Annea Lockwood

Saturday, March 13, 2010 | 8pm

NIGHT AND FOG (1987) Annea Lockwood
voice, baritone saxophone, percussion, ‘tape’
texts: Osip Mandelstam, Carolyn Forché

These texts, by Osip Mandelstam, the Russian poet who died in one of Stalin’s camps in 1938, and Carolyn Forché, a contemporary American poet, span 58 years and evoke the same darkness – the murderous state. The first and third songs are settings of Mandelstam’s I was washing outside in the darkness (1921) and the first two lines of The Age (1923), translated by Clarence Brown and W.S.Merwin. Forché’s The Visitor was written in 1979 after two years in El Salvador. The title, Night and Fog refers to the 1941 Nacht und Nebel Erlass, the Nazi decree ordering that people “endangering German security” be seized and made to vanish without trace; no information might be given to their families and burial sites were kept secret. A.L.

IN OUR NAME (2008 – 9) Annea Lockwood
voice, cello, ‘tape’
texts: Jumah al-Dossari, Emad Abdullah Hassan, and Osama Abu Kabir.

‘In Our Name’ is based upon three of the many poems written in Guantánamo by detainees with no expectation that they could ever be heard “outside the wire”. Many poems were confiscated by the Pentagon before the writers’ lawyers could read them and remain locked away, the Pentagon “arguing that poetry ‘presents a special risk’ to national security because of its ‘content and format.’ “, Marc Falkoff writes in his introduction to the collection which he has edited, ‘Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak’.
He also wrote the following biographical notes and kindly gave us permission to quote them:

‘Death Poem’, was written by Jumah al-Dossari,“a thirty-three year-old Bahraini national, [and] the father of a young daughter. He [was] held at Guantánamo for more than five years. In addition to being detained without charge or trial, Dossari has been subjected to a range of physical and psychological abuses, some of which are detailed in ‘Inside the Wire’, an account of the Guantánamo prison by former military intelligence soldier Erik Saar. He [was] held in solitary confinement from the end of 2003 [until 2007] and, according to the U.S. military, tried to kill himself twelve times while in the prison. On one occasion he was found by his lawyer, hanging by his neck and bleeding from a gash to his arm.” A recent interview by Josh White, published in the Washington Post, explains that Dossari denied “any connection to terrorism and was ultimately released to Saudi Arabia in July 2007” where he has recently remarried, is employed and doing well.

‘Brothers, bear the weight’ is an excerpt from ‘The Truth’, written by Emad Abdullah Hassan,who is from Aden,Yemen. “A prolific poet, he was taken into custody in Pakistan while studying at a university”. As of 2007 “he remains in Guantánamo, although the U.S. Military does not allege that he has participated in any violence whatsoever.”

The author of ‘Is it true?’, Osama Abu Kabir, “is a Jordanian water truck driverwho worked for the municipality of Greater Amman. After joining an Islamic missionary organization called Jama’at al-Tablighi, he traveled to Afghanistan, where he was detained by anti-Taliban forces and handed over to the U.S. military. One of the justifications offered for his continued detention is that he was captured wearing a Casio digital watch, a brand supposedly favored by members of al Qaeda because some models may be used as bomb detonators.” Having been kept in extended solitary confinement, like al-Dossari, Kabir was released in November 2007, and returned home to Jordan.

These poems are used by permission of the University of Iowa Press and are from ‘Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak’, edited by Marc Falkoff and published in 2007 by the University of Iowa Press. We are grateful to Stuart Dempster, New Albion and Deep Listening Publications for permission to sample a passage from ‘Didjerilayover’, on the New Albion CD ‘Stuart Dempster: Underground Layovers from the Cistern Chapel’ (NA076CD); to Matthias Kaul for permission to use his special mouth-loudspeaker; and to Lyndel Thiesen.

Thirst 6 or 2-channel “tape” (2008)

Thirst counterpoints tension and serenity, swinging between Grand Central at rush hour and sculptor Simone Fattal’s memories of her grandparents’ courtyard in Damascus – a place of sensory richness, wholeness and peace. Such memories create a refuge for the mind from the pervasive noise of crisis surrounding us. A Serbian song sung by Kristin Norderval, Jutros mi je ruza procvetala, threads through the piece. I am most grateful to Simone and Kristin, to Bruce Odland for his Baschet Structures Sonores samples, to Paul Geluso and Stephan Moore with whom I worked on this six channel mix, and to William Voelkle, the curator of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts at the Morgan Library, for the opportunity to record there.

Thirst was commissioned by Issue Project Room with funding from the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust; it was also supported in part by the Henry Cowell Award, made possible by the Henry Cowell Estate and administered by the American Music Center.

Sept Papillons (2000), for cello solo

“Sept Papillons” was composed by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (b 1952), and was the first piece she wrote after her opera “L’Amour de loin”. A dramatic departure from the opera in both scale and substance, the piece uses the the delicate sounds of harmonics to produce an ephemeral mood.

“Sept papillons” was commissioned by the Rudolf Steiner foundation and was first performed in Helsinki in September 2000, and premiered by the Finnish cellist Anssi Karttunen.

About the Artists

Born in New Zealand in 1939 and living in the US since 1973, Annea Lockwood is known for her
explorations of the rich world of natural acoustic sounds and environments, in works ranging
from sound art and installations, through text-sound and performance art to concert music. Her
music has been performed in many venues and festivals including: the Possibility of Action
exhibition at MACBA Barcelona, De Ijsbreker, the Other Minds Festival-San Francisco, the
Walker Art Center, the American Century: 1950 – 2000 exhibition at the Whitney Museum, the
Los Angeles County Museum, Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, CNMAT
Berkeley, the Asia-Pacific Festival, Donaufest 2006 Ulm, the Donau Festival Krems, the 7th
Totally Huge New Music Festival Perth, and the Ear To The Earth Festival – New York.

Her sound installation, A Sound Map of the Danube, is currently running at Schloss Orth, the
headquarters of the Donau Auen National Park. Austria. This is a surround ‘sound map’ of the
entire Danube River, incorporating a wide variety of water, animal and underwater insect sounds,
rocks from the riverbed and the voices of those whose lives are intimately connected to the river.
Other recent projects include Ceci n’est pas un piano, for piano, video and electronics
commissioned by Jennifer Hymer; Jitterbug, commissioned by the Merce Cunningham Dance
Company, a six channel soundscape with two improvising musicians; and In Our Name, a
collaboration with Thomas Buckner based on poems by prisoners in Guantánamo. She was a
recipient of the 2007 Henry Cowell Award. Her music has been issued on CD and online on the
Lovely Music, EM, XI, Rattle, Lorelt, and Pogus labels.

For more than 40 years, baritone Thomas Buckner has 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, 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. Buckner is featured on over 40 recordings, including 6 of his own solo albums. His most recent solo recording “New Music for Baritone & Chamber Ensemble” includes works by Annea Lockwood, Tania Leon, and Petr Kotik. He also appears in the newly released CD/DVD “Kirili et le Nymphéas (Hommage à Monet)”. This recording documents the latest in his ongoing series of collaborations between the sculptor Alain Kirili and improvising musicians and dancers. For the past twenty years, Buckner has co-produced the Interpretations series in New York City. He also created the Mutable Music record label to produce new recordings and reissue some important historic recordings, previously unavailable in CD format.

Theodore (Ted) Mook has been an active proponent of new music, particularly microtonal music since 1980. After graduating from the Boston University School of Music, he became a member of Dinosaur Annex (Boston) and performed with several other ensembles in the Boston area. He maintained his interest in contemporary music after moving to New York in 1983, and has performed with Speculum Musicae, the New York New Music Ensemble, Continuum, Newband and many other groups. He has premiered works by some of today’s most prestigious composers, among them Chen Yi, John Zorn, Daniel Rothman, Lee Hyla, Ezra Sims, David Lang, and Ralph Shapey, and gave the World Premiere of one of Roger Session’s last works, the Duo for Violin and Cello. Since the mid-1990s, Mr. Mook has developed a parallel career in computers, where he has worked in IT & programming for corporate clients, developed fonts for microtonal compositions, developed websites and worked as a music copyist and arranger.