Pauline Oliveros, American accordionist, composer, and a central figure in the development of experimental and post-war electronic art music, passed away on November 24th.

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 the 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’.

From a very young age Oliveros was interested in the sound field around her and started to learn to play music as early as kindergarten. She learned to play the accordion at nine years of age from her mother, and later went on to learn the tuba and French horn for grade school and college music. At the age of sixteen she decided to be a composer.

From the 1980s onwards, Oliveros focused on improvisation, particularly as an accordionist. She continued to teach at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mills College, publishing five books – ‘Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings 1992–2009’, ‘Initiation Dream’, ‘Software for People’, ‘The Roots of the Moment’, and ‘Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice’ – and becoming the recipient of several awards, until the end of her life. Oliveros’ album ‘Accordion and Voice’ (1982) and her Stuart Dempster and Panatois collaboration ‘Deep Listening’ (1989) are considered landmark recordings.

At the time of her death, she was the Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. A distinguished explorer of sound, she commented, “I feel that students always learn more from each other than they do from their professor. They learn by doing.”