Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think the worst thing is stereotyping.
I try to schedule the Intensives wherever I go.
Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears
[Improvisation ] is been with me all my life. We all do it.
A mouse and a keyboard is not a good performance instrument.
I used to go into the studio around midnight and stay all night.
Radio broadcasting was only 25 years old when I was born in 1932.
Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.
Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening
Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music.
Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening.
When I am composing, the sounds are leading me to the way I want them to organize.
In the beginning we were making tape music, meaning, we were making music on tape.
I felt a challenge to compose music. That's where my challenge was, for the most part.
I had to cope with attitudes that were not supportive all along. I mean, you still have that.
[My interest in music] is from my mother and my grandmother, who were pianists, and they taught.
When I composed the first sonic meditation, I realized that I was composing the direction of attention.
That's software in the States that I helped to develop. It enables people with disabilities to improvise.
I got very interested in attention and awareness and how to achieve certain states through understanding this.
The sound that I play is delayed, it's modified, and it's modulated. It's an intelligent system; it's happening now.
It might be fun to have audience members wander up the ramps as well, so they can listen from different vantage points.
The students were missing out a lot in their ensemble playing because they weren't listening to each other or the environment.
The sound and just the fact that it was different from the piano, yet it still had some familiarity [made my fascinated with accordion].
I am also interested in music expanding consciousness. By expanding consciousness, I mean that old patterns can be replaced with new ones.
Deep listening is experiencing heightened awareness or expanded awareness of sound and of silence, of quiet, and of sounding - making sounds.
My writing has always been a rather non-linear process. I've found if I get something down, I can listen to it and other things start to come.
I'm thinking of the audience as being ambient, meaning not sitting focused but being in the space and exploring it while listening to the players.
It's going to take about a year or two for the transfer to be completed. We have a certification program so professionals can teach deep listening.
You run into stereotypes so that the stereotype filters who you are and what you do, and having to deal with that was the most frustrating thing for me.
I would play a long tone on my accordion, or I'd sing one, and I would note how it felt - what it did with my mental space. These were meditations that I did.
It was around the end of the '60s, when I began to compose sonic meditations. Before that I was doing a lot of reflecting on myself, and listening to long tones.
The San Francisco Tape Music Centre was a kind of collective non-profit that my friends and I got started so that we could pool our equipment and make tape music.
That change happened about 1991. It was not possible to transfer the Expanded Instrument System to the computer until then, when 16-bit recording became available.
I heard a lot of different kinds of music. I heard country music, I heard jazz, I heard symphonic music, opera, everything you can think of except very modern music.
I feel that students always learn more from each other than they do from their professor. They learn by doing and not by trying to soak up information from one person.
I wrote my sonic meditations and started using them with students. I took a bunch of UCSD students out to Joshua Tree and we did the sonic meditations on the boulders.
You invent things like algorithms to take care of some of the changes you want to make. The changes aren't detectable. There's all kinds of things happening as I play.
All the way from the first thing that I can remember, like our Victrola - a wind-up record player - and my grandfather's crystal radio, and my father's shortwave radio.
After a long section of the glass playing, you'll hear an instrumental sound emerge from some undisclosed location. There'll be a lot of mystery about the sound, I think.
I have a commission to do a piece in a place in California, Oliver Ranch, which has an eight-storey structure called The Tower designed by the visual artist Ann Hamilton.
Those people who don't have any voluntary control, or hands, can work with the physical movement that they can do - whatever voluntary movement they have, even the slightest .
I think that this performance with the Thingamajigs is going to be an exploration of the acoustic space and particularly the vertical space, which we don't think about so much.
That was at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival in about 1989. There were 6,000 women there, and they were out in a meadow, and I offered the tuning meditation and they did it.
[Students] they did the sonic meditations, I would observe them in their ensembles, and the ensembles improved incredibly. So I knew I had something to do and something to say.
I'll just say that I made my own explorations of tone by listening to a tone for a long time until I began to understand what my sensations were, what my mind was doing with tone.
My mother brought accordion home. She was going to learn to play it so she could teach it and increase her income. And I got fascinated with it, so she backed off and let me do it.
We think about sitting in a space and hearing some music by having our ears pointed forward towards the musicians sitting opposite us. I'm really not following that paradigm at all.
Working in theoretical systems can take away the juice. It can also be very beautiful, but when you're trying to satisfy a theoretical principle rather than a sonic reality, then it can become dry.
My mother brought home the accordion in 1942. I was fascinated and wanted to learn to play it. Some of my music has a relationship to dance styles - The Well and the Gentle or The Wanderer for example.
I thought that it would be interesting to have a mirror and grab a light and shine it around in different ways. It's an analog to the acoustic reflections that we're going to be trying to activate as well.