Reissuing two essential, major works from improviser, conceptualist, accordionist and composer Pauline Oliveros--The Well & The Gentle--recorded in 1984 with participation including fellow accordionist Guy Klucevsek, The Well recorded in the studio in Pennsylvania, The Gentle using the resonance of the drinking watertank Severin of Cologne in West Germany.
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Pauline Oliveros-accordion, composer
Guy Klucevsek-accordion
Charles Forbes-cello
Wesley Hall-clarinet
Laurel Wyckoff-flute
Florence Ierardi-percussion
John Dulik-piano
Marshall Taylor-saxophone
Stephen Marcucci-saxophone
Barbara Noska-voice
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UPC: 793447545912
Label: Important Records
Catalog ID: IMPREC 459LP
Squidco Product Code: 33036
Format: 2 LPs
Condition: New
Released: 2023
Country: USA
Packaging: Double LP in a Gatefold Sleeve
SIDE A and B recorded at Yellow Springs Institute For Contemporary Studies and The Arts, in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, on July 14th, 1984, by Werner Stobel.
C1 recorded at Ohio State University, in Columbus, Ohio on April 5th, 1984, by John Hetrick.
C2 to D2 recorded in the drinking watertank Severin of Cologne, West Germany, on December 8th and 9th, 1984, by Rolf Dahmen and Frank Norden.
"The Well & The Gentle, two of the major works of Pauline Oliveros, are presented here in a first time reissue on double vinyl in a gatefold sleeve with extensive liner notes.
If Oliveros had followed a more conventional path she may have, all social obstacles aside, been considered among the major composers of her time. However, Oliveros approached composition in a more egalitarian manner. She wrote music for musicians to interact with or, in the composers words, she wished to create "an inclusive and interdependent and unfolding world of relationships."
Oliveros' propensity towards inclusion is part of what makes this work so remarkably distinctive. The Well & The Gentle is carefully crafted, allowing performers to participate in the creation of the work. Players are asked to collaborate, focus, react and make imaginative choices. Only then can the performers "pass through stages of awakening to the possibilities inherent in making music, working together, leading to the essence of what can shape musical impulses and individual freedom simultaneously."
Unlike most major composers of the era, Oliveros' work focuses on collaboration and improvisation. For Oliveros, the processes involved in making music are as fundamental as the music itself. Oliveros creates, as Arthur Sabatini put it so eloquently in the liner notes, "A world in which sound and the practices entailed in making music merge; become, at once, source and atmosphere, energy and essence, presence and dynamic."
Pauline Oliveros was an electronic music pioneer, accordionist, composer and educator who resided in Kingston, New York. Her instrument was tuned in Just Intonation and she often included it in her meditative improvisational music. Her music is not meditative in the sense that it is intended for listening to while meditating, rather each piece is a form of meditation, such as her aptly titled Sonic Meditations.
A central figure in post-war electronic art music, Oliveros is one of the original members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center (along with Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Anthony Martin), which was the resource on the U.S. West coast for electronic music during the 1960s. The Center later moved to Mills College, where she was its first director, and is now called the Center for Contemporary Music. Oliveros often improvised with the Expanded Instrument System, an electronic signal processing system she designed, in her performances and recordings."-Important Records
Artist Biographies
• Show Bio for Pauline Oliveros "Pauline Oliveros was a senior figure in contemporary American music. Her career spans fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. Recently awarded the John Cage award for 2012 from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. Oliveros has been as interested in finding new sounds as in finding new uses for old ones --her primary instrument was the accordion, an unexpected visitor perhaps to musical cutting edge, but one which she approaches in much the same way that a Zen musician might approach the Japanese shakuhachi. Pauline Oliveros' life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others' sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Since the 1960's she has influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. Pauline Oliveros was the founder of "Deep Listening," which comes from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. Pauline Oliveros describes Deep Listening as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening was my life practice," she explains, simply. Oliveros was founder of Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer." ^ Hide Bio for Pauline Oliveros • Show Bio for Guy Klucevsek "Guy Klucevsek is one of the world's most versatile and highly-respected accordionists. He has performed and/or recorded with Laurie Anderson, Bang On a Can, Brave Combo, Anthony Braxton, Anthony Coleman, Dave Douglas, Bill Frisell, Rahim al Haj, Robin Holcomb, Kepa Junkera, the Kronos Quartet, Natalie Merchant, Present Music, Relâche, Zeitgeist, and John Zorn. He is the recipient of a 2010 United States Artists Collins Fellowship, an unrestricted $50,000 award given annually to "America's finest artists." He has premiered over 50 solo accordion pieces, including his own, as well as those he has commissioned from Mary Ellen Childs, William Duckworth, Fred Frith, Aaron Jay Kernis, Jerome Kitzke, Stephen Montague, Somei Satoh, Lois V Vierk, and John Zorn. Performances include the Ten Days on the Island Festival (Tasmania), the Adelaide Festival (Australia), the Berlin Jazz Festival, Lincoln Center, Spoleto Festival/USA, BAM Next Wave Festival, Cotati Accordion Festival, San Antonio International Accordion Festival, Vienna International Accordion Festival, and the children's television show "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood." His 1987 project, Polka From the Fringe, a collection of commissioned polkas by Fred Frith, Elliott Sharp, Bobby Previte, Carl Finch, et. al., toured around the world and was released on 2 cds on the eva label, and were named "best recordings 1992" on WNYC-FM's "New Sounds" program. In 1996, he founded Accordion Tribe, an international ensemble of composer/accordionists Otto Lechner (Austria), Maria Kalanemi (Finland), Lars Hollmer (Sweden), Bratko Bibic (Slovenia) and himself. They toured internationally from 1996-2009, are the subjects of Stefan Schwietert's award-winning documentary film, Accordion Tribe: Music Travels, and released 3 cds on the Intuition (Germany) label. His music theatre scores include "Chinoiserie" and "Obon" with Ping Chong and Company, "Hard Coal," with the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, "Industrious Angels" for Laurie McCants, "Cirque Lili" for French circus artist Jérôme Thomas, which has been performed over 250 times world wide, always with live music, and his own piece, "Squeeze Play," an evening of collaborations with Dan Hurlin, David Dorfman and Dan Froot, Claire Porter, and Mary Ellen Childs. He and Dan Hurlin were awarded, jointly, a BESSIE for, "The Heart of the Andes," which has played the Henson International Puppetry Festival, The Barbican Center in London, and the Ten Days on the Island Festival, Tasmania. Klucevsek has released over 20 recordings as soloist/leader on Tzadik, Winter & Winter, innova, Starkland, Review, Intuition, CRI, and XI. Stereo Review cited his Starkland recording, Transylvanian Software, as a recording of special merit" (1995). He can also be heard on John Williams's orchestral scores for the Steven Spielberg films, "The Terminal," "Munich," "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," and "The Adventures of Tin-Tin," and on A. R. Rahman's score for "People Like Us."" ^ Hide Bio for Guy Klucevsek • Show Bio for Charles Forbes "He is a cellist and teacher who was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts and took his studies in cello, chamber music and conducting at Harvard College and the Manhattan School of Music with teachers such as Maurice Eisenberg, Leonard Shure and Pablo Casals. His carer as a professional musician has seen him perform with countless American orchestras and ensembles and some of these include the Buffalo Philharmonic, Chancellor String Quartet, Concerto Soloists Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Network for New Music, Orchestra 2001, Philadelphia Camerata, Princeton Chamber Orchestra, Relache Ensemble, Springfield Symphony, Vermont Symphony and Windsor String Quartet. He also founded and spent three decades as a member of the New York Camerata, worked with Leopold Stokowski as the Principal Cellist of the American Symphony and appeared as a solo recitalist at Carnegie Hall on four occasions. More recently he has been the Principal Cello with the Bucks County Symphony and a member of Orchestra 2001 and the ensembles Liebesfreud and Ensemble Impromptu. He has appeared on several recordings that include Songs from Another Time by New York Camerata, Gloria! Gloria! with Benita Valente, The Philadelphia Singers & Concerto Soloists Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia and A Miriam Gideon Retrospective and Images: Music by Eleanor Cory and Walter Winslow: Concertati Veneziani & Other Works. In the field of musical education he has been involved with the Princeton Chamber Music Play Week as it's music director since it was established in the two decades ago. He has also been a private tutor at the Settlement Music School and a faculty member of several schools that include Amherst College, Doylestown's Community Conservatory, Exeter Academy, the University of Delaware and Manhattan School of Music among others. He is also the compiler of the publication Cellos Scales and Arpeggios and the inventor of the music scroller, which allows music to be read with the aid of a foot pedal instead of turning pages." ^ Hide Bio for Charles Forbes • Show Bio for Wesley Hall Wesley Hall is an American clarinetist known for the ensemble Relâche and her work with Pauline Oliveros. ^ Hide Bio for Wesley Hall • Show Bio for Laurel Wyckoff Laurel Wyckoff is an American flutist known for the ensemble Relâche and her work with Pauline Oliveros. ^ Hide Bio for Laurel Wyckoff • Show Bio for Florence Ierardi "Florence Ierardi received Bachelor's and Master's degrees in percussion performance at Temple University, where she studied with Alan Abel and Glenn Steele. She has performed with The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Kennett Symphony, Pennsylvania Ballet, Delaware Symphony, and the Philadelphia Chorus. Flossie has worked collaboratively with movement artists, including Eiko Fan, Moving Target Dance Company, and ZeroMoving Dance Company. She is a faculty member at Drexel University, where she teaches Clinical Musical Improvisation." ^ Hide Bio for Florence Ierardi • Show Bio for John Dulik John Dulik is a Philadelphia based pianist, known for the ensemble Relâche. ^ Hide Bio for John Dulik • Show Bio for Marshall Taylor "Saxophonist Marshall Taylor studied the Paris Conservatoire, under a Fulbright grant, and his teachers and coaches include Marcel Mule, Frederick Hemke, Henry Schuman, Marcel Moyse and Ifor Jones. As a performer, he appears in recital, chamber music, ballet, orchestral, new music and modern dance settings. He has played in Eastern and Western Europe and Japan as well as the United States. He has worked closely with such composers as Milton Babbitt, Luciano Berio, Lukas Foss, David Glaser, Matthew Greenbaum, Karel Husa, William Kraft, Jan Krzywicki, Gerald Levinson, Ursula Mamlok, Pauline Oliveros, Raoul Pleskow, James Primosch, Shulamit Ran, Terry Riley and Maurice Wright, playing and recording their compositions, some of which were written for him." ^ Hide Bio for Marshall Taylor • Show Bio for Stephen Marcucci Stephen Marcucci is an American saxophonist, known for the ensemble Relâche, dedicated to the performance of contemporary classical music. Based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the group was formed as a composer-performer collective by Joseph Franklin and Joseph Showalter in 1977 and officially granted not-for-profit status in 1979. ^ Hide Bio for Stephen Marcucci • Show Bio for Barbara Noska Barbara Noska is a US soprano vocalist, known for the gruop Relâche and her work with Pauline Oliveros. ^ Hide Bio for Barbara Noska
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Track Listing:
SIDE A
1. The Well 19:50
SIDE B
1. The Gentle 20:00
SIDE C
1. The Well / The Gentle 12:45
The Receptive 16:00
SIDE D
1. A Love Song 4:45
2. The Gentle 15:25
Vinyl Recordings
Improvised Music
Free Improvisation
Large Ensembles
Recordings Utilizing the Natural Resonance of a Space
New in Improvised Music
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