Floating in mid-air
Lockwood’s most recent pieces are written for acoustic-electric instruments and incorporate multi-media and indigenous instruments in her compositions.
Thousand Year Dreaming, from which we've selected for you Floating in mid-air, was commissioned in 1990 by Essential Music. It grew out of an improvisatory piece, Nautilus, which Art Baron, Scott Robinson and Lockwood realised in 1989. They found that the sound of conch shell trumpets, didjeridu and frame drums really flowered in the resonant spaces they were using for the piece. Lockwood started imagining the sonorities possible with four didjeridus, gongs, conches and trombones and frame drums, all shaped by the penetrating and sensuous edge of oboes and clarinets. T
hat's Floating in mid-air, from Thousand Year Dreaming, released by Pogus Productions, whom we would like to thank for having us share this piece on our archive.
Annea Lockwood was born in New Zeland in 1939, she studied composition in Europe at The Royal College of Music in London, at the Darmstadt Ferienkurs fur Neue Musik and at the Musikhochschule in Germany. She's a composer and she has been teaching electronic music at the Vassar College for a long while. Her compositions often involve recordings of natural found sounds and feature non-conventional instruments, such as glass tubing and burning, traditional native Australian didgeridoos, conch shells and moreover in the 70’s Annea Lockwood began to compose what could be considered performance art pieces, though her work was still situated in the realm of music; they are considered so because the essence of the compositional ideas made the audience and environment agents in the piece.