Pauline Oliveros is a senior figure in American avant-garde music. Her career spans fifty years of boundary-dissolving music making. Oliveros is as interested in finding new sounds as she is in finding new uses for old ones. While her primary instrument is the accordion, her compositions and performances explore modes of making and listening to music enabled by technology. Since the 1960s she has influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth, and ritual. Recently awarded the John Cage award for 2012 from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Oliveros is Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College, CA.