Annea Lockwood Beside the Hudson River
Coming to America
ANNEA LOCKWOOD: I didn’t come over here until ’73. Pauline got me over here.
FRANK J. OTERI: Really?
ANNEA LOCKWOOD: Yeah! [laughs] One of the many things that I’m grateful to Pauline Oliveros for…
FRANK J. OTERI: So how did that happen?
ANNEA LOCKWOOD: Ruth Anderson, my partner, had put in the electronic music studio at Hunter College and was directing it. It was the first one to go into the CUNY system, I think. She was going on sabbatical and called Pauline to see if Pauline would like to take her place for a year in the city. Pauline said that she had a sabbatical too, but she suggested me. I had been dying to get over here. Most of my musical friends were American by that point. I had been meeting a lot of people in London: Charles Amirkhanian, the Sonic Arts Union folks, Alvin Curran, and all sorts of good friends were here, Cage and Tudor and so on. I was dying to get here, so I said yes. I remember it vividly. I was in the bath. [laughs] I got out of the bath one evening, this call came from the States: would you like to like to come to the States? I had been trying to figure out how to get here for at least 3 or 4 years. I wrapped a towel around me and said, “Yes!” [laughs]
FRANK J. OTERI: At this point, 30 years later, do you consider yourself an American composer?
ANNEA LOCKWOOD: I’m often called an American composer. I don’t know. I don’t have a real answer to that. I still somewhere think of myself as a New Zealander. It’s my birthroots and it’s the soundscape and landscape that’s really triggered a lot of my work. Many of the ways that I think about sound come from my experiences in New Zealand as a child. But I live here and it’s the most nourishing environment I’ve been in yet. It’s given a lot to me. America has been very generous to me. So, yes, I’m both. I think I’m both.
FRANK J. OTERI: Certainly a lot of the environments that have triggered your work have been American environments, specifically this particular area we’re in.
ANNEA LOCKWOOD: Yeah.