Annea Lockwood has created groundbreaking works by using unedited sounds and forms already present in the world around us. Her music does not impose itself upon a place but rather listens to it, allowing listeners and performers to connect deeply with the environment. She invites musicians to work with what is already there, to become part of the sonic ecosystem rather than reshape it. Often, her focus is on natural spaces in flux — rivers, wetlands, shifting terrains — places whose identity is constantly evolving. A river, for Lockwood, is not just a stream of water but a living matrix of interactions: fish, insects, musicians stepping into the current; rocks worn smooth over millennia, bearing patterns that predate human memory. These elements are not background — they are the score.
In Bayou-Borne, six musicians trace the six arms of the Texas delta, following them as they diverge, flow, and ultimately converge into the sea. It is a piece of both geography and motion, in which listening becomes navigation. The work is dedicated to Pauline Oliveros.
In Jitterbug, six duos are embedded within the ambient soundscape of a river, performing musical responses to six stones found in that same river. Each stone serves as a tactile score, guiding musicians through its textures, shapes, and histories. Here, the gesture of holding becomes as vital as the act of playing.
Lockwood’s scores, often shaped by these found materials and natural phenomena, are less instructions and more invitations — ways of opening the world to us through attention and attunement. But this world, as her work makes painfully clear, is under serious threat from human activity. Her pieces do not sermonise; rather, they embody a form of ecological listening that implicates us. Her work calls us to reimagine our role — not as distant observers, but as co-inhabitants of a fragile and interwoven sound-world.
In 2017 MAZE gave a stunning interpretation of Jitterbug at the Tactile Paths Festival in Berlin, full of subtle detail and fluid energy. That they have returned to the work now – and have also created this beautiful realization of Bayou-Borne, for Pauline – is something for which I am deeply grateful.
Annea Lockwood
The members of MAZE deliver stunning realizations, particularly on Jitterbug, which sounds fuller and more alive, teeming with the natural world’s vitality, than any previous account I’ve been lucky enough to hear.
Peter Margasak – The Best Contemporary Classical on Bandcamp, April 2022.