Courtesy of White Fungus

New York-based composer and sound artist Annea Lockwood is known for her extraordinary use of spontaneous and environmental sound. From her infamous piano-burning performances of the late 1960s to her recordings of volcanoes and earthquakes, Lockwood has continued to provoke her audience into an ever-deepening understanding of the world through sound.

Recently Lockwood released A Sound Map Of The Danube, a three-disc album on Lovely Music. The album features compositions made using field recordings and interviews conducted while the artist travelled along Europe's second largest river, The Danube, which runs from The Black Forest in Germany through Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia and Bulgaria to Romania and Ukraine where it opens into the Black Sea.

An installation of the work was completed in 2005 during the Donau Festival in Krems, Austria. In 2008 Lockwood will bringing the work to Auckland. Wellington composer and musician Daniel Beban caught up with Lockwood recently and in an interview discussed the artist's fascination with rivers and her life in sound.

Daniel Beban: I was wanting to start by talking about rivers, but as a way in, maybe we could talk a bit about growing up in New Zealand. You grew up in Christchurch?

Annea Lockwood: Yeah, with a father who would have spent his entire life up in the Alps if he could have, and who did a lot of climbing from a little hut he bought with some friends up at Arthur's Pass. He took us there a lot as we were growing up in summers and in the winters.

DB: So were you interested in sound from an early age? How did you get started in that area?

AL: I think there were two things going on, one on the surface and one underneath. On the surface, yes, my mother was a composer, didn't do a great deal, but did compose and she choreographed and got me started in music quite early on, around five. I started piano lessons and she hooked me up with a really excellent teacher, Gwen Moon, in Christchurch whose husband also ran a small string orchestra. So in a little while, three or four years later, my mother had taught me to notate the tunes that I was making up, the way all kids who play musical instruments do, but she taught me to write them down which was a really great start. Some time later Gwen and her husband encouraged me to write for his string orchestra, so I started doing that. And I had a lot of encouragement from the faculty at Canterbury University. All through high school and on through university, I just kept composing.

The lower layer, so to speak, the lower layer of my involvement with sound, I think, is that I did quite a bit of listening as a kid. Why I mentioned Arthur's Pass is because three or four years ago I finally put two and two together in terms of my fascination with rivers and their sounds. When we were kids, my brother and I would lie in our bunks at night, once we'd been put to bed, and listen for kiwis across a river that wasn't far from the hut. We could hear the river perfectly plainly and every now and again we heard a kiwi, which was like pulling a jewel out of a Christmas cake, it was so rare but it was so wonderful. And because we were listening for kiwis I think it really sharpened our sensitivity to other sounds and I did a lot of river listening.

DB: Tell me a bit more about Arthur's Pass and the hut there to create a bit of a picture for listeners.

AL: It was a one-room hut with a corrugated iron roof, of course, which we used to paint every two or three years, and a rain barrel outside the door. Very basic indeed. It had a coal furnace, we didn't burn wood. It was a coal furnace my poor mother cooked on patiently for a few years, which must have been tough, but it was great. It had a long bench table against one wall looking up and out a window up the pass.

As I said, the river was quite close. There had been a village built when the tunnel was being put through from Arthur's Pass to Orira, through the Southern Alps, with a collection of railwaymen's huts which were sold off when the tunnel was finished, mostly sold to my father's friends who were starting a Christchurch ski club and exploring the mountains.

DB: Getting back to rivers, what fascinated you about the sound of rivers?

AL: It's very complex. When I actually started working with river sounds and collecting recordings of them and making recordings of them in the 1960s, that was precisely why I turned to them. I'd been studying electronic music in Holland with Fried Michael Turnig and he was out of the Cologne studio that was really purist, you know, a very purist tradition of working only with electronically generated sound, oscillators and so on. I found the sounds sort of boring. The processes were interesting. The structures that people were working with were fascinating, but the sounds themselves seemed only half-alive to me.

I began to wonder what constituted live-ness in a sound. For me it's unpredictability and complexity combined, and water sounds are really complex when you start listening into them. They're multi-layered, they're multi-rhythmic and have all sorts of pitch patterns and lots of really nifty noise components. It was like glass, which I also turned to at around that time. It was a really satisfyingly interesting sound source.

DB: Prior to leaving Christchurch, were you involved in sound work, rather than writing music for instruments?

AL: No, nobody was really doing it, as far as I was aware, at that point. I left Christchurch in 1961 when I was 21. I had just finished a BMus at Canterbury and I think the only person I know who would have been doing that sort of work at that time would have been Douglas Lilburn up in Wellington. Had I'd gone to Vic maybe I would have had exposure to what he was doing and turned in that direction earlier, but unlike the situation now in Christchurch, where there's a wealth of activity in this area, unlike the present time, there was nothing going on.

Musically Christchurch was a very conservative town but also very encouraging of young musicians, which was my good fortune. However, when I got to England, as soon as I got to England, and was studying with a composition professor at the Royal College of Music, Peter Rasiim Fricker, he told me to go to Darmstadt, to summer school.

Darmstadt was a summer school, that's still running, at which all the current hot musical, compositional minds of the day were giving seminars and lecture series. Concerts of their work were being programmed nightly and people were arguing in pubs and restaurants all day long about their ideas. When I first went to Darmstadt, Modana was still doing this, Cage had been there the previous year, Lamonte Young was there that year, Stockhausen was lecturing, Boulez was lecturing, Berio was lecturing. It was a wild scene, it was a wonderful scene, and it grabbed me immediately. The forms of music and the ideas coming from them were deeply exciting to me, and then I met Koenig and I wanted to get into electronic music. It felt like the new medium at that time.

Of course it wasn't, it was already about 20 years old, but at 23 one's grasp of aesthetic history is sort of shallow, at least mine was. So for me it was a brand new medium and it opened up so many wonderful creative possibilities. I wanted to move away from instrumental and vocal music comprehensively, so that's what sent me off that way.

DB: I've read in an interview about you seeing Lamonte Young pushing a chair around a room. Tell me a little more about that experience, what struck you about that? Was it a new way of creating music, or the use of sound?

AL: The piece is called Furniture Music. Well, the context surrounding Lamonte's actions in that room was that of total Serialism. Boulez and Stockhausen and co. were all trying to figure out total serialism and therefore total control of musical parameters, right then. And that degree of hyper-control was perhaps intimidating. It doesn't jive at all with the way I think about sound, organising sound and organising music, and Lamonte's approach, which incorporated happenstance, the way a sound can change in the moment, it embraced that. And it was all about that in a way, it was an exhilarating opposite direction.

It opened up the possibility of a really different direction. But other than that, the sounds he was making on those wooden floors and a chair were really amazing, so much fun and constantly changing, you can imagine what they were like. So it was a little as if he had managed to switch on a whole new sound source for me and along with it came a whole new conceptual approach and it was just what I needed, what I was most drawn to. I was lucky to have that experience.

DB: Tell me about your first pieces after that experience. How did you start off your own explorations into sound?

AL: I spent a year in Cologne working with Koenig and studying electronic music with him in Holland. He would go there every month and teach seminars and run a studio and I was doing that for a year, at the end of which I went back to England and hooked up with a sound poet, Bob Cobbing. We started working together on tape pieces. I was working with found sound, working purely electro-acoustically. I was modifying his voice and collaging all sorts of other sounds with and against it. From there I moved out in a variety of directions. I did a series of electro-acoustic scores for Richard Alston who set up the London Contemporary Dance Company, he was great to work with.

DB: Tell me about working with glass, practically speaking, how did you go about experimenting with it? What kind of glass objects were you using and how did you go about getting sound out of them?

AL: The most unusual were, for example, four-inch by six-inch sheets of micro-glass, which is extremely thin and is used to make electromicroscopiece slides in much smaller sizes. To my astonishment it would make very deep sounds. If I would very gently shake a piece of micro-glass in front of a microphone, it produced really low frequency glissando and tones and so on, completely out of proportion to its size and thickness, I mean thinness, of course.

But there was always a wonderful disproportion between its frequency range and its size. I would go through waste bins at Pilkingtons factories and in one waste bin I pulled out something that looked like spun-out candy floss, extremely thin threads all jumbled up together and crushed together and for a long time I would crush two big chunks of this against one another in front of the mic which was a truly ferocious sound, horrific, ferocious sound, doing it in slow motion. I got the more standard things you might expect, large panes of glass from Pilkingtons. The most beautiful had a sheet of wire sandwiched between two thin panes and the wire would carry vibrations. Somehow if the panes were muted then the whole pane would be super resonant. I had a wonderful large one, a six-foot by six-foot one, that's big and very heavy. I would set that up on scaffolding. I was working with Harvey Metuson, an American, at the time who designed scaffolding structures for the glass, designed a lighting system for the glass concerts and would perform some of it with me. We would hang this huge pane of glass from the scaffolding and then I would bow the edge of it, sometimes with a solid glass rod like you find in a chemistry lab, sometimes with very long, four-foot tubes of glass, quite narrow in diameter. Being hollow they had their own resonance and I would move them in a circular bowing pattern or cross-wise bowing patterns getting the large pane to resonate along with the tube. I remember one of them had a somewhat roughened surface and I could rub a candlestick across it and get really deep tones out of it. These are some of the things I was working with.

DB: How did that translate into performance?

AL: Well I can briefly describe a performance to you. We would have total blackout in the theatre, which was always a pain to arrange, but we'd always manage to get it. Even the exit lights would be off, so that people's eyes, there was no visual input, whatsoever. Because even then I was trying to pull people away from the emphasis on visual culture and more towards aural culture. So no visual input, and I would be standing off-stage in front of a very sensitive mic, and just manipulating small pieces of glass a short distance from the mic. And these sounds would come through the sound system in the theatre, sounds of which people couldn't imagine the origin. Sounds that were really unfamiliar, they could make no associative connection to the sound so they really had to listen.

I figured people would listen harder and harder to try and identify the sounds since that's the way we normally respond to sounds straight off the cuff, and they wouldn't be able to identify them. It would keep them hooked, listening further and further into the sound. So this went on for about half an hour and then Harvey would have the lighting guy bring up theatrical gels, theatre gels, and put light onto the stage and on the stage there would be 12-foot by 12-foot scaffolding from which were hung various sized panes of glass like an enormous mobile, and a couple of bottle trees, the wooden trees that vintners used to hang their bottles on when they'd wash them out to dry. And I used to drop tiny pieces of micro-glass, a sort of shower of micro-glass down through the bottles, bouncing off the bottles and resonating. And there was a four-foot long by two-and-a-half foot wide corridor of glass tubes, four-foot long or maybe six-foot long. On each side the tubes were of a different diameter and I'd walk through the corridor swishing this curtain of tubes with mics suspended overhead. And so for the rest, about an hour-and-a-half, of the concert, all sounds were made on stage with these structures.

DB: You've mentioned the phrase 'anti-composition' in regards to The Glass Concert. Can you tell me what you mean by that?

AL: It was a reaction to total serialism and ultra control of all the parameters, the ultra-fine structuring of all possible parameters. It was in reaction to that. And it also came from my feeling that sounds themselves, an individual sound's intricacies and beauties, details, tends to get lost once it becomes a component in a string of sounds which are really mapping out some structural change, some structural aspect of a piece, or mapping out a larger sound element. I get very hooked on hearing all those very fine details and get very excited by them and the more they're stringed together and the faster they're stringed together, interacting, and the more they're used to interact with one another the less you hear of the detail, I think.

So anti-composition, it was like separating out all the atoms, if you regard a single sound event as an atom. Separating them all out, providing space between them so you can listen to each atom for all its innate beauties, as a little composition in itself.

DB: You've talked about trance states being important in music. Is this in terms of the time given to particular sounds or the way you listen?

AL: Trance states were a real interest of mine in the late 60s and the early 70s, less so since. That was a period of extended works, part of the times. My interest in trance states, trance music really came about because I got, and remain, I guess, very interested in how sound affects our bodies, always trying to bring our awareness of sound to that level, if possible. I got very interested in rituals in which trance and music are both major elements because I figured that the sound contributed a lot to going into a trance state, allowing for somebody to enter a trance state. And I was curious about what body changes this induced…making sound more visceral.

DB: Tell me a bit about the swapping of sonic meditations with Pauline Oliveros. What did that involve?

AL: They're text pieces, let me see if I can recall any of them. Her own sonic meditations have been published by Smith Publications and they've been around and been anthologised a lot. And she recently did a gig at the Serpentine Gallery in London and I wouldn't be surprised if she had included a sonic meditation in that evening.

My own sonic meditations for example: Settle yourself. Centre yourself. Then listen to the furthest sound, the most distant sound. Then stretch your ears even further for a sound beyond that threshold. And then continue to stretch them for sound even beyond that threshold, stretching your ears into the far distance. It takes quite a while to settle down enough to hear really subtle distance sounds but once your hearing threshold has dropped far enough to allow you to do that then it's possible to hear over considerable distances. So that's one of them and that's a form of meditation.

DB: I'd like to change tack slightly and talk about Piano Transplants. From what little I know there's four basic pieces. Could you tell me a little bit about the pieces?

AL: There are indeed four of them, one of them is called Piano Burning, one of them is Piano Drowning, one is called Piano Garden and the last one came to be called Southern Exposure. Piano Burning was the first of them.

The score for all of these is really simple, and the score for piano burning was: if you have an old microphone you can afford to burn up, put it in the base of an upright piano. Piano burning should really be with an upright piano, the structure is much more beautiful when you watch it burn than that of a grand, and they're a lot easier to obtain. Put an old mic at the bottom, at the base of an old upright piano. The piano must always be one that's irretrievable, that nobody could work on, that no tuner or re-builder could possibly bring back. It's got to be a truly defunct piano. So that said, place your microphone, run it out to some recoding device and put a little wad of paper soaked in something flammable - I used to use lighter fluid that catches really fast - down in one corner of the piano. Don't sprinkle lighter fluid or any flammable liquid over the whole piano. Gotterdamerang is not what we're after. Basically start the piano burning with quite a small flame, just a little bit in one corner, and slowly the flames will spread through the whole structure and as they do they burn away one layer of the structure after another until finally you get down to the harp and it's absolutely beautiful to watch. Often I suggest that people overstring the strings, so when they pop they really resonate. There's a group of people that are going to be doing it in Calgary for New Years Eve this year which I think is absolutely nifty, a wonderful date at which to do it. And it takes a long time, instant conflagration not being the idea, it can take up to three hours. The flames are the most beautiful colours because of the different varnishes on the instrument, so you get violets and greens as well as the reds and oranges. Sometimes I've seen things like smoke just spiralling up from between the keys. And the sounds are terrific. So that's piano burning.

DB: You're a pianist, or you were a piano student. Is piano burning at all a form of protest? Because it's quite confrontational, as far as symbols go, the burning of the piano. Does that come into it for you?

AL: Well if it does it's certainly a thoroughly buried motivation. I did the first piano burning because I wanted to record fire. Richard Austin and I were thinking of making a piece in which I would use fire sounds, he would use fire imagery and we'd heat the performance space up a lot so that the audience was really hot. We never got around to it. The piece was going to be called Heat. We started on it and I was mulling over what I could burn that would make interesting sounds, quite apart from the normal fire sounds.

I might have been living in Wandsworth at the time, in any case I was aware that in London old pianos could be dumped in Wandsworth County Council's garbage disposal area so it had a whole lot of defunct pianos. I was asked to do a piece in a festival on the Chelsea embankment so I talked the festival people into getting piano movers to move a couple of pianos from Wandsworth to the embankment, and took it from there, and recorded. The wonderful funny thing about the first piano burning was that its purpose was completely undercut by the fact that a whole crowd of people gathered around, predictably, but I hadn't been thinking about that, and talked their heads off for at least twenty minutes to half an hour of this very slow process, and they gradually simmered down, but there were always voices in the background on the tape so it was completely unusable. And then the event turned itself into some sort of curious, it's very magnetising, it turned itself into an event of itself, almost a funny little ritual, something in its own right, and I never tried to record any of the piano transplants after that.

DB: Was there anything, music-wise, that you intended to play on those pianos or were they installations for people to use as they wish?

AL: No, nothing special for those, but even before the piano burning or around the time of the piano burning, I'd been beginning to play Cage's music and was fascinated by piano preparations and decided that it would be interesting to do a permanently prepared piano and take preparations a lot further than he would ever have been able to do, given that he always had to pack up his preparations and go back to the hotel after a performance. I got hold of an old piano that was still viable, barely, but viable, and did all sorts of things inside it. I had a pair of doll's eyes that Hugh Davies and I had found at a toy parts store near where I was living in London at the time. And when you trilled on a couple of high notes the eye lashes would move up and down, the eyes would flirt at you. I had a lot of fun with that piano.

John Lifton, a good English friend and also an artist and composer, cut a whole in the side of the piano in the shape of a mouth, I got a lot of red plasticine and formed a mouth. And then he hooked up a bubble-blowing machine to the sustaining pedal, so whenever you pedalled, a stream of bubbles would come out the mouth in the side of the piano. And there were many other things inside that piano which I eventually left with Hugh Davies. When I had it, there was a dictum, you could only play Lilly Marlene on it, when Hugh had it you could only play a certain Bach Partita on it, that was it. Completely arbitrary simply for the sake of being arbitrary.

DB: Before we wrap up I'd just like to talk some more about water and the work you've been doing in the Danube and also the Hudson River, the Soundmap of the Hudson River. How did those pieces work, what's involved?

AL: The Hudson dates from 1981-2 and the Danube I finished in 2005. The Soundmap of the Danube is still moving around, it will be in Austria next year and in New Zealand, I'm bringing it to Auckland.

For the Soundmap of the Danube people walk into a space and are surrounded by a 5.1 sound system. Sometimes the speakers are on tall columns, sometimes suspended, which is a nicer situation. In front of you is a large map of the Danube. That's a river that few people see a complete map of. You see it in Austria, you see a corner of it in Moldova and so on, but very few Danubians themselves have seen a map of the entire river or really have a grasp of its complete shape. So making a map of the whole river itself was fun and interesting for people to look at.

The map is 72 inches by 36 and on it is listed each site at which I recorded, for which I retained the recording for the final mix. So there's a whole lot of little dots on the map, the main cities and countries and frontiers, mountain ranges, but no roads, none of that sort of information, and the river really jumps out at you. Beneath the map image itself is a list of all the sites. Each little dot has a number associated with it and you look down below the map to that number and you find out not only where the recording was made but at what time in the running cycle of the whole piece, which is nearly three hours, that you can hear that site. Next to the map is a time display which progresses through the three hours and then automatically, with the looping of the audio, restarts. What people are mostly doing is looking at the time display and then checking back on the map to figure what site they're listening to.

Beneath the map is a jumble of rocks I picked out of the river bed, feeling that a lot of what we do is virtual now and not tactile and one misses the tactile, and rivers are very tactile indeed. So I wanted to give people's hands a direct connection to the river. And these are rocks which are reshaped by the river, scratched up, amazing shapes, some of them are hollow, beautifully coloured. So they lie under the map and people can pick them up and turn them over in their hands and smell them and make that sort of connection to the river. I was recording at the surface and I also recorded underwater. I borrowed a friend's hydrophone on and off for five years which was amazingly generous, Maggie Pane, another composer, so I recorded underwater and also along the banks, of course. I was always recording ambient sounds, human activity and animals, geese, frogs and all the various denizens of the river. I also talked with people along the river, trying to get at what the river means to them and I was looking for people to whom the river is absolutely central in their lives. And there's such a wonderful flow of languages and dialects down that river. It goes through ten countries. Austria and Germany are both German but different dialects and from then on each language is different. Serbian and Croatian are related but they're making distinctions these days, and from then on each language is really different, so the flow of languages is rich.

I would ask people 'what does the river mean to you and could you live without it?' and this would elicit all sorts of wonderful answers which stayed in the original language, so there's a book of translations of all these voices that drift in and out of the river sounds. You can go to the book and see what you are listening to. And the sounds are just moving around that circle of five speakers as you listen.

DB: When you recorded were you walking?

AL: I did it all by walking and hiking. I tried once recording while moving down river in a boat, and the boat sound was really intrusive and that wasn't what I was interested in. What I was getting at with that piece, which I finally realised, was that I was trying to figure out what a river is. I've been listening to rivers all my life, but trying to figure out what is the nature of a river, so I wasn't interested in accumulating bumps and so on from inside a boat.

I did a lot of walking. I would go over to Europe with my partner Ruth Anderson, another composer. We'd rent a car and the further east we got the older the cars got and we'd just follow fishermen's tracks, little roads, little local roads going along, and get out and walk and wait for my ears to prick up when I heard a sound I hadn't heard before, and settle down for half an hour or more and record it.

DB: And what did you find out about the nature of rivers?

AL: It would be neat if I could synopsise it verbally but I can't. My body knows, it's a sort of body knowledge or a sense in my body of something at least of the nature of a river, but it's nothing I think I could ever put into words. But then I made a whole audio piece about that, which is that. So you listen to the piece and maybe a little bit of the essence of a river is encapsulated in those sounds. They are the sounds of a river.