The Witness
In 1989, Pauline Oliveros composed The Witness, a text score that invites interpreters to engage with three challenging strategies for listening, attuning, and responding to the natural environment and to one another. Oliveros’s philosophies of community and collaboration and the practice and process of Deep Listening® has inspired generations of artists, researchers, scientists, anthropologists, ecologists, educators, and activists. For the past three years, Claire has been a part of an international coalition of researchers in the OpenLab Witness, and she has worked closely with the Ecuadorian anthropologist Eduardo Kohn and the Sapara Nation Forest Defender Manari Ushigua.
PROGRAM NOTES BY EDUARDO KOHN
Pauline Oliveros’ The Witness (1989) is a compositional exploration of what she calls Deep Listening, a practice aimed at learning to listen “in as many ways as possible to everything that can possibly be heard all of the time.” Through Deep Listening, she writes, “we open to listen to the world as a field of possibilities and we listen with narrowed attention for specific things of vital interest to us in the world.” This practice “takes us below the surface of our consciousness, and helps…dissolve limiting boundaries,” so that we can listen to others, including other than human beings, and to the larger whole of which, collectively, we are a part. 1 For the Amazonian leader Manari Ushigua, who tonight shares the stage with the performers as a witness, the word for this larger whole, this fragile web of living selves that collectively sustains us, is “forest” (naku in Sapara). Learning to listen to the forest is today, in Oliveros’ words, of “vital interest.” The Witness is one vehicle for doing so. (read more)
Past Performances
Claire Chase (flutes), Susie Ibarra (percussion), Alex Peh (percussion) and Senem Pirler (live electronics) perform THE WITNESS at Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale, New York. This exploration foregrounds the more-than-human sounds of the mine—rhythmic water droplets, footsteps, birds—and welcomes these contributions as directive and collaborative forces in the performance.
Rehearsing for a performance of The Witness at Carnegie Hall in January 2023. Photo: Hilary Swift.
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Artforum/Bookforum: A Conversation between Claire Chase and Eduardo Kohn
A transcontinental version of The Witness – LLANCHAMA COCHA – QUITO – MONTREAL – NEW YORK
Remembering Pauline Oliveros