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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The Hrafntinna/Black Obsidian Score

The score was made on the interactive digital platform MIRO.

The main creaters of the piece, Rønning, Thordarson, Jonsdottir, Eide Bøen had editing access to the same score and the different artforms had their own lines in the score. All participants in the project had reading access.

This solutions was chosen in order to make a practical approach to the collaborative aspect. Also the score was a "living document" so it would allways be updated.

When the workshops started, after initiative from the stage director at the Icelandic Opera, Niels Thibaurd Girerd, the score was printed out as large as possible and put on the wall in the rehearsal room.

During the rehearsals, musicians would walk to and from the score to check music, timeline, and to add their own notes.

Some of the events in the score are supposed to be syncronised from signals from the conductor or sound signals from the other performers.

Other events are more fluctuous in time and can be performed whenever the performer feels like it within the actual part of the piece.

The score was a notation of the compositional process leading up to the start of the rehearsals and it was acted upon freely.

It was a sort of guiding map, but still with terretories of undiscovered places. A starting place for improvisation.

The 6 voice choral with the Icelandic poem as heard in the video excerpt of the piece:

Click on score to open

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