Deep Listening
Artist: Kim Noce
“How we listen creates our life. Listening is the basis of all culture.”
500 Voices from around the globe gathered each Saturday in April at 5pm EDT to lend their voices in 30 minutes of a World Wide Meditation based on the work of Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening.
Oddly enough, this invitation came from a daily empowerment email my shuttered gym is sending to help us all cope during the Covid-19 pandemic. I have been aware of Oliveros’ work for years. I’ve referred to it in previous Blogs and in my Singing Journey Retreats, particularly those centered on the art of listening. But here was a chance to experience and participate firsthand with her Deep Listening Institute, surviving partner, and avid fans and followers in my own time of need.
Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) was an American composer who pushed the envelope on sound and how we perceive it. Compelled to study the way sound is created and realized, with a special emphasis on the acoustics in cathedrals, caves, and cisterns, she focused on the difference between hearing and listening, topics I expound on often. As Oliveros says, the ear hears, the brain listens, and the body senses vibrations. Then all are interpreted with our past experiences.
My own sonic explorations have found me singing in the caves of Turkey and Ireland, multiple American and European cathedrals, stairwells, museums and such with the emphasis on space and place as a participant in sound-making. The Listening Retreats I have led at NY’s Rubin Museum have centered on the deep listening, with the additional observation on the emotional content of one’s inner listening, sonic reference, and consciousness.
Late March found me swirling in the mystery and confusion of this world amid pandemic, yet grateful for feeling rooted in my sense of self and life. Even so, we are all living with the questions of how long? What next? What is safe - and for whom? With eager desire to connect more deeply with my own self and unknown others, I accepted this invitation to Oliveros’ Deep Listening with some apprehension and sense of vulnerability. Headphones on, I closed my eyes as Ione, Oliveros’ surviving partner, led us with simple instructions: “deep breaths, long tones… listen and match a voice you hear, then tone a note you hear within yourself but not being voiced.” Alternate. Repeat.
Marvelous techno gurus, magically managed what we each heard, narrowing the input a bit and deliciously adding a 12 second delay much like the Cathedral of St John the Divine NY, softening our collective sound. Time flew. Lost in a sea of sound, I vocally stretched to connect with some distant sound/human. With the next breath, I voiced myself and added to the mix. All in balance. The equilibrium I seemed to attain from this meditation was comforting. Life in cacophony. Hope and harmony amidst chaos. Sense of self, belonging, connectedness, calm, enervation, all joined within me.
500 Voices from around the globe creating one heavenly chorus. I only want to listen more deeply, and more deeply, and more deeply.
“Walk so softly that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”