The accordionist, composer, and improviser Pauline Oliveros, who passed away last month, published her “Sonic Meditations” in 1974. This set of 25 pieces is made up of text instructions designed to facilitate deeper listening. Some do not require musical ability to execute, such as “Native,” which consists of the two sentences “Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”
These ear-footfalls came to mind Tuesday night at the Goethe-Institut, where Dutch pianist Reinier Van Houdt performed Michael Pisaro’s “Green Hour, Gray Future” in an intimate salon, presented by the Boston new-music series Non-Event. Pisaro is perhaps the most notable American representative of the Wandelweiser Group, an international collective and ensemble known for creating atmospheric, expansive music that unfolds slowly and weaves silence into its scores. For some, such music is more effective than NyQuil for drifting off to dreamland. For others, it invites the listener into an untethered state of hypersensitive listening, where time becomes amorphous and the entire body tunes in to a piece’s sound world plus whatever ambient noise may slip in. The creak of doors elsewhere in the building, the whoosh of cars on Beacon Street, and the breathing of fellow concertgoers mingled with Pisaro’s hazy landscape.
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To begin, Van Houdt repeatedly tolled a low note and let the overtones resound to the fullest, subtly depressing and releasing the sustain pedal to let the sound expand and contract. With this treatment, the piano probed familiar but strange territory, drawing out the sensations of each note until the dregs dissipated like smoke. The 73-minute piece moved along a gradient from loud-ish, low, and austere to quiet, high, and dense, and having had individual notes’ sinews and bones initially illuminated in such detail informed the experience of listening to the more complex passages.
“Green Hour, Gray Future” was written in memory of the composer’s friend Mark Trayle. Its harmonic language is rooted in consonances, not strictly tonal but at home with melody. One of the later, midrange passages could have been a missing motive from Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports.” Van Houdt’s playing was delicate and deliberate, turning the pages with as little noise as possible. Pre-recorded electronics first echoed and sustained the pitches of the piano, injecting their own timbres into the decaying waves. They gradually moved more toward soft noise, including some field recordings, a recent interest of the composer’s.
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Listening slowed the heart rate and narrowed and widened the field of vision all at once. It felt like watching the construction of a sand mandala in muted colors, each section forming the base for the next, more intricate texture. My only suggestion would be to move the audience’s chairs a bit farther apart: The line between meditation and sleep often blurs, especially in warm, dark rooms, and the person next to me more than once momentarily dozed off and caught himself after landing on my shoulder.
Zoë Madonna can be reached at zoe.madonna@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @knitandlisten. Madonna’s work is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.