Come meet adorable kittens and puppies available for adoption from across the Monterey area at this special community event in partnership with Our Neighborhood Pet Project! Enjoy light refreshments while getting to know local rescue animals looking for their forever homes.

The Carmel Bach Festival invites everyone to participate in a Tuning Meditation by Pauline Oliveros.  This free, informal program is an opportunity to become a composer, a performer, and an audience member simultaneously.  As we listen intently to each other, we create not only music but also community.

Oliveros composed a number of Sonic Meditations, which invite participants to listen carefully and openly—to pay close attention while maintaining awareness of all surrounding sounds.  Her compositions are text scores that are only few sentences long and hug the line between score and poetry.

No musical experience or talent is necessary to follow the simple instructions of the Meditation score:  sound a pitch and then modify it to respond to the pitches other people are creating—matching or forming harmonies or modulating to a new sound structure.  This continues as long as people are engaged in listening and creating new sounds.

Pauline Oliveros was first known as a pioneer of electronic music, but she was particularly influential for her philosophy of Deep Listening.  Younger composers, including Angélica Negrón, acknowledge her powerful influence.  Negrón has included one of Oliveros’s works in her program “Field of Sound,” on July 23.

Come with friends, family, and dogs.  Bring a blanket, chair or yoga mat.  (There are only a few benches in the redwood grove.)

“Through Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening, I finally know what harmony is…It’s about the pleasure of making music.”  --  John Cage