Our first reading assignment was Quantum Listening by Pauline Oliveros.
I have to admit that the structure (or apparent lack of) made it very difficult for me to read. I had a very hard time following her train of thought. Thanks to Rob Faludi’s BlogBlender, I discovered Gian Pablo’s reaction to it which encourages me to read it in a different way. Despite having played music for years, I had not considered reading an essay as music before.
Some of the themes she discussed with respect to deep listening reminded me of Aaron Copland’s What to Listen for in Music and also of Barry Green’s The Inner Game of Music
I wondered what she meant by “practice practice”, though.
Two things about her essay resonated with me.
1: the desire to create music collaboratively with people who don’t have formal musical training. To this end, I may try out to work out a “simple set of rules” by which we can do this in my Living Art class.
2: when I was in college and worked in a recording studio, I began to experience a deeper listening than I had ever done before. Part of my job was to verify that transfers we made from digital audio tapes (DATs) into ProTools didn’t contain glitches. I listened to the recordings very intently through headphones and through the process, I began to hear details I hadn’t experienced before. I developed a deeper sense of appreciation for clarity and fidelity in recordings.
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