My Deep Listening Retreat Experience
by Dave Knott

I was introduced to "Deep Listening" via [trombonist and teacher] Stuart Dempster. I had received a grant to make an instrument-building and -playing workshop with at-risk youth (Sonic Tools, 1998), and the guidelines for the grant included a provision that there be an academic sponsor. Stuart agreed to be the sponsor for the project.

One afternoon, while we were carpooling back from the workshop location, I handled and then handed to Stuart some small stones that lived in the dish-shaped dash below the vehicle's odometer. Stuart held the stones close to his ear, and after a while suggested that I check out Deep Listening. I had heard recordings of the Deep Listening Band with Stuart and [pioneering composer, performer, and music theorist] Pauline Oliveros, and I had read and been using Oliveros's Sonic Meditations with music therapy students and with 5- to 7-year-old children at a Salem, Oregon, YMCA. Really, I was only scratching the surface of their potential.

Published in 1974, the Sonic Meditations were "recipes for directing attention to listening and sounding." (LaBelle, 2000) Growing from weekly work with the C Ensemble and with Oliveros's study of Tai Chi, the pieces were intended for anyone, regardless of musical training, and provide opportunities for individuals and groups to focus attention and expand awareness. The work is humanistic and inclusive, with goals of communication and healing.

"She attempts to erase the subject/object or performer/audience relationship by returning to ancient forms which preclude spectators. She is interested in communication among all forms of life through Sonic Energy. She is especially interested in the healing power of Sonic Energy and its transmission within groups." (Oliveros, 1974)

Observation of one's breath cycle is often an integral part of the meditation, as well as conducting the meetings without speaking.

"With continuous work some of the following becomes possible with Sonic Meditations: heightened states of awareness or expanded consciousness, changes in physiology and psychology from known and unknown tensions to relaxations which gradually become permanent. These changes may represent a tuning of mind and body." (Oliveros, 1974)

In 1973, Oliveros was granted a research fellowship at the Project for Music Experiment to conduct a Meditation Project with 20 volunteers for two hours each day for eight weeks. Utilizing exercises in kinetic awareness, sonic and Tai Chi meditations, and Karate techniques for training attention and awareness, in the end Oliveros found that the "key product of all this training is the development of receptivity." (Oliveros, 1984)

One of the measures of the project's effectiveness was a pre- and post-test EEG sample. In pre-tests, subjects tended to be high-amplitude alpha-wave producers, but high readings were only found in one or the other of the subjects' brain hemispheres. Post-test samples showed that there was a tendency toward equalization of the alpha-wave amplitude across both hemispheres. These tests suggest that some "balancing or synchronization" occurred over the course of the project.

All of this information I had been reading, this whole field of Deep Listening, seemed to confirm many of my own personal experiences of contemplation with sound-producing objects and instruments. And beyond my interests in music and healing, Oliveros seemed to be articulating a method for proper being: how to be aware and focus attention. I was grateful to be able to attend the Deep Listening Beginner's Retreat this past summer. There were 19 retreatants and three retreat leaders: Pauline Oliveros, Heloise Gold, and Ione.

"Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to every thing possible to hear no matter what you are doing." (Oliveros, 1990) This statement is drawn from the preface to Deep Listening Pieces, a collection of "strategies for listening and responding," and reflects central themes of observation and intuition that unite Oliveros's work. These pieces were composed between 1971 and 1990, along with Sonic Meditations.

As their literature describing the Three-Year Certificate Program states, "The practice of Deep Listening continually unfolds over time as a multi-dimensional process." At least three of these dimensions are represented by each instructor. Pauline leads the group in listening meditations and pieces using internal, external, global, and focal listening and sounding in different ways. Heloise leads the morning meditation walks and chi-gung exercises and teaches the group a short form of Tai Chi. Ione is our dream teacher, leading the group in exercises based on retreatants' dreams and giving assignments for writing about and querying our dreams.

A brief program accurately described the structure of days:

"Seven hours of daily ritual, breathing techniques, listening/sounding meditations, practicing silence, journeying for expanded resources, listening through dreams, tracking listening with sound journals, interaction, discoveries, exploration, strategies for creating and performing, scoring, writing, drawing, movement sessions in the open air, listening for creative opportunities, exchange and lively conversation." (Pauline Oliveros Foundation, 2000)

The Retreat Experience Journal

Besides the craggy, acrobatic four-wheel drive adventure to arrive at Rose Mountain (~8,500 feet, Sangre de Cristo Mountains, New Mexico), there was a feeling of leaving something - cars, telephones, city streets - the lesson here may be being free from imposed structures. The only imposed structures on Rose Mountain besides the retreat experiences are natural ones: sleeping, eating, elimination, traveling by foot (and ear).

My campsite is on the west face of Rose Mountain looking out at two other peaks. Am sitting on a huge rock about 20 feet from my tent looking down into a canyon. The forest is populated with mostly pine trees and scrub oak, black bears, bunnies, chipmunks, skunks. Andy Gold (proprietor) says that there are no poisonous snakes, insects/spiders, etc. - too high in elevation - I can see clouds floating through the canyon below me. Rain and hail/sleet most of afternoon off and on, 56 degrees in late afternoon.

Once free from the imposed structures, there is still "the mind" that must, one hopes, eventually arrive on site.

Have arrived at the DL retreat am here along with the other 18 retreatants and six staff am looking forward. Really? How about enjoying right now?

Pauline talks of the first day, or "cycle," as arriving, the second as "settling in," the third as "surrender." After this introduction to the retreat and the ecosystem we are a part of, we eat our first of many amazingly scrumptious meals prepared by the honorable cooks.

After supper, we all gather in the studio for our first listening meditation with Pauline. The studio is a large room with a wooden floor. The north wall is made entirely of glass. There are numerous comfortable pillows to ensure that we all get our "sits bones" higher in elevation than our feet. We sit upright as if a line rising from the earth travels through our spines and up out of the tops of our heads. Pauline gently strikes a bowl bell. We sit for some time, listening, adjusting, listening to our thoughts, and returning to listening.

Ione gives us instructions on keeping dream journals and to not dismiss any dream awareness, no matter how small. This she describes as "the exaltation of the fragment." We are paired up with dream partners to support each other's dreaming, and are asked to write down on a small piece of paper what we want our dreaming this evening to tell us. We are then to put it under our pillows before we go to sleep. Pauline describes how we will spend our evenings and mornings in nonverbal mode. I feel a sense of relief after hearing this. I don't know why.

After some discussion and questions, I learn that air pressure on the tympanum (eardrum) creates a high-pitched "shwwwssssh" sound registering at about 3500 hz.

We conclude with a music relaxation piece. We all lay comfortably on the floor in near darkness. The slow flicker of one candle's light moves in the room. I know that it is moved by our collective motions and breath, but for some reason, I find myself thinking it is moved by the respiration of the earth. Pauline animates a drum, Jason blows through a clarinet. When the music ends, there is no speaking. We all know we are in nonverbal mode.

This nonverbal mode became for me a fundamental part of the entire experience. Every day of the retreat, from the conclusion of our dream sessions with Ione in the evening (~9 - 11 pm) until sometime during our Deep Listening time with Pauline the next day (~11 am - 1 pm), we did not speak. Individually, I felt free and a greater awareness of my surroundings that was qualitatively different than at times when I was speaking. Socially, I noticed that one-to-one communication was reduced to matters of importance only, such as "<gesture><gesture>" (pass that apricot spread).

At 6:15 the next morning, most of "tent city" was awakened by a bell sound slowly moving around our campsites. We warmed up with herbal tea and coffee and read the mantra for our meditation walk and accompanying notes.

Pauline whistled as if steam-powered, and Heloise led our slow-moving processional through the forest, stopping to take in chi.

chi-gung = energy cultivation meditation walk Tao practice - opening palms and pores to take in chi

"I will walk firmly and quietly upon the earth"

Slowing down

1. Pay attention to all movements

2. Moving place to place and activities, ex.: brushing teeth, slow down eating -- chew slowly

Once out in the meadow, we formed a circle and, through gesture only, Heloise led us in facing the five directions (E, S, W, N, and center) and chi-gung exercises. Awake and warm, we headed for breakfast.

After the breakfast orchestra, Pauline led us to the Margit Schenker Memorial Opera House - a sitting area under a canopy of pines and in the shadow of a very large rock. After our listening meditation, we were gestured and moved about so that we were paired up with someone of equal height, back to back. We were shown to follow our breath and allow it to become tone. This is a variation of "Back to Back" from Deep Listening Pieces (Oliveros, 1990).

The resulting piece was unusual in that each dyad had unique perspective on the sound of the whole. Also, I felt my partner's tones in my back and the back of my head, as well as my tones in the front of my head, neck, and chest. The openness of the score or directions allowed each person to tune their voice and body using the group harmony and the physical vibration of their partner as a stimulus. Its form swelled, flowed, and concluded together quite naturally. The rest of the week was filled with unique collaborations, composing and improvising, exploring the moment through movement, quiet listening and dreams.

This essay was written to describe the practice of Deep Listening as I have experienced it, so that an interested reader may gain insight into the theories or what is written about DL by reading witness accounts. Turn interest into practice. For as the commentary of the Deep Listening Three-Year Certificate Program states:

"It is possible to experience and sustain a substantial shift in perception through practice."

LaBelle, B. (2000). "a point within a circle" (interview with Pauline Oliveros) pp. 16-21. Atlanta, GA: ArtPapers.

Oliveros, P. (1990). Deep Listening Pieces. Kingston, NY: Deep Listening Publications.

Oliveros, P. (1974). Software for People. Baltimore, MD: Smith Publications.

Oliveros, P. (1974). Sonic Meditations. Smith Publications. Republished 2000, The Pauline Oliveros Foundation.

These publications are available through the Deep Listening Catalog at www.deeplistening.org, or locally from Anomalous Records at www.anomalousrecords.com

lightning flashes through the tent walls and bugs crackle crackle softly outside. A train in the way distance hushes along its tracks. Time to sleep

Dave Knott is an instrument builder, improviser, and music therapist based in Seattle.

Radio Free Improv: The Tentacle Radio Page

(For more radio info, see our Radio page.)

Two New Offerings Challenge Your Frequencies

Two exciting new radio programs have hit the airwaves in the Puget Sound area and the Rose City, respectively. A few months ago, KBOO FM, Portland's boundary-breaking community radio station, added yet another excellent eclectic and adventurous program in Rolf Semprebon's Subterranean Modern, a biweekly early-morning aural feast (see listings below). Earlier this summer, Iain Edgewater's Prisms debuted on KBCS FM, providing fans of avant-classical music a weekly dose of late-night fare as part of Bellevue Community College's diverse, open-ended format (see below). Both Semprebon and Edgewater carefully plan congruent themes for their shows, which feature both preselected and impromptu musical offerings peppered with astute commentary and insights about the music, its history, and the lives of its creators. Listeners in Portland and Seattle/Bellevue have the luxury of tuning in to either of these (and many other) adventurous programs on their FM dials or via live streaming audio on the stations' Web sites.

Of Playlists and Web Sites

Enthusiasts of Peter Monaghan's superb Outside Jazz program -- heard every Wednesday from 9 pm-midnight on KBCS 91.3 FM in the Seattle area -- can now receive an e-mail version of each week's playlist within a week after the broadcast. (Peter apologizes in advance for occasional late mailings due to his hectic work schedule.) You can join the Outside Jazz list by calling Peter during his show at (425) 564-2424, or by sending an e-mail request to monop@compuserve.com.

For listeners of Christopher DeLaurenti's post-classical, electronic, and electroacoustic music program The Sonar Map -- heard Wednesday evenings from 10 PM-midnight on KSER 90.7 FM Lynnwood/Seattle -- playlists and more are just a click away. The show's Web site has been revamped, including a new "easy to pronounce on the air" URL: www.sonarmap.net! The sonarmap.net site goes 'live' on October 15, with links to hundreds of composers as well as complete archived playlists of every Sonar Map broadcast since August 1998. Many other creative radio programs maintain an Internet presence with sound archives, playlists, links, and more; to explore some of these sites, check out the Tentacle's RFI Web page at www.tentacle. org/radio.html.

RFI Cyber Pass

The Tentacle's Radio Free Improv Web page (www.tentacle.org/radio.html) features monthly program highlights and a grid of Northwest Adventurous Radio Programs broadcast from Vancouver, B.C. to Portland and points in between. We encourage radio hosts, listeners, program directors, and station managers to contact us with information about new or unintentionally overlooked exploratory AM, FM, low-powered, and Internet music programs. Contact Mike Marlin at tentacle@tentacle.org or use the handy radio submittal form on the Tentacle Web site at www.tentacle.org/submit.html

Featured Programs

Subterranean Modern with Rolf Semprebon

KBOO 90.7 FM, Portland (www.kboo.org) every other Thursday morning from 3-5:30 am (10/12, 10/26, 11/9, 11/23)

"Avant rock and experimental music -- everything from underground psychedelic and progressive music from the early 1970s, krautrock, and industrial to improvisational noise, surreal electronica, plunderphonics, space rock, and strange music too weird and noncommercial to be classified. Occasional music collages and spoken word added in." For more information, contact rolf@triax.com.

Thursday, October 12: Nurse With Wound
"From bizarre Dada-esque tape manipulation to chaotic improvisations, this group has been at the forefront of avant-electronic experimental music for the last two decades. Tune in to the weird and surreal world of Nurse With Wound."

Thursday, October 26: Subterranean Modern Halloween Special
"A dark and demented soundscape of creepy noises, nightmare dirges, horror movie soundtracks, and more."

Thursday, November 9: French Dada music
Including bands such as DDAA, Bruit TTV, and Lt Caramel.

Prisms with Iain Edgewater

Wednesdays at midnight, KBCS 91.3 FM, Bellevue/Seattle (www.kbcs-fm.org)

"Prisms is a review (sometimes themed, sometimes not) of avant-garde 'classical' music, experimental soundscapes, and various other high points in Western art music from the twentieth century and beyond."

For more information, visit the Prisms Web site at members.xoom. com/prismshome

October 12: Works of Toru Takemitsu
"This recently deceased (1996) composer manifested a variety of musical faces, and produced a good deal of worthwhile music as he bridged multiple compositional domains. We'll examine his work in roughly historical context."

October 26: Cacophonies
"As a warm-up for Hallowe'en, or just for the hell of it, we'll play a whole show's worth of really noisy, aurally obnoxious (yet ultimately beautiful) works from folks like Radulescu, Reed, Filament, and Naked City."

November 9: Works of György Ligeti
"Perhaps no well-known composer from the last half of the twentieth century has integrated so many influences, styles, and materials into his approach to composition as György Ligeti. We'll hear a wide selection of his works from the late 1940s to the present."

November 23: Tod Machover's VALIS
"Because there was a great deal of rescheduling in the Speculative Fiction/Experimental Music series that ran from June to September, and because Machover's operatic setting of the Philip Dick novel VALIS was the one that bore the brunt of the rescheduling, I've decided to rerun it more or less as it was presented before."

Sonarchy Live Radio Hour

Saturdays, 11 pm-midnight, KCMU 90.3 FM, Seattle

Produced and mixed by sound engineer extraordinaire Doug Haire, Sonarchy features new music artists performing live from the studios of Jack Straw Productions. See the live performance calendar in this issue for October listings. For more information, call (206) 634-0919 or visit www. jackstraw.org

Manifesto Portfolio Strategy for the New Millennium

by Doug Nufer

For writers and composers of avant-garde or experimental work, the all-purpose manifesto is simple: Do what hasn't been done. Doing this is a little more complicated, but by following a formal constraint, arcane source texts, a law of physics, or some other odd notion, anyone can employ a method that's bound to generate original works. Then comes the difficult part: reaching an audience. If successful on their own terms, these works inspire scorn, contempt, and neglect from all but a few hardy listeners and readers. In response to this, writers and composers might explain what they do; and, these explanations often have the effect of alienating potential readers and funding agencies (publishers, grants organizations, etc.), particularly if the explanation expresses itself as a manifesto.

A manifesto may be no more and no less than an artist's statement of purpose. The problem with manifestos is, they illustrate a classic example of the inversely proportional relationship: The smarter you try to be, the stupider you seem to be. As important as it is for an artist to have a clear sense of purpose, it can be more important (and more difficult) for an artist to communicate this sense of purpose to readers and funding agencies. The special challenge an avant-garde artist faces is how to perform a graceful and genial annihilation -- how to make your work sound exciting, generative, and new, without blatantly denouncing everyone else's work as boring, derivative, and stale.

At this point, the artist may be tempted to play for laughs, to write a funny manifesto that ridicules the idea of writing a manifesto. This, of course, is a terrible mistake. Not only have funny manifestos already been done, they tend to make your work look less than serious, and, by extension, they insult the readers and funding agencies who really care about manifestos. Almost as ill advised as the overtly funny or slapstick manifesto is the ironic manifesto. With the ironic manifesto, the artist hides behind a hedge of ambiguity. Statements that could mean anything have the effect of saying nothing, which, again, expresses nothing but disdain for readers and funding agencies.

That leaves sincerity, the pure and simple unadorned confession. "This is who I am and what I do and what I believe." Yuck. Simply awful. Worse than awful, sincerity buys into the most pernicious trend in North American publishing today, probably the trend that your work, if it is any good at all, stands in absolute opposition to: the memoir. Such crude self-aggrandizement is best left to rot in a teenager's daydreams. And yet, for the avant-garde artist who must justify the existence of work most people despise, the sincere approach to manifesto portfolio strategy may be the only solution.

How, then, does the artist or musician employ sincerity as a manifesto strategy without selling out? You lie. That is, you create an artist character to represent yourself. Rather than give vent to true personal aspirations, you write a manifesto to match the work you have done and the work you intend to do. Use your imagination. If you can't invent a capsule review of a career based on all the works you haven't written, perhaps you're in the wrong business. Creating an artist character who sincerely delivers the manifesto goods may sound like an exercise in irony, but it isn't. The irony is, the lie you devise to explain what you do comes closer to the truth than anything dredged up from the bottom of your heart.

Doug Nufer's artist character truly believes that fiction is an art that primarily comes from language and secondarily tells a story. When not in character, he writes fiction that is mostly based on formal constraints, and helps edit American Book Review and the Washington Free Press.

Ink Tank

While music itself remains the best gateway to musical ideas and inspiration, books on music and musicians offer invaluable guidance for additional exploration. From time to time in this space, members of the Tentacle Collective will briefly describe some of their favorite musical tomes.

Tuning of the World by R. Murray Schafer
(Destiny Books, 1999 / Knopf, 1977)

Originally published in 1977, Tuning of the World examines myths, literature, and archival data to chronicle the history of humanity's perception and interaction with our sonic environment, the soundscape. Schafer coined the term soundscape, which regrettably has since been bedizened by a legion of drooling New Age boobs whose "soundscapes" tend to consist of sustained string synth pads and the distant warbling of reverberated cowbells. Replete with interesting facts (such as the steady increase in decibels of fire engine sirens) anecdotes (recollections of hunting horn and posthorns in Germany), and historical perspectives (the evolving definition of noise), the book is perfect for browsing. I should add, however, that for me, the tome's mass of information and probing insights invited, if not compelled, repeated reading. The book not only evokes how our forebears heard the world, but also offers a theoretical framework with which to battle the aural imperialism of daily life and reclaim the soundscape. The appendix contains a useful glossary along with several examples for mapping soundscapes. Recently republished, you can find the book, redundantly renamed The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, at better bookstores and libraries.

Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond by Michael Nyman
(Cambridge University Press, 1999 / Schirmer Books, 1974)

It's back! Long out of print and impossible to find, Experimental Music is essential reading for anyone interested in music since 1950. Profiling the music and ideas of Cage, Fluxus, Cardew, Reich, Tenney, and many others, this classic text will ignite the imagination of any exploratory musician. Of the numerous score examples, every musician should try at least one of the Fluxus pieces, which reveal the now-deep roots of performance art. In any case, the chapter on Fluxus should be mandatory reading for all aspiring artists lest the wheel gets reinvented again! Experimental Music's reappearance may also reopen the argument over the term experimental music. Believing that the era of experimental music has come and gone, or contending that Experimental Music denotes an era rather than a perpetual concern, some composers and performers prefer sound art. Except for a passable discography, the second edition has not been updated or expanded, although Nyman added a new preface and Brian Eno (who?) contributed a mildly provocative foreward.

- Christopher DeLaurenti

On First Hearing the Stochastic Kaleidophon of Carter Scholz

by Ron Drummond

Last night, listening to "Kaleidophon," my bedroom door happened to be open. As I drifted in the shifting veils of bell-like harmonics and the percussive tattoo that my heart beat on the inflexible, infection-tautened drum of my right ear, the kitchen faucet suddenly resumed its leaky flow, creating a complex, slightly skewed pattern of drippings and splashings due to the dirty dishes in the sink, complete with hesitations, stuttered resumptions, micro-repetitions, gushing flows. Amidst all these ranked and random firings, I'd swear a macro-pattern emerged, a growing sense that everything -- ringing harmonics, eardrum tattoo, faulty plumbing -- was minutely and intricately synched. A very surreal moment, and the only time in the week I've had this nasty ear infection that I was happy with the contribution it made to my auditory life.

Ron Drummond is a Seattle-based writer, editor, and music excavator.

Noise-Lovin'Ned

byFfej

X-tra Fun Optional Rules

Ned's Musical Chairs
This game is segmented into "jams." While it is not defined how long a jam should be, a jam should end when it is felt appropriate by at least half of the players. At the end of each jam, every player passes his or her card to the player on their left. The next jam takes place with everyone playing according to the new character.

Ned's Random Solos
Play the game as normal. Get a director to roll one six-sided die throughout the set at will. The director will show the resulting number with fingers, at which point all players stop except for the one with the corresponding number, who then performs solo, continuing in character. The director then picks players to join in, one at a time. These players may choose to either play in their own character or in the character of the original soloist, until all players are back in the game, when everyone reverts to their own characters. If the soloist's character happens to be Les(2) or Nate(3), who are assigned accompanying roles, well, use your imagination. If fewer than six musicians are playing and the number called by the director does not correspond to anyone's character, then all players start playing in the character of the number rolled on the die. At a signal from the director, all players revert back to their own character.

Ned's Free-For-All
If more than six musicians are desired, make multiple copies of all of the cards and put them in a big stack for everyone to pick from. For real mayhem, provide the audience with instruments of varying types and let them pick cards and play as well. Just get as many people involved as possible! Trading characters from time to time is encouraged.

Ned's Collector Race
This game is actually competitive. First, make multiple copies of the cards, make a stack and place it face down, preferably in a place accessible to everyone involved. Each player picks his or her first card from the top of the deck to start. Players should not show the cards they're currently playing. The game is segmented into jams like Ned's Musical Chairs described above, except that any player can call for the jam to end at any time. The player who calls for the end gets to trade cards with one other musician of his or her choosing. Only the card played most recently by a player may be traded. All other players pick a new card from the stack while adding their old cards to their "collections." The goal is to collect all six cards before any of the other players do. When someone does collect all six, the game is over and the winner gets to celebrate by playing a "Victory Solo" in any style desired.