Annea Lockwood and Thomas Buckner to tour New Zealand
New Zealand composer Annea Lockwood and new music baritone
Thomas Buckner are to visit New Zealand this May with concerts at
Auckland University’s School of Music (May 7, 8pm) and Wellington’s
Adam Art Gallery (May 9, 8pm), as part of the gallery’s Sound Check
series of events.
The pair, whose musical partnership dates back to 1987, will be joined
by New Zealand cellist Janet Holborow in presenting three electroa-
coustic pieces that engage with spirituality, injustice and cultural
memory. None of the works have previously been performed in New
Zealand.
The most recent piece, In Our Name (2009), focuses around poems
written by three prisoners, Jumah Al Dossari, Emad Abdullah Hassan
and Osama Abu Kabir, while they were incacerated in Guantanamo
Bay. Al Dossari and Abu Kabir were released in 2007 but the fate of
Hassan is unaccounted for.
Thirst (2007) counterpoints tension and serenity, swinging between
New York’s Grand Central Station at the ‘high tide’ of rush hour, and
Lebanese sculptor Simone Fattal’s memories of her family home’s
courtyard in Damascus – a place of sensory richness and peace. A
Serbian song sung by Kristin Norderval, Jutros mi je ruza procvetala,
threads through the piece.
Duende (1998) draws upon the remarkable and expressive array of
sounds which Thomas Buckner has evolved over years of improvising,
a form of personal vocabulary from which Lockwood has selected
particular sounds reminding her of vocal transformations heard in
recordings of shamanic singing.
Annea Lockwood was born in Christchurch in 1939 where she received
early training as a composer, completing a B.Mus with honors at
Canterbury University. In 1961 she moved to London where she
studied composition at the Royal College of Music, while attending
summer courses at Darmstadt. Lockwood completed her studies in
Cologne and Holland, taking courses in electronic music with Gottfried
Michael Koenig. In 1973, feeling a strong connection to such American
composers as Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, the Sonic Arts Union (Ashley,
Behrman, Mumma, Lucier) and invited by composer Ruth Anderson to
teach at Hunter College, CUNY, she moved again to the US and settled
in Compound, New York. She is an Emerita Professor of Vassar College.
Baritone Thomas Buckner has for more than forty years dedicated
himself to the world of new and improvised music. Buckner has
collaborated with a host of new music composers including Robert
Ashley, Noah Creshevsky, Tom Hamilton, Earl Howard, Matthias
Kaul, Leroy Jenkins, Bun Ching Lam, Annea Lockwood, Roscoe
Mitchell, Alvin Lucier, Morton Subotnick, Phill Niblock, Wadada
Leo Smith, Chinary Ung, Christian Wolff and many others. He has
made appearances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Herbst
Theatre, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Ostrava Days Festival,
the Prague Spring Festival and the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki.
Annea Lockwood and Thomas Buckner will be guests at the Com-
posers’ Workshop at Auckland University at 3:45pm on May 7.
Lockwood will also present a workshop for students of composition
at Wellington’s School of Music on May 10 from 2:00-3:30pm.