Tunes on the Terrace: Arcana Music Ensemble

featuring the works of Pauline Oliveros 

In collaboration with Bowerbird, Stoneleigh is pleased to present the Arcana New Music Ensemble performing the music of Pauline Oliveros’s works The Well and The Gentle. Pauline Oliveros’ (1932-2016) life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others’ sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the ’50s, she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, and poets gathered in San Francisco. In the ’60s, she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth, and ritual.   

Written between 1982-1983 and commissioned by Philadelphia’s Relâche Ensemble, The Well and The Gentle are two of Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations – text-based, intuitive pieces rooted in listening with minimal instructions.   

Gates open at 5:30 PM. Come early to picnic on the lawn or wander the summer garden. The concert begins at 7:00pm on the Pool House terrace. All tickets are general admission and include seating. 

Please note: the rain date for this event is Sunday, June 14. 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS 

Pauline Oliveros’ (1932-2016) was the recipient of four Honorary Doctorates and among her many recent awards were the William Schuman Award for Lifetime Achievement, Columbia University, New York, NY, The Giga-Hertz-Award for Lifetime Achievement in Electronic Music from ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany and The John Cage award 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. She founded “Deep Listening®,” which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. She described 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,” Oliveros explained, simply. Oliveros founded Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer, Troy, NY. Her creative work is currently disseminated through The Pauline Oliveros Trust and the Ministry of Maåt, Inc. 

Arcana New Music Ensemble is a group of Philadelphia-based musicians dedicated to presenting interesting, beautiful, and unconventional music in interesting, beautiful, and unconventional places. Founded in 2015, the chamber ensemble is dedicated to contemporary classical music performing works by living composers and to reexamine music from the past, often focusing on composers whose work has been overlooked. A hallmark of Arcana’s programming is its frequent use of portrait concerts, which allow the ensemble to explore a composer’s work in depth. These programs balance music by widely recognized composers with works by those who are less well known or historically underrepresented.