THE NEW YORK TIMES, SATURDAY, APRIL 4, 2020 N C3As I entered the Zoom session last Satur-
day, I recognized some faces. The flutist
Claire Chase. The pianist Conrad Tao. The
violinist Carla Kihlstedt. The vocalist
Gelsey Bell. Over the years, I had reviewed
all these musicians from my critic’s perch in
darkened concert halls and underground
music clubs.
But this time I was joining them.
We — and about 600 other people — had
come together in cyberspace for “The
World Wide Tuning Meditation,” a new twist
on an old piece by the composer Pauline Oli-
veros, who died in 2016. Each of us was a tile
in an onscreen mosaic of amateurishly lit
humans gazing out from home offices and
bedrooms. The chat window flashed greet-
ings from around the globe: Madrid, Syd-
ney, Hawaii. Then we began.
Organized by Raquel Acevedo Klein; led
by Ms. Chase and the performance artist
Ione, Ms. Oliveros’s widow; and hosted by
the International Contemporary Ensemble,
the exercise will be repeated each Saturday
in April. The events are part of Music on the
Rebound, an online festival designed to sup-
port performers during the coronavirus
pandemic.
To start, Ione delivered the instructions
that take the place of a notated score: “Be-
gin by taking a deep breath and letting it all
the way out with air sound. Listen with your
mind’s ear for a tone.”
On your next breath, using any vowel
sound, you’re to sing the tone in your mind.
You listen closely to the voices around you
and, on your next breath, select a voice dis-
tant from you and match it. Then you sing a
note nobody else is making. You continue,
on each breath alternating between singing
your own tone and matching someone
else’s.
The piece is one of a number of sonic med-
itations that Ms. Oliveros created to hone
what she called “deep listening” — an art
that engages both heart and mind, focus
and generosity. Some of these exercises
grew out of Ms. Oliveros’s work with a femi-
nist group that used movement to unravel
gender norms governing women’s bodies.
Even if she could not have foreseen the iso-
lation and economic destruction wrought
by the pandemic, works like “Tuning Medi-
tation” were always intended to heal.
Speaking as a critic, ours wasn’t the most
beautiful expression of Ms. Oliveros’s score.
On YouTube, you can find a video of “Tuning
Meditation” being performed inside theFuentidueña Chapel at the Met Cloisters,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s medieval
outpost in Upper Manhattan. There, the re-
verberant acoustics create a sea of sound
that seems to gently undulate, waves of con-
sonance gathering and dispersing.
The recording of our half-hour meditation
last Saturday, by contrast, often sounds like
a cosmic flock of bleating sheep. In the ab-
sence of a shared physical space to reflect
back our voices, the only resonance we 600
isolated singers had was the one we created
for one another. Each time we homed in on a
speck of sound in the chorus and matched it,
we reinforced and extended it for the dura-
tion of one breath.
Ms. Oliveros was drawn to extreme
acoustics. In 1988, she and her fellow musi-
cians in Deep Listening Band recorded mu-
sic inside a giant underground cistern in
Port Townsend, Wash., that had a reverb
time of a whopping 45 seconds. In a space
like that, a single note seems to dance on
forever. On Zoom, only the care of a fellow
human could extend the life span of a partic-
ular sound.
Of course, for the purposes of echoloca-
tion, this kind of man-made resonance was
useless. Ms. Oliveros’s score says to listen
to distant partners for tuning, but from my
computer there was no telling whether a
given note had its origin in Berlin or on the
Upper West Side.
At first my ear was drawn to the outliers
among the hundreds of voices that created
a woolly cluster of pitches: the odd glinting
high note or surprisingly booming man’s
voice that cut through the fog. After a while,
I sought out my pitches among the more un-obtrusive voices hidden in the crowd and
felt a pang of altruistic pleasure partnering
up with these. I also noticed with bemused
admiration the occasional extended tech-
nique coming into play. Was I imagining it,
or did someone contribute a touch of Tuvan
throat singing?
Of course, standing out was part of our
mission. “Contribute by singing a new tone
that no one else is singing,” Ms. Oliveros in-
structs. And not just occasionally, but on ev-
ery other breath. I quickly learned that do-
ing this in a crowd of hundreds requires just
as much concentration as matching a pitch.
Listening intently during each intake of
breath, I would begin to plan a note, only to
find it was already taken. Or I would experi-
ence pangs of insecurity around a note as I
began to sing: Was it any good? Was it suffi-
ciently different?
Like any true meditation technique, Ms.
Oliveros’s piece holds up a mirror to such
inner processes and, over time, brings them
into balance. Alternating between agree-
ment and self-assertion, her “Tuning Medi-
tation” offers a practice for reconciling
interpersonal consonance with individual
difference.
Doing so in the virtual sphere conjures
the same disorienting mixture of isolation
and connection as the coronavirus crisis.
One feature of Zoom is that audibility trans-
lates into visibility: When video conference
participants speak, their images jump into
larger view. For musicians whose liveli-
hoods are being pulverized by the pan-
demic, this might have been a dark remind-
er to them to keep making themselves
heard.Join This Worldwide Musical Meditation
Through April, anyone can be
part of a global performance
of ‘Tuning Meditation,’ by
Pauline Oliveros, over Zoom.
By CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIMAbove, a screenshot from
“The World Wide Tuning
Meditation,” a Zoom-based
twist on a composition by
Pauline Oliveros, top left in- Left, the performance
artist Ione, one of the
organizers of the event.
JACK MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGESVIA RAQUEL ACEVEDO KLEINMICHAEL KIRBY SMITH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESFill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each
heavily outlined box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication or
division, as indicated in the box. A 4x4 grid will use the digits 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6.
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Recollections of
My Nonexistence
Rebecca Solnit
“A clarion call of a
memoir [from] one of our
most potent cultural critics.”
—O, The Oprah MagazineACROSS
1 Barb from the
mouth
9 Tedious work
14 Captain of the
mathletes,
stereotypically
16 Talking points?
17 Cavernous
opening
18 Before: Fr.
19 Be expressive,
say
20 Singer with
the 2014 hit
“Chandelier”
21 Queen or king
maker
22 Operate on with
a beam
23 Prefix with
marathon
25 Meaningful
26 Dir. from Duluth,
Minn., to
Madison, Wis.
27 You won’t see
them again
29 Weekly show
filmed in Studio
8H, for short
30 Pioneer in graph
theory
31 Covered porch
33 Midriff-revealing
wear36 “Don’t mind me!”
37 It’s a series of
movements
38 What four
quarters make
39 Some online
comments, for
short
40 Primary source
of revenue for
Facebook42 Chocolate ___
45 “After you, ___”
47 People
48 Nymph who
divulged Jupiter’s
affair with
Juturna, in Ovid49 Derive
51 PIN point
52 Sink
53 Quartz type
54 Certain library
fund-raiser
56 Numbskull
57 Reassure
58 Numbskull
59 Prison guard in
the Harry Potter
booksDOWN
1 They can be
everything2 Kids : goats ::
crias : ___
3 Buck4 What you’re
usually advised
not to wear
to someone’s
wedding
5 Tennis player
Caroline
Wozniacki or
actress Brigitte
Nielsen
6 Oscar-winning
Lee
7 You might not
get it during a
power nap8 Brutus, e.g.
9 College figs.
10 Went all over11 “My suspicion is
...”12 Company whose
name is said to
mean “Leave
luck to heaven”
13 Purchase for a
smartphone
15 Pluto, e.g.23 Dumps
24 Many ski lodges
27 Word with sight
or control
28 Some Indian
wear30 Org. with the
Office of Land
and Emergency
Management32 One of a couple,
say
33 First of three
spinoffs in an
acclaimed TV
franchise34 Pluto, e.g.35 Where you
might incur
charges
overseas36 Pen pal?
38 Like mushrooms
and shrimp,
often41 Really takes off
42 Attack43 Melodic
passage44 Campaign rally
decoration46 “I’m with you”48 Get dark
50 It may be high
for a penthouse52 Lessen
55 Moat featureANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLEPUZZLE BY YACOB YONAS4/4/20SARA SEEST SWI T
PLEB CORNERSTONE
ALA I UPSETALERTS
MO N T A G U E C A P L E T
SW I MC A P L E T S D R Y
MUTT ITIS
IMACS TWI TTY MPG
WI THORWI THOUTYOU
ODE NOE L L E T AS E S
PELE BASH
CAPULET MONTAGE
AL LNEW G I NGERED
P I ECEOFCAKE SOL I
REAL TROOPER ON I T
ANT E KEYED FADS12345678 91011121314 15 1617 1819 20 2122 23 24 2526 27 28 2930 31 3233 34 35 3637 3839 40 41 42 43 4445 46 47 4849 50 51 5253 54 5556 5758 59Crossword Edited by Will Shortz
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