- Thousand Year Dreaming (1990)
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Annea Lockwood
for oboe/english horn, A clarinet/contrabass clarinet, two tenor trombones, percussion, four didjeridu, voice, and slide projections
To me the didjeridu is the sound of the earth’s core, pulsing serenely - an expression of the life force. When I started working on the score images from the Lascaux cave paintings came to mind as in some way connected with that resonating pulsing. Dated to the Aurignacian Paleolithic period (ca 17,000 BC), they contain recurring symbols such as checkerboards and tridents which are not yet well understood. However, the intense awe and love with which the animal images have been created are vividly clear. Like sound, they also manifest the life force.
From discussions of Korean musical traditions with composer Jin Hi Kim came ideas about cyclically unfolding structures which helped greatly as I tried to work out a natural shape for these sounds and images - four sections with the following subtitles: breathing and dreaming; the Chi stirs; floating in mid-air; in full bloom.
- Saouah! (1987)
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Annea Lockwood
for SATB choir (16 voices), four gongs, and boats (if possible)
The text is by the composer.
- RCSC (2001)
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Annea Lockwood
for solo piano
ca. 4'15"
RCSC was commissioned by Sarah Cahill as one of a set of seven short pieces by women composers in honor of Ruth Crawford Seeger. The title is a near palindrome of their names and for its pitch content the piece draws on a ten note row from the Final movement of Crawford Seeger’s second string quartet.
Video recording was performed by Ricardo Descalzo.
Click here to watch a performance (YouTube).
- Night and Fog (1987)
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Annea Lockwood
for baritone voice, baritone saxophone, percussion, and pre-recorded sound (stereo)
These three texts, by Osip Mandelstam, the Russian poet who died in the Gulag, and by Carolyn Forché, the contemporary American writer, span fifty-eight years and evoke the same darkness, the murderous State. The first and third songs are settings of Mandelstam’s “I was washing outside in the darkness” (1921), and the first two lines of “The Age” (1923), written in the harsh aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and the famine which followed. Both poems have been translated by Clarence Brown and W.S.Merwin.
Forché’s “The Visitor” was written in 1979 after she lived for two years in El Salvador at a time when the military’s oppression was intense and the paramilitary death squads sent the numbers of the “disappeared” soaring. “Night and Fog” (“Nacht und Nebel”) was the Nazi euphemism for the Third Reich’s death camps. “Night and Fog” was commissioned by Thomas Buckner.
- Monkey Trips (1995)
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Annea Lockwood
for six layers; two bowed strings, two winds/brass, two percussion (include MIDI if possible), and any other instruments desired, amplification
Monkey Trips is based upon the Tibetan Buddhist metaphor of the six states/realms of being which we constantly recreate and assume to be reality, six “different kinds of projections or dream worlds” (Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche). Each realm is associated with a particular instrument and the piece moves through them successively.
The Heaven Realm (violin), realm of serenity and stasis in which the monkey dwells on her achievements, blocking out everything undesirable; the intrusion of another player draws her out of this solipsistic state and into dialogue.
The Realm of the Jealous Gods (percussion) in which fear of losing the bliss of the first state evokes a need to defend it, and a need to control and compete, but the competitive “other” is no other, it is oneself.
In the Human Realm (cello), realm of passion and intellect, the monkey becomes discriminating – exploring, comparing, reaching out to possess the pleasurable, but discovering that pleasure slips away and craving creates frustrations. However, the idea of unity emerges.
Those frustrations impel a retreat into the Animal Realm (bass clarinet), away from intensity into the habitual, rooting around in a more limited world, clinging stubbornly to the safely familiar, whether painful or comfortable.
Then a desperate feeling of starvation sets in, the Realm of the Hungry Spirits (flutes); visions of open space and of plenty turn into deprivation. A thirsting for what monkey remembers she once had becomes insatiable. Always reaching out but never realizing that in order to drink, you have to first open your throat.
The Hell Realm (percussion): a feeling of being trapped in a small space, of struggling to control this self-created imprisonment. The more she struggles, the more solid grow the walls until rage is exhausted. Then the monkey begins to let go, and suddenly sees that the walls are self-created, the realms are self-created. She breaks through into open space.
Click here to view the score. (Note: this score is for study purposes only, and is not available for purchase.)
Click here to purchase the MP3 through Lorelt Records Limited.
- Luminescence (2004)
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Annea Lockwood
for baritone voice, flute, trumpet, viola, cello, piano, percussion, and speaking voice
Luminescence was commissioned by Thomas Buckner, and is based on poems from Etel Adnan's SEA, which evoke the Lebanese coast of the Mediterranean, her birthplace. The Pacific Ocean is also a strong presence in her life as in Thomas Buckner's and mine, and so the piece celebrates our three-way friendship and our shared love of that ocean, which influenced the first song: here, the phrase lengths match the timing of long Pacific waves which I recorded in New Zealand, some years ago.
Click here to listen on Annea Lockwood's website.
- Jitterbug (2007)
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Annea Lockwood
for two amplified performers and six sound channels
Jitterbug, for two musicians and six channels of prerecorded sound, was commissioned by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 2006 for the dance eyeSpace. In Jitterbug, the musicians are interpreting photographs of rocks taken for this project by Gwen Deely, as graphic scores; these are intricate in their patterns and color shifts and I found them in a creek bed, up in the Montana Rockies. A pre-recorded surround-sound score draws on insect sounds: aquatic insects which I recorded in the small lakes and backwaters of the Flathead Valley, Montana; and ‘air’ insects generously made available to me by Lang Elliott, of the NatureSound Studio. A curious aspect of the underwater recordings was that these strong sound signals were being created by beetles and other microscopic insects which were always invisible to me, although the water was clear and often shallow. Deep tones from bowed gongs and a piano infiltrate this insect world, providing a strong contrast.
Gustavo Aguilar, William Winant and Joseph Kubera, with audio engineers Maggi Payne and Marilyn Ries generously recorded these sounds for the project.
Click here to listen on Annea Lockwood's website.
- Immersion (1998)
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Annea Lockwood
for amplified marimba, two tam-tams, and crystal bowl gong (in F)
ca. 11'15"
Immersion, for marimba and two tam-tams was written for Dominic Donato and Frank Cassara and arranged for the Talujon Percussion Quartet in 2001. It grew out of a fascination with the rich beating frequencies generated by long cluster rolls in the low register of the marimba and the interaction between the marimba and a quartz bowl gong tuned to F.
Click here to listen on Annea Lockwood's website.
- The Angle of Repose (1991)
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Annea Lockwood
for baritone voice, khaen, and alto flute
The Angle of Repose is an evening song, commissioned by Thomas Buckner and scored for baritone, alto flute and khaen (a Thai mouth organ). It incorporates two texts. The first is an Ojibwa Indian text quoted by Peter Matthiessen in his book Nine-Headed Dragon River. The second is from a letter written in 1904 by Rainer Maria Rilke to his wife, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, while on holiday in Denmark. The angle of repose is the angle of inclination of a slope at which sliding earth and boulders come to rest.
Click here to purchase the album through Lovely Music.
- Gone! (2007)
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Annea Lockwood
for music-box piano, and 20 helium balloons
Gone! was commissioned by pianist Jennifer Hymer.
- Ear-Walking Woman (1996)
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Annea Lockwood
for prepared piano and amplification
Ear-Walking Woman for prepared piano and exploring pianist, uses the classic piano preparations: coins (to detune the strings), screws, wiring insulation sheathing, plus bubble wrap, a rubber ball and small wooden balls, two round stones, a bowl gong, mallets and a water glass. The piece was commissioned by Lois Svard, to whom it is dedicated and who has given many superb performances of it.
When I started experimenting with these objects on my own piano, I found that even slight changes in the method of producing a sound evoked striking variants in sonic detail, for example: rocking a stone gently between two sets of strings brings out several pitches and their overtones, iterating in unpredictable rhythms. Getting the stone to rock really hard adds higher pitches and at times the stone will turn over, setting off a new set of strings and pitches, which gradually fade away as the stone comes to rest.
The work is set up as an open-ended exploration, in which I have determined which ‘tools’ are to be used in each section, and the pianist is asked to listen closely to the sounds created by each action, and to explore further the variants which arise when s/he uses a little more pressure and change of speed, a slightly different wrist position, a different make of piano. I think of this experience as “ear-walking”, like a hiker exploring a landscape.
- Annea Lockwood
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Born in New Zealand in 1939, Annea Lockwood moved to England in 1961, studying composition at the Royal College of Music, London, attending summer courses at Darmstadt and completing her studies in Cologne and Holland, taking courses in electronic music with Gottfried Michael Koenig. In 1973 feeling a strong connection to such American composers as Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, the Sonic Arts Union (Ashley, Behrman, Mumma, Lucier), and invited by composer Ruth Anderson to teach at Hunter College, CUNY, she moved again to the US and settled in Crompond, NY. She is an Emerita Professor at Vassar College.
During the 1960s she collaborated with sound poets, choreographers and visual artists, and also created a number of works such as the Glass Concerts which initiated her lifelong fascination with timbre and new sound sources. In synchronous homage to Christian Barnard's pioneering heart transplants, Lockwood began a series of Piano Transplants (1969-82) in which defunct pianos were burned, drowned, beached, and planted in an English garden.
During the 1970s and '80s she turned her attention to performance works focused on environmental sounds and life-narratives, often using low-tech devices such as her Sound Ball, containing six small speakers and a receiver, designed by Robert Bielecki for Three Short Stories and an Apotheosis, in which the ball is rolled, swung on a long cord and passed around the audience. World Rhythms, A Sound Map of the Hudson River, Delta Run, built around a conversation she recorded with the sculptor, Walter Wincha, who was close to death, and other works were widely presented in the US, Europe and in New Zealand.
Since the early 1990s, she has written for a number of ensembles and solo performers, often incorporating electronics and visual elements. Thousand Year Dreaming is scored for four didgeridus, conch shell trumpets and other instruments and incorporates slides of the cave paintings at Lascaux. Duende, a collaboration with baritone Thomas Buckner, carries the singer into a heightened state, similar to a shamanic journey, through the medium of his own voice. Ceci n'est pas un piano for piano, video and electronics merges images from the Piano Transplants with Jennifer Hymer's musings on her hands and pianos she has owned, her voice being sent through, and colored by the piano strings.
Other recent work includes Vortex commissioned by Bang on a Can for the All-Stars; a surround-sound installation, A Sound Map of the Danube; Luminescence, settings of texts by Etel Adnan for Thomas Buckner and the SEM Ensemble; Gone! in which a little piano-shaped music box, attached to 20 helium balloons, is released from a concert grand and floats off over the audience playing, in one case,Memories. Jitterbug, commissioned by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for the dance eyeSpace, incorporates Lockwood's recordings of aquatic insects, and two improvising musicians working from photographs of rock surfaces. Poems by three of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are the focus of In Our Name, a collaboration with Thomas Buckner for baritone voice, cello and 'tape'.
Much of her music has been recorded, on the Lovely, XI, Mutable, Pogus, EM Records (Japan), Rattle Records, Soundz Fine (NZ), Harmonia Mundi and Ambitus labels. She is a recipient of the 2007 Henry Cowell Award.
Links
The following are links to outside websites, and will open in a new window.
Biographies
Audio
Articles
American Women Composers, Volume 16 Parts 1-2 by Karin Pendle. Pages 28-29
Annea Lockwood RCSC solo piano blog post
DVD Review of Ear-Walking Woman (pdf)
Concert Notes from The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative
Writings
Leonardo Music Journal Volume 19, 2009