Annea Lockwood / Claire Chase /
The Elwha River

Annea Lockwood is fascinated by how a single sound event can be a tiny composition in itself, filled with intricate interior details, and encompassing its own unique structure. An invitation for intensive listening has long been a feature of Lockwood’s creative practice. She is fascinated when a sound shifts out of her control. Rivers, in particular, carry a multitude of gloriously complex and unpredictable sonic potentialities and have their own special sense of agency.
 

Lockwood has been listening with rivers for decades. Her work with rivers spans countries and includes sound maps of the Hudson (1982), the Danube (2005), and the Housatonic (2010) rivers, as well as recent collaborations on the Schuylkill River with Liz Phillips (2022), and the Columbia River with Nate Wooley (ongoing). Her distinction of listening “with,” rather than “to,” is significant – she sees herself as just one of many organisms that are listening  together, within the river environment. For Lockwood, listening offers a special channel of connection, a flow of energy from one phenomenon to another. It’s an ecological perspective that resonates with Claire Chase’s dedication to creating new ecosystems for the music of our time: a flow of vitalizing energy, vibrancy, expansion, creativity, sustenance, and renewal. As collaborators, Annea Lockwood and Claire Chase are acutely attuned to the intimate details of sound and the effect of sound on the human body.
 

Listening and Making with the Elwha

There is a third key collaborator within Elwha!: the Elwha River itself. Chase and Lockwood approach the Elwha as an equal partner, in the spirit of movements advocating for the personhood and legal rights of rivers, such as in Aotearoa New Zealand, where Lockwood grew up, which in 2017 was the first jurisdiction in the world to grant legal personhood to a river.
 

The Elwha runs for 45 miles through the ancestral and spiritual home of the Lower Elwha Klallam people, in Washington State. From 1911 to 2014, the river was blocked by two dams which decimated its ecosystem and unlawfully drove the indigenous people of the area from their ancestral lands. In 2014, following a tremendous local and international advocacy effort, one of the largest dam removal projects in National Park Service History was completed, allowing the Elwha to run freely once more through the Olympic Peninsula. Today, the Elwha’s rapid ecological regeneration is, in the words of Lockwood, “a deeply encouraging affirmation of resilience.”
 

Words alone cannot describe a river

Elwha! is the first of Lockwood’s river works to integrate a human performer right from the inception of the project. Chase and Lockwood prioritized spending time together with the Elwha, taking several trips to explore its sounds, make recordings and discover the ways in which Chase’s ‘voice’ – her flutes – could interweave with the ‘voice’ of the river. In response to these explorations, Chase incorporates an array of live and pre-recorded flutes in the work. Bamboo water flutes, glissando flutes, piccolos, bass flutes, C flutes, and contrabass flutes converge with the river’s multifaceted sound, diffused throughout the performance space through a seven-channel mix.
 

The work opens above the surface of the water, with the wild call of an elk and an uncanny response from Chase, who explores the whinnying potentials of a bamboo water flute. A cloud of bamboo water flutes (six pre-recorded by Chase, and one performed live) slowly shifts as the life of the river awakens. There’s a magic in not quite knowing where the wind along the riverbank becomes breath through the flute, or where rapidly rearticulated flute murmurings transform into the fluttering wings of a bird. 
 

Lockwood says that “words alone cannot describe a river, because words are not multisensory.” Sound, however, is a bodily experience, and in Elwha!, one feels as if gently immersed in the river itself. Soft splashes of water over rock adopt an almost tactile physicality in the space, emerging from the surround mix like the spray of a river caught in the wind, cool and refreshing on the skin. Chase’s many recorded layers of bamboo flutes, sliding in pitch as they are dipped in and out of water, carry us into the river with the contour of its intricate currents. A moment of improvisation with the Elwha is captured using the hydrophone, dipped into the river and slowly lowered and lifted, performing with the Elwha as a living instrument, and sonically evoking a liquid xylophone.
 

Reflections of being

Lockwood’s recorded river sounds are not artifacts to be manipulated like motifs in a composition. Rather, she hears them as articulations of the river’s being, and as invitations to collaborate with the non-human world. Chase accepts the Elwha’s invitation into the entanglement. The voice crafted through her many flutes is one which is woven from the rich pitch and rhythmic material of the Elwha, informed by research assistant Aleks Pilmanis’s detailed transcriptions of the river’s music. The river’s vital song emerges, manifested through Chase’s solo platinum flute, carrying us through a winding journey, before finally coming to rest within a cluster of flute voices.

With each of the seven flutes dispersed to a different speaker, the interplay of breath and sound is highlighted with wonderful immediacy and proximity. These sonorities evoke a reverence in their resonance and a vibrancy in their timbral twisting, until eventually dissolving into a cadenza of whistling tones, like spirits in the wind. The rich and haunting voices of seven bass flutes then draw us to someplace dark and deep, while soft splashes from the water’s surface and birds high in the trees above sprinkle the space with lightness.
 

In the salmon pool

The poignant low flutes become occasionally accented by short grunting evocations, squelchy voices with a güiro-like timbre to them. The source? Farting salmon! These striking moments were recorded by researcher Dr. Kelsie Murchy of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, who generously allowed Lockwood and Chase to incorporate them. Since the liberation of the Elwha in 2014, its fish life – including all five species of native Pacific salmon and four species of anadromous trout – is returning in a demonstration of extraordinary resilience. 
 

Lockwood was eager to collect sound recordings during the fall Chinook salmon spawning migration. She and Chase had already connected with David Tye, a fisheries researcher and resident of the area who knows the Elwha and its fish species well. Tye knew exactly where to find the salmon in their migratory return, and assisted Lockwood in recording near a logjam, which members of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe had constructed as a place for salmon to rest. The resulting recording is included within Elwha! and runs long and uninterrupted. We sit within this fishy world, the solo river dispersed through the seven speaker channels, swirling, currents bouncing off the logjam in intricate polyphonies as we listen to the mysterious exchanges of the salmon, the swishes and flaps of their tails.
 

A convergence of energies

The arrival at the river mouth is marked by the rising of many bubbling, tapping, whistling, thudding, rustling, gurgling, droning, bellowing layers emanating, gaining momentum, and eventually surging with urgency. Seven contrabass flutes are at the center of this convergence of energies at the climax of the work. As the mass of contrabass flutes fades, the glissandi voices of the bamboo water flutes re-emerge. We are left with Chase alone in the space with the diffused voice of the Elwha around her. We have followed the Elwha to its convergence with the ocean. 
 

To experience this work is to join in celebrating the liberation of the beautiful Elwha River, and to tune one’s ears to movements around the world advocating for more reciprocal, relational ways of being with and caring for waterways. Words alone cannot describe a river, nor can they adequately describe this work: it is better to listen.