by Louise Gray
It was while attending summer schools in Darmstadt during the early 1960s that Annea Lockwood realised that there was more to sound than its orderly manipulation into the composed form of music alone, into what Edgard Varèse would have termed “organised sound”. At the time, she was a young postgraduate student, newly arrived in Europe from New Zealand for studies in composition and piano at the Royal College of Music in London. She was an enthusiastic participant at Darmstadt, then very much the world’s focal point for the pure, electronic music associated with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and Pierre Boulez. She remembers the excitement of Darmstadt, its generous teachers (one of them was the German-Dutch composer Gottfried Michael Koenig, with whom she later studied under), the heady atmosphere of it. “I was really drawn to, excited by, electronic music,” she recalled in an interview we did in 2016, “because now, finally, other than writing for one’s own instrument, I was having the experience of feeling that sound was in my own hands and malleable. [It was] just there for me to work with, which was thrilling.”1