Deep listening

The Fort Worden cistern, Port Townsend, lies a little way outside Seattle.  It was built in 1907 as a two million gallon water tank for the US Army at its base there.  It takes the form of a huge, thin pill-box, 186 feet in diameter, 14 feet high, built of reinforced concrete. Inside there is a forest of supporting pillars.  Empty now, the space has a reverberation time of 45 seconds, constant across frequencies, with no individual echoes returned.  In October 1988, the accordion-player Pauline Oliveros, the trombonist Start Dempster, and the singer/didgeridoo-player Panaiotis recorded the album “Deep Listening”, a series of composition using the acoustic of this space as an integral part of the music.

Deep listening because the pieces were improvised, created from the act of hearing and reacting to the ambient sounds.  These themselves were the overlapping echoes of 45 seconds of previous notes.  To create a coherent structure the players had not only to listen carefully to that instant, and respond, but also to be able to think back and ahead in time as their music was washed out into huge, fading waves.  The musicians therefore had to live with the implications of every creative act for not just the present but for an extended future. The heavier the responsibility, the deeper the listening.

Deep listening because in these improvisations, as the space itself became a player, it too seemed to be listening attentively, the better to answer the music-making of its fellow performers.  This was no dead, transparent, anonymous concert hall.  Instead it had its idiosyncrasies, its sonic tricks, its subtle shifting in time of the sounds as they married and died, even its playful motions in space, as the notes were passed around the walls of the cistern until they gradually embraced the players.

Deep listening because we the invisible audience, privileged through recordings to eavesdrop on this experience, must listen as we have never done before.  Gone are the old certainties of a well-defined aural image, the comforting clarity.  The space does everything we are told that spaces should not do:its huge reverberation makes it not a subtle colouring to a self-sufficient performance, but the leader of the performance, its dominant fact.

The result is highly disorienting.  Literally, because the acoustic destroys all sense of place or direction.  The sounds do not come from any one place, any one musician; there is no “them” playing to “us”, no easy directed dialogue.  Metaphorically it disturbs because we cannot fall back on our old skills.  If we want to hear this music we really must listen – which we so rarely do today, since most compositions just go through the same old motions, punching the tired buttons of education and habit.  With these pieces we learn how demanding deep listening truly is.

But also how rewarding.  Because like the players, like the space, we become part of the creative process through our concentrated attention, our picking out of strands in this web of sound.  Deep listening, because in achieving this participation we realise just how profound it is.

(22.3.92)

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