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Please join in a study group exploring the practice of Deep Listening (2014)



Deep Listening is a philosophy and practice developed by the American composer, Pauline Oliveros. Deep Listening cultivates attention to sound on all levels, heightening our awareness and expanding our potential for connection and interaction with our environment, technology and performance with others in music and in life in general.

The study group will explore the fundamental processes of Deep Listening. We will work with physical exercises and energy awareness, attention to breath and breathing, global and focused listening, listening to each other, improvisation, vocal toning and much more really fun stuff!

There is no charge for the study group - all that is required is a commitment of your time and energy to explore this beneficial practice. No special skills are necessary though you may and probably will develop some during the studies. All are welcome!

Winter/Spring 2014 - here we are at Lynn Run State Park in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania for 3rd session of our Deep Listening Study Group. It was a warm morning in March and we spent the time listening and walking in silence to the creak of wood thawing, a steady hush of the stream, trickle waterfall, soft steps, breathing deeply crystalline air, crunching snow under our boots, a low pitch drone of jet aircraft..
Since then we completed 8 sessions in the study of Deep Listening Fundamental Practices. For our final session we ascended to the summit of Jacks Mountain in Mifflin County where both valleys flank the look out / listen in. As we gazed into the expanse of blue blue sky listening to the buzzing flurry of insect activity, listening to the silent glide of a hawk,
we learned to fly!

Field recordings from our 7th session held at the Alan Seeger Natural Area, Rothrock State Forest, Pennsylvania.







As a facilitator and participant I am studying also. The study group is an integral part of my training for the Deep Listening Certificate Program. I have attended Deep Listening Intensives conducted by Pauline Oliveros. In June 2013, I was a presenter at the first International Deep Listening Art/Science Conference at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Spring 2013 I thoroughly enjoyed performing a number of her works with Ghost Ensemble at Eyebeam Art+Technology Center, Permutations / Supernatural Sounds and Make Music NY in New York City.


Stay tuned or better yet contact me for the next study group in Central Pennsylvania.
ALL are Welcome!

Contact Somna by email :: bulist dot somna at gmail dot com.

SOMNA M BULIST is a harpist and composer/performer. The possibilities of sound as a generative force inspire her music making. She made her first public appearance at the 1998 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, where she performed her original work for solo harp, The FAERYE Invocations. She has performed her works in the New York International Fringe Festival, First Night Pittsburgh and many others. She is a 2006/2007 ASCAPLUS Award recipient for crossover performances of her original compositions in rock clubs and underground festivals in New York City, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and studied harp with the renowned harpist and innovator Lucile Lawrence.




PAULINE OLIVEROS is 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 is 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 is 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 is 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 is 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 is my life practice," she explains, simply. Oliveros is founder of Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation.

For more information in Pauline's activities please visit the Deep Listening Institute :: http://deeplistening.org
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