Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality by Martha Mockus — a new book from Routledge Press ::

From the author: This book selects important compositions by Pauline Oliveros from 1960 to 1985 and listens to them sounding out lesbian messages of creativity, community, love, and sexuality within Oliveros’s specific social and conceptual milieu. I am inspired by her observation, quoted on page 1, that “it’s funny to listen this way” precisely because it enables a closer engagement with the material and ideological conditions of Oliveros’s music. With each piece I seek to get inside the sounds—how they are produced and their guiding aesthetics—and articulate how I hear them within North American feminist and lesbian contexts of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Work in lesbian theory by Terry Castle, Audre Lorde, Sue-Ellen Case, and Teresa de Lauretis as well as lesbian fiction by Dorothy Allison, Jane Rule, and Monique Wittig provide the reverberant spaces within which my listening takes place.

I hear Oliveros’s work as lesbian musicality—a musical enactment of mid- and late-century lesbian subjectivity, critique, and transformation on several levels….