Ojai Postcard #1
On Pauline Oliveros’s “Sonic Meditations”
Sitting and listening to live music from a source I cannot see can be a strange experience. As a student at Oberlin, I spent a few half-hours staring at the front wall of Fairchild Chapel as friends and visiting luminaries played the famous organ from the loft behind the pews. Initially it was a disconcerting sensation, watching the blank gray stone as the musicians worked their many-handed magic from above, but after a while I learned to enjoy it. As a writer, it gave me a chance to only focus on the music as it reached me, worrying about the technicalities of performance later if such details were needed.