Long Beach Opera to Spend Entire Season Spotlighting Musical Visionary Pauline Oliveros

The Long Beach Opera has a vision, and it’s not afraid to implement it.

The opera house has embarked on a yearlong tour of the works of visionary musician Pauline Oliveros, an experimental and avant-garde accordionist, composer, and music theorist whose groundbreaking work was tremendously influential in Southern California and beyond.

The legacy of Oliveros is particularly strong in Southern California, where she co-founded the Department of Music at the University of California, San Diego in 1967.

“There’s a lot of overlap in the Pauline world for us,” said James Darrah, artistic director and chief creative officer for the Long Beach Opera.

“Our music director did the workshop of her last opera that she notated, the Nubian Flower that we’re doing last in our season, we have people that worked with her during her lifetime. For our first piece, Earth Ears, we had Shelly Argon, who is a harpist literally trained by her at Mills… there’s a lot of cool overlap.”

Texas-born Oliveros, who died in 2016, was known mainly not as a traditional opera composer or musician, but as an experimental and electronic music and acoustic spectacle pioneer who influenced artists such as John Cage and Philip Glass.

Oliveros was Latina, a feminist, and a lesbian — a stark contrast to the homogeneity of most famous American composers — and was also a child of the border, who wrote her discordant feelings about her identity into her art.

She is perhaps most famous for creating the theory of “deep listening,” which encourages the listener to be fully aware of how sounds made by humans interact with nature and the world around them.

“I found myself listening to long sounds and becoming more interested in what the sound did themselves than what I would do with them,” she told NPR in 1976. “And as this work proceeded, I began to become interested in what the kind of listening I was doing did to me and my own internal processes.”

“We wanted something that was kind of about the future,” said Darrah, who also runs Opera UCLA. He added that no opera house has ever focused on her music before. “We’re doing something kind of unique, but also trying to maintain a level of authenticity musically.”

The four shows, which began in December and will play through July, will be performed across multiple venues.

On Feb. 15 and 16, Oliveros’s “El Relicario de los Animales,” an exploration of the human connection to the natural world, will be performed at Heritage Square Museum in Los Angeles, featuring mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton and soprano Brenda Rae.

Tickets are $75, but the Long Beach Opera also offers deep discounts for students and pay-what-you-can models, in line with their philosophy that art should be available and accessible to all.

“Exclusivity never gave birth to good art,” Darrah said.

More information about the Long Beach Opera can be found here.