At 85, Composer Annea Lockwood Is Far From Done Listening

Outside Annea Lockwood’s house you could hear the sounds of a gentle breeze, rustling the leaves of her tree-lined driveway and swinging the wind chimes in her backyard. Every so often birds would interject with a bit of song over the rumble of a car down the road.

“This neighborhood is a lovely, peaceful little place,” Lockwood said one morning last month. “But it has a very radical background.”

Lockwood, 85, a composer of insatiable curiosity and a singular ear for the music of the natural world, lives about an hour north of Manhattan, on street named after Baron de Hirsch, a 19th-century philanthropist who sponsored the resettlement of persecuted Russian Jews. Her house was originally built for the Mohegan Colony, a community with anarchist roots. Not far away, toward the Hudson River, people attending a Paul Robeson concert were once attacked in what came to be known as the Peekskill Riots.

“So this is an area with a right-wing town and a left-wing colony,” Lockwood said. “Fascinating, isn’t it?”

For the last 50 years, Lockwood has lived and worked here in Crompond, N.Y., in a house that she shared with her partner, the composer Ruth Anderson, until her death in 2019. But Lockwood also spends a lot of time outdoors, especially in recent collaborations with a younger generation of musicians that have taken her on adventures along rivers like the Columbia and the Elwha.