Thank you David and Boing Boing for publishing an obituary to one of my favorite composers and a pillar of 20th Century music. Always a pioneer, Oliveros built many new communities and settlements in many new musical territories.
Oliveros innovated an incredibly wide range of techniques including tape music composition; oscillator synthases; sampling; voice-as-synthesizer scored composition; contact mic works (most notably, in my mind, her Apple Crate works); graphic scoring; instructional scoring; theater-as-music; rituals for group music making; extended instrument systems; deep listening …
To commemorate the life and death and music of Oliveros in my own small way, I have uploaded an undergraduate essay I wrote on her seminal piece Bye Bye Butterfly to the Internet Archive.
I think I got an A+ for it, but it’s very dry - it does have a good bibliography though! If you have any interest in electronic music, I highly recommend this history of the Tape Music Center:
Bernstein, David W, ed. The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the
avant-garde. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008
(In the essay I was actually just using the very well received Oliveros work in a round-about-way to try and discredit theorist Leigh Landy’s “something to hold onto factors” which, to me, seemed to be tantamount to a prescribed recipe for electronic music composers to use to make their work more accessible e.g. “iii. No more than four sound types at once”. The horror!).
