Meditations on Listening, a creative exploration of the conductor's role and a development towards a post-conducting practice

Halldis Ronning

Halldis Rønning's artistic research contributes to the field of conducting, transdisciplinarity and listening practices. She seeks to open the traditional conductor's role towards co-creative practices and find new artistic expressions of conducting. Can conducting be conceptual art? Can it be performance or dance? How can it relate to visual art? Her motivation to open up the role is rooted in a wish to deepen her listening practice as a conductor. This deepening includes creative, spatial, embodied, visual, imaginary and relational listening. Listening as artistic quality and as artistic process. The work starts in the experimental art field and ends up in the Concert Hall with Stavanger Symphony Orchestra. There is a feministic context to the research and she touches upon topics such as mutual exchange, space to create, agency and control. But also the conducting body as an expression in itself, in relation to nature or an orchestra.

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Dancing with flashlights

One of the performative solutions for me in the piece became to dance with flashlights. In that way I could make signals to the musicians as well as play with the lights together with the sound and the surroundings.

Here you can se me playing with light on the floor together with the music.

In this project I explored the limits of conducting, from the traffic-police conductor giving ques, to being a dancer performing together with only one musician in a mutual exchange of receiving and initiating music and movement... to performance-like actions in a room to mark the transitions from one part of the piece to the next.

It could also be just relating to the collective sound by moving/performing and thereby adding layers of meaning/interpretation for the audience or to act as a visual counterpart to musical sounds.

My role was not decided upon, but the musicians would need some signals due to the space we were in.

Apart from that I had to find out what my role would be.

I knew somewhere deep down that I might dance in the piece. It felt exciting to have the possibility to be a dancing conductor and the dynamic in the creative group made me feel totally free to develop my role in what way I would like.

When the rehearsals started we were doing exercises and etudes on the paintings of Guro.

Since I was not an instrumentalist in the process, I would only listen and observe the musical improvisational process.

Sometimes I would feel the urge to take the lead, because I am used to leading, but I had to find a different role and I started by observing.

I soon noticed that my trained conductor's ear was a great resource, and Guro would frequently check in with me for comments on diversity, balance and expression in the totality of the sound.

We would do experiment with me doing different kinds of conducting.

At one point one of the performers, Vivian Wang said: When I am being conducted I stop listening!

I found this very interesting and it resonated with me long after the project was over.

This contributed to push the project further into the direction of listening.

Another important aspect of the project for further research was the fact that

I found out that my interaction with any musician in the project was a total mutual artistic exchange where there was no clear distinction between receiver and initiator. That was an important realization for me and pointed in the direction of a place where nobody is conducting anybody as I write more about in the text Listening as artistic practice and the role of receiving in this kind of exchange.

Being a dancer-conductor, observing listener and creative collaborator in «Resonant Silence»

I want to mention this project that Guro Skumsnes Moe created and invited me into. This presentation of her project is not large enough to give justice to its richness, but I nevertheless wanted to mention it in the reflection. The project was important in the research period because it represented something so different from traditional conducting. It was the extreme opposite of conducting a symphony orchestra.

The production took place in the old Silo at Bergen School of Architecture, a large industrial space with columns, atics, and very peculiar acoustics.

The set up was that the musicians would be spread out on two different floors, some would sit in chambers up in the ceiling and some would be standing on the ground floor.

The room was vast and due to the placement of the musicians, there was little visual contact between the performers.

All the musicians were independent improvisation artists, each one with a strong individual artistic signature. All of them had a strong creative inner listening and only a couple of musicians had played under a conductor before. There was no score for me to interpret and rehearse, instead there were fragments of poetic texts and paintings by Guro as a starting point for everyone's collective interpretation.

Resonant Silence

a site-spesific concert-performance performed at the Borealis festival, 2022

Guro Skomsnes Moe, initiative, composition, concert and octobass

Halldis Rønning conductor and concept

Astrid Groseth- Choreography, dance and concept

Elisabet Holager Lund- scenography and concept

Danishta Rivero - Hydrophonium, cello and voice

Jacob Felix Heule - Percussion

Oscar Escalante - bag pipe, long wind instruments and voice

Martin Escalante - alto saxophone, long wind instruments and voice

Vivian Wang - analog synth, percussion and voice

Tuulia Kallio - Kantele, tambourine and voice