Ed Cooper: 'Listening with Annea Lockwood's Rivers'

‘World’ does not mean anything other than this ‘nothing’ that no one can ‘mean’ [vouloir dire], but that is said in every saying: in other words, Being itself as the absolute value in itself of all that there is, but this absolute value as the being-with of all that is itself bare and impossible to evaluate. It is neither meaning [vouloir-dire] nor the giving of value [dire-valoir], but value as such, that is, ‘meaning’ which is the meaning of Being only because it is Being itself, its existence, its truth. Existence is with: otherwise nothing exists.

             — Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (1996)

In Novalis’s dream, water is at the heart of the experience; it continues to rock the dreamer while he is resting on the river bank. This is an example of the constant activity of an oneiric material element.

            — Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (1942) 

Environmental sonorities have resonated through Annea Lockwood’s musical work since the 1960s. The composer is perhaps best known for Piano Burning (1968) in which, as the title suggests, an upright piano is set alight, and the pianist is instructed to play whatever pleases them for as long as they can. Although Lockwood specifies that the piano used ought to be beyond a state of repair, there is feasibly a kind of détournement at work here: burning the most classic of classical music instruments, which may optionally be adorned with balloons, as if (ironically) celebrating its own immolation.

The visual spectacle of Piano Burning is striking and evocative. There are, however, sonic dimensions to the work—the piece is, after all, a musical composition by a composer, who is a pianist herself. When experienced as an isolated audio recording, when listened to, a rather different experience emerges. The contained but natural wails of the fire form an undulating ambience: distinct sonorities blaze through and between each other, punctuated every so often by snapping clusters of piano strings. Piano Burning established Lockwood’s practice of using environmental sounds as musical materials, orchestrated to ends beyond the simply disruptive or destructive. Its curated interplay between seemingly natural and artfully unnatural sounds instead invites a novel way of listening—of relating to the perceived environment—that might otherwise be inaccessible.

Lockwood’s ongoing project River Archives builds on this concern of reimagining a listener’s relationship to environmental sound. The series thus far comprises ‘sound maps’ of the Hudson, Danube, and Housatonic, completed in 1982, 2005, and 2013 respectively. These are long compositions, originally intended as sound installations but now available as stereo recordings, comprised of sounds collected by Lockwood on trips up and down each of the three rivers. Crucially, these acts of mapping are not neutral documentations of the natural world. Instead, through their status as musical compositions, they serve to draw out particular characteristics of their source through the peculiar kind of listening that they require.

Lockwood herself has made a number of comments on such aural invitations. In a short statement given as part of London-based symposium eavesdropping in 2020, entitled ‘The Necessity of Re-attachment’, Lockwood recalls standing in her garden, noting how she caught herself ‘listening to and switched to listening with, at which point it really expanded and it became listening with the neighbourhood’ [my emphasis]. This talk shares its name with a short text by Lockwood, in which she offers the following prompts for listening ambiently, yet actively:

Listening with an awareness that all around you are other life-forms simultaneously listening and sensing with you – plant roots, owls, centipedes, cicadas – mutually intertwined within the web of vibrations which animate and surround the planet.

Listening so closely to a river that you enter the river, are listening inside a river’s flow.

Becoming one with the river as its sound enters your body – right here, not separate.

Here the separate functions afforded to listening with and listening to are not so easily distinguished; where the former might describe an attitude of wide receptivity, the latter converges upon its object—the river—to the point of (metaphorical) unison. Such entangled aural immersion is the method by which Lockwood, in River Archives, has attempted to ‘grasp the nature of the river, its being’, as she recounted in her lecture ‘Living by ear’, given at McGill University in June 2024.

Engaging with these sounds through digital recordings, however, institutes a remove at odds with these ecological, even spiritual, intentions. Moreover, sat at my desk in the south of England, thousands of miles away from places that I’ve never visited, the idea of ‘listening with’ a river appeared to me full of ambiguities. The preposition might suggest that the river and I are listening together to something other than us. Alternatively, I might listen with the river in the sense that I am accompanying it: perhaps we both help each other to listen. Or, perhaps, I listen with the river as if it is a tool, or prosthesis, something to be used to achieve a specific end. These ambiguities suggest an approach in which I do not impose myself on the river, but rather let the river guide my listening. An act of decentring oneself would seem to underlie such an approach: to be, yourself, a conduit. But how does this abstracted form of attention fit with the inevitable processes of selecting and editing at work in digital recording technology?

This question, of course, could instead be framed positively: How might Lockwood’s rivers be experienced as recordings while at the same time acknowledging her directive of ‘listening with’? I provide a response to this question below. Like listening to a recording (of a river), the linguistic representation of the aural is itself a distancing, yet enabling form of mediation and recollection. The aural always evades direct description, but this truth is marked with acute particularity here: ‘with’, as a prepositional relation, itself functions as a medium, rather than as something that can be directly addressed. I know that I can’t (truthfully or otherwise) recount my experience of ‘listening with’ Lockwood’s rivers, a description which has already begun. The wager is that through such an essentially cumbersome, personal and, indeed, failing, attempt that something of a resonance of ‘listening with’ (myself) might be voiced.

* * * 

I play the sounds of the Danube through reasonable quality headphones in early April in a village just outside of Salisbury. It rains. I’m back at my family home, at a desk in my younger sister’s old bedroom. I like to write with the window open whilst my ginger tabby cat sleeps on the bed beside me. He’s gone this time. The spectre of winter echoes in the briskness of the breeze, which carries the pointillism of birds breaking their dormancy, the sounds of which are sometimes punctuated by feline snoring and stretching elsewhere. An engine in the distance.

I think I hear several sounds at once: a deeper drip into a hollow that describes a space, and much faster flows. German voices enter. I speak some German, enough that I can strain to hear, then understand, or otherwise let the words wash through my ears, avoiding direct associations. A plane produces what feels like a long, slow, descending glissando against the birds outside and inside my ears. Filtered at the edge of my ears.

A different water brims. Perhaps it’s somewhere new, perhaps it’s something new, perhaps it’s neither. I clear my throat and this fills my ears. (Sometimes I worry that I can’t do the sort of listening that I’m supposed to when I’m ill; I don’t like to listen when I’m ill.) New waters slowly emerge. The rain stops so the birds raise louder. I pause the recording because I’m bored and I listen to something else.

Maybe there are ways that I might hear Annea’s rivers in a more isolated fashion. I could listen with noise cancelling headphones or perhaps in a heavily noise-treated studio, though I don’t currently have access to one. I take my headphones off and listen to the recording through my tinny laptop speakers (perhaps this might help to ‘listen with’—even the sounds of my fingers typing nearly drowns out the rivers, but I can’t type perfectly in synchronicity as I listen anyway—not least because my internal voice seems louder than usual at the moment—but I doubt anyone would mind all that much).

Ethereal tones catch me off guard and reveal themselves to be church bells, plain or edited, I can’t tell. More water endlessly flowing on and on (I worry I will run out of ways to describe it). The water keeps coming, down and more. There is an intensity that wasn’t there before (or at least I didn’t notice it). Everything slows, not in terms of time which passes much quicker, but concentration. Welcome space between the bells. A quiet in the recording provokes a disquiet in me, sending me back to my surroundings. A suggestion that I cannot listen how I ought to or perhaps at all if I myself am not quiet (another clear of the throat and now a sore shoulder). I am and could be beside myself. (A) Silence and (a) lowly ambient sound(s).

I put my headphones back on. Space hugs my ears and a very small stream appears on my left, the side of my sister’s bed where the cat sleeps. The stream transforms into a metallic sound, perhaps insects, perhaps something else. A Bavarian accent, with its pleasing R’s, rolls between each of my ears. My cat comes back in the room—from the right—and wants to sit on my lap, so I let him. He claws me, gently, and purrs, strongly. I have to hunch around him to type, but I don’t mind (our chests purr together). The German R’s quickly fade and then re-enters with an animal noise—I look down at him.

More engines return me from the cathedral to the different river(s). Two distinct flows: one further away and one much closer. Annea’s rivers continue to play even when they don’t; pigeons coo—ascending and descending at what feels like regular intervals. I doubt my ears, so I momentarily remove my headphones. My aches intrude on myself; Annea’s rivers persist when they don’t play and when I listen to something else entirely. An obviously artificial zooming in on a new downward pouring, which also seems to be ringing; endless rhythms that pass me by, now augmented by the chug of what I assume is a boat but could be a train. To scintillate is to swash. A sustained screech, possibly really there, possibly really here; my attention is held and I too hold my attention (insofar as I type while I listen). The left and right are distinct; the former lower and hollower, the latter higher and somehow upwards. A saturation of downpour: it rains (in my ears). I think I see the drops against the window, but sometimes it looks like it’s raining, even when it’s not.

Ed Cooper (he/they) is a writer and composer. His writing is generally concerned with contemporary music, covering issues such as gender, musical bodies, and listening. These texts have been published in wide variety of journals, academic and otherwise, and appear in both English and German. His monograph, titled Aural Liminalities in New Music, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. His compositional work is widely performed throughout Europe, with recent performances by Terra Invisus, Anton Lukoszevieze, Kathryn Williams, and Jack Adler-McKean. His album, HEKATE'S VOICES, was released through Sawyer Spaces in April 2025.