Outside Annea Lockwood’s house you could hear the sounds of a gentle breeze, rustling the leaves of her tree-lined driveway and swinging the wind chimes in her backyard. Every so often birds would interject with a bit of song over the rumble of a car down the road.
“This neighborhood is a lovely, peaceful little place,” Lockwood said one morning last month. “But it has a very radical background.”
Lockwood, 85, a composer of insatiable curiosity and a singular ear for the music of the natural world, lives about an hour north of Manhattan, on street named after Baron de Hirsch, a 19th-century philanthropist who sponsored the resettlement of persecuted Russian Jews. Her house was originally built for the Mohegan Colony, a community with anarchist roots. Not far away, toward the Hudson River, people attending a Paul Robeson concert were once attacked in what came to be known as the Peekskill Riots.
“So this is an area with a right-wing town and a left-wing colony,” Lockwood said. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”
For the last 50 years, Lockwood has lived and worked here in Crompond, N.Y., in a house that she shared with her partner, the composer Ruth Anderson, until her death in 2019. But Lockwood also spends a lot of time outdoors, especially in recent collaborations with a younger generation of musicians that have taken her on adventures along rivers like the Columbia and the Elwha.
Among those younger artists is the flutist Claire Chase, with whom Lockwood is creating a new piece for Chase’s commissioning project Density 2036. And, starting on Thursday, Lockwood will be featured at the Ojai Music Festival in California, where Chase is this year’s music director.
“I’ve never met anyone who’s so blazingly on fire with ideas as she is,” Chase said. “She’s 85 and fierce on the hiking trail, but also with this library collection inside her brain and ears. Just being near her is magic: She gives you an opportunity to be the largest possible version of yourself, creatively.”
People tend to say things like that about Lockwood, who is far from a household name but a transformative artist for those who know her. Her career has been a prolonged study of listening, leading to works in which she has set pianos on fire, mapped the sounds of rivers and teased out the musical beauty of seemingly nonmusical material. She has always been daringly individual yet community minded, as eager to teach as she is to learn.
She grew up in New Zealand with a love for the natural world inherited from her parents; her father, she said, was a mountaineer and a lawyer, “in that order.” She listened to music by Mahler and Schubert, and eventually Berg and Webern, but didn’t really hear the full range of modernist sound until she moved to London to study in 1961.
While at the Royal College of Music, Lockwood spent her summers at Darmstadt in Germany, a hotbed of avant-gardism, where she learned from the composers Messiaen, Berio and Boulez. She once attended a seminar by La Monte Young and watched him perform a piece in which he pushed a chair and table across a wooden floor.
“It was just wonderful,” Lockwood said. “I mean, I had never listened to those particular sources of sound and timbres, and quite so attentively.”
You can hear a similar spirit in her 1970 album “Glass World,” a mesmerizing experiment in abstraction and resonance using glass materials. “I wanted,” she said, “to persuade people that a single sound event has a structure, which is really amazing and every bit as valuable as the structures that we create, just as complex if not more so.”
By the ’70s a tradition of musique concrète, a style based on assembling and processing raw sound, had been firmly established. But there was something different about “Glass World.” It was a more visceral listening experience; Chase called it “devotional.”
For Lockwood, listening is a way to connect with the nonhuman world. “I am seeking ways to recognize that we are part of that world, not dominant and not separate,” she said. “And sound is so powerful for that. It affects out blood pressure and muscle tension. You can’t control it.”
Sound has even affected how Lockwood lives. When she moved to New York, in 1973, she found an apartment on West End Avenue, a relatively quiet residential street in Manhattan. But she “couldn’t stand the noise,” she said.
Anderson had brought Lockwood to New York to cover her studio at Hunter College, and they fell in love, a period whose conversations are gorgeously collaged in the 2021 piece “For Ruth.” They decided to move in together and by chance learned about the house in Crompond, which they appreciated for its peacefulness and bought in 1976.
During that first decade in the United States, Lockwood and the artist Alison Knowles created Womens Work, an anthology of text-based works by composers, artists and choreographers. It was meant to be a practical document, instructional rather than academic, and a reaction, Lockwood said, to feeling “constantly second tiered.”
The collection included scores for Lockwood’s “Piano Transplants” series, which involved planting a garden around a partially buried piano, slowly sinking a piano in shallow water, and lighting one on fire and playing “whatever pleases you for as long as you can.” Already ecological, they have fresh resonance and urgency in an age of climate crisis. Chase said there is even an inspiring message in their call to “play your heart out as the piano recedes into the sea or burns into a cloud of smoke.”
Another defining project for Lockwood is her river sound maps made from field recordings of, for example, the Hudson, Danube and Housatonic. Liz Phillips, a sound-based artist who collaborated with Lockwood to collect audio from the Schuylkill, said that these works have been “enormously important” for the fields of art and ecology.
“She’s pretty amazing, the way she gets around rivers,” Phillips said. “And there’s a whole narrative side to it, meaning that she is able to capture them from top to bottom.”
Like Smetana’s famous tone poem “The Moldau,” Lockwood’s sound maps have an episodic, organic sense of storytelling. She captures the changing texture of the river’s surface, whether still or turbulent; the churning of sediment below; and surrounding environment, like a honking ship or someone’s surprisingly melodic speech.
Lockwood and the trumpeter Nate Wooley, for whom she wrote “Becoming Air,” an exploration of timbre and control, recently took a trip to map the Columbia River. The pair, more than three decades apart in age, have become friends, with music secondary to the relationship they have built over shared beers and discussions of books. “I get the feeling,” Wooley said, “that she’s not making music for an instrument, she’s making music for a person.”
Increasingly, she is making music with people. Lockwood described her 2019 work “Into the Vanishing Point” as being created alongside the players of the ensemble Yarn/Wire, and said that the sound map of the Columbia is both hers and Wooley’s. She taught him how to use a hydrophone to record underwater, he said, and through her he has learned “to be able to sit and listen to the river and just be with it.”
Her work with Chase has been similar. They had friends in common, including Pauline Oliveros. (Lockwood’s tribute to Oliveros, “bayou-borne, for Pauline” will be performed at Ojai’s opening concert.) But Chase and Lockwood didn’t meet until Chase asked her to write a piece for Density. Lockwood proposed a project related to the Elwha River, which she described as “a thrilling example of what can happen when you take dams out on a river and it takes itself back.”
Their process has been something of a call and response: Lockwood sent Chase a field recording to start, and Chase sent back audio of her flute. The result will be a work for seven flutes, prerecorded and played live, and multichannel sound premiering this fall. So far, they have completed about 20 minutes.
“It’s very tactile and D.I.Y.,” Chase said. “We’ve been building it section by section, and watching the way she works with her hands and listens with her whole body, like a bat, is so inspiring. It’s like having 1,000 master classes in one afternoon.”
Perhaps most inspiring, Chase added, is the openness, a kind of beginner’s mind, with which Lockwood is approaching the Elwha project. That, Lockwood said, is essential to her work.
“I think of it all as exploration,” Lockwood said. “Exploration outside oneself, exploration outside one’s being. I don’t want to have an idea of what something will always be. What I want is to interfere so little that when you hear a sound, you know you’re hearing its life.”
Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.
The post At 85, Annea Lockwood Isn’t Done Listening to the Earth appeared first on New York Times.
