The mythos of Pauline Oliveros begins, in many tellings, underground.
In the fall of 1988, the Houston-born composer and accordionist crawled with her friend, composer Stuart Dempster, into a 2-million-gallon cistern below a decommissioned U.S. Army base in Washington state. What was so special about this particular cistern? It had a 45-second reverb time, which meant that it took nearly a minute for sound to fade away. Oliveros and Dempster, along with two other musicians, carried their instruments 14 feet down a manhole to play. The result was the project that was, in many ways, the culmination of her life’s work: “Deep Listening.”
