For its 2025 season, the always innovative Long Beach Opera has chosen to focus on the work of a radically creative spirit of an earlier generation: composer Pauline Oliveros.
Oliveros, who lived from 1932 to 2016, was a prominent member of the American avant-garde for half a century. Born in Houston, she first made a name for herself while living in San Francisco in the 1960s.
Various facets of her work, including improvisation, the use of electronics, and the meditation-like practice she called “deep listening,” will be spotlighted during the course of LBO’s season.
The company will present four of her works, as well as a two-day film festival intended to “highlight her profound influence on sound, music, and art.”
The season will get underway early on Dec. 15 with Earth Ears: A Sonic Ritual, which dates from 1982–1985. The company describes it as “a meditative, interactive text score designed to bring performers and audience together in a powerful act of communal deep listening.” The one-time-only event will begin at 3 p.m. at Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro.
El Relicario de los Animales, from 1979, follows Feb. 15–16, 2025, at Los Angeles’ Heritage Square Museum. Described as a work that explores “the interconnectedness of humans and animals through improvisational sound,” it will feature mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton and soprano Brenda Rae, who will also be heard on percussion.
Oliveros’s 2001 piece The Library of Maps: An Opera in Many Parts will have its West Coast premiere April 12–13, 2025, on board the Queen Mary ocean liner in Long Beach. This large-scale work includes singers, dancers, and actors, plus an instrumental ensemble including accordion, trombone, and traditional Japanese koto. Like El Relicario, the opera will be staged by LBO Artistic Director James Darrah.
The film festival, which will take place July 26–27, 2025, at a venue to be announced, will focus on Oliveros’s legacy as a queer artist. Besides movies and digital shorts, the program will include a live performance: the West Coast premiere of her 2016 work The Nubian Word for Flowers: A Phantom Opera.
Unfinished at the time of Oliveros’s death, the opera was completed by several of her collaborators, including her life and creative partner Ione, who wrote the libretto and will direct the LBO production.
The piece premiered in Brooklyn in 2017. The New York Times called it “a surreal work of music theater” that focuses on “the interaction of the Nubian culture in Africa with the forces of colonialism.”
For more information on the 2025 season, go to LBO’s website.
