Chance meeting on a river of a tiger and glass
Today we delve into the sound world of Annea Lockwood, who turned 86 earlier this week, on July 29. Lockwood's music is literally elemental in that she does not simply compose it, she discovers it in fire, glass, water, and earth.
Lockwood was born in 1939 in Christchurch, New Zealand and has spent a lifetime pushing the boundaries of how we define music. She studied in New Zealand, London, Germany, and Holland, then settled in the United States, where she taught composition and electronic music at Vassar College in upstate New York.
She emerged in the 1960s as a fearless experimentalist, unafraid to challenge conventional notions of sound, structure, and instrumentation. One of her early groundbreaking works, "Glass World" (1967-70), explored the fragile, shimmering timbres of glass from shattered panes to delicate chimes. In 1970, she composed "Tiger Balm", a haunting, sensual collage of environmental recordings, human voices, and Eastern instruments.
Perhaps Lockwood's most profound and enduring legacy lies in her "Sound Map" series - audio portraits of rivers like the Hudson (1982), Danube (2001-04), and Housatonic (2013). These longform works combine natural recordings, interviews, and ambient textures, allowing listeners to hear a river not just as water, but as community, ecology, and memory.
In April 2025, Lockwood released "On Fractured Ground / Skin Resonance", and we will listen to the latter piece with Australian composer and percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson.
Stay tuned as we explore the sound world of Annea Lockwood: composer, ecologist, and sonic alchemist.
https://www.annealockwood.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annea_Lockwood
At 85, Annea Lockwood Isn’t Done Listening to the Earth
Lockwood, a composer who spins music from the sounds of the natural world, is sharing with and learning from a new generation of artists.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/arts/music/annea-lockwood-composer.html
Earth, Wind And Fire: An Interview With Annea Lockwood
Jennifer Lucy Allan talks to the New Zealand born composer about love letters on quarter-inch tape, piano gardens and doll shops, and the physical effects of sound upon our bodies
https://thequietus.com/interviews/annea-lockwood-interview/
Womens Work (1970s magazine)
https://primaryinformation.org/product/womens-work/
Pictured: Annea Lockwood received the cover feature in The Wire in August 2023
https://www.thewire.co.uk/issues/474
https://www.annealockwood.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/The_Wire_Annea-Lockwood_Issue_474.pdf
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| A Sound Map Of The Housatonic River Annea Lockwood - A Sound Map Of The Housatonic River - 3LEAVES - 2013 |
| Micro Glass Shaken Anna (Annea) Lockwood - Glass World Of Anna Lockwood - Tangent - 1970 |
| With plates of wired glass, glass discs, chunks of green cullet glass, glass tubing, sheets of micro-glass, glass jars and other incarnations of the material, Lockwood elicited a staggering array of sounds, some subtly uncanny and others as outlandish and alien as anything emitted from the era's early synthesizers.
Lockwood's glass concerts yielded a text-score published in Northern California new-music journal Source: Music of the Avant-Garde and attracted the attention of South African producer Michael Steyn, who encouraged her to record the glass pieces for his label Tangent. They worked for two years in a small, resonant church in London to document a veritable catalogue of the materials' tone and timbre; Lockwood wished to present each sound as if it were a piece of music in and of itself. |
| In Full Bloom (Part 2) Annea Lockwood - Thousand Year Dreaming - ¿What Next? Recordings - 1993 |
| Thousand Year Dreaming was commissioned by Essential Music and was written with the musicians on this recording, their particular strengths and inclinations, very much in mind. It grew out of an improvisatory piece, Nautilus, which Art Baron, Scott Robinson and Lockwood realised in 1989. They found that the sound of conch shell trumpets, didjeridu and frame drums really flowered in the resonant spaces they were using for the piece. Lockwood started imagining the sonorities possible with four didjeridus, gongs, conches and trombones and frame drums, all shaped by the penetrating and sensuous edge of oboes and clarinets.
Peter Zummo plays trombone and didjeridu. He is known for playing with Arthur Russell, Peter Gordon, The Lounge Lizards, David Behrman, et. al. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Zummo |
| For Ruth Annea Lockwood - Tête-À-Tête - Ergot - 2023 |
| Over the course of a nearly 50 year romantic and creative partnership sound artist Annea Lockwood and the late pioneering electronic composer Ruth Anderson have shared space on a number of significant releases of early electronic and tape music, including Charles Amirkhanian’s trailblazing 1977 anthology of women electronic composers New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, a 1981 split LP on Opus One, a 1997 CD for Phill Niblock’s XI imprint, and 1998’s Lesbian American Composers compilation on CRI. The couple additionally taught a course on the history of women’s music-making, at Hunter College, called Living Women, Living Music. Throughout their time together, they co-authored a number of Hearing Studies designed for people with no formal musical training, which were collected for a 2021 book publication by Open Space Music. They spent most of their private life between Crompond, NY and the house they built themselves at Flathead Lake, Montana. Although Ruth passed away in 2019, the composers’ dialogue continues today with Tête-à-tête, a collection of unreleased archival and new material spread across an LP and a single-sided 10” record.
“For Ruth” is Annea’s elegy to her life partner. In 2020, Annea returned to Hancock as well as to Ruth’s resting place at Flathead Lake to make field recordings, which she wove together with further excerpts of the couple’s 1974 conversations for a commission presented as part of the 2021 Counterflows Festival in Glasgow. A consummate field recordist, Annea imbues the simple sounds of church bells, birds, wind, and the bodies of water that permeated her time alongside Ruth with an otherworldly depth and sense of narrative akin to that of her celebrated sound maps of the Hudson, Danube, and Housatonic rivers. An oneiric, subtly tonal evocation of a meeting at the shores of existence. |
| Turning Gong Anna (Annea) Lockwood - Glass World Of Anna Lockwood - Tangent - 1970 |
| Inzell To Traismauer Annea Lockwood - A Sound Map Of The Danube - Lovely Music, Ltd. - 2008 |
| Between the winter of 2001 and the summer of 2004, I made five field-recording trips, moving slowly down the Danube from the sources in the Black Forest through Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania to the great delta on the Black Sea, recording the river's sounds (at the surface and underwater), aquatic insects, and the various inhabitants of its banks. At 2880 km. (1785 miles) the Danube is Europe?s second longest river and one of its most historically significant, having long been a trade and cultural conduit between east and west. Its drainage basin encompasses much of Central Europe and it has carved out deep gorges dividing the southern arm of the Carpathians from the Balkan Mountains.
I recorded from the banks, finding a great variety of water sounds as the gradient and bank materials changed, often feeling that I was hearing the process of geological change in real time. Towards the end of the final field trip, while listening to small waves slap into a rounded overhang the river had carved in a mud bank in Rasova, Romania (CD 3 track 2), I realised that the river has agency; it composes itself, shaping its sounds by the way it sculpts its banks. Along the way I spoke with people for whom the Danube is a central influence on their lives, an integral part of their identity, asking them ?What does the river mean to you? Could you live without it?? They responded in their native languages and dialects, their voices woven into the river's sounds, placed as close to the location where I met them as possible. ?What is a river?? was the question underlying the whole project for me. Many people helped with every aspect of the project at every stage, and I am deeply grateful for their generosity and interest. The installation, "A Sound Map of the Danube", was completed in 2005 and first presented during the Donau Festival in Krems, Austria. It was mixed in 5.1 surround sound with audio engineer Paul Geluso at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts in New York, and this version was re-mixed in stereo in 2008. - Annea Lockwood |
| Afghan Red Harvey Matusow's Jews Harp Band - War Between Fats And Thins - Head - 1969 |
| Tiger Balm Annea Lockwood - Tiger Balm / Amazonia Dreaming / Immersion - Black Truffle - 2017 (rec. 1970) |
| Annea Lockwood’s classic 1970 tape piece Tiger Balm was created while Lockwood was living in the UK. The side-long piece is a singular work within the cannon of tape music. Inspired by research into the ritual function of music, the piece explores the possibility of evoking ancient communal memories through sound. Breaking entirely with the dynamic language of the musique concrète tradition, Lockwood uses a select palette of mainly unprocessed sonic elements chosen for their mysterious and erotic characteristics (a purring cat, a heartbeat, gongs, slowed down jaw harp, a tiger, a woman’s breath, a plane passing overhead), presenting at most two sounds at once. As one sound flows organically into the next, their shared characteristics are highlighted, opening a space of dream logic and mysterious associations between nature and culture, the ancient and the modern. |
| Skin Resonance Annea Lockwood & Vanessa Tomlinson - On Fractured Ground / Skin Resonance - Black Truffle - 2025 
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| Skin Resonance is a collaboration with Australian composer and percussionist Vanessa Tomlinson. Developed through conversations in which the two discussed the idea of ‘sonic attraction’, the piece focuses on Tomlinson’s relationship to the bass drum, reflecting on the complex web of connections embodied in this seemingly simple instrument, which is at once ‘animal, wood, and metal’. Approaching the instrument in a suitably elemental fashion, Tomlinson’s performance strips away conventional technique to explore the resonance and timbral properties of skin, drum, and metal hardware, producing overlapping waves of texture that at times seem closer to wind swishing through leaves or the ocean than anything usually associated with a drum. Emphasising the symbiotic relationship between performer and instrument, Tomlinson’s voice is heard at times, exploring the field of associations and connections the bass drum suggests to her: ‘Maybe the bass drum skin is an ear as well?’ |
| World Rhythms Annea Lockwood - Annea Lockwood - New Wilderness Audiographics - 1977 |
| Bubbling Anna (Annea) Lockwood - Glass World Of Anna Lockwood - Tangent - 1970 |
| A Sound Map Of The Hudson River Annea Lockwood - A Sound Map Of The Hudson River - Lovely Music, Ltd. - 1989 |
| An aural journey from the source of the river, in the high peak area of the Adirondacks, downstream to the Lower Bay and the Atlantic Ocean; Annea Lockwood traces the course of the Hudson through on-site recordings of its flow at 15 separate locations. Annea Lockwood has recorded rivers in many countries to explore the special state of mind and body which the sounds of moving water create when one listens intently to the complex mesh of rhythms and pitches. The listener will find that each stretch of the Hudson has its own sonic texture, formed by the terrain, varying according to the weather, the season and downstream, the human environment whose sounds are intimately woven into the river's sounds. |
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Nice to listen to the outside while inside on a beautiful day
3:25 PM, August 1st, 2025