Michael Ned Holte
Good Listener
Meditations on Music and Pauline Oliveros

ISBN: 978-1-953189-15-8
E-BOOK ISBN: 978-1-953189-16-5
September 2024, English, 5 x 7 in, 622 pages, b&w, softcover
Design: Sming Sming Books

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.

Michael Ned Holte is a writer, curator, and faculty member in the art program at CalArts. His exhibition, how we are in time and space: Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, Barbara T. Smith, at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, was named by Hyperallergic as one of the top 50 exhibitions of 2022. His writing on art and culture has appeared in Afterall, Artforum, East of Borneo, Poetry, and X-TRA, among many other publications. He is the author of Bog Time, a pamphlet on the early tape and electronic music of Pauline Oliveros.