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.

Back

I commissioned the Black Obsidian Suite from Hilmar Thordarson for him to write an orchestra suite based on our co-creation: the experimental opera Hrafntinna/Black Obsidian, 2022.

With permission from the video artist Thorbjörg Jonsdottir I made a new video edit from the original project to adapt it to the orchestra suite.

I took part in the creation of the orchestra version in the way that I had an idea about which movements that could be included in the suite. I also asked Hilmar to create an ending that was based on breath sounds.

During the compositional process he would send me drafts of the score and I would comment on it, based on my compositional and performative knowledge with our original project Hrafntinna/Black Obsidian.

Everything else in the Black Obsidian Suite was Hilmar Thordarsons creation. According to Torrence’s model my role here was a combination of adviser and deviser.

Click to play

The Black Obsidian Suite

Recomposition, composition, orchestration Hilmar Thordarson, 2025

Glimpses from the process

Click to play

Tip

Tip