*David Behrman, zither, psalter, rattle, rainstick, processing; John King, electric guitar, viola, processing; William Winant, percussion; tape **Thomas Buckner, baritone; Theodore Mook, cello; tape ***Simone Fattal, narrator; Kristin Norderval, soprano; tape
Annea Lockwood (b 1939) distinguishes herself with works ingeniously combining recorded found and processed sounds, live-performance and visual components, and exhibiting her acute sense of timbre. While perhaps best known for her 1960s “glass concerts” featuring manifold glass-based sounds and her notorious Piano Transplants—burning, burying, and drowning obsolete pianos—she was drawn to the complex beauty of sounds found in the natural environment, which she captured on tape.
Lockwood was especially fascinated with the sonorities of moving water and water’s calming and healing properties and thus started an archive of recorded river sounds. From the 1970s, she explored improvisation and alternative performance techniques and asked her performers to use natural sound sources and instruments including rocks, stones, and conch shells. Having long been an attentive listener to nature and having given fragile and volatile nature a voice in many of her works, Lockwood has also occasionally drawn attention to vulnerable humans, such as a dying friend and prisoners deprived of their rights, in works like Delta Run (1981) and In Our Name (2009–10).
The current CD brings together three such works—Jitterbug* (2007), In Our Name**, and Thirst*** (2008), emphasizing non-human and human dignity and imaginatively merging musique concrète techniques with live performance.
