Good Listener

Good Listener: Meditations on Music and Pauline Oliveros is a performance-in-writing of Oliveros's Sonic Meditation XXI--a text score in the form of a question: "What constitutes your musical universe?" Michael Ned Holte responds to this brief but expansive prompt with a daily meditation that focuses attention on the work of Oliveros--the revolutionary composer, feminist and queer icon, and Deep Listening theorist--but expands outward to consider the author's own evolving relationship to music and sound. As a performance that documents its own making, the text also serves as a reflection on time, memory, improvisation, silence, solitude, loss, friendship, teaching, visual art, taste, and material culture, among many other subjects summoned in its daily pursuit.