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During Her year as first director of the Tape Music Center at Mills College
(now Center for Contemporary Music - CCM) in Oakland, California,
auline Oliveros completed Beautiful Soop (1966) and Alien Bog (1967) utilizing the original Buchla Box 100 series created for the Tape Center by Don Buchla and her tape delay system. The take up reel was on tape machine I and the playback reel on tape machine II. Through patching the playback signals from tracks 1 -4 were re-routed back to the recording head of machine I in a variety of configurations controlled by the composer. An excerpt of Alien Bog was released on an album Music From Mills -produced by David Rosenboom in 1986. Beautiful Soop is released for the first time.
"/ was deeply impressed by the sounds from the frog pond outside the studio window at Mills. I loved the accompaniment as I worked on my pieces. Though I never recorded the frogs I was of course influenced by their music. Since that time many other composers have also been influenced the sounds from the pond. Sadly, the pond will soon give way to a new building to expand the quarters of the COM. It will no doubt be haunted by ghost frogs!"
—Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros, now living in Kingston NV- has devoid her life to music and to helping others. She has established a worldwide reputation as a composer, accordionist, author, teacher and humanist. Her ground breaking work in electronic techniques, teaching methods, classical improvisation, myth and ritual, meditative and physical consciousness-raising is a large influence in American music. Since leaving the University of California at San Diego in 1981, at the rank of full professor, she has established the Pauline Oliveros Foundation, Inc. and directs the music program to support for creative projects, ideas and collaborations with other artists and emerging artists. In 1961, she was cofounder of the improvisational group Sonics, with Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick, that became the nucleus of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, now the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM) at Mills College. Oliveros was the first director m CCM (1966-67). Since then Oliveros has taught composition at Mills College 1986 and served as Darius Milhaud Professor in 1996 and 1997. She was one of the first composers to use live electronic music as a composition medium. Her electronic piece Bye Bye Butterfly (1965) was included in The New York Times critic John Rockwell's list of the ten most significant musical works of the 60's. The Roots of the Moment (1987) was included as the best of 1988 again by Rockwell in his year end review. Her revolutionary work in the use of tape delay and heterodyne techniques, coupled with the experimental use of combination tones and supersonic frequencies, presaged techniques now being explored digitally. Her more than thirty years of work with delay techniques is embodied in the Expanded Instrument System (EIS) documented in Leonardo Music Journal, the web site <www.deeplistening.org/dlb> and on the compact discs Crone Music (Lovely Music Ltd.), Sanctuary (Mode Records), Tosca Salad (Deep Listening). Her Dear. John: A Canon on the Name of Cage (commissioned by West German Radio in 1986 in celebration of Cage's Seventy-fifth birthday) was completed Using CCM's high-level HMSL (Hierarchical Music Specification Language) controlled by an Oliveros-designed program realized by Larry Polansky. All of her work emphasizes attentional strategies, musicianship and improvisational skills. Oliveros' compositions have been performed worldwide, land in 1985 she was honored by a retrospective of her work at the J.F.K. Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Her written work was anthologized in 1984 in Software for People (Smith Publications), The Roots of the Moment in 1997 (Drogue Press) and her recorded work and scores are available from Deep Listening Publications <www.deeplistening.org/dlo.
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