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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Demonstration of the Genki rings together with the

Max Patch used in the concert

The use of Technology in the Meditations on Listening concert

During the cooperation with Maja S.K. Ratkje and her piece (How) To Play The Ocean, it became clear that I needed some kind of technological devise to be able to trigger and adjust the volume of soundfiles. This was to realize the ideas in her score where the conductor can trigger and play with the volume of different ocean sounds. This aspect was part of the creative possibilities for the conductor.

I contacted NOTAM (Norwegian Center for Technology, Art and Music) to help me with a technological solution that could be used in Maja's piece. After some brainstorming I came up with the idea of the Genki rings, that I knew about through Hilmar Thordarson. They are MIDI controllers with user friendly software and they are commercialized, so possible to buy. A very important aspect was that it would also be possible to conduct wearing these rings.

I bought two of these rings spring 2025.

We also needed to solve the triggering of the art video in the performance and since the pieces that included video art in the program were very organic with a strong connection to musical sounds or physical movements on stage, I was looking for a way to organize the video files that made it possible to be free during performance, not having to adjust too much to the timing of a long video clip.

Christian Blom at NOTAM helped me with the rings and he programmed a Max patch that fitted with the technological needs in the concert, both the triggering and playing with sound files and the triggering of the video files.

I used much time in the summer to get used to the software, to how the rings responded to my movements and to the Max patch. I also learned some programming which was fun.

Click on image to play video

In the first part of the concert I experienced a problem with the bluetooth connection, one of the rings lost connection to the patch. The sound engineer suggested that this was because of 250 mobiles in the hall with bluetooth on.

So we had to ask the audience to turn the bluetooth off and restart the rings. Then it worked perfectly again and the rest of the concert was as seamless as intended.

In conversations with colleages after the concert I have received suggestions to eliminate the problem that appeared: In addition to ask the audience to turn off Bluetooth and activate flightmode on their mobiles I can add a cable with a bluetooth antenna at the end, from the laptop to the notestand, and attach it to the stand to secure connection to the rings at all times, this will also make them less affected by bluetooth signals from the audience. Also it could be smart to stresstest the rings even more in the concert hall before rehearsals, to make them loose connection and learn from that.

I see the rings as a good solution and will probably also use them in future concerts. I also think that in large pruductions like the Meditations on Listening I will have to have a technology assitant present at all times that can do the set up and testing of the rings.

I am inspired by Oliveros' fearless attitude towards technology and I think that conducting with technology is an area that will go fast forward in the coming years.

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