edition — a festival for other

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Annea Lockwood — Sound Streams

by Louise Gray

It was while attending summer schools in Darmstadt during the early 1960s that Annea
Lockwood realised that there was more to sound than its orderly manipulation into the
composed form of music alone, into what Edgard Varèse would have termed
“organised sound”. At the time, she was a young postgraduate student, newly arrived
in Europe from New Zealand for studies in composition and piano at the Royal College
of Music in London. She was an enthusiastic participant at Darmstadt, then very much
the world’s focal point for the pure, electronic music associated with Karlheinz
Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez. She remembers the excitement of
Darmstadt, its generous teachers (one of them was the German-Dutch composer
Gottfried Michael Koenig, with whom she later studied under), the heady atmosphere
of it. “I was really drawn to, excited by, electronic music,” she recalled in an interview
we did in 2016, “because now, finally, other than writing for one’s own instrument, I was
having the experience of feeling that sound was in my own hands and malleable. [It
was] just there for me to work with, which was thrilling.”1

It was, in other words, a liberation from the limits of instruments and into a new
auditory world. This malleability, that sound is capable of being shaped into new forms,
is central to Lockwood’s compositional development. It is a musical strategy that
opens up new worlds of sound to the possibility of audibility. And we hear the
consequences of this in many different ways across a wide range of Lockwood’s
varying compositions made from the 1960s to the present day. It’s in this sonic shape-
ability of an essentially dynamic material – sound itself – that the key to her work lies. It
unites not only the early childhood memories of sound that Lockwood has often spoken
of – the stream sounds and calls of kiwis and other birds up in the mountains of her
natal New Zealand – to her mature, compositional work, but also links also to the
translations of energy that is represented in the Piano Transplants (1968-72),2 the flows
of the river Sound Maps (1982-2010) – one of which, the Danube,3 is installed at this
festival – or is revealed sounds of far-off natural phenomena that we hear in Wild
Energy (2014, with Bob Bielecki). Her composition eagerly embraces the central
paradox that sound-shaping presents: that sound and music are insubstantial and yet
their wave-forms can be altered. Sound is always heard in its sensuousness rather than
a materiality.

Every musician learns, through practice, through ear and by a haptic relationship with
their instrument, how to be a sound-shaper. An integral aspect of any musician’s
developing craft has to do with how they achieve that expression, tone and colour, how
they each make the sound envelope which describes the life cycle of a note, a personal
one. Most musicians do this on conventional instruments, using conventional
techniques, to reach and explore a sound palette that is conventional to the method –
the piano, the violin, the whatever – at hand. If Lockwood’s early training reinforced
this conventional nature, it was Darmstadt and its espousal of rein elektronisch –
purely generated electronic – music that changed this. Lockwood discovered in
Darmstadt a materiality in the electronic sound that, on the one hand, reiterated what
she realised up in the New Zealand mountains – that all sound is available for musical
expression – but now offered the young composer the tools by which to achieve this
moulding and hinted at the radical routes that might be available.

It takes imagination to make the leap from one type of music to another one, but it also
takes time to form one’s own method and methodology, to craft a singular musical
vocabulary. After Lockwood’s initial enthusiasm for the pure electronic music she was
experimenting with at Darmstadt and importing back into her own nascent
compositions, she became musically restless. “I began to puzzle over why I didn’t find
ring-modulated sine tones fascinating and figured out that they’re really not that
intricate,” Lockwood has said. The sounds were actually too stable to maintain her
interest. A pure sine wave has little to do with – to use a word Lockwood often alights
on in conversation – “happenstance”. As she says: “The sounds that result are not
complex in the way that I enjoy complexity, [while] environmental, natural sounds are
indeed [complex].”

The result was a return to basics, to a hands-on approach to whatever came next. This
was aided, in part, by Hugh Davies, the composer and artist who was a long-term
friend to Lockwood. One of Davies’s projects had been an array of shozygs, his home-
made electro-acoustic musical instruments created out of domestic objects – springs,
wire, rubber-bands and circuits – and for which he created text scores. Davies was
certainly an influence when Lockwood took a decrepit upright piano and decided to do
some permanent preparations upon it.4 (Cage, Lockwood reasoned, was never able to
do a permanently prepared piano because people would always have other calls on the
instrument.) Among her modifications to the piano, she added a pair of fluttery toy
eyes, which would blink when the instrument was played. Mascara was later added to
the lashes. A toy train was placed upon the piano’s bass strings, and when a cord was
pulled, it would trill up and down the strings, making a deep rasping sound. Another
friend, the artist John Lifton, cut out a section in the side of the piano and rigged up a
bubble-blowing mechanism: when the piano’s soft pedal was depressed, bubbles
would stream from a big, red Plasticine mouth (think of a vampy, Mae West image) that
had been fixed to the instrument. It was all fun and this playfulness was very much in
keeping with some of the humour that was prevalent in Fluxus-influenced scores by
others in that period. Nevertheless, there was also a seriousness to the play in the
knowledge that access to ludic activity is the precursor to individuated creativity of
whatever kind. Play was a place to try some things and to break away from other
things, to create a space where things might happen.

This playfulness has much to do with the sonic imagination that makes Lockwood’s
music so interesting, for it opens up a direct channel to a simple, yet radical idea: that
one might hear the possibility of untapped sound sources in surprising places. The
play can be heard often all over her work, from this mid-60s permanently prepared
piano to Womens [sic] Work (1975-76), the two volumes of cross-disciplinary text
scores by other female artists that Lockwood, with the artist Alison Knowles, was to
compile once she had moved to the US. The sense of fun and a taste for delicious
images reaches a delirious apotheosis in Gone! (2007), Lockwood’s composition for a
tiny, tinkling, piano-shaped music-box that floats out from the body of a grand piano
and into the concert hall, borne aloft by a bunch of helium balloons attached to it. It
would be hard to find a more voluble image of musical freedom.

The permanently prepared piano became a template of sorts for Lockwood’s Piano
Transplants. The four works that make up the Transplants are performative, highly
visual events. One of them includes burning a piano, the second one planting a piano
in a garden, the third one letting the piano gently sink under water, while the final one
places a grand piano on a beach at the mercy of the ocean. The drama of the
Transplants has led to a fundamental misunderstanding that their meaning is bound
up in destruction. There are historical reasons as to why commentators have seen
them in this way, most significantly the near-contemporaneity of the Destruction in Art
Symposium in London in 1966, which was convened by the artist Gustav Metzger.
(Lockwood did attend parts of this and did perform a piano destruction with the artist
Rafael Ortiz.) It was clearly a counter-cultural moment. During one event, a piano was
destroyed – photographs show two artists using axes and heavy tools to shatter an
upright piano. But the Transplants are very much not about destruction. Rather, their
intent is to highlight the elemental process in composition, of translations of energy.
The sounds of the Transplants come from the way that each old and disused piano is
overwhelmed by nature and each sound is liberated, in a composition created out of
decomposition.

This process – of pulling things apart in order to create new work – can be expressed
as one of (de-)composition. It is a way of working that is capable of looking at the
minute, the unheard or dismissed sounds that are either normally inaccessible (the
aquatic insect sounds on Jitterbug, for example) to the human ear or, conversely, so
common that we no longer attend to them. Lockwood’s music has a way of making us
pay attention to such sound and hearing what she has described as their “structural
intimacy” (Lane and Carlyle 2013: 31). Lockwood used this phrase when talking to the
composer and sound artist Cathy Lane about the rivers that she had recorded for her
Sound Maps, and, as a summation, it offers an excellent way for us to think about
sound. “Structural intimacy” suggests that each thing – a river, a tree trunk, a water
current, has a sui generis sound, its own place in a sounding universe. Composition is
a strategy that sources sounds and re-orders them, but nevertheless recognises their
fundamental existence. Lockwood does this often, liberating a sonicity rather like a
genie coming out of a bottle: we think of her Glass Concerts (1967-73), in which a
wealth of different glass materials were amplified and so coaxed into sounding out so
many extraordinary tones and rhythms. Even in a work that uses conventional
instruments such as Immersion (for marimba, tam-tams, and quartz gong bowl) (1998),
the “structural intimacy” lies in the beating frequencies by which the instruments are
joined as they sound and resound.

Despite the wide range of sound sources that she uses, Lockwood’s trajectory is very
much not one of rejecting the musical technologies that came before her. Rather, her
emphasis has been on nurturing a deep, exploratory relationship with sound, of trying
to put as little between the sound and the listener as possible. When we listen to the
compositional installation of, for example, A Sound Map of the Hudson, we are
listening to the weight and flow of the river itself, the intricacies of the sonic patterns
that the water offers. The sound offers up a newly sensuous way of hearing the
landmass – Manhattan – that the river partially outlines. The river is what it is and has
been for so many thousands of years – Lockwood gives us its power unadorned and
without sentiment. To listen to it is to acknowledge great flows and weights of energy
that are there, should we choose to listen to them.

As a composer, Lockwood intervenes in how she shapes the work, but by using only a
minimal amount of electronic processing in the creation of the work, she ensures that
we, the listeners, are closer than we might realise to the water and its volume, both in
terms of weight and amplitude. Volume – in both its senses – is to the fore in a different
way in Ear-Walking Woman (1996), Lockwood’s work for “prepared piano and
exploring pianist”. Commissioned by Lois Svard, the pianist who performs the work in
both the DVD and CD releases of it, Ear-Walking Woman is about probing the interior
body of a piano, tapping out its resonances and sound streams through a sequence of
actions performed on a piano that has been detuned in a way that would have been
familiar to John Cage. The sounds in this case, are circumscribed by the curves and
lines of the piano’s body but there is a mapping going on, a sense of if this, then that
and what if? The piano becomes an island that invites sonic geographers to chart its
curves, its peaks and troughs. Lockwood asks all who do this ear-walking to make their
own landscapes within the boundaries of the piano itself.
Sound is not the only way that Lockwood engages with the natural world. She has also
used it as a method in terms of translating form into composition. We hear this in
Jitterbug (2007). Commissioned originally by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company,
Jitterbug is a six-channel work for two or more players –to be performed in Stockholm
by Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole and Sarah Hennies – who make sonic interpretations of
the patterns and colours of rocks that Lockwood found in a dry creek bed in the
Rockies of Montana near the site where she recorded the aquatic insects for the piece.
The photographs of the rocks – shot by Gwen Deeley – present a graphic score for the
musicians who create sonic representations of the rocks, each stratum of each stone
saying something about the history, the formation, the mineral contact of its geological
composition. An accompaniment provided by separate sound files – underwater
beetles, microscopic organisms, bodies of water, piano and gong resonances, recorded
in Montana and elsewhere – provides an environmental context to the rocks
themselves. You can hear a selection of these sounds on Lockwood’s website: rhythms,
melodies, counterpoints are built up with the scratchings, scrapings and the
broadcasting noises of insects, the gurgles and bubbles of the lakes and bodies of
water. Lockwood reveals the water to be a sonorous medium, teeming with the sound
of movement and dance. And, by adding the very human agency of musicians
performing their rock scores, a very direct link is made between arts, humanity and
nature, three categories that are intrinsically part of a greater whole in Lockwood’s
music.

For Lockwood, the natural world is not simply a source of manipulable sound. It
reminds us that energy flows around us and through us. It resonates in us and, if we
choose to listen critically and openly, offers the possibility of deep connections. But is
also provides a sonic register of some of the critical issues in the contemporary world,
issues that flow – just as the Danube has done for millennia – across political and
geographic boundaries. When Lockwood began her river series in 1982 (or indeed,
began her first recordings of rivers in the 1970s), most people had little awareness of
the deleterious environmental consequences that human action was having on the
world. That has now changed, and with that change, our contextualisation of works of
art – like Lockwood’s compositional installations – has a greater urgency, a greater
charge to them. To listen to Lockwood’s Sound Maps – the Hudson, the Housatonic
but especially the Danube – is to privilege nature over national boundaries and nation
states. The rivers are larger than politics might suggest, and their life cycles are
expressed in long durations of time. The snapshots of human life along each river –
provided with short, first-person accounts from those who lives are interlocked with
these great masses of movement – might people the river, but they are one element in
the sonic pattern of each sound map. Each of the rivers in Lockwood’s Sound Map
series have their own sonic characters: each one sounds differently at different
sounds. By mapping these sounds, Lockwood highlights their latent musicality and
allows us to hear what Salomé Voegelin refers to as “their invisible territories”:

These sonic worlds are not parallel worlds, fictional untruths or

illusions, but are variants of our actual reality that need a geography
to practise and articulate their invisible territories, immaterial things
and unseen activities; to give them legitimacy ​and make them count as
knowledge and as power of the real. (Voegelin 2018: 78)

One might say that this type of composition is as much about using natural processes
as sound sources to be manipulated in various ways, as it is about hearing the natural
world. I am reminded of Pauline Oliveros, whose development and practice of Deep
Listening starts from a fundamental premise: that hearing and listening are two
different functions. The first is a physiological process performed involuntarily by the
auditory equipment of the ear. Listening, on the other hand, is a process that is
chosen: listening can be dulled by many things – inattention, social norms,
preconceptions – which means that Deep Listening is a process that asks its
practitioners to engage a critical acuity to the very how-ness of their listening.
Lockwood’s compositions fulfil a similar role. In reminding us that acoustic space is
not to be found only in the concert hall but in the many environments around us and in
which we inhabit and affect, she asks – as she has been asking us for a long time now –
not only to hear but to listen to the world, and by definition one another. It is a request
of a profound and critical importance and one that we ignore at the peril of the greater
good.

1 Marshall, Louise. 2018. ‘Deep Listening: The Strategic Compositional Practice of

Female Experimental Composers Post 1945’. PhD thesis, London: University of the
Arts London.
2 The tripartite Piano Transplants are Piano Burning (1968-), Piano Garden (1969-) and
Piano Drowning (1972). The last in this series was revisited in Pacific Ocean (1982),
which was finally realised as Southern Exposure in 2005. Any piano used in these
works are always beyond repair.

3 2005. Recorded between 2001-04, at locations from Germany to the Black Sea.

4 Lockwood’s permanently prepared piano is now in the Hugh Davies Collection at

Goldsmiths, University of London.

Bibliography

Lane, Cathy, and Angus Carlyle. 2013. In The Field: The Art of Field Recording.
Axminster, Devon: Uniformbooks.

Marshall, Louise. 2018. ‘Deep Listening: The Strategic Compositional Practice of

Female Experimental Composers Post 1945’. PhD thesis, London: University of the
Arts London.

Voegelin, Salomé. 2018. The Political Possibility of Sound. London: Bloomsbury

Academic.

Annea Lockwood’s work will be featured as part of the Fourth Edition Festival for
Other Music in Stockholm in February 2019 with an installation of her ‘Sound Map of
The Danube[ at MDT’s Studio 2 and a performance at Fylkingen of ‘Jitterbug’
(together with Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole and Sarah Hennies) and ‘Immersion’.

Buy Festival Pass or tickets for the Saturday concert at Fylkingen.

Louise Gray writes on sound and music for The Wire. She a member of CRiSAP
(Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice) at the London College of
Communication, University of the Arts London, where she is an associate lecturer in
Sound Art. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Wellcome Collection, London.

This essay is included in Notes on Other Music, an A5 perfect-bound book published

on the occasion of the Fourth Edition Festival for Other Music.

More information and purchasing info.

edition-festival / January 5, 2019 / Notes / Annea Lockwood, Immersion, Jitterbug, Louise Gray,
Sound Map of the Danube, Sound Maps, Sound Streams

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