Annea Lockwood.(Annea Lockwood. Ear-Walking Woman)(Video recording review)

Annea Lockwood. Ear-Walking Woman. DVD. Performed by Lois Svard. [n.p.]: Innovera Studios, 2005. IS 021. $16.49.

Pianist Lois Svard has devoted her career to the performance of contemporary and avant-garde music. Her most recent recording showcases Ear-Walking Woman (1996), a piece for prepared piano she commissioned from New Zealand-born composer Annea Lockwood (b. 1939). Lockwood is perhaps best known for her early conceptual work, including Piano Transplants (1969-72), a series of happenings in which she burned, buried, and drowned several pianos in a series of conceptual pieces. Ear-Walking Woman, a homage to John Cage's prepared piano works, employs many of the preparations that he developed during the 1940s: coins to simulate the sounds of the gamelan, screws to create sympathetic vibrations, and electrical sheathing to deaden the strings. Moreover, Lockwood notes in an interview included on this DVD that she drew inspiration from Richard Bunger's seminal prepared piano method The Well-Prepared Piano (1981) and from experimentation with a wide variety of found objects in her own home. Lockwood intends for listeners and performers alike to delight in the subtle changes of timbre and the unpredictability of each performance; the title, as she describes in an interview included on this DVD, "describes the process of walking with one's ears and discovering sonic details, a little like walking slowly in a woods and really scrutinizing the ground closely."

This DVD will be of great interest to performers, composers, scholars, and enthusiasts of avant-garde piano music for several reasons. First, performers and composers will be interested to view the "Preparation Demos," in which Svard and Lockwood offer step-by-step demonstrations showing how to prepare a piano, discuss some of the specific problems associated with such an endeavor, and show various ways to perform using these modifications. Second, scholars will appreciate the "Conversations" section, in which Lockwood offers her anecdotes about the ...