A weekly excavation by Prismatica
ARCHE
Week of August 16, 2026 · Resistance and Rebellion
Welcome Note
The Issue 4 Call for Submissions is officially live! The final issue of our inaugural volume addresses a topic both poignant and increasingly unavoidable: resistance and rebellion.
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Composer of the Week
Tips for deeper listening
Pauline Oliveros
What is relevant to her style is deep listening, a through line of the American avant-garde throughout the 20th century. For Oliveros, as for other artists like John Cage and Morton Feldman, listening was distinct from hearing; we "hear with our ears", says Oliveros in her 2015 Ted Talk, but "listen with our mind". To listen is to direct our attention toward that which we hear; it is an active rather than passive act, and it carries a psychological and, perhaps, spiritual benefit. Not that Oliveros was spiritual in her music-making (she does not seem to have appropriated that Cagean definition of music: "to sober and quiet the mind so as to open it to divine influence"), but deep listening necessarily entails the circumstances where one might encounter some type of spirituality if one so believes in it.
The reason for this is the nature of deep listening: attending to existence itself as it unfolds around us. This is an activity which is accessible to everyone; unlike the Gnosticism of religion which attempts to uncover the hidden textures of reality, deep listening concerns itself with the texture of reality as it is experienced, though often overlooked. Oliveros' conception is unique from the rest of the American composers working along similar lines, however, and it is important to understand how and why, for the sake of deepening our appreciation of her methods.
The notion of deep listening was not taught to Oliveros, though; perhaps appropriately, it was discovered over the course of her work. Deep Listening is, first and foremost, a pun, at least in its literal sense. The concept (for Oliveros) originated in her (willing) descent of the Dan Harpole underground cistern in Port Townsend, Washington, the purpose of which was to record music unrelated to the concept the descent inspired. Her experience in that cistern, however, birthed the expression and became a call to all composers and instrumentalists to take note of their environment as an active aspect of any listening experience. If you are like me, this may all begin to sound familiar, as John Cage pioneered a similar philosophy with his infamous 4'33 in 1952. Oliveros, however, approaches the environment from a different perspective, in that the environment becomes a conduit for the sound, rather than a mere representation of it. In this way, whereas Cage saw the environment as producing sound, Oliveros saw the environment as containing sound, both in the sense of holding and bounding.
Perhaps this is why much of Oliveros' work might be described as ambient; while Cage was more interested in sound as sound, regardless of the experience, Oliveros encourages us to actively listen to sound as it evolves and develops over long tones and harmonies. This is not dissimilar from Messiaen's work in Quartet for the End of Time, which may explain Oliveros' tribute to him with her Quartet for the End of Space. For Oliveros, this also means much of her recordings emphasize resonant and reverberating spaces; again, conduits for sound rather than producers of it. Sound, then, becomes almost meditative for Oliveros, enveloping the listener and encouraging them to listen with patient intention.
As the director of a multitude of nascent electronic and contemporary music centers throughout the middle of the 20th century, Oliveros established herself as a leader of the electronic avant-garde, something which no doubt influenced her later periods of sonic awareness and attention. Electronics allowed her a measure of temporal and architectural manipulation which emphasized presentness in sound rather than development. This is most notable in her creation of the Expanded Instrument System, a system of "reel-to-reel tape machines that allowed for an instrumentalist's or vocalist's improvisatory responses to various tape delays," (Liveness in Modern Music: Musicians, Technology, and the Perception of Performance, Paul Sanden). Oliveros states, "What I play in the present comes back in the future while I am still playing, is transformed and becomes a part of the past. This situation keeps you busy listening," (Sanden). We see in this the deep listening which was yet to be formulated explicitly: a focus on what sounds are occurring now instead of what sounds are yet to be.
Deep listening evolved into Sonic awareness, a philosophy of listening embodied by a symbol: a circle with a central dot. This philosophy began dichotomous, split between attention (represented by the central dot) and awareness, both reflecting the aspects of listening. To be attentive is to direct oneself toward a specific moment, feature, or action, while being aware meant recognizing the context in which that specific moment occurred. This is, again, reminiscent of Cage's early works which emphasized structure and rhythm (awareness) as the ground for individual moments, or "Gamuts" as he called them. Oliveros would expand this philosophy, however, quartering the circle into the following quadrants: actively making sound; actually imagining sound; listening to present sound; remembering past sound. Again we see the concept of temporality etherized upon the musical table (cf. Varo's Harmony from 1956), along with the active and passive elements of hearing and listening.
Oliveros offers us a few practices on cultivating this philosophy of deep listening in her book, Sonic Meditations (1971):
- 1. Listen to a sound until you no longer recognize it.
- 2. [for a group] Sit in a circle with your eyes closed. Begin by observing your own breath. Gradually form a mental image of one person who is sitting in the circle. Sing a long tone to that person. Then sing the pitch that person is singing. Change your mental image to another person and repeat until you have contacted every person in the circle one or more times.
- 3. [for a group] Each person finds a place to be, either near to or distant from the others, either in doors or out-of-doors. Begin the meditation by observing your own breathing. As you become aware of sounds from the environment, gradually begin to reinforce the pitch of the sound source. Reinforce either vocally, mentally, or with an instrument. If you lose touch with the source, wait quietly for another. Reinforce means to strengthen or sustain. If the pitch of the sound source is out of your range, then reinforce mentally.
- 4. Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.
If Cage transformed the way we hear music, Oliveros transformed the way we listen to it. Perhaps we can become better listeners in all aspects of our lives if we follow Oliveros' example.
Further Listening
- Deep Listening, 1989
- The Roots of the Moment, 1988
- Quartet for the End of Space, 2011
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Artist of the Week
parangón surrealista
Remedios Varo
Considering her background (her mother was Catholic and her father was a Universalist with a bent toward science), her scholarship (she studied in Madrid where she discovered Dali), and her social context (she experienced the rise of fascist Spain, including the bombing of Guernica that would inspire Picasso's painting of the same name, and was part of a Barcelonian artist collective known as "Grup Logicofobista"), that she was drawn to surrealism is no surprise. Its world offered her something few other artistic institutions did: freedom. Her imagination, which in and of itself is a powerful tool for those enmeshed in oppression and chaos, became the conduit for her paintings, and in several of them we can see a subtle autobiography, like in Emigrantes from 1962 or in her reputed final painting Naturaleza Muerta Resucitando which displays the "forbidden fruits" variously attributed to Eve's demise in the biblical Book of Genesis, all revolving around a candle flame, a recurring symbol of curiosity and intellect (cf. The Fable by El Greco for an oppositional symbolism). In light (pun intended) of Varo's life, we can see in this painting the fruits of her work revolving around her continued curiosity and creativity.
Further explorations of her own psyche can be seen in paintings like Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst which shows a woman, social mask dropped after a psychoanalytic session, holding an image of her father which she prepares to drop into a well. According to Rachel Gould of The Art Tourist, this might best be interpreted as the subject's dropping of patriarchal chains, along with the various neuroses (seen in the basket held in the subject's other hand) effected by familial and social traumas.
Despite the trauma of forced expatriation, Varo found some solidarity in the aforementioned las tres brujas, which, preceding the LaVeyan curiosities in San Francisco, celebrated a shared fascination with the occult. Many of Varo's paintings from this time reveal an artistic spirit exploring the metaphysical, as in 1956's The Juggler. However, we should not believe Varo's story is a fable on pursuing one's dreams in spite of challenges. To view her in this light would be to reduce her imagination to a mere goal, rather than the foundation of her ontology. Instead, Varo's importance lies in the core of her creativity, which she used not as a ready-made dream but as a way of living in a world increasingly unfree and oppressive. Surrealism is too often relegated to escapism; it is an artistic practice of imagination, yes, but of imagination for imagination's sake, so say critics. Varo reveals a surrealism that is more than this; it is a surrealism which commits its artist to the life being lived, through the imaginative. It is, to borrow admittedly metaphysical phrasings, alchemical in its process.
Varo transformed life around her through her paintings, not to escape but to explore. In this way, her work can be seen as a type of rebellion against the modern world. It is not in turning away, but in turning toward, that Varo's work reveals to us the brilliance of imagination.
Further Viewing
- La Pianiste Masque
- Modernidad
- Ojos Sobre la Mesa
- Still Life Reviving
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From the Prismatica Desk
Issue 4, Resistance and Rebellion, is now accepting submissions. For full details and to submit your works, click here.
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Until the Next Excavation
Resist through creativity; rebel through remembrance.
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