Annea Lockwood

Composer Annea Lockwood is an avant-garde experimenter who was a pioneer in the fields of sound sculpture and mixed-media composition. Many of her works are based on found natural sounds. Lockwood was born (as Anna Lockwood) in Christchurch, New Zealand, on July 29, 1939. During her childhood, she was trained as a classical pianist but also spent much time hiking in rural New Zealand, where she developed an interest in the natural sound world. She earned a bachelor's degree in music from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and then went on to the Royal College of Music in London in 1961, where she studied until 1963 with Peter Racine Fricker. She also took courses at the Darmstadt Ferienkurs für Neue Musik and the Musikhochschule Köln in Germany, and in the Netherlands. Returning to London in 1964, she lived as a freelance composer and performer. Her 1966 work, The Glass Concert, was written for two performers playing a variety of glass sound-makers, including tubing and glass shards. That work was recorded as early as 1970 on the Nonsequitur label. In 1973, Lockwood moved to the U.S., began teaching at Hunter College in New York, and began experimenting with performance art and found sounds. She had her own electronics studio there, and she remains one of very few women in the U.S. to have designed her own studio. Her Piano Transplants series, coordinated with the heart transplants being developed in South Africa, submerged, burned, or planted disused pianos in various locations. Lockwood's World Rhythms (1975) mixed sounds of an earthquake, a fire, quasars, a volcano, mud pools, tides, and birds, answered with a gong. Lockwood composed Sound Maps of the Hudson and Danube Rivers, incorporating sounds at various locations along the river involved. In 1982, she joined the faculty at Vassar College, where she remains active as professor emerita in the early 2020s. Lockwood's works have been recorded on more than a dozen albums, mostly on the Lovely Music and Xi Records labels. Her Becoming Air (2018) was developed with trumpeter Nate Wooley and uses extended techniques and electronics to destabilize, in a way, the player's control over his instruments, while Into the Vanishing Point (2019) addressed the global crash in insect populations; those two works appeared in 2021 on an album on the Black Truffle label.
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