fundamental to the idea of Treatise, quoting Gottlob Frege saying “Symbols are not empty simply because not meaning anything with which we can be acquainted”, and asking “What am I actually manipulating in the way of material?” [Cardew 100].

The piece was performed only by musicians, by students of the Koninklijk Conservatorium's Ensemble Academy and myself [see Case Study: KonCon and Deep Listening]. Although it is theoretically possible to have the audience improvise a performance of Treatise in concert, I found that the most interesting part of the work happened in rehearsals, where discussion about intention, text, and subtext led to us reevaluating the meaning of what we were doing.

...[discuss history, Scratch orchestra]

No instructions for treatise – only pictures

can sound very different

Can be played by any group of musicians or non-musicians

History of performance – treatise handbook – excerpts performed (one page is possible)

Most famous performance on CD Goodbye 20^th century???

In this study only played by musicians

work was very enlightening

search for meaning behind symbols

what does each symbol mean

how do they combine to mean something more

Just as words with their own meaning combine to make something profound

“To be or not to be...”

So can these symbols be combined to create more than their meaning

Why do we say what we say? - text and subtext

Would be very interesting to work on the piece with non-musicians

The Great Learning

Deserves its own separate extensive study

More Scratch pieces not chosen for study, could be included in further research

With more time, many other composers and works could have been chosen. Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning would be an ideal piece for further study, but unfortunately goes beyond the scope and given to this research. Many other pieces written for the Scratch Orchestra would be ideal for further research [CONTINUE - publication]

LaMonte Young's Composition 1960 #7 was recommended to me, as well as works by John Cage, and Vinko Globokar, whose collection of works Individuum Collectivum provide an interesting source for further exploration on this theme.