Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen: Speculative forestmusic

Field of study: Artistic Research

In this artistic research project, Holen is going to create and perform a speculative forestmusic. She will do so by creating sound-creatures that function as musical manifestations of the forest's own voice. Through sound-costumes, performing together across vast distances, storytelling and choreographed movement, she will investigate an intra-active music where humans and more-than-humans are interconnected. She thus aims to establish a practice that moves away from the anthropocentrism of recent history towards a new musical entanglement between nature and humans.

The project rests on ethical considerations concerning responsibility and care for nature, and the activism inherent in the urge to see a shared agency between oneself and the natural world.

The central research questions are:

1. Which compositional tools and processes can enable an intra-active music between performer and the multiple agencies within site-specific landscapes?
2. How can a speculative forestmusic break down traditional hierarchies between music/nature, stage/audience and instrument/body/virtuosity?
3. In what manner can care (for nature) manifest itself in a compositional method?
4. How can an intra-active forestmusic create conditions for new transformative practices within the field of music?

Green artistic research

This project falls under NMH's focus area "green artistic research", with improvisation and composition being relevant disciplines for the practice as performer-composer.

Speculative forestmusic is a site-specific outdoor project that rests on the shoulders of several existing artistic practices such as soundwalks, site-specific sound art, deep listening and music theatre. The project can be seen as part of a "nature turn" within contemporary music in the last two decades. But where many composers and performers bring nature into the concert hall, this project will create and perform music in, with and for the forest. Walking hand in hand with thinkers such as Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Anna Tsing, Speculative forestmusic will spin a wide net of connections to other artists, thinkers and writers who can inform, challenge and expand this research.

The main goal of this project is to create a new musical practice and develop methods to this end. A major inspiration is Ursula K. Le Guin's "The carrier bag theory of fiction" (1986), which describes a process of collecting, preserving and revisiting. Being and working in the forest is a crucial point of this research, and other important methods will include "landscape dramaturgy": creating sound-creatures through sound-costumes and compositional processes including improvisation, co-creation, and text.

The artistic result will be one iterative and expanding composition, recreated and reshaped in dialogue with each site-specific landscape. The work will be shown at least six times during the research period, in primeval forest, old-growth forest, plantation forest and in clear-cut forest areas during all four seasons. The piece will have different durations, and the amount of performers will vary from solo to a forest full of singers.

***

Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen is enrolled in the PhD programme in Artistic Research from 1 September 2025.