The core of my artistic practice is listening and conducting.
Those are the coherent elements in my practice.
I have tried to include as many listening modes as I can in the project, and at the same time open up and expand my role as a conductor.
These two motivations are intertwined and based on a wish to deepen the listening through my artistic practice.
In this artistic research I emphesize the part of listening skills that are beyond hearing. Although,- a conductor's trained ear is one of her most important tools, both in a traditional classical and contemporary musical setting, and also in experimental projects as I have experienced during the PHD.
But hearing is not the only way in. One of my most powerful concert experiences as an audience member was Pauline Oliveros' work in Tarek Atoui's project at the Bergen Assembly in 2016 where a deaf person conducted the musicians of BIT20 contemporary music ensemble, all musicians playing on instruments made for the occation. (Atoui 2016)
This was a different kind of experience than a regular concert, but I remember it as something that spoke deeply to me.
One of the beautiful aspects of this concert was the humbleness and vulnerability the situation created, and I experienced it as something completely new and fresh and I felt a strong sense of community and connection.
During the first half of the PhD period I discovered the works of Pauline Oliveros. Her book "Quantum Listening" had a profound impact on me. That book opened up for me the transformative as well as the creative possibilites in listening and I started to reflect further on structural issues within the conductor-orchestra relationship that needs listening.
Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) was a visionary American composer, accordionist, teacher and experimental music pioneer.
She was also an author and philosopher.
In 1960 she cofounded the Fan Fransisco Tape Music Center, a hub for electronic and experimental music that served as a creative work environment for young composers.
She taught music at Mills College, University of California, San Diego, Oberlyn Conservatory of music and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
In the late 80s she began developing the term Deep Listening and later she founded the Deep Listening Institute (now the Center for Deep Listening)
The Deep Listening philosophy extends listening into an act that is not limited to hearing or musical performance.
The practice of listening includes (but are not limited to): attention and awareness practices, body work, improvisation, sonic meditations, everyday listening and technology as extensions of listening.
Oliveros' Deep Listening philosophy created an international community that continues this practice.
One of the quotes from Oliveros book Quantum Listening became an impossible research question that I worked with.
How could this quote relate to my role as orchestra conductor?
«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.». (Oliveros 2022)
Listening as a practice has the possibility to open us up to what the obstacles to listening actually are. It is a way to discover, talk and work with large, tough structural problems in a non polarizing way.
Since listening has the capacity to open up situations and relations, and if a deepening of the listening is my basic motivation, it is only natural that the role of the conductor itself must be challenged.
With a wish for a deepening of the listening within the conductor-orchestra structure, these questions arose:
What parts of the conductor-orchestra relationship needs listening?
How can we more often move into the point of exchange where nobody is conducting anybody?
What if the musicians and the conductor could listen more deeply to their own inner creative artistic voices?
Can the conductor be vulnerable?
This Artistic Research project has been exploring the conductor's role in several ways. Some of them unconventional and challenging processes, but nevertheless fruitful and for myself groundbreaking.
I have been exposing myself to situations where my artistic role was not defined and where I had to develop it during rehearsals. (Resonant Silence)
I have led a large multimedia, transdisciplinary project where leadership and co-creation went hand in hand. (Hrafntinna/Black Obsidian)
These two experimental projects broke the glassroof of my own knowledge and understanding of what a conductor can be and do. They have also given me new insights about leadership and the conductor's role.
I have used embodied conducting as an artistic expression in itself, looking at conducting from outside the profession, but still within the arts. This conceptual conducting points towards a post- conducting practice. (Being Conducted By The Ocean)
I have brought art and reflective insights gained from my experimental projects unto the stage of the Symphony Orchestra. (Meditations on listening, SSO)
Some of the main motivations have been
To be able to combine the act of conducting with the possibility to be more creative.
In my view creative conducting is not possible without increasing the creative possibilities of the people I work with, the musicians.
To open up this creativity and exchange between orchestra musicians and conductor, we need new repertoire that encourages that kind of relationship and we need to ask questions about our excisting methods and roles.
It has also been a motivation for me to bring more artforms into one totality of expression, welcomed and intertwined in a natural way.
There are several reasons for this: one is that it is how I think art.
Colours, physical movements, sounds, space are all part of the same listening.
When I listen, transdisciplinarity happens.
On the other hand, working across disciplines is something very challenging and complex and it requires us to use all our artistic and personal strengths. But perhaps most importantly, transdisciplinary projects and processes forces us to listen to each other.
In the classical music world we usually keep our artistic focus within the tradition and within the field.
Transdisciplinarity is a listening method that in itself can bring about an opening and development.
This artistic research period has led me to a deeper understanding of the conducting craft, the field I am part of and myself as an artist.
Dear reader
Welcome to my artistic research project.
Imagine that you go into a large room, here you will find texts, videos, images, sound, an essay... they are all connected.
You can look at the reflection and artistic result as a space where you can move around freely and listen, like listening to musicians spread out in a large room, playing for you.
I encourage you to use all your senses while listening.
Enjoy!