Listening with the body
has been a method of mine for several years.
During the PhD I have delved more deeply into this method and started to explore how it can serve as a pointer for artistic direction and choices, how it enhances the creative processes and deepens the connection to fellow artists and audiences.
I call it body listening because I always try to integrate the body in the listening. In fact I mean that if we listen with the body, we add a new dimention to our listening capacity. We facilitate access to the realm of our intuition.
During the PhD I started reading Pauline Oliveros books: Quantum Listening and Deep Listening, A composer's Sound Practice.
I realized that her writings and practice had a strong resonans with my own artistic practice and her texts and music has encouraged me to explore new dimensions of listening and expanded my articualtion on what listening can mean.
Text to the musicians of Stavanger Symphony Orchestra
The text was sent to the musicians a couple of months before the production.
The concert Meditations on Listening, in collaboration with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, is the artistic result of my artistic research in conducting at the Faculty of Performing Arts, University of Stavanger.
My work has involved exploring the role of the conductor both relationally and artistically, by opening up new ways of creating musical interactions. I have developed these methods within artistic constellations where the roles and relationships between musicians, singers, and conductor have been flexible and shifting. This exploration has given space for musical improvisation, physical movement as an artistic expression, and collaboration with visual art.
At the center of my artistic practice is an interest in listening, which I think of as our most essential tool in working with music.
I experience listening as multidimensional, extending beyond the sonic: it can be bodily, spatial, creative, imaginative, relational, and visual/transdisciplinary. Our attention can act as a bridge between these dimensions. In the concert Meditations on Listening, I wish to highlight several of these aspects of listening.
Creative listening is an inward form of listening for each performer, offering the possibility to make musical choices that shape the composition and the whole in a way that goes further than traditional interpretation. This might be described as a redistribution of creative agency from the composer to the performers. Several works on the programme—Colouring Echoes (Halldis Rønning), (How) To Play the Ocean (Maja S. Ratkje), and Black Obsidian (Hilmar Thordarson and Halldis Rønning)—give both musicians and conductor the opportunity to act as creative co-creators within the frameworks of the compositions.
Visual listening may primarily concern the audience, as they will be oriented toward the video screen. Several works include art video created by professional video artists, with strong expertise in the visual field. These videos are closely connected to the music—sometimes as “imaginary music” without sound, expressed only through movement (as in Choreographical Flowers), or as music performed by full orchestra in interplay with video art (as in Black Obsidian).
The visual dimension becomes a play with the audience’s imagination. Since the videos are abstract, colours, forms, and atmospheres resonate with the musical expression.
Embodied and spatial listening is foregrounded in works such as Colouring Echoes, where musicians position themselves on the balconies, surrounding the audience with sound. This creates a different spatial and sonic experience both for the listeners and for the performers themselves. The performers are grouped differently than on a traditional stage, the notation is graphic, and the piece is performed without a conductor.
In Choreographical Flowers, the visual aspect of musical movement takes centre stage. Here, we give the illusion of playing an “imaginary music” (that is, without producing sound). Together with video images of, for example, flowers opening, the piece becomes a playful exercise in visual listening, lasting approximately 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
Receiving.
Much of the research has dealt with mutual exchange—the moment where it becomes unclear who is conducting whom. Not a moment of chaos, but rather a merging of actions, where the conductor takes in what the musicians are doing just as much as initiating. Two works in the concert—Being Conducted by the Ocean and Arvo Pärt’s second movement Silentium from Tabula Rasa (with the conductor seated)—focus on this act of “taking in” as an essential part of moving closer to a state of reciprocal exchange.
(Translated into english by help from AI)
I have worked with Alexander Technique on and off for 30 years with teacher Stephen Parker. This work has influenced me as a performing artist including my listening practice.
The following video shows excerpts from a lesson with Stephen Parker where we discuss and exemplify the process of listening in relation to the Alexander Technique.
Listening as artistic practice
Halldis Rønning
“Listening is the key to performance”
When a conductor stands on the podium, she finds herself in a sort of power field between the audience and the musicians. A place where directional attention and energies meets. The kind of presence that is necessary for both rehearsals and concerts is so intense that there is no room for other thoughts than the music, the task, the situation, the people, the energy, the room.
To perform concerts for an audience increases one’s ability to be strongly present.
In my artistic practice I have searched for constellations where this presence can develop and be enhanced.
“Listening with the palms of the hands”
(ibid., p.3)
In every situation where a conductor meets a group of musicians, she develops her body language for musical communication. When a conductor is open and receptive in the conducting situation and reflects after a rehearsal or a project, she will learn directly from the sound produced by the musicians and the situations that occur. This is true to every musical situation where conducting is involved. The more experienced and skilful the musicians are and the more responsive they are to reading the conductor’s movements, the more the conductor can learn from and by the sound. Professional musicians will read the conductor’s movements on a subtle level, and the sounding result of a movement from her will immediately be audible to everyone in the room.
That sounding result will impact how the conductor both reads a score in the future and how she chooses to move in the next similar musical situation.
The conductor develops her musical language through interaction with the musicians.
My instrument is not the orchestra or the instrumentalists,
my instrument is the relation between me and the people playing.
This relationship consists deeply of interaction through thought, intuition, body, movement and sound.
“Listening shapes culture, locally and universally”
(ibid., p.30)
One can say that to listen is an openness to “take in” or to receive, to listen outwardly as much as inwardly.
For a performer: To impact the sound, but also to let yourself be impacted by the sound. To look at listening this way can have a transformative potential.
This kind of listening also opens for creativity in the exchange between performers.
My good colleague, conductor and composer Håkon Daniel Nystedt, also at the moment doing artistic researc in the field of conducting at the opera department of Oslo Academy of The Arts, recently said in one of our conversations about conducting, improvising and listening: “The best moments are when you as a conductor don’t know who is conducting: the orchestra or yourself.” (Håkon Daniel Nystedt, pers. comm., 20th of oct 2023)
This points to exactly this alternation between impacting and being impacted, at the same moment. In this exchange it is as important to be the receiving part as to be the initiating part.
To what extent can a conductor in front of an ensemble allow herself to receive the sound, to be led by the sound, to BE THE SOUND?
To what extent is there room for the individual musician in an ensemble to listen inwardly to his own artistic voice, as much as he listens outwardly?
“What if you could hear the frequency of colours?”
(ibid., 40)
To mix our senses in language, artistically or linguistically can open new creative, imaginary spaces.
I use my senses to expand my field of perception. That listening informs how I conduct, how I improvise, how I dance-conduct and how I compose.
The feeling of sound in my body, the feeling of my body in the room and the feeling of the relational atmospheres... are part of my listening process, learning process and creative process on the podium. The heard sound, the memory of sound, and the imagination of sound, all interact. The kinesthetic sense of movement, its relation to sound, space and people interacts with the imagination of possible movements.
An extended approach to listening can be a transdisciplinary approach to art.
It has been interesting for me to find out about Gertrude Grünow, the only musican to teach at the Bauhaus school and the only woman teaching at the Bauhaus during the Weimar period from 1919-1924. She developed a pedagogical course for the students based on her "Theory of Harmonization". It was a philosophical approach to creativity and the body and it aimed at "full integration of the senses through movement excercises and the learned perception of synaesthetic equivalences among sound colour, form and movement". (Otto 2019)
In the years Grunow taught, her classes were an obligatory part of the curriculum and thereby influenced many of the Bauhaus artists.
This holistic idea of including all the senses in the pedagogical practice for the art students is expressed by Linn Burchart, Grünow expert as:
"The unity of the senses was central to her ideas" and "she found this unity realized in the preconscious and the unconscious- in the world of sensation." (Burchart 2019)
Grunow's researc points further to synaesthesia research, neuroscience and developmental psychology, however my artistic research does not go in these directions.
I have also descovered a relation between my own artistic practice and Mareike Dobewall's artistic practice in the way that she includes a multimodal listening into the process of making the artwork as well as into the artwork itself. She uses the term "full-body listening" as her method of this multimodal listening where the body is at all times integrated and in relation to sound, relations and space. (Dobewall 2021)