SOPHIE and Pauline Oliveros were two experimental musicians whose oscillating experiences of womanhood and queerness resonated prominently in their art. Widely considered the leading purveyor of hyperpop, SOPHIE made sporadic, abrasive sounds that felt like glimpses into her psyche at the time of their creation, when she was in the process of transitioning but not yet out to the public. Pauline Oliveros subverted normative musical conventions, writing compositions that were almost always unresolved, undecided, and unspecified. As a lesbian composer who began hitting her creative stride in the post-war second-wave feminist movement, this disruptive approach to music-making defied the hyper-masculine conventions of classical music, often heard in the structure of a sonata or symphony.
Personal experience will always be a contributing factor in shaping an individual's art, whether intentional or not. Contexts that intersect the personal and the political are among the most prevalent aspects of SOPHIE and Oliveros's work. In Queer Sound: How SOPHIE & Pauline Oliveros Synthesized Their Lives, I highlight the semiotic dynamics in their work and why their personal lives mattered in the larger scope of the music as a whole.
SOPHIE Schema
Personal Information
Name(s): Sophie Xeon
Date and place of birth: September 17, 1986 in Glasgow, UK
Death and place of death: January 30, 2021 in Athens, Greece
Transformation(s): SOPHIE left school to pursue a career in music production. She was most interested in the physicality and texture of sound, building sonic architecture that mimics the sounds of whiplashes, squeaking latex, clanging metal, and fizzy pops of soda. She experimented with pitch and tone modulation, using samplers and machines to pitch the vocals up to a cartoon-like register, blurring the lines between the human/organic and the artificial/machine.
Intellectual, Political, Social, and Cultural Significance
Works/Agency: SOPHIE’s transformative work with sound is exemplified in her abrasive techno song, “Faceshopping.” The spoken-word lyrics at the beginning declare, “My face is the front of shop,” alluding to beauty as a commodity. For many trans women, their identities come at a major cost. Lines such as, “I’m real when I shop my face,” draw a parallel to the immense pressure on trans women to perform “real femininity,” by spending money on body modifications like facial feminisation surgery, breast augmentation, and vaginoplasty, so that they can be viewed as “more real.”
Reputation: SOPHIE had a glowing reputation in the music industry. She became a sought-after producer, collaborating with artists like Rihanna and Madonna. She is considered one of the innovators of hyperpop—an exaggerated, avant-garde take on pop music marked by an abundance of electronic and dance production.
Legacy and Influence: SOPHIE revolutionized pop music with her innovative, avant-garde approach to the genre. She made abrasive, hyper-industrial music that disrupted conventional paradigms of femininity and masculinity, which was largely informed by her trans identity. During the formative years of her career (2013-2017), SOPHIE remained completely invisible to the public eye, releasing projects and disappearing without a trace, devoid of any physical form. Her approach was revolutionary, forcing listeners to focus solely on the music and not the body behind it. Her influence is palpable in several popular hyperpop acts today, including 100 gecs, Black Dresses, Slayyyter, and others.
Clusters & Search Terms
Current Identification(s): Grammy-nominated, hyperpop,
Clusters: SOPHIE is one of many artists in the hyperpop collective. Other artists in that camp include A.G. Cook, Charli XCX, 100 gecs, Dorian Electra, Slayyyter, GFOTY, umru, and Arca.
Search Terms: SOPHIE, hyperpop, Oil of Ever Pearl’s Un-Insides, It’s Okay to Cry, Immaterial Girl, Faceshopping.
Bibliography
Primary (selected):
“SOPHIE On Criticism, Collaborating and Childhood.” The Lenny Letter
Archival resources (selected):
McClary, S. (2010). Feminine endings: Music, gender, and sexuality. Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press.
Web resources (selected):
Sayrs, E. (n.d.). Deconstructing MCCLARY: Narrative, Feminine sexuality, and feminism in Susan McClary's feminine Endings - College Music Symposium. Retrieved May 10, 2021, from https://symposium.music.org/index.php/33-34/item/2098-deconstructing-mcclary-narrative-feminine-sexuality-and-feminism-in-susan-mcclarys-feminine-endings.
SOPHIE. Faceshopping (Official Video). YouTube. 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es9-P1SOeHU&feature=youtu.be
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Pauline Oliveros Schema
Personal Information
Name(s): Pauline Oliveros
Date and place of birth: May 30th, 1942, in Houston, TX
Death and place of death: November 24, 2016, in Kingston, NY
Family
Mother: Edith Gutierrez
Father: John Oliveros
Education:
Moores School of Music
University of Houston (1949-1952)
San Francisco State University (1957)
Transformation(s): Pauline Oliveros—in addition to her skilled accordion playing and experimental composition—was renowned for pioneering the practices of deep listening and sonic meditations. Her guiding principle was "Hear with your ears, listen with your heart.” As a lesbian composer who began hitting her creative stride in the post-war second-wave feminist movement, her approach to deep listening is explicitly queer and maternal, disrupting male-centric norms of classical playing through the sonata and symphony forms.
Intellectual, Political, Social, and Cultural Significance
Works/Agency: Oliveros’s 1970 composition, “To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe, In Recognition of Their Desperation,” was scored after reading the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, the playwright who shot Andy Warhol. The score that Oliveros composed for this particular piece functions asan experiment in which pitch and rhythm are undecided and unspecified, requiring the piece to become an exercise in deep listening, where six performers must choose five pitches, play long and drawn-out tones, and imitate the intensity of one another’s pitches and tones in a “continuous circulation of power,” a relation that is distinctly queer and specific to women.
Legacy and Influence: On August 3, 2018, a “Deep Listening Plaza in Honor of Pauline Oliveros” was unveiled in Kingston, NY (Press Release)
Clusters & Search Terms
Clusters: One of her experimental post-war contemporaries is the post-war avant-garde composer John Cage, who used silence as another practice of listening. Oliveros is also part of a long line of overlooked women electronic pioneers in music history including Daphne Oram, the founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and Laurie Spiegel, the founder of the software Music Mouse.
Search Terms: Deep listening, sonic meditations, post-war composition, sounding out, To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe: In Recognition of Their Desperation.
Bibliography
Primary (selected):
Oliveros, “On Sonic Meditations” from Software For People (1984)
Archival resources (selected):
Mockus, M. (2017). Sounding out: Pauline Oliveros and lesbian musicality. New York: Routledge.
Web resources (selected):
The New Yorker. “Listening as Activism: The “Sonic Meditations” of Pauline Oliveros.”
Oliveros, Pauline. To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation. Vimeo video. 2017. https://vimeo.com/236532502?fl=pl&fe=vl&utm_
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Bio
Isabel Corp (she/they) is a blogger and New York City-based music industry professional who specializes in digital content creation as a Digital Marketing Manager at Crowd Surf, where they implement creative digital rollout strategies for indie, established, and legacy artists. She is also the founder of A Grrrl’s Two Sound Cents, a cross-platform hub for feminist voices in music, media, and noise.
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