Ear-Walking Woman Annea Lockwood

There’s two groups that have been playing my music live, Yarn/Wire and Maze Ensemble, both terrific groups with wonderful musicians. I haven’t worked with Maze Ensemble for a little while, but we have made beautiful recordings in the past. The piece we will perform with Yarn/Wire is special to me; we truly composed it together. We actually were in their New York studio a number of times, working through ideas. I’ve been working more with the idea of composing together, or co-composing. So, not just me coming up with an idea and passing it on to the musicians. But to really evolve things together. I’ve done it with Nate Wooley, a trumpet virtuoso and wonderful experimentalist and composer himself, or recently with Vanessa Tomlinson in Australia. She’s a terrific percussionist. We did a bass drum piece together, in which I get her talking about her feelings when she’s touching and playing the instrument. She speaks about what the instrument means to her, how her body responds when she’s playing. She went off in the most wonderful and surprising direction.

Let’s look at Bayou-Born , which is based on an actual map of the bayous which converge on Houston and flow through the city and out to the Gulf. It’s dedicated to the late composer Pauline Oliveros. It was commissioned by McGill University in Montreal, which was shaping an 85th birthday celebration for Pauline and 85 composers were all invited to make a short piece of 85 seconds long. Pauline passed away a few months before it could happen. She grew up there, so I figured she knew those bayous. She was a rascal, Pauline was. As a kid, she would have been in and out of them, coming into the house with muddy feet. She was very much on my mind. The players have a map which they’re tracing sonically and the different instruments converge. What starts as solos distributed through the space become duets and then trios, as the various instruments converge, and then finally it’s a completely interwoven sextet as all six tributaries join the main tributary and they all go down to Houston. Sometimes that sort of method is called guided improvisation. I call it shaped improvisation.

I set up a structure which involves timing as well. This will state that the players enter sequentially, spatially, in certain intervals. On the map, geographic intervals are translated to time intervals. Essentially they’re following a temporal structure that’s very laid out. I also ask them to darken the color of the sounds that they’re making as they get towards Houston in memory of a really awful hurricane, Hurricane Harvey, that happened there the year that we premiered the piece. It was impossible not to take it into the piece and remember those deaths, and I still ask players to do that. The piece can shape shift over time. The foundations stay the same, but the context and the players change, so all these elements depend on each other.

Yes, in the end the festival could not get hold of the final permit. I love to see the piece, still. It’s visually strong, just gorgeous, so I would’ve liked to have seen that once more. But also, I’m a little wary of putting even more carbon dioxide out there. The following wasn’t the case with Rewire in the slightest, but sometimes, when people have asked if they can do Piano Burning, I’ve had quite extensive discussions with them to discover whether or not it’s because it’s titillating. Perhaps it feels like a sacrilegious act of destruction. I try to find out whether that’s the attraction, or whether there’s more to the desire to do it than that. And eventually, I often try to steer them in the direction of Piano Garden instead, which is actually a lot of fun. The Transplant works became installations about slow transformational processes through natural forces, working on very tightly and beautifully constructed human objects, such as pianos. We planted one in Luxembourg just back in November, actually, in the gardens of the European Court of Justice, which blew my mind.

There’s a big sound festival in Luxemburg every year, the Rainy Days Festival. They invited me and suggested Piano Burning, and I suggested Piano Garden instead. The organizers of the festival approached the European Court of Justice not quite knowing what the response would be, and it was very positive. So, on a wet morning at the end of the festival, we all went out to this extensive cleared area where rows of shrubs and trees have been planted, and planted a little upright piano in a slip trench. You have to crouch down and play it, and little by little the plants will weave their way through.

On the side of the piano, yes. And it’ll eventually fall off.

Yes, it captured moments that won’t return . What comes up very strongly in my mind, is that we need to develop ways of protecting rivers and their riparian zones because they’re extremely rich environments with many types of species and plants and so on. We are not good at protecting them, we’ve exploited them. So that’s very much in the front of my mind at the moment. I’m about to start two collaborations about two different rivers up in the northwest of the USA, so I’m thinking hard about them. One of which, the Columbia, has been extensively dammed. The other, the Elwha, was just in 2014 released from its two dams, so it’s a free river. There’s sort of complementarity and dichotomy there that I’m really curious about. I am thinking about environmental change and changes in environmental systems specifically in relation to riparian protection right now.

Between 2002 and 2004, I was making hydrophone recordings of the Danube river. In those years, Ruth Anderson, my partner and composer, and I were making these long journeys on the river. Each of them was at least four weeks to five weeks, and the last one was six weeks. You should see the photographs of us when we reached the Black Sea! We were just totally worn out. I was hearing all sorts of activity underwater. Not uniform by any means. Some areas were much more dense than others, depending on local conditions. And then in 2008, I was asked to make a sound map of the Housatonic River, a beautiful little river, that starts in Massachusetts, goes through Connecticut and ends in Long Island Sound. I made a couple of underwater recordings of it, and the population seemed distinctly sparser and it puzzled me. I mean, really sparse. I started talking to Leah Barclay, an Australian composer and researcher, who is doing really important work with river systems and other ecologies. She said that sound could vary seasonally. This I expected. It also varies by temperature. There are other factors involved, however, which don’t necessarily reflect global warming changes. And I sat back and suddenly understood that it is very easy to fall into the temptation of doom thinking, right? Thinking that you’re finding instances in which populations are crashing and so on, but that isn’t necessarily the root cause of what you think you’re hearing, or in my case, what you’re misinterpreting.

I want to answer by thinking of tracing; tracing how bodies respond to sound, to action . I think our bodies respond to sound so strongly, and along with that comes a whole web of associational ideas, right? Triggered by sounds which are personally meaningful to us. That it’s possible that we can be drawn into caring for phenomena such as moving water, which all humans love and respond to—out of that can come memories of a river, a creek, some moving body of water. A lake which you grew up with, that you loved, that you fished in. And as those memories surface, maybe a sense of caring for the river, and then the beginning of a thought process in which you look at the condition of the river now, or you suddenly realize that the river you remember is no longer vibrant—and then, hopefully, there is action. That is the arc that I have been hoping to encourage, without being too didactic about it, which I try to avoid. I prefer to make suggestions.

You can see this type of action in the ways which have been discovered to give personhood to natural phenomena, which is increasing as a tactic. There’s the originating example, which is from New Zealand, so it is very dear to me. The Whanganui River is the home river of the Te Awa Tupua iwi. They were pushing against its appropriation super hard, so that it never was and never has been dammed. In 2017, through government legislation in New Zealand, they were recognized as the protectors of the river, and if you harm the river, you are harming the iwi, and that’s absolutely, absolutely unacceptable.

And then, there was a recent set of conferences with indigenous leaders, from Tahiti and the Cook Islands and New Zealand, getting together and instigating protection for whales, which only just happened. So if somebody is moved towards taking action, there is a way to do it, and a way that’s spreading and a way that’s becoming effective. It’s concrete.

I love the conversations that ensue. It feels like the ground is not strange to them in any way, you know? It’s a natural ground for younger generations. They already inhabit it. But what happens after, is truly an imponderable thing. I’m really happy that much of my work has been recorded. Some of my works are player-specific, you know, similar to site-specific.

I guess I hope that the ideas behind the pieces continue to spark new ideas—new ideas about ways of being in the world and acknowledging that we are not just in the world, but [that] we’re inseparable from everything else in the world. I think that’s, for me, the most important idea for me to work with. I mean, you can encapsulate it by saying, by talking about “listening with” instead of “listening to”. Listening to implies separation, right? Listening with implies an acknowledgement that you’re part of what you’re listening to, you’re not separate from it. That’s the idea that’s most crucial to me to work from, and I would hope that in some way or another it continues, shapeshifts, but keeps its underlying clarity. I’d like that to be a resident in the mind, the soul, the body and the way of working, and the way of being in the world and working within the world. You know?

For a long time I’ve been suggesting to people that when they’re looking at a cluster of ideas that they’re coming up with, if it’s a matter of deciding which direction you’ll go in, choose the most extreme idea, because that will reveal the most. I look at people sometimes when they look a little startled and say: “Well, you know, it’s not a matter of life or death. It’s not going to kill you. Just do it and see what emerges from it.” And it’s all exploration for me. It’s all ways of exploring the world within which we live, of which we’re a part. So just keep exploring. It’s vital.

In the sixties, we learned by doing. Pauline Oliveros was incredibly skilled, so was my partner Ruth Anderson. And then there were people like me who just really learned by the seat of their pants. It started because I heard some electronic music in Darmstadt when I was about 23 and was knocked out by it. It felt to me as if sound was clay, I could mold it, I could create sounds which I could only imagine. The sounds that I was making until then, didn’t have a quality of aliveness in them, I felt. So I started to slowly analyze what I meant by aliveness and moving into sounds which were generated by material other than electronics, and already contained a lot of beautiful, inherent detail which I wasn’t able to construct electronically. So I moved in that direction, working essentially with found sound from the environments around me which were full of detail and vitality. I learned technical skills by wanting to accommodate these sounds. A lot of it was ear training: training my ears to pick up on detail and figuring out distances. You listen well and you record. And then you change your mic angle and you listen again. It’s pragmatic and direct. It’s not theoretical. At least in my way of doing it, it’s a back and forth between listening and thinking and adjusting and listening and adjusting.

That’s a tricky one. It gets too personal too quickly, which is why it’s tricky. And then becomes… It’s infiltrated by loss, in other words. My desire for Ruth and my loss of her. Not that I like loss particularly as a word, but yeah, it’s the case. And it takes on other forms of course, too. There’s the wonderful sense of being overwhelmed by sounds which are vibrant, alive, moving, rich. And working with those sounds in the studio, which is always a tremendous thrill. It’s totally consuming and thrilling. And that’s very much a form of desire. To be in the midst of such sounds and working with them, following their shape and what happens to this sound, how it evolves and so on. It’s a very strong desire.

Yes, I have done that in the past, where I overthink things. But when I do, the thing dies immediately. And it sits in a notebook somewhere that I don’t even look at again, you know. It demolishes itself and clearly is thinned out to the point where you really don’t want to pursue it. For me, when I overthink something, it usually means that I want to be doing, want to be working that way, but I’m not really ready to, or have not got a strong enough idea to engage me, to pull me into that way of feeling and being and working yet.

No, I’m going back immediately at the end of the festival for three days and I’m going to pack an entirely different set of clothing and gear and go off to the Columbia River in Washington State up near the Canadian border. It’s a huge river which Nate Wooley , a trumpet player and composer I’ve worked with previously, grew up with as a kid and loves, and one day he described it to me in such a way that I said: “I’ve got to be out there recording with you.”

I may be all ‘rivered out’ by the time I get back, but that hasn’t happened yet.