“ ‘Go to a river,’ begins the text score for Annea Lockwood’s ‘Water Meditations,’ from 1973, writes Kerry O’Brien in Friday’s (11/8) New York Times. “It’s not the typical instruction one expects from a musical score, but it is characteristic of Ms. Lockwood … a composer of audacious experimental works on the border of musical performance and conceptual art … Ms. Lockwood turned 80 in July, and she is being celebrated on Thursday with a Composer Portrait concert at the Miller Theater at Columbia University. Featuring a premiere by the piano-percussion quartet Yarn/Wire, the event is a tribute to Ms. Lockwood’s devotion to collaboration and her reverence for sound’s potential to move people, particularly in a time of environmental crisis…. [In] the mid-1960s, she began assembling a ‘River Archive,’ soliciting recordings from around the globe. She began corresponding with the like-minded composer Pauline Oliveros…. Her [2016] work ‘bayou-borne (for Pauline)’ [is] dedicated to Oliveros. The graphic score is a map, depicting six bayous that converge in Oliveros’s hometown, Houston. Weeks before the September 2017 premiere, Hurricane Harvey struck…. Her new piece for Yarn/Wire, ‘Into the Vanishing Point,’ originated as a reflection on the climate crisis.”
Posted November 12, 2019
