Pauline Oliveros

I love Pauline Oliveros. When I tracked her down to the University of California in San Diego for an interview (for The Advocate), she was impressed that I had come so far just to interview her, a meditative experimental musical composer. We talked for an hour, sitting outside under some trees. I recorded the interview with a cassette machine. The ambient sounds of traffic and wind make the entire interview seem like one of her compositions. She showed me pictures of some fliers she had made for a lecture (in which she substituted a picture of a man with a mustache for her own picture).

I tried playing some of her recordings in the background during poker a couple of weeks ago. Everybody asked me to turn it off. But most of her music melts into the surroundings, and alters it. She once gave a concert during which she sat down, asked everyone in the audience to hum a note quietly and then alter the note they were humming to a step up from the note that they heard the person next to them humming. From all accounts, it was an event of great transcendence.