On the occasion of the Fromm Music Foundation concert celebrating the last two decades of her groundbreaking work, the visionary composer Annea Lockwood sits down with writer, photographer, and art historian Teju Cole, and musician and professor Claire Chase.
The talk will open with a performance of Lockwood’s bayou borne (2016) by the Harvard New Music Ensemble.
Through conversation, they will explore the remarkable collaborative dimensions of Lockwood’s compositional process, with special attention to the works featured on the November 6 performance––Becoming Air (2018), Jitterbug (2007), Buoyant (2013), and Into the Vanishing Point (2019)––and invite the audience into the dialogue.
Featuring:
- Annea Lockwood, composer
- Moderated by Teju Cole, writer, photographer, art historian, and Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing
- The Harvard New Music Ensemble
Curated and Hosted by Professor Claire Chase
Parking: Please note that ArtLab does not have parking, and area street parking is limited. Rideshare and public transit are recommended.
About the artists:
Annea Lockwood, composer
Annea Lockwood (b. 1939), was recently described by The New York Times as “a composer of insatiable curiosity and a singular ear for the music of the natural world,”
Since 1970 Lockwood has recorded rivers in many countries, not to document them, but rather for the special state of mind and body which the sounds of moving water create when one listens intently to the complex mesh of rhythms and pitches. Each stretch of a river has its own sonic texture, formed by the terrain, varying according to the weather, the season and, downstream, the human environment whose sounds are intimately woven into the river’s sounds.
“With bringing rivers into an urban environment through sound, I’ve long hoped to convey the experience of that sound as a nourishing form of energy. And perhaps indirectly, over time, the experience becomes real, concrete, immediate, close up. Perhaps that person will slowly be able to empathize or understand more, even take steps politically and socially to preserve the phenomenon. My process is really indirect but it is direct.” – Annea Lockwood
More information about Annea Lockwood
Jacek Smolicki (Loeb/ ArtLab Fellow Loeb ArtLab Fellow)is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher whose work explores the critical, existential, and technological dimensions of listening, recording, and archiving across human and more-than-human contexts. His practice encompasses soundwalks, soundscape compositions, experimental archives, and installations. He co-founded the Walking Festival of Sound, a nomadic platform that connects artists, researchers, and local communities around the role of sound in shaping our environments.
Claire Chase (Professor, Harvard Department of Music) is a soloist, collaborative artist, educator, curator and advocate for new and experimental music. She has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of composers, and she has championed new music internationally by forming organizations, cultivating intersectional alliances, founding commissioning initiatives and supporting community and education programs that reach new audiences. She was the first flutist to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012, and in 2017 was the first flutist to be awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Chase has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from The Curtis Institute of Music and The Cleveland Institute of Music.
Teju Cole (Gore Vidal Professor of Creative Writing, Harvard Department of English) is a novelist, essayist, and photographer. He was the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine from 2015 until 2019. He is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine.
This public program is a collaboration of Harvard University, Department of Music and ArtLab, with support from the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA), the Johnson-Kulukundis Family President’s Fund for Arts at Harvard University, and Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard.