Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros (May 30, 1932 – November 24, 2016) was an American composer, accordionist and a central figure in the development of experimental and post-war electronic art music.

She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, and served as its director. She taught music at Mills College, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Oliveros authored books, formulated new music theories, and investigated new ways to focus attention on music including her concepts of "Deep Listening" and "sonic awareness". She was an Eyebeam resident.

Oliveros started to play music as early as kindergarten, and at nine years of age she began to play the accordion, received from her mother because of its popularity in the 1940s. She later went on to learn the tuba and French horn for grade school and college music. At the age of sixteen she had decided to be a composer.

Oliveros arrived in California and supported herself with a day job, and supplemented this by giving accordion lessons to students. From there Oliveros went on to attend Moores School of Music at the University of Houston studying with Willard A. Palmer and earned BFA degree in compositions from San Francisco State College where her teachers included composer Robert Erickson, with whom she had private lessons and who mentored her for six to seven years. This is also where she met artists Terry Riley, Stuart Dempster and Loren Rush.

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