Lockwood, Annea F. (1939—)

New Zealand-born composer. Born on July 29, 1939, in Christchurch, New Zealand; daughter of Gladys (Ferguson) Lockwood (a history and physical education teacher) and George Lockwood (a lawyer); B.Mus (hons); further study at the Royal College of Music, London, with Peter Racine Fricker (1961–63), at the Darmstadt Ferienkurs für Neue Musik (1962–63) and with Gottfried Michael Koenig at the Musikhochschule, Cologne, Germany, and in Holland (1963–64); lives with Ruth Anderson (a composer and flutist).

Annea F. Lockwood was born in 1939 in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she received her early training as a composer. After completing a B.Mus., she went on to study composition

at the Royal College of Music, London, with Peter Racine Fricker (1961–63), at the Darmstadt Ferienkurs für Neue Musik (1962–63), and with Gottfried Michael Koenig at the Musikhochschule, Cologne, Germany, and in Holland (1963–64). Returning to London in 1964, she freelanced as a composer-performer in Britain and Europe until moving to the United States in 1973, where she continued to freelance and also taught, first at City University of New York (CUNY), Hunter College, then, from 1982 to 2001, on the faculty of Vassar College.

During the 1960s, she collaborated frequently with sound-poets, choreographers, and visual artists and created a number of works which she herself performed, such as Glass Concert (1967) later published in Source: Music of the Avant-Garde and recorded on Tangent Records, then on What Next CDs. In this work, a variety of complex sounds were drawn from industrial glass shards, and glass tubing and presented as an audio-visual theater piece. In homage to Christiaan Barnard's pioneering heart transplants, Lockwood created the Piano Transplants (1969–72) in which old, defunct pianos were variously burned, "drowned" in a shallow pond in Amarillo, Texas, and partially buried in an English garden.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Lockwood turned her attention to performance works focused on environmental sounds, life-narratives and performance works using low-tech devices such as her Sound Ball (a foam-covered ball containing six small speakers and a radio receiver, originally designed to "put sound into the hands of dancers"). These included World Rhythms (1975), widely presented in the U.S., Europe, and New Zealand, as well as Conversations with Ancestors (1979), based on the life stories of four women over 80, A Sound Map of the Hudson (1982), Delta Run (1982), built around a conversation she recorded with the sculptor Walter Wincha, who was close to death, and the surreal Three Short Stories and an Apotheosis (1985), using the Sound Ball.

In the 1990s, Lockwood began writing for acoustic instruments and voices, sometimes incorporating electronics and visual elements, producing pieces for a variety of ensembles: Thousand Year Dreaming (1991) is scored for four didgeridus and other instruments and incorporates slides of the cave paintings at Lascaux; Ear-Walking Woman (1996), for pianist Lois Svard , invites the pianist to discover a range of sounds available inside the instrument; Duende (1997), a collaboration with baritone Thomas Buckner, carries the singer into a heightened state, similar to a shamanic journey, through the medium of his own voice. Much of Lockwood's music has been recorded on American, English, and New Zealand labels and published in the U.S. and in New Zealand.