Annea Lockwood: Becoming Air Performed by Nate Wooley

ISSUE is pleased to present WITH, the second evening of FOR/WITH, a mini-festival featuring new commissions and works by iconoclast composers Annea Lockwood, Ashlely Fure, Felipe Lara, and Wadada Leo Smith. Now in its second year, the FOR/WITH series celebrates the collaborative process between performer and composer, the spirit of spontaneity in contemporary music, and the ever-present search for the new.

Organized by performer, composer, and 2011 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Nate Wooley, FOR/WITH simultaneously premieres distinct new compositions for solo trumpet while also embarking on a celebration of the independent work of the series’ commissioned composers. The festival continues to subtly revolve around Wooley’s project to commission artists outside the sphere of “capital T” trumpet repertoire to write solo pieces that feature the trumpet player as a whole, rather than the capabilities of the trumpet as a machine.

The second evening of the series opens with the world premiere of Becoming Air by Annea Lockwood, followed by the U.S. premiere of Library on Lightning by Ashley Fure performed by Rebekah Heller, current ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Brandon Lopez, and Wooley. The evening also features Felipe Lara’s recent composition Metafagote performed by Rebekah Heller, and, lastly, the world premiere of the duo rendition of Wadada Leo Smith’s Red Autumn Gold, performed by Nate Wooley and Leo Smith himself.

Her first-ever piece for trumpet, Annea Lockwood’s Becoming Air<.i> completely inhabits the concept of the FOR/WITH festival. It was composed through intimate collaboration with Wooley, using much of his improvising electro-acoustic vocabulary. And, yet, is absolutely an Annea Lockwood composition: performative, shamanic, and with an attention to the naturalness of sound that makes the audience rethink their aural surroundings.

Born in New Zealand in 1939, Annea Lockwood moved to England in 1961, studying composition at the Royal College of Music, London, attending summer courses at Darmstadt and completing 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 Crompond, NY. She is an Emerita Professor at Vassar College. During the 1960s she collaborated with sound poets, choreographers and visual artists, and also created a number of works such as the Glass Concerts which initiated her lifelong fascination with timbre and new sound sources. In synchronous homage to Christian Barnard’s pioneering heart transplants, Lockwood began a series of Piano Transplants (1969-82) in which defunct pianos were burned, drowned, beached, and planted in an English garden. During the 1970s and ’80s she turned her attention to performance works focused on environmental sounds and life-narratives, often using low-tech devices such as her Sound Ball, containing six small speakers and a receiver, designed by Robert Bielecki for Three Short Stories and an Apotheosis, in which the ball is rolled, swung on a long cord and passed around the audience. World Rhythms, A Sound Map of the Hudson River, Delta Run, built around a conversation she recorded with the sculptor, Walter Wincha, who was close to death, and other works were widely presented in the US, Europe and in New Zealand. Since the early 1990s, she has written for a number of ensembles and solo performers, often incorporating electronics and visual elements. Thousand Year Dreaming is scored for four didgeridoos, conch shell trumpets and other instruments and incorporates slides of the cave paintings at Lascaux. Duende, a collaboration with baritone Thomas Buckner, carries the singer into a heightened state, similar to a shamanic journey, through the medium of his own voice. Ceci n’est pas un piano for piano, video and electronics merges images from the Piano Transplants with Jennifer Hymer’s musings on her hands and pianos she has owned, her voice being sent through, and colored by the piano strings. Much of her music has been recorded, on the Lovely, XI, Mutable, Pogus, EM Records (Japan), Rattle Records, Soundz Fine (NZ), Harmonia Mundi and Ambitus labels. She is a recipient of the 2007 Henry Cowell Award.

Nate Wooley was born in 1974 in Clatskanie, Oregon, a town of 2,000 people in the timber country of the Pacific Northwestern corner of the U.S. He began playing trumpet professionally with his father, a big band saxophonist, at the age of 13. His time in Oregon, a place of relative quiet and slow time reference, instilled in Nate a musical aesthetic that has informed all of his music making for the past 20 years, but in no situation more than his solo trumpet performance. He has since become one of the most in-demand trumpet players in the burgeoning Brooklyn jazz, improv, noise, and new music scenes. He has performed regularly with such iconic figures and ensembles as John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Eliane Radigue, Ken Vandermark, Annea Lockwood, Evan Parker, Christian Wolff, Yoshi Wada, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), as well as being a collaborator with some of the brightest lights of his generation such as Ashley Fure, Chris Corsano, C. Spencer Yeh, Peter Evans and Mary Halvorson. Wooley has a long-standing history of working with ISSUE Project Room including being a 2011 Artist-In-Residence, developing and performing multiple projects, and also presenting the first iteration of FOR/WITH in collaboration with Annea Lockwood, Michael Pisaro and Christian Wolff, at ISSUE in September 2017