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Annea Lockwood
Ruth Anderson
SINOPAH
World Rhythms
Sounds & Sources
Volcanic eruptions: Hawaii Earthquakes: from che archives of the Lamont-Doherty Geological Laboratory of Columbia University; include a T-phase quake recorded on the floor of the Tasman Ocean, which bounced between the Australian and New Zealand coasts. Radio waves', from a pulsar in the Vela Supernova, recorded at Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico and at the Radio Astronomy Observatory, Greenbank National Observatory, West Virginia. Geysers and mud pools: from Yellowstone National Park. Rivers: Feldspar Brook, Calamity Brook, the Opalescent River (tributaries of the upper Hudson River), the Hudson River. Peepers (tree frogs): recorded near the Mississippi River, A bonfire with crows: recorded in Ingatestone, Essex, England. Waves: on Flathead Lake, Montana. Human breathing A large tam-tam: recorded in one continuous take at the California Institute of the Arts-Annea Lockwood playing.
These sounds are a physical manifestation of energies which shape us and our environment constantly, energies of which we are not always aware, but which powerfully influence and interact with the rhythms of our bodies. They have their own intrinsic rhythmic patterns, and are also interactive with one another. Sometimes this is perceptible to us, as with the linkage between oceanic volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and coastline changes. Often however, the time scale is too great or the effects too subtle for human perception. World Rhythms explores the intuition that such rhythms are components of one vast rhythm.
Many of these sounds are familiar to people from their own aural worlds, a common language. One night, after a performance in Christchurch, New Zealand, a woman came up to me and commented on how easy it was to understand the piece, because many of the sounds were part of her own experience. They can be corridors of perception for us also; in listening we are sensing other phenomena through their sounds, a way of coming to know ourselves as part of the phenomenal web.
The tam-tam is being played in response to an inner continuum. The player is asked not to respond consciously to the other sounds with which s/he is surrounded but to focus on the body's response to the action of sounding the gong, on the effects of that action and that resonance and on the duration of the body's response, waiting until all those ripples have died away before striking again. Thus the gong is a manifestation of an internal feedback cycle. I wanted to include some form of biorhythm, not a sonic analogy for such a rhythm, but the sound fully integrated with the rhythm, the action of playing giving rise both to the sound and the interior muscular and nerve responses which in turn set the pacing of the strikes.
World Rhythms originated as a ten-channel live improvisation in which the volcanoes are in stereo and each of the other sounds appears on a separate loudspeaker. Spatial configurations change constantly in the live performance mix, as the channel combinations change. The audience is surrounded by ten loudspeakers, and the tam-tam player and person mixing are placed in the center. It was first performed in 1975 in New York. I mixed the recording in real-time in the studio at Vassar College (December 1997), and would like to express my thanks to the California Institute of the Arts, and especially to Phill Niblock, for the opportunity and encouragement to finally make a full-length recording of the piece.
— Annea Lockwood
This is not an album of environmental sound for relaxation, though listening to it might have a calming effect. Nor is it sonic nostalgia for a "tamed" or even "cute" nature. Some of these sounds (especially if played loudly on speakers with good bass response) can bite! The volcanos, geysers, mud pools, and thunder recorded here are all dangerous (though exquisite) sounds, or at least sounds of danger. And the clicka-clicka-clicka of the pulsar is only a radio-phonic tracing of a phenomenon so huge (a star spinning that rapidly on its axis!) that it practically dwarfs human understanding.
The rhythms in World Rhythms exist on (at least) two levels. First is the immediately audible - the pulsar is slightly faster than the frogs, which are faster than the breathing, which is faster than the gong, which is faster than the volcanos, etc. Second is the rhythm of the mix. When do the sounds come in, how often, in what manner? A truly cosmic (from stars to frogs) set of proportions are presented for contemplation, both on the level of sound as a thing in itself, and also on the level of sound as a metaphor/manifestation of other ideas.
Emerging from the rich mix of compositional ideas in Europe/America in the early 1970s, World Rhythms is a big summing up of a number of strands in Annea's work: environmental recording (as also shown in her later A Sound Map of the Hudson River), concentrating on the structure of the single sound (as in her Glass Concerts), improvisation with live electronics (the large scale structure results from an improvisational mix of 10 channels of sound, each to its own speaker), ritual theater (two players - gong and tapes -meditatively performing, surrounded by an audience, who are themselves surrounded by an orchestra of loudspeakers), and the use of meditation to create musical rhythms (the gong player is following her own process, independently of the tape playback).
In live performance, with lighting and the performers' attitudes establishing the setting, and with each sound coming from its own location in space, the piece must have been awe-inspiring. Two decades later, reduced in scale to a CD in one's listening space, it is still impressive. Turn the volume up on this one, and if the neighbours complain, invite them in - the nature of this experience is too good not to share.
- Warren Bart, composer-performer
Annea Lockwood's work has frequently been motivated by a desire to read the deeper significance of the natural world. World Rhythms is her boldest and most audacious essay, a work in which she strives to atune herself, and us, to natural sounds as "one physical manifestation of energies which constantly shape us and our environment." (1)
A current view among some scientists is that the Earth itself is a self-regulating system, a macro-organism, a complex "identity" based on the ordered co-operation and mutualism of its component parts. Both in its concept and in its realisation, World Rhythms echos this belief in a "unified field of energies," of which we are part and to which we must align ourselves. The composer transcends her traditional role: in World Rhythms Annea Lockwood, for a time, becomes metamorphosed into a medium through which the world's natural rhythms are channeled, focused and brought into balance.
World Rhythms is much more than a simple transference of environmental sounds into the concert hall or art gallery. The work is not an artifact, its presentation not a "performance" so much as a "process," by which we can escape our human separateness and hear "the world as a web of diverse and coexisting energies enfolded within one vast rhythm beyond our perception."'21
—Jack Body, composer and Lecturer at the School of Music, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand
<1>"'Annea Lockwood, the score for World Rhythms.
<2>ibid.
Annea Lockwood
Born in New Zealand in 1939, Annea Lockwood moved to Europe in 1961, where she studied at the Royal College of Music and the Cologne Musikhochschule and rook courses at Darmstadt. In the mid-60s Lockwood turned to electronics, mixed-media and ultimately to the exploration of natural acoustic sounds, from which came such works as the Glass Concerts ('66-72), the Piano Transplants, Tiger Balm (72), World Rhythms (75), The Sound Map of the Hudson River ('82) and other installations and performance works. She moved to the USA in 1973 and since then has toured frequently in this country, Europe and Australia and has given numerous workshops in collaboration with Ruth Anderson.
Recent works include Shapeshifter, premiered by the American Symphony Chamber Orchestra in 1996; a microtonal piece, Western Spaces for Newband; Monkey Trips, created in collaboration with the California E.A.R. Unit; Ear-Walking Woman for prepared piano, commissioned by Lois Svard, and Tongues of Fire, Tongues of Silk, for eight sopranos and percussion. Her music is recorded on Lovely Music, What Next?/Non Sequitor, Opus One, Finnadar/Atlantic, Rattle Records, CRI and XI. She is on the music faculty at Vassar College where she teaches composition.
Ruth Anderson
I come out of your Sleep
Notes within the context of sound poetry/text-sound
I come out of your sleep follows a tradition of sound poetry, or text-sound, begun in part by Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate, expanded by Henri Chopin, John Cage, and Bernard Heidsieck, by Charles Amirkhanian, Carles Santos and Jackson MacLow, with seminal works in this area. These abstract pieces are formed directly from the sounds of the text used or created, with the full gamut of consonants, vowels and inflections, along with compositional techniques of process, repetition, patterning and overlap. Composers working with a broad range of media have used text-sound as one of their resources, as in Beth Anderson s performance piece, /// Were A Poet, which also plays with the meaning of the words. In her choral piece, Sound Patterns, Pauline Oiiveros uses a wide gamut of sounds which are less verbal than simply vocal. An electroacoustic work by Alvin Lucier, / Am Sitting In A Room, loops a tape of these words to interact with, and disappear into room ambience. Word shapes have been translated into vocal and instrumental gestures by Sorrel Hays and Steve Reich. Annea Lockwood recognizes sound as a form of energy and has created a duetchant, Malaman, in which the words for sound itself, taken from many different languages, create a flowing rhythmic counterpoint. Rap artists use both meaning and sound, working off word lengths, rhyme and dynamics to emphasize a message, with beat driving the momentum.
I come out of your sleep is based on the speech vowels in Louise Bogan's poem, Little Lohelia. Vowels have a natural flow, while consonants define separate spaces and trigger distinct rhythms. Some vowels form melodic contours, others are steady state tones of varying qualities on different pitches which form oblique rhymes with one another. Here they are whispered and elongated, interacting in four canonic lines. The shapes of vowels become breathed melodic arcs and tones, and that breathing becomes the core of a stylized meditation. In the poem, a dual self is described in mirror images. In the text-sound composition these images flow through their vowel sounds to resolve into one another. No longer verbal, they merge in a holistic recognition of the unity of the self implicit in the essence of the poem,
A very soft dynamic level is an integral component of this piece. It is important to listen to it in the way that it was composed, near the threshold of hearing.
— Ruth Anderson
Notes within the context of meditation
Today meditation in its many variations and forms has become more familiar in the arts and in medicine. 4 ' 33” - the so called silent piece by John Cage written in 1952 is a prototype. The great pianist of the day, David Tudor, premiered 4' 33"shortly after it was written and referred to the experience as "meditative." Robert Raushenberg's white paintings -preceding 4'33" — invited contemplation. Cage studied Zen with D. T. Suzuki. Through the 1960's and 70's, more and more artists of all disciplines explored and incorporated different forms of meditation into their works. Today, more and more performers practice some form of meditation. The general public has been introduced to meditation and its healing effects through programs on television and by physicians.
Ruth Anderson's music comes from a deeply internal awareness of intimate sounding. The setting of the poem using the intonation of whisper is a way to invite the listener to turn inward — to release any expectation of projected performance. Whisper means closeness, even secrecy. The breath rhythm is an invitation to meditation. The focus of meditation could be the poem, could be the breath, could be the sound, could be the non-threatening nature of the piece as a whole. The music creates a space of safety. The sound can carry one to an altered state of consciousness, one can synchronize with the breath rhythm, one can experience the relaxation response. The work is a meditation — the composer's meditation. One can awaken from the listening feeling refreshed as if sleep happened or that the meditating presence of the composer was real inside the room where one is listening and entraining. Entrainment is a function of music and of text. Rhythm coordinates societies for work and for play — this music is an effective coordination for peace, quiet and meditation.
— Pauline 0/zveros
Ruth Anderson
The conceptual basis for Ruth Anderson's most recent music has been her study of Zen. There are meditations for the individual listener as in Points and Resolutions, electro-acoustic works. Other meditative works are interactive, as in Centering, a performance piece for dancer with four observers, and Time and Tempo, an installation. The latter two works demonstrate our essential unity with one another and with our environment, through audio and visual biofeedback. Earlier pieces include collage, as in SUM (State of the Union Message), and The Pregnant Dream (with May Swenson) and electronic sound games, as in Triangular Ping Pong and Tuneable Hopscotch.
She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Artists' Public Service, New York State Council on the Arts, Research Foundation of the City University of New York, Alice M. Ditson Fund, and Fulbright Awards for two years in Paris, among others. Her work has been featured in festivals, on state or public radio performances, at new music centers in the United States, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia. Other recorded music of hers is available from CRI.
She was a flutist during her twenties, primarily with the Totenberg Instrumental Ensemble, with one season as principal flutist of the Boston Pops touring orchestra, and an orchestrator in her thirties for documentaries at NBC-TV, with one Broadway season at Lincoln Center Theater for the revivals of Annie Get Your Gun and Showboat. She then became founding director of the Electronic Music Studio at Hunter College where she also taught theory and composition, retiring in 1989.
Born in Montana, she now lives in the country near New York City during the winter and summers in Montana.
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