This album marks the culmination of a long collaborative relationship rooted in a mutual love of exploring piano resonances, and brings together the complete concert piano works by Annea Lockwood. In the last piece, a transducer speaker inside the instrument transforms and transmutes the pianist’s voice and memory itself in a new version of Ceci N’est Pas Un Piano made especially for this project, fed through the resonance of the frame.

Xenia first discovered the music of Annea Lockwood as an undergraduate music student at Victoria University of Wellington in the late 1990s. She remembers listening to Red Mesa and reading about Piano Transplants, which she found to be radical, exciting and inspiring.

Sixteen years later, Xenia finally got to meet Annea and talk about the lives, deaths and memories of pianos while working on Piano Burning in North Wales, subsequently learning the complete concert works and realising other Piano Transplants. Their conversations about music, nature and memory continued over the years in New York, London, Belfast, Peekskill and the two Bangors (Wales and Northern Ireland); while combing the Irish coastline for round rocks to bounce on piano strings and through correspondence.

Piano Garden, one of the Piano Transplants installations, is thriving in Rathmullan, Ireland, where Xenia planted it with great care in 2023. Then, in 2024, she joined composer Catherine Kontz in Luxembourg, playing Cardew on another piano which Catherine and Annea had planted the same year (together with composer Ed Bennett) in a slanted trench in the garden of the European Courts of Justice. Piano Garden opens the instrument to the unpredictable, ongoing ‘preparations’ created by plants, curious animals and weather.

The “indoor” piano works take a similar approach. The composer’s treatment of the instrument requires both the performer and the listener to “walk” with their ears, savouring an evolving menu of gourmet sounds ranging from the breath-like scuttling of cedar balls on the strings to strident scrapes, percussive strikes and bass roars. The piano becomes a collection of sound sources discovered over time through objects and tactile connections, while the placement, timing and repetition of events varies and is modified by the performer in response to the resonance of the instrument and the space it occupies.

Tracklist

1. Ear-Walking Woman (13:17)
2. Red Mesa (14:45)
3. RCSC (3:24)
4. Ceci N’est Pas Un Piano (10:34)

Ear-Walking Woman (excerpt)

Red Mesa (excerpt)

RCSC (excerpt)

Ceci N’est Pas Un Piano (excerpt)

Programme Notes

RCSC (2001) was commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill as one of a set of seven short pieces by women composers honoring Ruth Crawford Seeger, whose music I deeply admire. The title is a near-palindrome of their names, and for its pitch content I drew on the ten-note row from the final movement of Crawford’s String Quartet 1931. RCSC is dedicated to Sarah Cahill.

Red Mesa (1989) was written at the request of the composer and pianist Max Lifchitz, and is dedicated to Ruth Anderson. It was written after a solo journey I made in the starkly beautiful Four Corners desert country of the American Southwest in 1988. A mesa is a flat-topped tableland with steep flanks. Some, such as Mesa Verde, shelter cliff dwellings, pueblos with origins dating back to the 500s A.D., elegant houses and ceremonial structures arising by the early 1100s, and largely deserted by the early 14th century, due, it is thought, to a long drought.

Ear-Walking Woman (1996) was commissioned by pianist Lois Svard, to whom it is dedicated. It is a collaboration in which the player is using various tools such as bubble wrap, a pestle, stones, small wooden balls etc. I ask her to listen closely to the sounds created by each action, exploring the new sounds which always arise when she uses a little more pressure, a slightly different wrist position or timing, a different make of piano. I call this “ear-walking”.

Ceci N’est Pas Un Piano (2002) was commissioned by pianist Jennifer Hymer to whom it is dedicated. It has long been my feeling that musical performance is a deeply generous gift, drawing as it does on the performer’s whole body, history and spirit. With Ceci… I want to acknowledge that, asking Xenia to talk about her hands and about pianos she owns and loves, then weaving her recorded thoughts and memories into the sonic flow, eventually directly through the piano’s resonance, merging her voice with her instrument.

Xenia’s beautiful interpretations of these pieces bring them to life so vividly. I am also deeply grateful to the exceptional pianists, above, whose invitations have enticed me back to the inexhaustible sound world of the piano, my first instrument.
— Annea Lockwood

Biographies

Annea Lockwood

Environmental sound is the ground of Lockwood’s thinking and much of her work: Wild Energy (2014) with Bob Bielecki – a sound installation focused on geophysical, atmospheric and mammalian infra and ultra sound sources, is permanently installed at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts. Inside the Watershed, (2022), a collaborative installation with Liz Phillips, brought the underwater world of the Schuylkill River up onto the riverbank at an arbor in Philadelphia, and On Fractured Ground (2023) reveals the interior sonorities of the peace walls in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Annea Lockwood has been a recipient of many commissions, most recently from the Fromm Foundation for a collaboration with flutist Claire Chase. In 2022 she was honored with the SEAMUS (Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States) Lifetime Achievement Award, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2022.

Xenia Pestova Bennett

Pianist, composer and improviser Xenia Pestova Bennett has earned an international reputation as a leading proponent of uncompromising music. Her work spans a wide range of sound worlds, styles and genres from classical and contemporary art music to free improvisation, experimental electronica, multimedia and avant-pop.

Xenia has been featured at international festivals and concert halls around the world including at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, National Concert Hall in Dublin, The Glasshouse Gateshead, Glasgow Royal Concert Halls, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Festival Archipel (Geneva), Approximation (Dusseldorf), Ars Musica (Brussels), Christchurch Arts Festival (New Zealand), Lanaudière (Canada), London Contemporary Music Festival, Musica (Strasbourg), New Music Dublin, Royal Albert Hall (London), Sonorities (Belfast), Spark (USA), Rainy Days (Luxembourg) and Voix Nouvelles Royaumont (France). She has also performed in a tropical rainforest, on a river ferry, deep inside cave systems and underground fortresses and while partially submerged in a pond.

CREDITS

Recording, editing and mixing: Craig Jackson (SARC).
Recorded at the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast.
Mastering by Yannis Kyriakides.
Thank you to Ed Bennett and Pedro Rebelo.
Cover illustration and design by Isabelle Vigier.
Programme notes by Annea Lockwood.