Lawrence English Interviews Annea Lockwood

Words LAWRENCE ENGLISH

There’s a vibrant energy that surrounds Annea Lockwood. It’s an energy that is created both by her ceaseless curiosity and her openness to the world around her. It’s also, no doubt, the energy responsible for her profoundly diverse and engaging output of the past six decades.

A self-described "water person," much of Annea’s work has been focused on the fluidity of rivers, the vibratory shimmer of oceans and lakes, and the pulsation of waves. It’s from these constant, but never solid forms that she has drawn forth a life’s work that herald equally acts of generous listening, invitational composition and a hunger for considered experimentation.

On the occasion of curating her Wild Energy installation — a work created in collaboration with Bob Bielecki for the Brisbane Festival — I had the opportunity to speak to Annea at length about her work as a listener, composer, and feminist....

Lawrence English: I wanted to start out by picking up something we touched on in a previous exchange — something that is fundamental to how we think about creating work, and the idea of embodied listening. From an outside perspective, it appears that throughout your life, listening has played as important a role as composing, in that one supports and perhaps, provokes the other intrinsically. I wondered if you could speak to how your ears opened up, and continued to open up to the world? What does listening mean for you and has that shifted across your life? 

Annea Lockwood: I don’t think I can trace back to when or how my ears opened up, except to say that as a child I was encouraged to listen by my parents’ passionate love of music and also by being in the mountains a lot. It made me aware of changing weather, bird species coming and going (we have very beautiful birds there – lovely sounds from the gritty intense communications of keas to delicate, mellow pitches of bellbirds), river flow sound by my parents, and their friends’ attention to and pleasure in all this.

Listening is like breathing — so involuntary sometimes, at other times a deliberate decision to focus. A teacher with whom I was studying Zen gave me a koan once, which I love: “Who hears?”

My listening is changing as I age – I’m going on 81 – and the top end in my left ear especially is dropping down. This is affecting my spatial location for short sounds, and I wonder how it’s affecting my perception when I’m doing field recording. I love presence in a sound – the infectious vitality that brings to you as you listen — and miss not hearing some of the highs as I used to. I am careful not to boost the highs in my studio in unconscious compensation when mixing... a delicate balance, that.

Lawrence: I recognize that our hearing changes a lot as our body ages — I know mine has already — but I was interested to know more about your methods and habits for listening. Have you found that the interests and capacities you have as a listener have shifted, deepened, or expanded over the course of your career? How do you think about listening as a creative practice?

Annea: It's hard for me to nail down something as defined as a method. The closest I come to that in making field recordings is the practice of settling so that I'm physically comfortable before recording. (I've done a lot of handheld [recordings], so this is essential.) Then I become inwardly still, expand my field of attention wider and wider (a sort of peripheral hearing) until I think I am able to hear everything within range around me, with nothing either foregrounded or backgrounded. And of course, my mic still surprises me — its field of attention being entirely unmoved by anything except a direct hit.

In general, I experience sound so strongly in and through my body that it brings me a real visceral sense of connection to whatever I'm listening to, and that is probably true for many of us. That, to me, is a powerful embodied, often unconscious reminder that I am not separate from the world around me, and I suspect this is true for many people. And is, in itself, a creative practice.

Lawrence: Taking one step back from this, I’m interested in understanding the relationship you perceive between the environment, the body, and sound. Many of your works approach these three aspects in very tangible ways. What has considering these elements individually and collectively revealed to you over the decades?

Annea: Concerning the nexus of environment, body, and sound, yes, that’s at the center of much of my work — something I’ve been working on for a long time and I see them as inseparable aspects of energy flow, all sorts of energy. This is the core of Wild Energy. Sound is one of the channels through which, as humans, we sense the energy of other phenomena, or beings, and release our own energy, so as acoustic energy flows through our bodies, affecting us physiologically and emotionally a conduit of connection is formed with a geyser blowing, or a frog croaking nearby, an experience of non-separation — the underlying reality. It can be a fleeting recognition, but it returns and is exhilarating and, I find, deeply nourishing.

Lawrence: One environment that has obviously been a point of focus is rivers. What has always captured me about your works with water and rivers is the point of friction that emerges between the sensing of time on land and in the water. Obviously the two are always changing, but land I suppose is a slower timeline. The river, as this constant, but never solid environment, rubbing up against the edges of land is such a fertile place to draw inspiration from. Why has the river captured you so deeply?

Annea: I don’t know. I can hypothesize about childhood exposure to Canterbury’s rivers in NZ, and have done, or the delight the complexity of their sounds brings me, or the innate human dependence on water, but in the end, like our friend Leah Barclay, I suspect, I am a water person, a river person — my medium and my natural habitat.

My partner Ruth Anderson was, too. So it seems completely natural that I will place her ashes in Flathead Lake — her true home.

Lawrence: That’s a beautiful gesture. I’d like to understand more about your passion for the aquatic, especially around mapping rivers. I’ve always found that idea of mapping to be a curious one, as in some respects your work celebrates the living quality of the river, tracing moments of its life from source to sea. Rather than an exercise in cartography, I’ve always felt you’ve captured the lived experience of the rivers you have explored.

Can I ask about how you made the selections to be presented in the works, and the working methods for these undertakings? When they are presented in their final version the pieces feel so resolved and focused, but I imagine the nature of making them is as winding and dynamic as the rivers themselves?

Annea: You are exactly right when you note that my work 'celebrates the living quality of the river'; I am thrilled that you feel I've captured something of that. The maps give people a way to follow that life — from source to sea — and perceive something of the way a river interacts with its geology, and of course shapes it too. But there's also the low-key personal pleasure of hearing how a site/place where you fish, swim, hang out on the Danube or Hudson or Housatonic sounded on a particular day when you weren't there, some familiar trace in the sound despite the large variation due to weather, water levels, and the exact spot. People really like to do that.

There are layers of selection: the initial site, whether the recording is sufficiently interesting to be included, and if so, which segment to choose and what should be its duration. I choose a site purely by ear — so none of the sound maps are documentary in the usual sense — asking myself 'Is this alive-sounding? Have I heard something like it before?' If indeed it has the indefinable (before you ask!) quality of liveness and is unlike anything I've already recorded, I settle in and record.

I made the Danube work in four long trips from 2001-2004. I would listen back to the day's recordings with Ruth, wherever we'd landed for the night, then at the end of the trip, at home, I'd eliminate recordings which in some way duplicated some site already selected. Of course, since I was working downstream, tracking the river’s unfolding, the ordering — a foundation of the structure — was a given.

I start deciding on the duration of each site after choosing the best section of the recording based on a subjective sense of how long another listener might remain engaged in the sound flow, rather than a structural plan. At that stage, I also apply EQ if needed to subdue distant traffic or bring out a particularly pretty little pitch pattern within the overall sound — usually that is what attracted me to the site to begin with. No reverb at that stage and I actually recall only using it once in the final Danube mix. I love natural resonance.

Now I am listening to the work as a whole and in the final stage I first refine durations and chart them, site by site, to check that I am not falling into any repetitive/predictable patterns, then think about the spatialization: 5.1 for the Danube, 4.1 for the Housatonic and stereo [for] the Hudson. I graph detailed shifts in spatialization for each site, which I take to Paul Geluso at NYU with whom I do my final spatialised mix. We play with it – he’s a terrific engineer — make a few changes and are done.

Lawrence: Rivers seemed to have also been important settings for some of your other works. The first Piano Burning was on the Thames. This work and the subsequent piano transplants have obviously resonated deeply with a lot of folks over the years. I understand at the time it was both heralded as a new way of conceptualising sound work, and also decried. How did you feel about it in those moments in which it was first realized?

For me that piece has always suggested a particular curiosity of the chaotic and unexpected relationships that unfold between the fire and the materiality of the instrument. The piano has always felt quite ‘played upon’ during the burning. I wondered if you could speak to that work — how it came to capture your imagination and that relationship between the fire as performer and the materiality of instruments?

Annea: My strongest memories of the first Piano Burning are much less subtle — of how the audience’s excited talking was ruining the recording, which had been the point of the whole event; of how unexpectedly beautiful visually it was; and how satisfying the strings were when they flew free of the pins and twanged from time to time. And the unpredictable way in which the fire will travel through the instrument is always fascinating to me – playing upon the instrument indeed.

It was also playful. I burned another upright that evening to which we had stapled balloons (and which looked even more beautiful) and followed this up with a ‘séance’ in which Alex Gross, a friend, set about conjuring the spirit of Beethoven, seeking his comments. Finally a group of us went off to try and levitate St. Pancras Station — no luck. The last thing that was in our minds was that this was some sort of iconic event.

'How it came to capture your imagination' has a curious ring to it, as if the event had been somehow pre-existent or something I could envisage in advance…. You know, it really was grounded in the practical reality that I needed to make a really good, interesting recording of fire for a dance piece and had not yet succeeded with the usual materials. The surreal aspect of it, as with all the other Transplants, was probably appealing to me too, then once it was accomplished I began to think further about how ‘natural’ processes can disassemble even such a strong human fabrication as a piano, and got to plants, water, the ocean, which were all about gradual process (and the resonance with ‘Music as a Gradual Process’ pleased me too).

Lawrence: I can’t help but feel this idea — concerning the processes of disassembly — still maintains a central place in your work, even if that focus is more to do with how our industrial society has managed un/intentionally (or at least for sometime, unconsciously) to denude the planet. In recent decades you have spoken very directly to your concerns around these issues of environmental crisis; how do the compositions themselves reflect your feelings and hopes?

Annea: I am initially seduced by the sounds themselves — their liveness, detail and the energy transduced through them into me. In working with them I want other people to have a chance to experience those enlivening energies themselves. Little by little, over the years, I have come to sense that I not only coexist with the phenomena generating them, but am interdependent with them, not separate from them. On a basic level, they pass into and through my body, affecting me viscerally. Sound is an excellent conveyer that way. I am trying to give other people access to these particular sounds which, I feel, are channels of connection to the sources.

Bob (Bielecki) and I worked with pacing on Wild Energy, how particular sounds move through the space (a grove of rocks and young trees at Caramoor), how the varied and often very different sounds interweave, lead into and out of one another, hoping to draw you, listening, inside these sounds so that you feel the non-separation directly. From that can come a sense that you are part of it all. With that comes more and more awareness of the long chains of cause and effect between, say, wolves, elk, aspens and willows, and healthy stream banks, and you might start supporting wolf reintroductions in the Rockies.

The access I mention above can come through hearing such sounds with minimal interpretive mediation between you, the listener, and the sound source. This is easier with my river recordings, than with Wild Energy, where the vibrations have been recorded, transferred, transposed in order for us to hear them, but we have used as little modification as possible.

Their sounds are spreading out there, in the soundscape, listening you are among them, then within them.

Lawrence: That sense of spreading out makes me think of how I’ve always been impressed by the openness in some of your scores. I was curious to understand how you think about the idea of a score. There’s often a sense of strictness or a prescription, that they are a way of controlling a musician’s interaction with sound. By contrast, your scores have always felt more invitational. A prompting to become open to possibility, rather than a shutting down of it.

Annea: I love your description of my scores as invitational. Perhaps I can best tackle this question by considering the last few instrumental scores I’ve made which are all really guided improvisations, the most recent — Becoming Air (2018) and Into the Vanishing Point (2019) being true collaborations, the former with composer and trumpeter Nathan Wooley, the latter with the piano/percussion quartet Yarn/Wire. With both these pieces we started with a rough framework for the piece’s overall structure — which I came up with — and [it] morphed as we worked together. The eventual score consists of the players’ text notes made on the parts they have constructed and their interactions.

Nate has performed Becoming Air often and holds the score in his mind now. I expect this will happen with the four members of Yarn/Wire – Laura Barger, Ian Antonio, Ning Yu and Russell Greenberg — when performances can resume. In Becoming Air the premise of the work is exploration so the ‘score’ is simply a rough outline, almost a mnemonic.

With bayou-borne, for Pauline (2016, a sextet) the framework consists of a map of the six bayous flowing through Houston, Texas together with text instructions forming a timeline on which, in a 20-minute performance, the various bayous enter. Each is assigned to a particular player, who reads its curves as material for their improvisation.

Many of my instrumental and also vocal pieces incorporate improvisation to some degree. I think this comes from a long-ago recognition that a performer’s personality has everything to do with how a piece communicates, and a keen interest in this process and in explicitly acknowledging it, setting it free. 

Lawrence: Your work for instruments has, for me at least, shared the same sense of curiosity that you maintain for environments. So many of your instrumental works ask the performer to throw away the expected and the familiar in favor of uncovering new potentials of the materials you prepare for them, whether than be an instrument or other objects. How is it you, as the composer, perceive this relationship with the instruments and materials of sound?

AL - I have both instrumental/vocal scores which are fully composed (Red Mesa, RCSC, Night and Fog, Luminescence, Vortex); some which incorporate improvisation by the performers on or with given materials, (In Our Name, I Give You Back, Amazonia Dreaming, Ear-Walking Woman, Thousand Year Dreaming, bayou-borne); and some which are completely collaborative, co-composed with the performers (Duende with Thomas Buckner, Becoming Air with Nate Wooley, Into the Vanishing Point with Yarn/Wire ensemble, and of course Wild Energy with Bob Bielecki).

Exploration of terrain new to me is the driver of all my work, I think, so when I returned to writing scores (whether notated or text or graphic), I was curious to both explore the sonic capacities (extended techniques) of the instrument/voice beyond those I already knew, and to ground a work in the performer’s own curiosity about self and instrument. It started with my fascination with timbre, and extended out into what fascinates a particular player, what they are also exploring.

Accordingly, it’s hard for me to make a piece for or with someone with whom I cannot work person to person as I have been able to, for years, with Tom Buckner, and, recently through many meetings, with Nate Wooley. Without this close contact a piece feels initially rather abstract to me. Asking the player to truly improvise makes space for such personal input and has led me into these full collaborations.

Lawrence: I wanted to ask you about Wild Energy and your work with Bob Bielecki. How was it you came to be in touch and develop work together?

Annea: I had rarely collaborated with anyone on an installation before Bob and I started work on Wild Energy, and what a joy it has been! We’ve worked together several times in various ways since we met in, I think, the early ‘80s. He is famously a superb creator of unusual electronic devices and systems, such as the Sound Ball he made for me (for performing Three Short Stories and an Apotheosis) from six tiny speakers, an FM receiver, amp and filter, all nested perfectly inside a hinged kitchen colander which he covered with acoustic foam. Wild Energy takes us further into full collaboration.

Lawrence: Wild Energy is a work that opens out the earth. It allows us a chance to perceive a range of phenomenon that we can’t readily access. I wanted to ask, what were your first exposures to these curious sonic fields? When was it you first discover them and how did the idea of Wild Energy germinate?

Annea: In 2013 the composer Stephan Moore was planning an outdoor exhibition of new sound art for the summer festival which the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts presents annually in Katonah, New York, and invited me to contribute something. I immediately thought of Bob – an opportunity to develop something together from scratch with a musician whom I admire greatly. About that time I had seen an interview with volcanologist Milton A. Garces describing ongoing research on Mt. Kilauea, Hawai’i, illustrated with gorgeous sound clips from active volcanic vents. I wanted them, wanted to work with those sounds, most of which were originally infrasound and had been transposed up into the human hearing range at his laboratory, the Infrasound Laboratory, the University of Hawai’i.

That formed the basis of our installation, placing sounds from non-human phenomena – geophysical, atmospheric, biological – which affect our environment constantly but are either above or below our unaided human hearing range. Bob started researching equipment which could be installed and left out in the open for a year or more and designing a concealed play back system. I contacted laboratories working with such vibratory phenomena, roughed out a set of eleven little individual compositions with these materials, interspersed with (recorded) silences which place the ambient soundscape in the foreground, and then we brought everything to the site we had chosen and started working out the spatialization through four subwoofers and seven speakers. 

Lawrence: You’ve always struck me as being very optimistic. I wondered if you’d be open to commenting how you feel things have shifted, be that positive or negative, with respect of how you feel your work and the other of other feminist peers has impacted on the subsequent generation of women exploring and working with sound?

Annea: I do think the work of my generation matters to younger women composers and sound artists. Given what was for so long an excluding ‘patrimony’ of male composers, which is finally eroding, it always matters that one has a female ancestry, as it were. It mattered to me and from the communications and friendships I have with younger women I can see that it still matters, even though there are now so many more of us.

In this respect Pauline Oliveros’ influence is strong and easily perceived, as is that of Pamela Z, Hildegard Westerkamp, Ikue Mori, Gillian Whitehead, among so many others.

Lawrence: It’s affirming to hear that. I wanted to finish by asking you, given your life spent in music and art, I wondered if you had any reflections on what you have come to value most from this work?

Annea: When I was a kid I wanted to explore the physical world, as I think we all do – the nature of stones, of rivers, and more and more. Being able to work with environmental sound and with our experience of it has given me a path which takes me closer and closer - such a richness! It wakes me up. And as to what younger artists should keep in their mind as they travel along their pathways? Ruth Anderson would say 'no shoulds.'  I’d say 'just trust it.'