(How) To Play The Ocean (2025)

How can an orchestra sound like an ocean?

The rich and multi-layered sea, reconciling and disturbing, full of all types of big and small waves at once in simultaneous fractal patterns, always changing—from calm ripples to house-high swells—much alive, yet never aware of its overwhelming effect on humans since the beginning of our two-footed (short in the face of Earth’s history) timeline, has always been a source of inspiration to human art, music no less.

(How) To Play The Ocean is an attempt to engage in dialogue with the ocean in an associative and playful way.

Ratkje has been an outspoken voice on environmental issues for years. This work is a continuation of this commitment, where she unites new music and the inheritors of our planet. In 2016, Ratkje created an eight-channel sound work for the foyer of Stavanger Concert Hall, composed from recordings of children from Stavanger playing Ratkje’s graphical scores and instructions based on water level measurements from the city. The Stavanger edition of the work, Vannstand (Sea Level), was part of Ratkje’s collaboration with nyMusikk, where she realised, in unique sound installations, the results from workshops and recordings with children in four different Norwegian coastal towns.

The life-giving sea has been the basis for growth and development, and now human influence is changing the seemingly eternal cycle along the Norwegian coast. In (How) To Play The Ocean, children from Stavanger have been given the opportunity to reflect and respond musically to this issue. Ratkje’s audio archive of children from Stavanger interpreting their relationship to their own coast and sea in light of environmental and climate change has been a source of inspiration, as well as transcription, when writing for orchestra in (How) To Play The Ocean. The conductor is encouraged to conduct the orchestra like an ocean and is given much freedom in shaping the small and big waves in the piece.