Good Listener: Meditations on Music and Pauline Oliveros Book

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.