A lot goes into designing these programs for After Everything.

I spend a lot of time sitting with a mountain of music, thinking about it, experiencing it in every way–many of the pieces we perform do not have recordings– and wondering at the aesthetic experience that the audience might have when listening to it. This means that I usually feel incredibly confident and knowledgeable about each piece on every program we perform and am very rarely surprised. 

And yet, I was surprised at our February 1st concert by the Annea Lockwood piece. 

So much of the history of notated music is about walls and barriers to entry. There have always been gatekeepers, at varying times in history stronger or weaker ones, but the overall thrust has been one of an “exclusive club."  To this day, we're so often told: “You don’t understand classical music," that we have actually internalized that and even say it to ourselves. Often after a concert someone will say to me: “I loved it! Didn’t understand it, but I loved it!” This is about walls, preventing people from experiencing something.

Recently, slowly, we are beginning to see more cracks in these walls. Originally this took the form of tokenism, or appropriation, but gradually and over time we are beginning to see seeds of real inclusion in these spaces. Many artists that have contributed to this in their own small ways, but one who especially stands out is Annea Lockwood.

I’ll admit it, I chose this piece because of the title. Water and Memory. It just fit so well with my understanding of the nature themes of this concert series.  There is one recording of this piece, but honestly it’s a difficult piece to capture through a recording, so I was working a lot on faith.  Our own rehearsals of this piece mused more into philosophical discussion than perfections of passage work.

Come Saturday’s show, I was not expecting much from this piece, but I felt it was important to include music from this legacy of opening up to the world. After all, how can the world truly change from a position of exclusion?

But I did not expect it to affect me so deeply, or so well.

The piece uses breathing, humming, and speaking to emulate waves of water. The piece begins during the intermission itself, letting things start while the audience isn't even in their seats (water is always there). The humming reaches different degrees of intensity, and different words for water are spoken in a variety of languages. As this takes place, three people tell stories from their life about their memories of water. The sound framework for this piece elevates all of the stories. None of them need to be profound for them to become profound in the telling. Evan told of his first memory of almost drowning. Matheus told of a fear of heights and jumping into a lake. Nikola told of a time that they biked to Ocean Beach listening to Ariana Grande’s God is a Woman and then submerged themselves in the ocean.

I think a hidden aspect of this piece’s profundity is that water itself is profound. In some ways, just that Annea Lockwood asks the performers to tell a “true story from your life about water”, well pretty much anything that you would say that is a story that includes water, the water is significant.  The ritualization of water, the cleansing properties, the sense of rebirth, or of freedom, there is no way for water not to feel profound.  Each story told elevated the experience. They became not a story, but a chorus in the tale of existence. By the same extension, each note sung became a drop in the ocean, and by being part of the ocean, opened us all up to the one-ness of experience. The audience, the performers, the composer, all of humanity, at that moment, we were all together.