Biography
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Born
29 July 1939 (age 84)
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Born In
Christchurch, Canterbury, South Island, New Zealand
Annea Lockwood (born July 29, 1939 in Christchurch, New Zealand) is a New Zealand born American composer. She taught electronic music at Vassar College. Her work often involves recordings of natural found sounds. She has also recorded Fluxus-inspired pieces involved burning or drowning pianos.
Annea studied composition and completed a B.Mus with honors from Canterbury University, New Zealand. She went on to study composition at several institutions around Europe with notable teachers: The Royal College of Music (London) with Peter Racine Fricker, the Darmstadt Ferienkurs fur Neue Musik with Gottfried Michael Koenig, the Musikhochschule, (Cologne, Germany) and in also Holland. During the late 60’s and early seventies, Annea performed and composed around Europe but made London her home. Her compositions featured non-conventional instruments, such as glass tubing and burning, moss covered pianos, which she described as sound sculptures, and presented in performance pieces with other sound poets and integrated choreography. Lockwood is most well-known for “The Glass Concert” (1967) which was published in Source Music of the Avant-Garde then recorded and released by Tangent records.
In the 70’s Annea began to compose what could be considered performance art pieces, though her work was still situated in the realm of music; they are considered so because the essence of the compositional ideas made the audience and environment agents in the piece. During this time Lockwood worked with environmental sounds, capturing them and building developed compositions around an environmental inspiration: A Sound Map of the Hudson River (1982), World Rhythms (1975), and parts built on of archetypes and conversations with significant people, Conversations with the Ancestors (1979), composed on conversations with 4 women in their eighties, Delta Run (1982, based on a conversation with the sculptor Walter Wincha), One piece, Three Short Stories and Apotheosis (1985) notably used what Lockwood named the Soundball, which was a foam-covered ball that was made of 6 small speakers and a radio receiver. The impetus for this unusual piece of equipment was to "put sound into the hands of dancers”.
Lockwood’s most recent pieces are written for acoustic-electric instruments and incorporate multi-media and indigenous instruments in her compositions: Thousand Year Dreaming (1991) is a work for four didgeridoos and blends images of the Lascaux cave as part of the performance.
Her progressive ideas and the breadth of her range is quite impressive; from the microtonal, electro-acoustic soundscapes and vocal music, she seems to have explored and expressed previously ignored spaces in modern composition. Her music has been presented at festivals all over the world, including events in Germany, Scandinavia, Italy, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. Lockwood, a Professor Emeritus at Vassar College, NY since 1982, has retired from teaching though she still writes and performs. Her recordings are distributed through these labels: Lovely, XI, ?What Next?/OO Discs, Rattle Records (NZ), Harmonia Mundi, Earth Ear, CRI, and Finnadar/Atlantic.
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