Who is composer Annea Lockwood?

‘Since the late 1960s Annea Lockwood has been staging mischievous and meticulous situational dramas in sound’.

So writes broadcaster Kate Molleson in her book Sound Within Sound, which presents an alternative history of twentieth century classical music, highlighting composers who dared to challenge its conventions. Lockwood undoubtedly sits in that category, a composer who has eschewed traditional instruments, and traditional approaches from the very start of her career.

From the 1960s to the present day she has quietly set about challenging the classical music cannon, moving audiences with, as Molleson describes, ‘her awe, her reverence, her sense of acute attention’. So, who is the composer Annea Lockwood?

Her musical education spans three continents

Annea Lockwood was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1939. She first studied composition at the University of Canterbury, completing a Bachelor of Music before moving to the UK to continue her composition studies at London’s Royal College of Music between 1961 and 1963. She also enjoyed a year studying in mainland Europe, in West Germany at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse and the Cologne University of Music, and in the Netherlands, before settling in London in the mid 1960s. In 1973 Lockwood relocated to the US where she still lives today having worked at Vassar College since 1982 where she is now an emeritus professor.

Her unconventional approach to composition began with breaking glass

From the late 1960s Lockwood began producing compositions which drew on non-conventional instruments; whilst many of her contemporaries were drawn to the new opportunities in electronic music, Lockwood went in a different direction, turning instead to physical objects. This began in earnest with 1967’s ‘The Glass Concert’, for which she drew a breadth of sonic effects from the movement, breaking and shattering of glass in a great variety of forms, from test tubes to lightbulbs, drinking glasses to industrial rods, and large suspended panes.

She is the piano’s only natural predator

OK, that’s something of an exaggeration, but one of Lockwood’s most famous works is her Piano Transplants series, in which pianos are burnt, drowned or returned to nature. The series, which began in 1969, was inspired in part by surgeon Christian Barnard’s pioneering heart transplants of the same period and also by John Cage’s pieces for ‘prepared piano’. Lockwood sought to permanently prepare a piano and ‘transplant’ the instrument and its implied sounds, out of conventional concert halls into the natural environment, where they were instead ‘played’ by fire, water or fauna. Here are Lockwood’s instructions for Piano Burning, a work which is still performed by artists today.

– Set upright piano (not a grand) in an open space with the lid closed.
– Spill a little lighter fluid on a twist of paper and place inside, near the pedals.
– Light it.
– Balloons may be stapled to the piano.
– Play whatever pleases you for as long as you can.

She has long been fascinated by environmental sounds

Lockwood began assembling a River Archive – recordings of rivers and streams she encountered on her travels – in the 1960s, composing installations from the sounds that were collectively titled, Play the Ganges backwards one more time, Sam. In one outdoor presentation of the work, she placed speakers in the trees in a public square in Hartford, so that ‘People just casually passing through the square would find themselves under a waterfall suddenly – walking around with their heads up searching for the sound sources’.

This idea evolved further into 1982’s Sound Map of the Hudson River, the first work in Lockwood’s Sound Maps series. The work began when she applied for an administrative job at the Hudson river Museum, and the personnel director told her ‘you’re an artist, not an administrator. Why don’t you make us an art proposal?’

Speaking to The Quietus about the moment, Lockwood said ‘I looked out the window at the Hudson and thought, why don’t I do an entire river? I’d been in New York long enough to know how much New Yorkers love the Hudson, but that it’s often visual. I thought people didn’t really know the power of the river, but if you can hear a river, you can hear its energy.’

She has also explored the human voice as an instrument

Beyond the found sounds of the natural environment, Lockwood has also produced compositions which draw on the human voice; not as song, but through ‘life narratives’, recorded conversations with significant people. Her 1979 work Conversations with the Ancestors draws on a discussion with four women in their eighties, whilst Delta Run (1982) is based on a conversation with the sculptor Walter Wincha.

Her collaborations are often as unconventional as her compositions…

Much like in her own works, improvisation is also often a central pillar of Lockwood’s work with other artists. Among some of her most notable collaborations are Jitterbug, commissioned by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which incorporates Lockwood’s recordings of aquatic insects and involves three musicians improvising a score from photography of rock surfaces.

With engineer and sound designer Robert Bielecki she created the Sound Ball – a ball containing six small speakers and a receiver – which is rolled, swung on a long chord and passed round the audience in the piece Three Short Stories and an Apotheosis, as Lockwood described it, ‘putting the sound in the hands of the audience’. Lockwood and Bielecki also worked together on 2014’s Wild Energy, a multi-channel outdoor installation that includes sound from the infra and ultra sound worlds.

…as too are her commissions

Since the 1980s Lockwood has written more regularly for conventual instruments and has been in regular demand, with a multitude of avant-garde ensembles and soloists commissioning her, including Bang On A Can, Yarn/Wire, baritone Thomas Buckner, and pianists Sarah Cahill, Lois Svard, and Jennifer Hymer. One of her recent stand out commissions was 2018’s Becoming Air with the trumpeter ​​Nate Woolley. Speaking to San Francisco Classical Voice’s Tamzin Elliott, Lockwood explained the process behind the work.

‘I did with him what I do with almost all the performers that I work with… I asked him what sounds he most loves to explore, not what sound he has perfected, but what he’s currently digging into exploring, and recorded them all. We discovered we both resonated when sounds move out of control… I took all of that home, and as I played it back, listening more and more intently, I realised that a sort of structural shape could emerge from it, which seemed very naturally to start with the mouth … The mouth seemed the obvious, the clear place to start.’

She once referred to herself a ‘river fanatic’

So it was perhaps no surprise when she returned to recording waterways at the start of the 21st century. ‘Having set aside working with water for some twenty years, I discovered that I very much wanted to be immersed in that process again’, Lockwood told the website Tokafi of her Sound Map of the Danube (2001-04). ‘The Danube came to mind right away and no other river was considered, in part because it carves through such varied topographies and through so many cultures [and] it has been a major historical frontier, so its human history is fascinating to me’. Lockwood’s recording of the Danube took three years, and she has since followed it up with a third Sound Map work, charting the sounds of the Housatonic River.