Saturday, February 21
1433 E 33rd St Cleveland
Doors 7:30, music 8PM
$15-20 suggested donation
No one will be turned away for lack of funds
Tickets Available

Annea Lockwood

Annea Lockwood’s music ranges from sound art and environmental sound installations to concert music. Recent works include three collaborations: Elwha!, with Claire Chase, Into the Vanishing Point with Yarn/Wire, Becoming Air with Nate Wooley. Water has been a recurring focus of her work and her sound maps of rivers: the Hudson River, the Danube, the Housatonic River, and with Liz Phillips the Schuylkill, have been widely presented. A sound map of the Columbia River with Nate Wooley is nearing completion, supported by a grant from New Music USA.

A Fromm Music Foundation commission was recently awarded for Elwha! and a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts supports the creation of a new installation for PS 21, Chatham, New York. Lockwood is a recipient of the SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award 2020, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The program consists of acoustic and electroacoustic works by Annea Lockwood. Lockwood is joined by a group of local collaborators to realize the works, Spirit Catchers and bayou-borne for Pauline including Kristen Ban Drake, Naomi Columna, bbob drake, Melanie Emig, Rob Galo, Ben Gmetro, Grace Harper, Leia Hohenfeld, and Amelia Korbitz. This event is made possible by the generous support from the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology.

Bouyant (2013)

Dusk (2012)

For Ruth (2021)

Spirit Catchers (1974)

—Intermission—

On Fractured Ground (2023)

bayou-borne for Pauline (2016)

Buoyant (2013)

I spend my summers on a large lake in NW Montana, Flathead Lake; one afternoon, reading down by  the lake, I began to notice the deliciously pitched plops and gurgles with which the piece opens and was able to set my microphone down in amongst the rocks, very close to the water. Later that year, visiting a friend’s installation at the Hoboken Ferry Terminal in New Jersey, I was struck by the sounds the metal gangplanks generated, and returned on a windy day. Each time a boat passed on the Hudson or a ferry docked nearby, the gangplanks’ overlapping sections produced intricate textures, resonating strongly in the hangar-like terminal. Buoyant is the interplay of these sources, together with a recording I made in 1999 on a boat basin on Lake Como, Italy.

Dusk (2012)

Dusk incorporates the low frequency sounds generated by seafloor ‘black smoker’ hydrothermal vents, transposed bat calls, and percussionist William Winant playing a tam tam.

For Ruth (2021)

In July, 1973 Ruth Anderson and I met for the first time and within three days we were joyously entangled. For the next nine months while I was teaching in her studio at Hunter College, NYC, and she was living in Hancock, NH on a sabbatical - composing, piling wood, swimming - we called each other by phone, often twice a day, “… together in our voices” as she wrote. Ruth recorded those conversations, and in ’74 she collaged fragments –– interweaving them with snatches of old popular songs, Yes Sir, That’s My Baby; Oh, You Beautiful Doll; and Bill Bailey into Conversations (’74).

It was a gift to me, a private piece. In a letter to me written at that time she says “Yes, conversations. Replayed at another time are like photographs, a framed, kept, high tuned awareness for flow of rhythm from a person, that person’s composition & a composition of that person, how people cope with that one medium we must all share, of speech.”

For Ruth. In June 2020, seven months after Ruth died, I returned to Hancock, wanting to be back in that peaceful world, and made field recordings in and around the village, at Willard Pond - an Audubon Sanctuary where we loved to swim, and Sargent Lake, weaving our voices from those same phone conversations in ’73 back into that origin place, and finally at Flathead Lake, Montana where she rests.

Spirit Catchers (1974)

Four people have each been asked to bring with them an object which they have had for many years—an object such as one would never throw away in a move—something which seems to have attached to itself something of its owner’s self or history, a spirit-catcher. (Shamanistic term for an object, e.g. a stone, in which ally spirits are stored or exorcised spirits held.)

Each performer…begins to remember aloud all its associations, all the events connected with it, gradually uncovering all the accessible layers of feelings and memory accumulated around the object.

[Through] 4 microphones each mixed out to an individual loudspeaker …the four people are talking to themselves, thinking aloud, introverted and should aim to become oblivious of everything but the memory process, oblivious of audience, amplification, the other speakers. Remembering has an ebb and flow to it, a shifting momentum which is the focus of this piece. Words come slowly, spaced out, until an image has crystalized, when the voice changes, is charged with energy, and the pace of the talking increases and the density of imagery with it.

The person mixing brings up amplification for each speaker successively…[to] cross fade from speaker to speaker.

On Fractured Ground (2023)

The Peace Lines of Belfast are immense, apparently permanent walls of corrugated steel, cement, brick, some topped with barbed wire up to and sometimes exceeding twenty-five feet high. Along with heavy gates which close off roads, the walls’ function was to separate Catholic republican neighborhoods and unionist Protestant neighborhoods. Removal was supposed to begin in the years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998 but some of the walls have only become higher and more extensive.

I went to Belfast in October ’22 to record the walls with the composers and sound artists, Pedro Rebelo and Georgios Varoutsos for a very special film, A History of the Present, created by Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon, and was shocked by their mass, the brutal way they sever neighborhoods so rather than record glimpses of the neighborhoods, their ambient soundscape, I wanted to hear and convey the walls themselves, how sound vibrations move through them – to hear and reflect their massive weight, blocking vision, blocking free movement, blocking exchange and community.

bayou-borne for Pauline (2016)

Dedicated to Pauline Oliveros

This is a map of the 'mother' bayou flowing through Houston, Texas - Buffalo Bayou - and its main tributaries: Greens Bayou with a secondary tributary, White Oak Bayou, Brays Bayou, Sims Bayou, flowing left (West) to right (East). Bayous such as these are slow-moving streams or rivers, often with marshy borders, in low-lying floodplains.

Pauline Oliveros grew up in Houston and I have imagined that, as a child, she knew one or more of these rivers intimately. The score was composed for the exhibition "Still Listening: New Works in Honour of Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016)", a memorial celebration and conference in June, 2017 at McGill University in Montreal.

For six players, vocal and or instrumental. Read as six lines/parts with Greens Bayou taken by two players who converge. If the performance space allows, the players can be separated spatially initially, moving freely then coming closer together at the confluences, finally with all six converging at the spot marked * and moving through the Houston Ship Channel and out to Galveston Bay.