SOUNDS OF NOW: ANNEA LOCKWOOD – PREPARED PIANO

Iridescence and Tapetum lucidum (2023) are part of a cycle of ten pieces for piano, with Iridescence using the same piano preparations as Annea Lockwood’s Ear-Walking Woman. The sea permeates the movements of this piece – it is there and not there at the same time. Over the course of about four years, I lived in a very special house overlooking the Belfast Lough. According to some, it used to belong to a sea captain. On clear days, Scotland was visible just across the water with hills and wind turbines. The sound and smell of the sea was constant. Storms threw down tree branches and fling salt onto the windows. There were many birds: plump eiders, redshanks, oyster catchers, shags, guillemots, corvids and gulls dropping mollusk shells onto the rocks to get at the tender flesh inside. There were rock pools, crabs, limpets, snails; sea vegetables: dulce, sea radish, scurvy grass. Seals sunbathed and curved their tails into the air; sometimes, you saw little sea otters. Container ships huddled in the bay to wait out storms, their lights gleaming in the night. There was a little cove with the submerged cave, waves churning, cold-water swimmers in all seasons and weathers, starfish gleaming from the depths below, a whole unknown forest beneath the surface. Then, the beach: sadly, full of plastic, glass, golf balls, lighters, toys, bottles, and depending on rainfall, toilet paper. I am grateful to Bill Thompson’s cameo as captain of the CSS Alabama in 1864 on Tapetum lucidum.

Xenia Pestova Bennet

Red Mesa (1989) was written at the request of the composer and pianist Max Litschitz, and is dedicated to Ruth Anderson. It was written after a solo journey I made in the starkly beautiful Four Corners desert country of the American Southwest in 1988. A mesa is a flat-topped tableland with steep flanks. Some, such as Mesa Verde, shelter cliff dwellings, pueblos with origins dating back to the 500s A.D., elegant houses and ceremonial structures arising by the early 1100s, and largely deserted by the early 14th century, due, it is thought, to a long drought.

Annea Lockwood

Ceci n’est pas un piano (2002) was commissioned by pianist Jennifer Hymer to whom it is dedicated. It has long been my feeling that musical performance is a deeply generous gift, drawing as it does on the performer’s whole body, history and spirit. With Ceci… I want to acknowledge that, asking Xenia to talk about her hands and about pianos she owns and loves, then weaving her recorded thoughts and memories into the sonic flow, eventually directly through the piano’s resonance, merging her voice with her instrument.

Annea Lockwood

Buoyant (2013) 

I spend my summers on a large lake in N.W.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 of a boat basin on Lake Como, Italy. 

Annea Lockwood 

RCSC (2001) was commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill as one of a set of seven short pieces by women composers honoring Ruth Crawford Seeger, whose music I deeply admire. The title is a near-palindrome of their names, and for its pitch content I drew on the ten-note row from the final movement of Crawford’s String Quartet 1931. RCSC is dedicated to Sarah Cahill.

Annea Lockwood