Fireside Chat – Pauline Oliveros: San Francisco Tape Music Center

Pauline Oliveros was one of electronic music's most important early figures, a trained accordionist from Houston who found herself experimenting with new methods and technologies after arriving in San Francisco during the Beat Generation '50s. An early member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, she rubbed elbows with figures like Morton Subotnick, Terry Riley and Steve Reich, eventually becoming the program’s first director at Mills College. In the years that followed, she logged lengthy stints at UC San Diego and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York, which houses her Center for Deep Listening. As a composer, her works embrace the rapture of audible sensation, and meditate on the ocean of sound that listeners can find themselves in. She conveys the message that sound and its effects are powerfully equalizers, a vital aspect of our reality.