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Institute for Studies In American Music |
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Inside
This Issue: The Composer, the Work, and Its Audience by Adrienne Fried Block Jewish American Music:
Review by Evan Rapport More News from Nowhere: Review by David G. Pier Reviving the Folk: Review by Ray Allen |
What
Is a River? Annea Lockwood’s Sonic Journeys
Annea Lockwood at the premiere of Piano Burning Thames River, London, 1968 Courtesy of Annea Lockwood
Born in New Zealand in 1939, Lockwood moved
in 1961 to London, where she studied composition and piano at the Royal College
of Music. In 1963-64, she did post-graduate work with Gottfried Michael König at the Musikhochschule
Köln. It was from this male-dominated Germanic
musical environment—heavily slanted to the study and development of
relationships between music, mathematics, and science—that Lockwood turned
her eyes and ears to a contemplation of environmental richness and diversity.
She reflects: I have become fascinated by the complexity
of the single sound. I have treated each sound as though it were a piece of
music in itself. For me, every sound has its own minute form—is comprised of
small flashing rhythms, shifting tones, momentum, comes, vanishes, lives out
its own structure. Since we are used to hearing sounds together, either
juxtaposed or compared, one sound alone seems simple; but so are the round, scruffed stones lying about everywhere, until you crack
one apart and all its intricate beauty takes you by surprise.1 For more than forty years, Lockwood has
created a body of diverse and culturally significant work. A number of her
pieces have become legends. Among the most celebrated of these icons are the Glass
Concerts (1966-73), the four Piano Transplants (1968-72), the Sound
Map of the Hudson River (1982), and a Sound Map of the Danube River,
which will be completed in early 2005. From 1966 to 1973, Lockwood frequently
performed her Glass Concert on various pieces of glass, which were
slapped, rubbed, blown, bowed, popped, and amplified.2 The recording and publication of excerpts from Lockwood's
work with glass drew Lockwood's Piano Burning (1968) was
the first of her four Piano Transplants pieces. It was widely cited at
its inception as an example of the decline and fall of Western civilization,
but was then, as it is now, a work of enormous poignancy and far-reaching
social and musical resonance. Piano Burning began as an opportunity to
record the sound of fire for a new dance work by the choreographer Richard
Alston of London's Strider Dance Company, but the immolation quickly took on
a life of its own as an inkblot which lent itself to a multiplicity of interpretations. A small crowd gathered at the Thames
embankment, drawn by Lockwood's attempt to record the sound of a burning piano.
Michael Lee notes that "The attractive and diverse sounds emitted by the
burning piano coupled with the delicately purple-tinged flames of burning
varnish made a powerful impresssion on both
Lockwood and her impromptu audience."4 Special-interest individuals,
music professionals, and new-music enthusiasts
bought tickets and came together to behold, and ultimately to become a
part of, a ritual cremation of a familiar object at the bank of a local
river. This was not to be the last of Annea
Lockwood's engagements with rivers and the people who are affected by them. In 1982, Lockwood created her Sound Map
of the Hudson River. The piece is based on a series of nineteen
recordings taken from various locations from the river's source (Lake Tear of
the Clouds) to its mouth in the Atlantic Ocean, which Lockwood edited and
mixed to create a two-hour installation. Commissioned by the Hudson
River Museum in Yonkers, New York in 1982, the work was warmly welcomed by
the community that had spent so many years along the banks of the river.
Lockwood's Sound Map of the Hudson River is now on permanent display
at the museum.5 In 2002, Lockwood began her most ambitious
project, A Sound Map of the Danube River. From a series of recordings
of sites from its source to its delta, she is making a Sound Map of the
river, "interleaved with the memories and reflections of people living
by and from the river (in their native languages), forming a
parallel flow of languages and relationship with the
river."6 The river's surface is recorded with a microphone; a
hydrophone captures a multitude of underwater sounds. Mixed into these will be the voices of
those I am interviewing. Sentences and phrases from the interviews will also
be translated into English and German, imprinted on stones which I am
collecting from the riverbed, and incorporated into the installation;
handling them will give people direct tactile contact with the river's
geological nature…7 I'm counting on people's love of picking up
rocks to ensure that they will be much handled. It's a way of feeling the
river's power and of bringing the body into the installation. So much work is
virtual right now, in the sense that one's skin
can't touch it. I think the skin gets hungry.8 A Sound Map of the Danube River is a work of major and unique social significance.
It is the only work I know that begins its cultural journey from the small
Danube towns that are closest to the river itself, and moves outward to the
major cities. "It's really important to me that the Map be presented in
the small Danube towns, where the river really shapes people's lives,"
Lockwood writes. "The microphone acts as a microscope and the internal
nature of the river becomes so evident when you listen to it close-up I hope
very much to share that with such communities."9 The ritual burning that spontaneously
attracted a curious crowd to the banks of the Thames in 1968 has evolved into
a massive project that promises to attract a great deal of regional and
international attention. ("I think the work has a chance of
communicating very directly with people outside the art world, largely
because the sounds are unmediated, direct, factual."10) The
rural resident who lives in villages where Beethoven sonatas are not played
has nonetheless the will and disposition to listen to his or her little bit
of local river. In small towns that may not
regularly encounter new music, human nature provides the curiosity and,
perhaps, a sense of territorial pride that the river that runs just there,
close by, is more today than it had seemed for all the years before. Lockwood
muses: I started out thinking what a rich flow of
languages and dialects move down that river—10 countries, layers and layers
of human migration and history facilitated by the river itself, but
especially, how rich the different sounds of those languages might be. So I
decided to mix the voices in with the river sounds, the human presence and
effect on the river, being inseparable from the river. And this dovetailed
with something which has been driving the whole project for me: What is a
river? So I've been asking everyone I've interviewed, "What does the
river mean to you?" and the answers come in the local language. So there
should be that nice little shock of recognition, of intelligibility for local
residents.11 A performance of anything by the Vienna
Philharmonic is not news in the small towns that dot the Danube, but a
curiously alluring river event in Grein and Krems grows steadily stronger as it passes from village to
village. Local news becomes national news in Vienna and in Budapest, working
its way outward to places that never knew these towns, nor very much about
the great and beautiful river that runs along their shores. In her twenties, Lockwood pondered the
beauty and "spirit" of tiny stones. Though she could not have known
then that these pebbles would eventually lead her to map the mighty Danube,
the seeds of her originality and talent were already in place. Lockwood's
music is rooted in a cosmology that recognizes the innately spiritual core
that she sees in stones, glass, rivers, animals, and, of course, the men and
women who occupy and share our environment. By manipulating,
re-contextualizing, and framing the common elements that form the fabric of
our lives, Lockwood opens our ears, our eyes, and our selves to worlds of
beauty that resonate from the surface to the depths of our beings. What is a river? Much more than we knew it
to be before Annea Lockwood showed us how to
experience it with fresh ears and open minds. Noah Creshevsky
New York City Notes 1 Annea Lockwood, liner notes for The
Glass World of Annea Lockwood (Tangent Records,
1970). 2 A recording of one of these concerts was issued by Tangent Records in
1970, and reissued by What Next? in 1996. Glass
Concert 2 was published in Source: Music of the Avant
Garde 5 in 1969. 3 See <www.newmusicbox.org>,
January 2004. 4 Michael Lee, "Annea Lockwood's Burning
Piano, Scuffed Stones, and Noble Snare: Feminist Politics and Sound Sources
in Music," Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 3
(1999). 5 This work has also been released in a condensed format as a recording
on the Lovely label (2081), 1989. 6 Lockwood, Project Description, 2002. 7 Ibid. 8 Correspondence with the author,
September 2004. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. |
