(Sept 17) The Relâche Chronicles: Pauline Oliveros "The Well" // Oct 11, 1987: "The Well" at NMA Philadelphia
Featuring a long interview excerpt from 1987 between Pauline Oliveros and Augusta LaPaix during NMA 1987 and a 1985 NYC performance of the work by Relâche
https://www.relache.org/podcast/episode/77c73351/episode-number-three-pauline-oliveros-the-well
podcast description:
This is a major work by the pioneering composer, sound artist and activist, Pauline Oliveros. Created in collaboration with dancer-choreographer, Deborah Hay, and the Relâche Ensemble while in residence at the Yellow Springs Institute for the Arts and Humanities in Chester Springs, PA, “The Well” has been performed throughout the U.S., Europe, Japan, and South America by Relâche and recorded on Hat Hut Records. The podcast team discusses how “The Well” was developed and shaped in collaboration with Pauline and Deborah, with assistance from Guy Klucevsek, who was an original member of the Relâche Ensemble. Duration is 34:34.
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The Relâche Chronicles, January 25, 2023 No. 3
Pauline Oliveros, Relâche and The Well
special guest interviewee - Guy Klucevsek
♪0:00 Pauline Oliveros (excerpt, into background)
0:13 Joseph Franklin: Welcome to the Relâche Chronicles. A podcast with live performances by the Relâche Ensemble with commentary by composers, performers and others who were part of the action.
I’m Joseph Franklin along with my friends Joe Kasinskas and Arthur Stidfole, we’re going to discuss an important time in the history of the Relâche Ensemble, when we collaborated on a work that became an iconic piece for the group, created by composer Pauline Oliveros. And it happened at the Yellow Springs Institute.
[...] : The Yellow Springs Institute comes up because without that, there never would be a, a confluence, I guess you’d call it of Pauline Oliveros and the Relâche Ensemble. I think we should, ah, describe what the Yellow Springs Institute was, and its founder, John Clauser.
[...] : Where was it?
Joseph Franklin: Well, it was located thirty miles west of Philadelphia and ah, a little village called Chester Springs, right in the middle of these prized farms that bred horses. And here was the Yellow Springs Institute in the village of Chester Springs. John Clauser, in the late 1970s, he invited me to visit the Yellow Springs Institute for Contemporary Studies and the Arts.
And John laid out a plan to me – he wanted to create a situation where artists, thinkers, writers, smart people gathered for a week’s residency, get to know each other, to discuss potential projects together and if successful, to create a collaborative work that would then be performed at the end of their residency on Saturday afternoon.
And that’s when I remembered Joe Kasinskas getting in there, because he was part of the ah Saturday afternoon or Saturday events which were really remarkable.
Joe Kasinskas: Those six Saturdays, ah, there were such a number of people that were invited to participate in these week-long sessions and the stellar level is amazing. Joseph Campbell, Robert Blythe, ah, Pauline Oliveros. It’s just, ah, an amazing confluence. That word keeps coming up. It’s one thing to – to meet somebody for a couple of hours and have a conversation but it – it’s another to ah, live with them for a week, catch them in – in their various moods and ah, all the vicissitudes of life, all – all those things that can go on, and I – I think that was there in the Institute.
(Oliveros continues in the background)
2:42 Joseph Franklin: I had a special relationship because not only was I the director of the Relâche Ensemble, but I was hired by John to be the production coordinator for all of the events there. What happened is Jo-, John and I were at a meeting, in a planning meeting and he brought up Pauline Oliveros’ name to me and he said, “you know, I’ve been reading about Pauline, listening to her music and I think she’d be perfect for our arts class.”
At that point, I had never met Pauline, I only knew her work. So I said, “yeah, let’s do it.” So John invited Pauline in 1983 and I can remember that morning very well. Pauline came in and she was with her good friend, ah, the dancer choreographer Deborah Hay. Some people knew Deborah for her work, of course – she has her own dance company. But she was also the – I believe the co-founder and then the Director of the Judson Dance Theatre in the mid-sixties. She was the perfect person to collaborate with and Pauline’s idea, and Deborah’s was to create a musical work with members of the Relâche Ensemble that would essentially support Deborah’s choreography.
3:49 And that was the genesis of the piece which became known as The Well.
[...] : I think it’s a good time to say that Pauline’s music is – is not the kind that was written down in normal musical notation. And say, like more a, ah, a music of encounter, I – I call it. Her presence would draw things out of people.
Joseph Franklin: Ah, absolutely, it’s a critical component here because it gave me a chance to challenge some of the notions that were then prevalent. It gave us an opportunity to read off the page. Excuse me. Play off the page. And this was a, absolutely opening salvo in something that we followed up on many – for many years after that. And created a number of other piece (sic) that utilized the improvisational skills of the Relâche players.
4:42 [...] : How did she draw this out of Relâche who hadn’t done something like this before?
Joseph Franklin: There were three sections to the piece. There were three sections with specific verbal instructions. The Receptive, which essentially became a duo with Guy Klucevsek and Pauline.
[...] : That was the first part.
Joseph Franklin: Yes, number one. And number two was The Well itself, it was called The Well. What everyone really responded to were five words. “Listen. Merge. Match. Support.” And “Soar”. And I think it’s safe to say that everybody, finally, really got the, [swing for it], down pretty well.
[...] : And each word was a, ah, a movement so to speak, so the “listen” part was very interesting. It caused people to listen to each other. You don’t think of listening as an active event.
5:35 Joseph Franklin: But she also had a diagram, remember? She – she wrote a diagram in that was essentially the score. And I know Guy has talked about this in some detail because he really kind of responded to the five point image that was developed through the I Ching, correct?
[...] : Right, like the receptive, the well and the gentle. And they’re different hexagrams in the – in the I Ching, an ancient Chinese Book of Wisdom and it’s kind of interesting to think about that. The receptive, things going in, like being receptive. The well, regular life is going on, on the surface, but ah, in order to get sustenance you needed to go deeper into that well. And the – the gentle, the whole thing is the gentle penetration of this gentle wind.
So I think she en-, envisioned those three things as being a larger piece. But The Well was interesting because you’re drawing things out of yourself, but you’re drawing things out of other people as well.
[...] : After the Yellow Springs week, did you perform it with dance very much?
6:34
Joseph Franklin: Primarily the Relâche Ensemble made The Well a concert piece, and performed it, uh, I don’t know how many times. Many, many, many times all throughout the U.S. and on international tours. We performed in Japan, and this was 1989 and by then we had The Well under our belts. We played it a lot.
We were asked to collaborate with a group of Japanese musicians and they were all master musicians of Gagaku, music from the Imperial Court. It took a little time for them to connect with us but once they got it, they got it. Ah, we gave a couple of really good performances with them. It was really fun.
7:15 But the tuning’s different. As you can imagine, they’re bringing their – their indigenous instruments. It was recorded for Japanese radio. I played for Pauline a recording from one of their concerts and I remember she cupped her head and said, “ha, that’s pretty good, that tuning’s a little bit different. I – I sort of like it.” (Chuckles)
[...] : Joseph and I each spent quite a bit of time in Japan and I was in Tokyo, studying Gagaku. And that music was codified in the year 800 when the Emperor brought in musicians from Korea and China. And they had different tuning systems, which they’ve maintained for the last 1200 years and they don’t bend, so you have to sit there and play in your own tuning system against the other tuning system.
I can imagine adding in the two tuning systems from Gagaku must have contributed a completely new dimension to the performance of The Well at that time.
8:05 Joseph Franklin: Yeah, it was great, it was great. There were so many wonderful moments in the performance of The Well over a period of probably ten years altogether. It became another kind of a piece in the subsequent years.
Arthur Stidfole: Before we go to the piece, Joe Kasinskas and Guy Klucevsek were actually talking recently.
Joe Kasinskas: Before Guy and I talk, I’d like to say that beneath our conversations, we’re hearing a performance of The Well from New Music America 1987 that was performed by Relâche in Philadelphia. So Guy, I have a couple of questions for you about the origins of The Well. I just wonder whether like the – the dance was, ah, just in its [scott] stages when everybody arrived at Yellow Springs, or whether Deborah Hay had something in mind.
Ah, whether Pauline had something in mind? My reading of it – it seemed like everything started at, at zero and that piece was formed right there in that week’s session at Yellow Springs. Everybody, ah, came on the scene with no expectations basically.
9:15
Guy Klucevsek: I don’t know if got ahead of time, but I – I got the feeling that that – the graph with the nexus and the five terms, may have been something that Deborah and Pauline were already working with on their own as a duo and that those terms were being used to suggest things of how they could relate to each other, in terms of movement and sound.
And when she brought it to Yellow Springs, it became a matter of how to relate to that with all the musicians and the dancer because at that point, it’s possible that if one musician could choose to be using one of the terms of, of “listen”, mix, match, support, soar, in relationship to Deborah instead of any other musician in the ensemble. So, ah, Deborah became like an equal partner in how you could relate to one another.
10:07 The way I remember the piece developing is that what we did at Yellow Springs was this: Pauline came with this graphic score, with this nexus of points ah, at each point there was one of these words that I had mentioned and what happened at Yellow Springs was not that we developed the composition but we developed a relationship to the score and then a relationship to forming it over time.
Ah, and basically I thought it was a – a week of rehearsals in how just the way an orchestra (chuckles) rehear-, rehearse a piece in one sense in that you’re trying to find your way into the score. Very differently of course, because there is on form, there is no ah preconceived form. It reminded me of something that I read recently about ah, Pauline’s recording, in 1 of IV, one of the earliest pieces of electronic music which is ah represented among the recording of Richard Max-, Maxfield and Steve Reich.
11:06 It was Steve Reich’s Come Out was, was also on. She says that there was some criticism of that from the media because they said there was no form to it. And she said all the work for her came from setting up the equipment in a way that certain things could happen. And (chuckles) and then letting it happen over time.
And that there – there was no formal structure; it was setting up things so that this could happen. And if people who don’t know that piece, it’s all sine waves generating tones outside of the human, ah, human ears frequency range. But they combine the – the sine wave oscillators combine in certain ways that form sub-tones and it can then be heard by people.
11:55 And then she set up the tape recorder with a tape delay so that reverb and echo would also be set up. All the work that she described, it came in setting up those things so that other things could happen. And I see um The Well the same way. That what she brought in was ah, a graph and a set of words and put the musicians and the dancer there, and set up an environment in which anything could happen if you were paying attention to the words.
And I – I – I myself spent the week trying to figure out the difference (chuckles) part of the week – the difference between matching and merging. I asked – I actually remember taking Pauline aside and saying, “what’s the difference between match and merge? (Chuckles)” She said, “well, I think that match to me means that you hear something and you’re trying to match it as close as possible.” She said, “it could be something literal, like you would hear, ah, an A440 being played on the flute and you try to match tone exactly as you can.” She said, “merge could be that you hear a texture and you want to merge into that texture but because it’s not just one thing, it – it’s a combination of things, you want to merge into it not necessarily by matching anyone there, but the making of the thicker texture or a thinner texture, whatever.”
13:11 Obviously to me soar meant to solo but there are a lot of ways to solo. For example, Deborah could choose that term in a particular time and be soloing and I could either choose to soar at the same time so it could be kind of a duo of, ah, of my solo and her solo or any other solos going on in the band, or I could try to do a support which is, could be a drone or a rhythm that she could dance to. And I – I was trying to find my way the whole way- weekend to what each term meant and how I could use that to relate to Deborah Hay and to the other musicians.
And I – it’s my impression that everybody was trying to do that, and by the end of the week, we had a good feel for how we could do this. Now, there still is no set structure, so it’s basically, you have a ce-, certain amount of time which is not pre-determined, and you’re doing this activity within the open sense of time about there always is some limits, like okay we have a thirty minute performance and we have four other pieces to do (chuckles) so we should probably keep this within twenty minutes or something like that.
14:12 But it’s not precisely fifteen, it’s not precisely thirty two, it might come at eighteen, it might come in at twenty-five, but nobody is measuring that time. We’re going off of ah, the give and take of energy and flow.
Joe Kasinskas: So Pauline didn’t indicate when to go from match to merge?
Guy Klucevsek: Yeah, she was not conducting, no.
Joe Kasinskas: That term, the first one, it’s sort of meditative, the group has to listen. You don’t, at the face of it, think of it as an active thing, listening. Listening to her was, ah, being attentive to the sound in the room and then there would be a notion to act at some point. And then the piece would begin. Is that somewhere near what your experience of that was, like who started?
15:02 Guy Klucevsek: I think that everybody started off by listening for indeterminate amount of time but I don’t know whether that’s what I hope we all did (chuckles) or what I remember that we all did. That would be my inclination. But then somebody has to start at some point and then that sets the mood for everything because one somet-, somebody makes a sound then someone else has to decide which of the other actions to take.
Although the action to take could be just continue listening. Ah, my strongest memories are of The Well I guess because of the uniqueness of it, we did a lot of pieces in Relâche with ah, recurring rhythms, you know um, whether it was In C or a Rzewski piece with which are very rhythmically driven so maybe I – I didn’t – I give it as much as um, what’s the word, weight ah, as, uh, The Well which kind of shook my way of thinking and hearing things.
But I don’t have s-, I don’t remember – I mean, there was a rhythm but was there a scale, was – was there – I don’t remember.
16:08 Joseph Franklin: There is a strong rhythmic component to the final movement of The Well – the Receptive. Pauline notated that very carefully in a kind of syncopated sixteenth and eigh, sixteenth/eight rhythm that is always introduced by the percussionist playing the clave. Adding tenor drum or four-tom to drive that rhythm along. And that is an important component because the ensemble really picks up on that.
And interestingly enough, one of the terms that we’ve – we discussed ah, that applies to The Well, one of the five words, soar is really evident in the performance of The Receptive. The ensemble really soars and they soar on top of this driving rhythm that’s laid down. So, let’s listen to a performance by the Relâche Ensemble of Pauline Oliveros’s The Well, performed on March 1985, at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery, in New York City.
♪17:08 Relâche The Well
33:28 Joseph Franklin: You’ve been listening to a really terrific performance of Pauline Oliveros’s The Well, performed March 2nd, 1985 at St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery by the Relâche Ensemble. The performers that evening were Guy Klucevsek, accordion; Barbara Noska, voice; Laurel Wyckoff, flute; Wesley Hall, clarinets, Steve Marcucci and Marshall Taylor, saxophones; John Dulik, piano; and Florence Ierardi, percussion. The recording was a by a long-time Relâche audio engineer, Warner Strobel.
This concludes program number three of the Relâche Chronicles, podcast written and directed by Arthur Stidfole, Joe Kasinskas and me, Joseph Franklin. Special thanks to Guy Klucevsek for his commentary and insights to The Well. A future program will feature Guy’s music. Don’t miss it! For more information on the Relâche Chronicles, please log on my website, josephfranklin.org. Thanks for tuning in to the Relâche Chronicles, and we’ll see you next time.
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Augusta Lapaix with Pauline Oliveros, probably October 6, 1987
broadcast on the CBC-FM program Two New Hours
Pauline Oliveros: …well, for me it – um, I feel like a musical voyeur. And (chuckles) and the voyeur state is one of alertness and ah, awakeness, awareness. Um, and I feel as, as if every uh, instant of music making is crucial. And it’s the difference between life and death.
So that, (clears throat) if you lose your attention (clears throat) for any instant, then you’ve lost the whole, the whole battle. And you’ve lost the audience, you’ve lost the music and you’ve lost yourself.
Augusta Lapaix: Pauline Oliveros’ philosophy of music and of life is not an easy one. Oliveros is known all over the world now as a leading figure in American contemporary music. She’s a composer, an accordionist and a teacher, and she’s done pioneering work in electronic techniques and in teaching methods.
0:54 She was also one of the founders of New Music America and a highlight of this year’s festival in Philadelphia was a closing night performance of her work called The Well. Now, The Well began back in 1982. It was originally a collaboration with the American dancer Deborah Hay. The work grew and expanded over the years, and it was finally recorded by the Swiss label Hat Art.
Oliveros uses an ancient Chinese book called the I Ching, and some of you may know it, as her source in this piece. The I Ching began as a book of wisdom, then it became a fortune teller’s tool over the centuries, and it’s still used that way today. But since its discovery by the West, a lot of people have been drawn to its original purpose. And in fact, John Cage was among the first to use the book in contemporary composition.
1:43 The I Ching is made up of a series of sixty four hexagrams and these hexagrams are in turn made up of broken and unbroken lines and they are in fact, a binary system. In The Well, Oliveros uses three of the hexagrams as scale steps.
Pauline Oliveros: The work itself is, um, ah, a – a kind of work which engages the creative process of the musicians. Um, and I don’t – I don’t like to refer to the work as – as simply improvisation because improvisation has so many different meanings this – these days. It’s a wide range and ah, people are quick to want to categorize it, as improvisation and without really going into detail as to what that means.
2:31 In this case, ah, the musicians get – are guided by, ah, in the first part by – by five words. Um, “listen”, “match”, “support”, um, ah, I can’t remember my words! (Laughs) It’s been a while now since I’ve talked about this piece! (Chuckles) “support”, ah, “soar” s-o-a-r, like to ride above. And the – the – the real is not so much what the words are at the moment but the interaction of listening and h-, ways of listening and ways of responding in the piece so that it – ah, uh, as it feeds back on itself and the musicians, ah, ah, intensify their listening and responding skills in the course of the piece, ah, a kind of heightened um, state of awareness emerges.
(applause from the ending of the broadcast of the New Music America version of The Well; I’ll see if I can get permission to post it when I present the day to day NMA Philadelphia posts in October…)
Augusta Lapaix: The Well, a work by Pauline Oliveros, performed by the Philadelphia new music ensemble Relâche. And that work, you can probably find in record import stores across the country on the Hat Art label.
(more applause)
4:16 Pauline Oliveros has worked for the most part outside the musical mainstream. She now holds a prominent position as I mentioned earlier on the American new music scene, but it wasn’t always that way. And when I spoke to her at the New Music America festival in Philadelphia this year, I asked her if the path she chose wasn’t a lonely one at times.
Pauline Oliveros: I was always fascinated with sound from the time that I can remember. My earliest remembrances are sound. Um, and so let’s say I had a rich interior life of listening. Um, and I didn’t find that lonely.
4:57 Um, what was lonely was being ah, ah, somewhat outside of the mainstream, always, from the time I was a child. And always, ah, being interested in the underdog, um, trying to help people who are being ridiculed by peers and so on, which was a terrible form of socialization, I think.
Um, and as I (clears throat) embarked on my own path of, uh, sound making, I mean – I sometimes had some companions and sometimes didn’t. Um, in the – about 1970 when I started doing um, sonic meditations, um, this was a point in my career where I sort of shucked off all of the things that I had um, learned and went to very, very simple forms.
6:01 Um, but simplicity was only a, um, cover for the complexity of – of – of listening in the way that I’ve described before. And it took a while before uh, my colleagues got it. Um, now you see a whole, um, movement, (chuckles) and it’s – and – and even the, um, marketplace has crabbed up a uh term, in a new age, there’s a marketing term which is now uh, selling, uh, um, a kind of mindless form of music ah, which doesn’t have much to do with what I’m talking about.
6:47 Augusta Lapaix: Does it disturb you that that whole marketing thing of new age music has happened? Does that, um, does that threaten in any way what you’re dealing, what you’re doing?
Pauline Oliveros: No, it doesn’t. Doesn’t threaten it at all. It’s just that, ah, occasionally I’m – I’m ah, I’m trying – there are people who have tried to ah, uh, package me up as a new age, um, musician. And I mean I have nothing against new age music or the term new age. Except that it has this – it’s commof-, commodified as Herbert Blau would say. (Chuckles) And packaged.
7:28 And, um, ah, is being sold. You know and it – and not so much that it’s even being sold, it’s gonna be consumed pretty soon and then ah, there’ll be a search for something else to sell. Because it’ll be used up! (Chuckles) But ah, the work that I’m doing, um, I just continue to do it and ah, watch the ah, way things move. Ah, and…
Augusta Lapaix: Where does the healing come in for you in your music? When did that connection start? Was that always there?
Pauline Oliveros: Well, it’s always been ah, a – a place in – in the world for me. Ha-, having a, having a – having some territory and a place to be is – is a, ah, an important part of one’s life. Um, but I notice that in specifically, ah, I – I started listening to tones intently and – and – and observing their effect upon me.
8:33 And – and feeling the changes that would come about through different sounding. And, um, ah, so I began to play with – and sing with that intent, you know to, um, ah, take care of myself, to feel better. (Chuckles) And to hope that it transmitted to others, or to have that intention. Um, so in that sense, ah, I find that it – that it is healing, it does work and people do give me feedback in that respect that having ah, experienced something that some music of mine that they had – had an experience of, of maybe getting rid of a headache or dropping some difficult feeling.
9:27 Augusta Lapaix: Where do you see this original new age music as having a place in the – in the new music scene today? Where does it fit? Is it something totally new or are we getting back to something that’s much older or what?
Pauline Oliveros: Um, I think that, ah, music as a form – of healing has been, you know, a part of our past and then ancient history and it – and it comes up and down. But we live in a society that’s, uh, ah, is bent on ah, music as entertainment and distraction and escape, escapism.
Ah, in – in more academic circles, it’s music as an intellectual exercise. But music has, ah, you know, many many functions. And if – ah, um, in shamanistic societies, music was a healing force. Um, the truth is that music is a very powerful force in, in human existence. Ah, and that it’s – it – it is – it’s been used in – in all sorts of ways.
10:37 It’s used now in our society to make people buy things. You know and that’s powerful. And ah, that’s a – um, ah, in a way, in a way it’s hidden.
Augusta Lapaix: (chuckles)
Pauline Oliveros: Even though it’s right out there in front of everybody,.
Augusta Lapaix: (chuckles)
Pauline Oliveros: But that’s what it’s doing.
Augusta Lapaix: That was American composer Pauline Oliveros.
♪Pauline Oliveros [meditative excerpt]
Above: the insert for the night’s program which ended with The Well at New Music America, noting the extra participation of Malcolm Goldstein, Mary Jane Leach, Stuart Dempster and Marc-André Hamelin. Also that night, Daniel Goode’s Wind Symphony and Ursula Oppens playing Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues.
♪
The Hat Art record from 1985 has been posted on y2b by Aaron Oppenheim. I couldn’t find it on Hat Art’s website for sale, but that full work is here at y2b:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-YqbZM_hCbqchuw23zctg0B1FmYtCkON
You can follow the above to hear the work one track at a time or start with the first here:
On the other hand, earlier this year, a new double album (with vinyl option) was released by Important Records, pairing The Well with The Gentle. The online detail doesn’t specify if it’s the same as the Hat Art recording, but I’ll include that detail here when I get it.
They have provided a 12 minute excerpt on Soundcloud as well:
And of course, you can get it via the bandcamp if you’re okay with the digital…