Musicians and conductor as dancers
Thordarson and I were clear from the start; the performers’ physical presence on stage was going to be an important artistic element.
In retrospect I see that the wish to include the body in the whole process from creating, to performing and as a visual expression was rooted in my own listening practice as a conductor.
Here it is nice to use the words of composer Jennifer Walshe from her compositinal manifesto “The New Discipline”:
“Perhaps we are finally willing to accept that the bodies playing the music are part of the music, that they’re present, they’re valid and they inform our listening whether subconsciously or consciously.” (Walshe 2016)
This is very relevant to our Hrafntinna/Black Obsidian composition, and I would like to add something to Walche’s statement. According to my artistic practice and experiences with experimental conducting projects; to include the body into the process and performance more attentively not only informs the audience’s listening but also informs or rather expands the listening of the performers themselves. And again, this extended listening might create a feedback-loop of listening between performers and audience.
Back to the Hrafntinna project, we invited choreographer and dancer Karen Eide Bøen to join us from the very start on all workshops and performances as a helper and guide for the movements.
Karen works with attention as a starting point for her artistic dance practice and she is interested in how different kinds of attention can give different qualities to a movement.
This relates very much to the training I have had with Alexander Technique Teacher Stephen Parker over a period of 30 years. This technique of embodied knowledge that was developed by F.M. Alexander (1869-1955) circles around the relationship between “awareness and movement” (Tarr 2008, 10) and it has been a great tool for my musical practice as a violinist and a conductor.
Central to my work with Stephen Parker has been the connection between a flexible attention and the act of playing, conducting and listening.
This work with attention was a connection between Karen’s and my own artistic practice, and it set the ground for our coming cooperation.
Karen worked with us (the musicians, the singers and me) over a long period of time. The workshops were not that many, but we had long periods of time in between them. In this way we got time to reflect, “digest” and create in between the workshops.
She encouraged and challenged our movements and collective actions in the space. She also encouraged us to perform the music while keeping a part of our attention within our bodies. This somewhat unfamiliar change of attention as well as the effort to combine the creation of sound and movement at the same time in the improvisation was challenging for us and required a lot of practice before it could flow effortlessly and be flexible during performance.
Her choreographical exercises helped us tune in to this practice, and interestingly, as artistic leader I noticed that the exercises had a unifying effect on us as a group. They actually changed and expanded the group's capacity for musical listening. I felt that the attentiveness and flexibility of the listening got better.
One of the singers in Tabula Rasa, soprano Sigrun Jørdre told me during the process that the project was liberating to her. Since our group practice was mainly based on improvisation, and so the process of creating and rehearsing were intertwined, there were only right actions for the performers.
She explains this as a strong experience of her own space to create. A space that offered many optional pathways.
This was a new experience for her as a classically trained singer.
She found that the improvisational approach as well as the inclusion of the body in the process, released her from nervousness, and she found that her musical communication was enhanced in performance. She explained that she looked forward to the premiere to see what would happen instead of being nervous about performing what had been agreed upon.
I think this is a major achievement and realization.
Further, this is how Sigrun explains the integration of the body in the project:
“For me the movements and the bodily expressions were the most present layers. The voice became secondary. The sound came out of a movement. In this project I never made a sound without an intention that came from a physical movement.” (from interview with Sigrun Jørdre 5th of march 2025)
For my own part, as the conductor-dancer, I experienced an immense artistic freedom. The fact that our bodies were always part of the improvisation together with the feeling of creative potentiality, made the inward listening, the performative, creative, intuitive listening very strong.
I also experienced that we as a group were working from the point of exchange between receiving and initiating, the point where we don’t always know who is conducting whom. One of the main reasons for this exchange to be possible was a strong culture in the group “to take in” the other.
I think that we experienced this feeling of potentiality and enhanced creative listening because the power to initiate and create was distributed between composers, performers and conductor.
Leading a process-oriented Gesamtkunstwerk
The main aesthetic thought was to equate and mix the art forms within an organic and abstract artistic language. This was made possible by inviting all the artists into the creative conversation from the very beginning. I think the aspect of including all artists from the start of a process is very important for the collective feeling of a mutual work to unfold. I think this method is also very important to really be able to use the artistic and relational benefits of transdisciplinary work.
We also did parallel creative work, so that not one art form would dictate the process for the other. There was no finished libretto or video that would determine the music, neither were there finished musical ideas that the other art forms would have to complement.
But rather, the work itself evolved during the process with contributions from everyone along the way.
At the same time Hilmar and me as main composers were leading the compositional process and gave aesthetic input that shaped the piece.
This way of working required that all involved artists had a great deal of confidence in both the process and the project, and finally, a great deal of acceptance for the unknown.
Dance artist Brynjar Åbel Bandlien expresses this beautifully in relation to his artistic research project, Dancing Recurrences:
“The idea of a common body of work gave a sense that we were building something together, the outline or the contour of something bigger that all the dancers-researchers were part of, but that none of us knew nor were fully in control of.” (Åbel Bandlien 2019, Vol II, 37)
In addition to this openness for the unknown and the group’s own process, there was a great deal of leadership involved as well. This is where my strengths as a conductor came in and helped to keep enough frames so that the process could be quite free. I guess that this mix of leadership and open processes is very interesting, it is stretching the principles of leadership in a direction of fluidity. But it is not chaos, it is just not as much order as in a classical setting.
In the creation of Hrafntinna/Black Obsidian we started with scenes based on nature elements like deep ocean, earth surface, ice and air and worked with these elements in an abstracted way through improvisation, conversation and imagination to search for textures, materialities, sounds, colours, choreographic expressions and visual images that in some way spoke to each other as well as to the nature element we were working with (fig. 4, and 6)
In the following image, the performers are watching an excerpt of the art video during the process, a video that was shot in an Icelandic ice cave.
It is my artistic conviction that the abstract aesthetics in this project was an opening into the transdisciplinary work.
The piece was performed at the Icelandic Opera 5th of june 2022 at the Reykjavik Arts Festival after three years of workshops, compositional work and transdisciplinary cooperation.
Hrafntinna/Black Obsidian (2018–2022)
A project that explored multidimensional listening and transdisciplinary art practice.
Coming out of a PhD project
In 2017 I started working together with composer Hilmar Thordarson in his PhD project “ConDis – Conducting Digital System: Extended role of the conductor in mixed music performance” at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. (Thordarson 2019)
Thordarson had developed an electronic conductor’s glove (Con Glove) as a tool for conductors to be able to alter the musicians’ amplified sound directly.
I conducted with the electronic glove on the world premiere of Thordarson’s piece Kuuki no Sukima- Between the air -a through composed mixed music composition for ensemble and interactive conductor with Trondheim Sinfonietta on the symposium “The Virtuoso Listener” at Dokkhuset in Trondheim,
By using the glove in Thordarson’s piece, I could control the overall volume of the electronics and be free to trigger the electronic sounds according to our group’s tempo. This gave the performances of the piece an organic and flexible quality.
The cooperation with Thordarson would soon develop further into a new co-creation, a full-scale scenic production with music, video art and movement called: Hrafntinna/Black Obsidian.
I wanted to explore the glove’s possibilities further, e.g. it’s possibilities for timbral effects on the sound—in a constellation where we would be less bound by the metrical system in notated music, and where our focus could be on exploring the physical and sonic relationship between musicians and conductor. At the same time, I wanted freedom to create and co-create, so improvisation became a natural ground for our new co-composition Hrafntinna, Black Obsidian.
Thordarson and I were the main composers, and since both Thordarson and myself are very visually oriented in how we create we initiated a cooperation with the Icelandic video artist Thorbjörg Jonsdottir for the visual component of the composition. We also invited musicians and singers from the Tabula Rasa Vocal Ensemble, the Icelandic Caput Ensemble, Guro Skumsnes Moe, double bass, Jostein Stalheim, accordeon and Else Olsen Storesund, prepared piano to join the project.
Listening to the process
This project and how it developed taught me a lot about artistic processes that differ very much from the rehearsal process I am used to as a classically trained conductor.
An open process over time where the result is not given and where the creative impact is made by every artist in the production.
In the Hrafntinna/Black Obsidian process the piece was made underway based on intuitive actions through improvisations together.
What comes out of that process is something that you cannot or will not control.
The result will be unique, and it will continuously transform.
Right until the premiere there was given room for personal, not planned/intuitive artistic unfolding from all performers on stage. The last thing I said to the performers after the General Rehearsal was: “do whatever you want, within the frames of the piece.”
Not a very common sentence for a conductor to say after a general rehearsal.
It was transformative to create this piece together, at the same time the piece was continually transformed by us.
Perhaps this is what Pauline Oliveros means by “the listening effect”:
«As you listen, the particles of sound decide to be heard. Listening affects what is sounding. It is a symbiotic relationship. As you listen, the environment is enlived. This is the listening effect.».
(ibid., p. 9)