Composer Burns Pianos, Records Earthquakes at 86

Annea Lockwood, an 86-year-old composer from New Zealand, has dedicated her career to exploring the musicality of everyday sounds and environmental elements. Her experimental journey began in the 1960s with a fascination for "dead sound" in electronic music, leading her to environmental recordings. Lockwood's early works included amplifying and breaking glass objects, questioning how a single sound event could be perceived as a musical phrase.

This ethos informed her iconic "Piano Burning" in 1968, where she recorded the destruction of a piano by fire. She later experimented with "Piano Garden," planting pianos to observe their sonic transformations as nature reclaimed them. Her compositions also encompass ambitious projects like "A Sound Map of the Danube," featuring wildlife and human sounds along the river, and works inspired by the peace walls of Belfast, capturing the complex tragedies embedded within those sounds.

Lockwood's collaborations and personal life deeply influenced her art. Her relationship with composer Ruth Anderson led to private works like "Conversations," later released as "For Ruth" after Anderson's death in 2019. Her extensive "World Rhythms" project, which includes recordings of earthquakes and geysers, has seen a new expanded release. Through her radical approach, Lockwood continues to encourage profound listening experiences.