Opera company devotes whole season to ‘pioneering queer composer’

From NPR LA:

The Long Beach Opera has unveiled its ambitious 2025 program focused entirely on the works of pioneering queer composer Pauline Oliveros.

James Darrah, artistic director of the Long Beach Opera, said audiences will have a chance to experience Oliveros’ unique take on the opera. “We really started to think that that was an interesting idea to show one woman’s kind of bold, varied work, and no two of these pieces are the same,” Darrah said.

Darrah described Oliveros as a musically curious Mexican American queer artist from Houston, Texas, who eventually moved to San Francisco and helped found the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1962.

“That period of time, when you look at it, is marked by exciting theatrical pieces that involved dance and sound and visual art. Later in life, some of her pieces are simple, spare, human voice or instrument, layers of sound,” Darrah said.

Oliveros is also known for creating a practice called Deep Listening that distinguishes listening from hearing. It’s taught in schools, workshops and other places of music. Her work spans over 50 years. She died in 2016.

Her lifetime and creative partner, playwright IONE, will direct Oliveros’ final composition, The Nubian Word For Flowers: A Phantom Opera….

Read on here.

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