Annea Lockwood

Composer Annea Lockwood emerged early as an avant-garde innovator, establishing herself among the first to explore sound sculpture and mixed-media composition. Many of her pieces draw directly from found natural sounds.

Born Anna Lockwood in Christchurch, New Zealand, on July 29, 1939, she received classical piano training as a child while also hiking extensively through rural New Zealand, where an interest in the surrounding sound environment took root. She completed a bachelor’s degree in music at the University of Canterbury before traveling to London’s Royal College of Music in 1961; there she studied with Peter Racine Fricker until 1963. Additional studies took her to the Darmstadt Ferienkurs für Neue Musik, the Musikhochschule Köln, and institutions in the Netherlands. After returning to London in 1964 she supported herself as a freelance composer and performer. Her 1966 composition The Glass Concert called for two players to activate an assortment of glass objects—tubing and shards among them—and was issued on the Nonsequitur label as early as 1970.

Lockwood relocated to the United States in 1973, accepted a teaching position at Hunter College in New York, and began integrating performance art with found-sound materials. She maintained a personal electronics studio at the college, remaining one of the few women in the country to have designed such a facility herself. The Piano Transplants series, conceived in parallel with the heart-transplant procedures then being pioneered in South Africa, involved submerging, burning, or planting abandoned pianos at assorted sites. World Rhythms (1975) combined recordings of an earthquake, a fire, quasars, a volcano, mud pools, tides, and birds, each punctuated by a gong stroke. She later produced Sound Maps of the Hudson and Danube Rivers, capturing sonic events at multiple points along each waterway. In 1982 she joined the faculty of Vassar College and continues there as professor emerita into the early 2020s.

Her catalog has appeared on more than a dozen albums, principally through Lovely Music and Xi Records. Becoming Air (2018), created in collaboration with trumpeter Nate Wooley, employs extended techniques and electronics that intentionally undermine the performer’s command of the instrument, while Into the Vanishing Point (2019) confronts the worldwide decline of insect populations; both pieces were released together in 2021 on the Black Truffle label.