Deep Listening in the Music Theory Classroom: A Socially-Attuned Approach to Music Fundamentals
by Celeste Oram and Michael Matsuno
(Published on January 27, 2020)
Teaching music fundamentals forms a cornerstone of the liberal arts model in higher education across the United States and worldwide. In this reflective piece, UC San Diego educators and doctoral candidates Celeste Oram and Michael Matsuno propose ways to expand awareness of the social and interpersonal impact that theory teaching has on students' musical development. Oram works as a composer and conductor; Matsuno is a flutist who specializes in contemporary performance.
As instructors of university-level music theory in the U.S., we continually find ourselves both perplexed and invigorated by a fundamental contradiction inherent in our work. We must teach the notational and theoretical principles of a historically grounded discipline to a living community that exists beyond the discipline's original social and geographic context. We in California are certainly not alone in experiencing this tension. Many musical traditions around the world undergo adaptation, transformation, and transplantation, flourishing in environments far removed from their original ceremonial spaces. In our case, Western classical music represents the tradition we inherit and respond to through our practices of experimental performance and composition, which we pursue as doctoral candidates and teaching associates at UC San Diego.
Over recent decades, a discourse has emerged within music studies — broadly categorized as music education — that advocates for a socially responsible and responsive approach to teaching musicianship. This discourse also calls for a fuller understanding of the power structures and exclusionary systems underlying Western classical music. Scholars and practitioners have worked to confront music history and music theory's Eurocentric, racialized, and patriarchal portrayals of musicians and repertoire. They explore how these portrayals affect contemporary music-making and public perceptions of music's cultural significance. Additionally, disability-studies scholars have labored to dismantle the exclusionary character of Western classical music traditions, especially what has been described as the "severely, punishingly conformational" demands placed on vocal and instrumental performers.
In response to these urgent calls for change, we recently took the opportunity to reflect on how foundational musicianship courses at the tertiary level narrowly define and assess musical skills from the Western classical tradition. These skills include staff notation, solfège, interval recognition, sight-singing, and similar competencies. In this one-size-fits-all model, "ability" develops according to a fixed menu of theoretical templates, practiced through drills and mechanistic exercises, and tested in what might be considered artificially unmusical scenarios. Our own experience as musicians confirms that these templates can cultivate skills that serve as building blocks for fluent engagement with many tonal music repertoires. Yet it often goes unquestioned that an almost constant focus on objective accuracy leaves "musicality" waiting at the door, treated almost as an afterthought to be applied at some later advanced stage. In our experience, such rigidly abstract rubrics imposed by repetitive skills tests can easily be internalized by students and teachers alike as predictors of creative potential or as measures of value and status within a musical community. This curricular model also tends to derive more from Western music's historical disciplinary concerns than from the interests and experiences of students themselves.
The late composer and educator Pauline Oliveros offers one radical alternative to standardized approaches for teaching music fundamentals. A co-founder of UC San Diego's music department, Oliveros is well known as a fixture of American musical experimentalism. As a composer, her work centered on electronic music alongside her practice of "Deep Listening": a personal and collective method for sharpening perceptual attention and sonic imagination.
Oliveros first taught basic musicianship courses as an assistant professor at UC San Diego in Fall 1969. Her method, revealed in lesson plans and documents archived in UC San Diego's Special Collections, sought to establish the music classroom as a space for social, environmental, and perceptual attunement. In an introductory musicianship course titled "The Nature of Music," she entirely replaced common-practice music theory conventions — scales, intervals, triads, and even staff notation — with a program of individual and group exercises exploring vocal and physical impulses, improvisation, and sonic awareness. Oliveros also taught continuing-level musicianship classes for music majors. While these courses addressed formalized music-theory conventions, class time revolved around participatory exercises that, as Oliveros argued in a 1975 letter to the Vice Chancellor, served both to "sharpen the necessary skills for good musicianship" and to "help students to communicate more directly and peacefully with each other." Unlike prevailing institutional pedagogy focused on individual comprehension of theoretical models, Oliveros's approach made sensory perception and social relationships the very substance of course material.
In the following paragraphs, we present an approach to teaching music fundamentals that retains a traditional grounding in Western musical literacy while drawing on Oliveros's interventions to reframe and revitalize both the subjects and methods of musical learning. The texts and prompts we provide are among several tools we have used to introduce foundational music theory alongside a broad exploration of sonic and environmental awareness. This reflection draws on our experience planning and implementing our syllabus in Fall 2019 at UC San Diego. The syllabus's first outing was not without difficulties, but it served as an energizing proof-of-concept while cementing our commitment to its continued development. Given the work-in-progress nature of our ideas, we offer this discussion and its resources less as a prescriptive method and more as an invitation for reflection, critique, and further adaptation by readers and fellow music educators.
Towards an Adaptive Pedagogy
In line with the prevailing consensus in Western music education, the university department where we teach describes "music fundamentals" in terms of introductory topics in music notation, theory, and ear training. We took seriously the mandate to teach these skills and conventions in the introductory, general-education course we were assigned, largely in the interests of those students who arrive in the music classroom with an ardent desire to participate in the musical practices they enjoy and admire — practices that, in many cases, depend on these skills.
At the same time, we felt compelled to develop a teaching method that could both equip students with these generalized conventions of musical literacy and consciously illuminate the particular, personal, and local contexts within which those conventions derive meaning and importance. In music theory courses organized around music theory "itself" as a wholesale system, the student tends to be positioned as the recipient in a one-directional transfer of knowledge. We were drawn to consider how an introduction to music theory might instead be organized around the immediate social and cultural environments of its practitioners. In this equation, the student is positioned as a developing yet lifelong participant in an ever-adapting cultural activity.
What skills we would teach was therefore only half the equation. Equal attention needed to be given to the attendant values and priorities that their manner of teaching might inscribe. These questions set the stage for our search for pedagogical tools that could offer coherent musical instruction yet mitigate the exclusionary impulses of mainstream music theory's "conformational" scaffold.
Oliveros: 'A Tuning of Minds and Bodies'
In the spirit of tuning into locally responsive musical practices, we turned to Oliveros, who set a precedent for alternative music education within our own institution. Oliveros's methods for teaching fundamental musicianship courses at UC San Diego through the 1970s developed alongside her explorations in what she called "Deep Listening" — a practice she described as being "intended to heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible." Beginning in 1970, Oliveros cultivated and shared this practice through a growing catalog of participatory scores and exercises focusing largely on environmental and vocal sound. She also held group workshops and training programs to equip others to lead Deep Listening practices.
By Oliveros's own account, the impetus for these investigations was the charged social and emotional landscape of UC San Diego and the United States at large in the early 1970s. The first U.S. draft lottery was drawn in December 1969. Combined with the cresting Civil Rights and Women's Liberation movements, these events transformed campus environments into combative crucibles for ideological expression. At UC San Diego, one such incident was horrifically fatal. Oliveros recalled: "I felt the temper of the times. I felt the tremendous fear and — what can I say — the opposite of calm."
The 1974 collection of scores represents a key work from this period and exemplifies her dedication to investigating music's soma-sensory potential and healing properties. For Oliveros, these scores "represent a tuning of mind and body." This collection ranks among Oliveros's earliest methods for Deep Listening and is dedicated to the Women's Ensemble, the group that met regularly in Oliveros's home between 1970 and 1972 and shaped the meditations through carrying them out as a dedicated disciplinary practice.
Oliveros instructs that "no special skills are necessary" for participation in these scores. "All that is required is a willing commitment to the given conditions." Perhaps the best-known score in the collection, Tuning Meditation, designed for a group of any size, begins with the instruction to "listen with your mind's ear for a tone. On the next breath using any vowel sound, sing the tone that you have silently perceived on one comfortable breath." Once each group member has "entered" in this way, they are instructed to "listen to the whole field of sound the group is making. Select a voice distant from you and tune as exactly as possible to the tone you are hearing from that voice." Through cyclical repetition, participants ultimately "communicate with as many different voices as possible." As Oliveros's biographer Martha Mockus observes, the sounding result will seldom "meet normative expectations of virtuosity." Yet, as Oliveros herself contended, performing the score is "as difficult as playing a virtuoso piece, but yet it has a simplicity, an immediacy, so you can begin."
Comparing Tuning Meditation with Oliveros's contemporaneous teaching materials reveals their common emphasis on group activity and shared experience. At the heart of her participatory and exploratory classroom exercises appears to have been a kind of ludomusical spirit and, with it, a restructuring of classroom order. However, the meaning of play or games in this sense does not imply frivolousness or even leisure. By the exactitude of their instruction, Oliveros's methods demand rigorously sustained focus and critical awareness. One set of instructions declares that "no errors are allowed." Consequently, her syllabi place emphasis on reflexive self-reporting: students receive prompts for post-hoc written reflection through journaling, as well as real-time verbal reflection via the "critic-conductor" role featured in many group exercises.
In this sense, Oliveros's approach radically recalibrates the politics and priorities of the music classroom. The cultivation of musicianship depends not on demonstrable individual "excellence" but on the successful cooperation of an ensemble and the richness of personal experience thereby yielded. Musicianship "skills" are organized not around discrete and reproducible maneuvers like singing intervals or identifying chords, but around perceptual and relational faculties that equip one to engage with and respond to specific musical environments.
Fundamentals of Music
Oliveros's cooperative classroom interventions offered practical models for the kind of music fundamentals course we hoped to lead: one that introduces conventions of music literacy — including music notation, meter, scales, keys, triads, and so forth — through imaginative, participatory music-making in a way that prioritizes attentive listening to oneself, one's fellow musicians, and one's environment. Below we catalog the main resources we drew from Oliveros, including scores for in-class activities. Additional short "prompt text" readings by professional musicians served to provide context for these activities and to offer models supporting students' own reflective writing.
Our syllabus as a whole aimed to make the social experience of music-making in situ both a primary tool for developing musical literacy and a subject of learning in itself. Central to this emphasis is the act of listening: attunement to the effects of what we hear on individual emotion and social relations, and learning to articulate those experiences in written and spoken language. Perhaps the most salient feature we hoped to sustain from Oliveros's model was a classroom dynamic in which all participants are continually encouraged to hone deeper attention — in the "Deep Listening" sense of complex and expansive awareness — to their immediate musical environment, regardless of how "advanced" their theoretical aptitude may be. This imperative applies equally to the teacher, who is cast not so much as an expert but as a guiding participant engaged in the same process of exploration as students.
In an attempt to maximize continuity with Oliveros's participatory activities, an en-masse vocal ensemble rehearsal served as our primary vehicle for introducing and rehearsing formalized conventions of theory and notation. This revolved around rehearsal of a core repertoire of notated music familiar to us from our own choral experience, including music by composers such as Ysaye M. Barnwell, Carolyn Chen, Melanie DeMore, and Meredith Monk. These composers' musical approaches arise from different traditions and contexts than Oliveros's. Barnwell draws from both classical music and gospel a cappella singing. Chen, a UC San Diego alumnus, draws from Romantic piano repertoire. DeMore works within musical community-building and activism, as well as Gullah traditions. Monk's work comes from New York minimalism, honing in on the personality of an individual voice. Interviews, talks, and artist statements by these composers provided further "prompt texts" for engagement and reflection, illuminating the robust traditions, communities, and social concerns shaping their work. The priorities of community-building and social engagement articulated by these artists do not equate precisely with Oliveros's priorities. Rather, together with Oliveros's scores and activities, this cumulative anthology lays out a rich counterpoint between social contexts, historical continuities, and the musical practices that mediate between them.
Tools, Resources and Texts
Below we share and discuss resources from our syllabus. While vouching for their value as tools in the music theory classroom, we also hope to prompt readers to consider any particular relevance these resources might have in different educational contexts. Just as we employed them as resources among others, Oliveros's methods lend themselves to adaptation and supplementation in order to support various activities, groups, and practices. After all, Oliveros's methods were in large part adapted for her own immediate social environment from her lifelong engagement in traditional practices such as Tai Chi and Buddhist meditation. To continue the adaptation process therefore seems an appropriate homage to her ethos.
1. Sound Walks and Sound Maps
This introductory project essentially re-enacts one of Oliveros's 1969 assignments and is modeled on the work of artists such as Annea Lockwood and Max Neuhaus. Students are tasked with creating a campus "sound map" after going on a group "sound walk": an exercise in attuning to the residual musical qualities in our bustling campus environment. Oliveros instructed her students — and ours — to "make a sound map of all or part of the campus community. Details should include direction and time and anything which will help another person find and hear with accuracy what is on your map." Because creating a sound map is essentially a notational exercise, these activities help prepare for the introduction of staff notation and provide a foil for considering its conventions, abstractions, and limits. Moreover, the act of listening is established as a mode of music-making — regardless of what is being listened to — one that requires legible, nuanced, and appropriate terminology if it is to be communicated. Conventional music theory systems such as intervals, meter, or mode might then be framed as descriptive tools alongside, but not excluding, verbal, invented, or phenomenological methods for parsing listening experiences.
2. Weekly Sound Journals
In another re-enactment of an Oliveros initiative, students are asked to write a weekly journal describing a memorable or otherwise interesting sound they heard that week, whether conventionally "musical" or not. Oliveros tasked students to "keep a diary to be turned in of sound experiences. Describe the sound or sounds. Express your feeling about or involvement with the sound or sounds. Bring the diary to each lab for discussion." Perhaps the greatest value of this task — beyond the attention to listening as a habit and an ever-sharpening skill — is the opportunity for students to repeat a task over many weeks, tracing its arc of change and development. In this way, the practice of listening becomes much like the practice of a musical instrument.
3. Rhythm Circles
Oliveros's game-like scores such as Rhythm Circle (1971), Rhythms (1996), and Zina's Circle (1971) exemplify her classroom strategies for exploring musical rhythm not only as a theoretical system but as a visceral experience in mind-body coordination that demands attentive proprioception within a group ensemble. These scores invite endless variation and re-composition around the needs and inclinations of the group. In this way, the rhythm circle premise can be adapted to rehearse pitched vocalization, solfège, scales, improvisation, and more. The role of the critic-conductor — performed by a student, not the teacher — forms an essential component of many such exercises. One lesson plan prescribes that "the critic conductor..."
are they can stop the exercise the moment they spot an error and must articulate what went wrong… the group then judges whether the critic’s assessment is accurate.’ Here, the students determine the group’s success through their own appetite for precision, not the teacher’s. The practice of musical precision therefore unfolds in tandem with rehearsing group communication and shared negotiation, effectively framing accuracy as something reached through collective effort and agreement, rather than pursued for its own sake. These same skills and realizations were brought into our group rehearsals of notated choral work.
4. Harmony and Texture in Sonic Meditations
Given that rehearsing notated music — a core focus of our course — so often calls for a conductor, the Sonic Meditations present a markedly different ensemble experience. What they share with notated scores is their status as composed instructions; their carefully crafted directions demand that each participant form a considered interpretation, since every individual’s decisions tangibly shape the collective result. For this reason, a performance of a Sonic Meditation can function as a laboratory where the ensemble-wide musical consequences of one person’s choices become immediately apparent. Returning to the same meditation repeatedly also offers a revealing diagnosis of the group’s shifting social dynamics, along with shifting qualities of attention and personal confidence.
Reflections — and Forward Momentum
Given the utopian spirit of Oliveros’s pedagogical vision — and, certainly, our own — it is essential to account for the considerable challenges and trade-offs we encountered in practice. To begin, within a highly competitive university environment, academic success and progression typically rely on the measurable demonstration of knowledge and its immediate applicability. Oliveros’s approach is relational and slow-burning; it resets everyone’s benchmarks for achievement and forward movement.
That is precisely its intervention. Yet our teaching showed that this shift brings with it some anxious uncertainty, along with stronger imperatives for trust and good faith between instructors and learners.
Moreover, using Oliveros’s teaching tools alongside musical practices that those tools deliberately undermine — such as a conducted rehearsal of notated vocal music — creates a curious double set of priorities. How, and whether, that duality is resolved, bridged, or simply acknowledged in daily work becomes the shared ongoing project of students and teachers. The returns on that project will undoubtedly vary. Archived student feedback from Oliveros’s early-1970s courses, alongside admirably candid evaluations from our own 2019 class, ranges from passionate reports of transformative experiences to blunt skepticism about the relevance and value of Oliveros’s methods.
Admittedly, reasoned skepticism can be a constructive force in the classroom; articulating why one resists Oliveros’s methods can usefully expose deeply held assumptions. Even our own unease at the perceived instability of the course’s dual priorities assumes that a valuable method must be a uniform one. Also telling is the arguably misogynistic bias in the language — appearing in student responses from both generations — that dismisses Oliveros’s practice as “cute” or mere “busywork.” Other objections seem rooted in a desire to enforce boundaries around what music is and is not. Probing that critique involves reckoning with how categories are upheld, both personally and culturally, and identifying what exactly is threatened by the apparent transgression between them. These conversations push teachers and students to examine the distances and contradictions between their habitual notions of music and musicianship, on one hand, and Oliveros’s starkly framed musical imperatives of attentive presence, careful ensemble attunement, and hearing every sound, on the other. In doing so, one can also point toward the varied, intersecting ways that the music college-conservatory’s values and standards prevent nuanced engagement with musical traditions and practices beyond its own — whether niche or towering, nearby or far-flung.
Ultimately, we do not claim that the approach we have outlined here is a magic cure for exclusionary frameworks in music education. Rather, teaching with Oliveros’s materials has offered a way for us, the teachers, to learn. Structured activities that center personal experience and equalize authority and agency offered new ways of attending to our professional relationship with students. We argue that, in an era of accelerating movement toward pedagogical change within the music academy, this kind of mutual exploration is vital: a chance to step outside rubrics for their own sake and build a pedagogy from the many sources of experience within a classroom. Finally, we wish to express our thanks to this course’s outstanding teaching assistants, who shouldered much of the daily work: Yi-hsien Chen, Teresa Diaz, Ioannis Mitsialis, Qingqing Wang, and Jacques Zafra.
Disclaimer: At the time this article was drafted, both authors were contracted to co-teach the particular Fall 2019 UCSD course discussed. However, owing to a last-minute administrative change, only Celeste taught the course. The syllabus and ideas presented in this paper are nonetheless the product of collaboration.