By Ruth Eddy
“Ruth Ruth ruth Ruth Ruth ruth Ruth Ruth Ruth”
Ruth Eddy: I have collected Ruths for a long time.
When I was a freshman in college I had daily access to the print edition of the New York Times. I would comb through the obituaries and cut out all the tiny paragraphs for people named Ruth.
A name in the sweet spot. Common, but rare.
[Music by Ruth Anderson, “Sum”]
Ruth Eddy: I’m a Ruth myself, which you might already know or probably guessed. I’m not sure what I’m looking for in other Ruths, or what it is about me that makes me really feel like a Ruth. Maybe I’m looking for something that we share beyond a name? How did the other Ruths do it? To find a connection anywhere is special, but a name is the shortest version of who you are. At least that’s how I feel about my name, Ruth.
[Music from “For Ruth”: “Maybe, mhmmm, laughs, bird song]
Ruth Eddy: A few years ago I found a really, really special Ruth. I was making the long drive home by myself from Portland to Montana in January. I decided to break the drive up into two days, and it was nearing the end of the first night on a long dark stretch of highway. I had grown tired of podcasts and audio books, and wanted to be surprised. I like to listen to the radio when I’m in the middle of nowhere, even though it’s often Christian or country music. You never know what the universe has to offer. This time, something different caught my ear. Instead of a twanging two step, there was lapping water and women laughing and birds chirping. And an unsettling droning noise. It was on an episode of “All Songs Considered,” a look back at experimental music from the past year. The track was called “For Ruth” and it felt like it was… for me. I’m going to play a bit more , so you can listen just like I got to.
[Music, “For Ruth”]
Ruth Eddy: I kept driving, but I didn’t forget what I heard. Who was this Ruth? Both of these women? And why did those sounds find me? Back home, I did some searching and it didn’t take long to find the full album online. “Tete-a-Tete,” literally meaning head-to-head. The album cover revealed a bit more: a black and white photo of two women in uproarious laughter. Head to head. It was so clear this was so real, maybe experimental, but I was listening to love. I read the description of “For Ruth.” The song was made by Annea Lockwood for Ruth Anderson, an elegy for her life partner who’d died a few years prior.
[Music: “For Ruth,” I love you, bye bye darling, bye bye]
Ruth Eddy: But, it was more than that. It was kind of a love letter, or a remixed-mix-tape love letter. A conversation between two lovers across time. Both Ruth and Annea are sound artists and composers – that’s how they met. It happened in the 1970s. Ruth had established an electronic music studio at Hunter College in New York and before she went on sabbatical, she hired Annea to take it over – temporarily. For Annea, they were big shoes to fill.
Annea Lockwood: I was nervous as hell because I hadn’t worked with voltage controlled electronics in, actually in-person. And, so I thought, oh god, I’m not going to be able to teach Ruth’s studio. I’m not up to date, and she showed up in very Montana style. Blue shirt, white shorts, sneakers with a hole in the toe (laughs) and she was totally instantly relaxing accordingly. She took us off to the FBI canteen and got us tomato juice.
Ruth Eddy: That’s because the music studio shared a building with the local FBI office. Something just funny. Annea and Ruth were exploring similar concepts in composing. Experiencing music , sound, and time outside of the measured lines that music had been written in before. Their connection was instant- maybe like they had found each other. While Ruth was away on sabbatical they talked almost every day on the phone, quickly falling in love. Ruth made recordings of these phone calls.
[Music, “Conversations”]
Ruth Eddy: And when Annea had to leave the country – to go back home to New Zealand for a bit – Ruth gave her an audio piece made of sound bites of them laughing and talking and just breathing together.
Annea Lockwood: as a gift to take with me so that her voice would be with me, because she knew I was going to miss her like crazy while I was away. }
Ruth Eddy: These intimate recordings were the foundation of their relationship, which lasted nearly 50 years, until Ruth died at the age of 91. I discovered Ruth Anderson was born in Montana. Which is where I live. I kept looking for more parallels with this other Ruth from Montana, because, you know, I do that, like I said. And I found them. The liner notes to Tete-a-Tete said “They spent most of their private life between Crompond, NY, and the house they built themselves at Flathead Lake, Montana.” Flathead Lake? I could barely believe it, that’s the lake I’ve spent most summers of my life swimming at. Where my great-great-grandparents were homesteaders. I was born on March 20th. She was born March 21. She cared a lot about sound and so do I. But this Ruth? She’s a real somebody. She has her own Wikipedia page with a smiling photo of her sitting above her stats in the upper right gray box, like notable people have. Born: Kalispell Died: The Bronx. Occupation(s) Orchestrator, composer, teacher. Known for: Electronic music
[Music, “So What”]
Ruth Eddy: She also had a lengthy obituary in the New York Times. Not the small paragraphs in the way back of the paper I had made a collection of years ago, lots of paragraphs. The headline called her a “pioneering electronic composer.”
[Music, “Pregnant Dream,” “I had a dream, in which I had a dream”]
Ruth Eddy: She made sound collages, and was also interested in the healing properties of sounds, making compositions of pure sine waves.
[Music, “pure sine waves”]
Ruth Eddy: To know more about Ruth, it was clear I needed to know more about Annea. Their work was similar – but also very different. While Ruth was working in sine waves, Annea became famous for burning pianos. Something she says has been misunderstood as a rebellious act of an avant garde artist, but came more from a curiosity of sound.
Annea Lockwood: Well things such as the soundboard cracking can happen , and the soundboard is one of the major parts of the instrument, and if that cracks, you can’t exactly fill in the crack and have the sound board resonate properly anymore, it doesn’t. It’s not just a matter of the strings going out of tune} {Anyway… that’s not Ruth , that’s an old event of mine}
Ruth Eddy: Other variations of Annea’s composition for the piano – besides burning – included “Piano Drowning” and “Piano Garden” “Dig a sloping trench and slip piano in sideways so that it is half-buried…. Do not protect against weather. …Leave pianos there forever.”
[Music, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony]
Ruth Eddy: Most compositions (don’t last forever, they are set with a finite time. Mahler’s Fourth Symphony typically lasts (ALT : Just under an hour) about 50 to 57 minutes, depending on the performance. Annea had written online that was the last piece of music Ruth listened to before she died. That that piece had been a touchstone throughout their lives. I kept finding my way back to the track “For Ruth.” I played it often on my own community radio show, and kept wondering about these women. I wasn’t able to find much more about Ruth online, but Annea had a professional website with lots of her work, and a contact. I reached out, wanting to share the admiration I had for her work, and learn more about Ruth. Thinking I would never hear back, but I did.
Annea Lockwood on Voicemail: Hello Mrs Eddy. It’s Annea Lockwood calling you back. It was wonderful to get your email about my partner Ruth Anderson, and yes, I’d love to talk with you.”
Ruth Eddy: We talked after that message and several more times. I could hear her smile through the phone and I loved to listen.
Annea Lockwood: She loved the lake, it was like an alter ego almost, we both did, but she especially.
Ruth Eddy on tape: You two built a house? On Flathead Lake?
Annea Lockwood: We went to the local library in Polson and took out an ancient book from the early 1900s on wooden structures and how to build foundations and so on, and just took it from there. Which lasted for 14 years. I mean it took us forever to build that house and we didn’t build every single summer, but most summers.
Ruth Eddy: Annea was open to my curiosity. She told me about their road trips across the country.
Annea Lockwood: We lived with two cats for a long time, so we fill the car with all that stuff and pop the cats in it, much to their disgust and head west. And after a day the cats would resign themselves and we would be one quarter of the distance. (laughs) It’s a long trip. It would take about four and a half days.
Ruth Eddy: And about that one summer, after being together for years, She and Ruth crossed the border into Canada to get married.
Annea Lockwood: It was unbelievably low key. And then Ruth and I, we picked up a quart of ice cream and a couple of plastic spoons -laughs- that was our wedding breakfast and we drove back to Montana.
Ruth Eddy: I felt like a fan-girl, trying to learn more about experimental sound and more about this Ruth that had become mythical to me.
Annea Lockwood: Ruth liked building things and she was really good with electronics, she was good with machines of all sorts, and tools and really handy and smart about them.
Ruth Eddy: But, I was a different Ruth on the other end of her line.
Ruth Eddy on phone: Hiii, Can you hear me? }
Ruth Eddy: And I stumbled a bit.
Annea Lockwood: Yes, I can.
Ruth Eddy: It wasn’t the ‘70s and we were not falling in love.
Annea Lockwood: Not to worry, Ruth, if you ask me something which I’m not so comfortable talking about, I’ll just say so.
Ruth on phone: ok Amazing ok.
Ruth Eddy: I felt clunky and like I asked the wrong questions
Ruth Eddy on phone: And I don’t even know if you would identify as gay or what even the language was when you two were getting together?
Annea Lockwood: She would not have gone there with you, so I don’t feel free to do so myself. Are you gay, yourself?
Ruth on phone: No I’m not
Annea Lockwood: ok, umm
Ruth Eddy: I missed the mark sometimes, but I learned… I learned it was more important that they were feminists than anything about their sexuality. And that their work helped connect them, but also define them as individuals. The two of them didn’t typically work on projects together while Ruth was alive – other than building the house on the lake, of course. But they did collaborate after she died – because Annea missed her and her voice and her art. There was “Tete-a-Tete,” the album, which includes the private recordings that Ruth made for Annea as their relationship was blooming. And there’s also this book with the two of them as authors – called “Hearing Studies,” which I bought.
Annea Lockwood: The hearing studies are really things you can pick up on a moment’s notice}
Ruth Eddy: It’s a thin, white paperback with some color photos of the two of them and 27 hearing exercises. I tried one out.
12: Your Name
- Say it in every possible way.
- Write it in every possible way.
- Say it the ways you wrote it, using your writing as a “score.”
(1 and 2 may be reversed)
“Ruth Ruth ruth Ruth Ruth ruth Ruth Ruth Ruth Ruth ruth Ruth ruth Ruth”
The exercises were designed for music students to pay closer attention to the sounds around them. Annea wrote online about Hearing Study 13, saying she could hear Ruth, when she listened.
13: Hearing a person: In a darkened room, find a comfortable totally relaxed position. Listen to a piece of music. Think of someone you love. Do not think of the music. When you find your thought of the person is gone, bring it back gently. Let other thoughts come, and then let them go.
I listened to more of Ruth’s work – I was especially drawn to her playfulness. She liked to play with pop culture, using audio from TV commercials.
[Music, “SUM”]
Ruth Eddy: Ruth titled this piece “SUM,” short for State of the Union Message. It was playful but also political, made as a cheeky response to Nixon’s address that same year. She was working on it when she met Annea in the 1970s. And she decided to include that track in her debut album, approving the test pressing of the record just before she died.
Annea Lockwood: There was at the end a certain urgency, so Ruth could see it and hear it, and she was able to see it and hear it and to name it for that matter.
Ruth Eddy: Her work had been in compilations over the years, but Annea helped make this happen just… for Ruth.
Annea Lockwood: So that was really right, you know, so that felt very right.
Ruth Eddy on phone: Yeah, in some ways just hearing you talk about it it also feels like a culmination of her life’s work in that there were lots of different kinds of threads but here they were all together, and I mean that was who Ruth was.
Annea Lockwood: yeah, that’s absolutely right, you’ve got it nailed, yes.
Ruth Eddy: I really enjoyed talking with Annea, but after a few long conversations, Annea got harder to reach . And after a bit of phone tag, we connected again.
Annea Lockwood: Yes Ruth and I both got Lyme disease back in the 80s but I haven’t had it since, until now.
Ruth Eddy: It turned out it wasn’t Lyme’s disease, but she had gotten sick from a tick probably from the field recordings she was doing along the banks of the Columbia River, for a new project of hers that looks at the famous western waterway through sound.
Annea Lockwood: I think I’m running out of energy.
Ruth Eddy: She said she could probably talk a little bit more
Annea Lockwood: Is there a crucial question you would like to ask me?
Ruth Eddy: I just wanted to keep talking, none of my questions felt crucial
Ruth Eddy on phone: Maybe we can talk another time too, hopefully you’ll be feeling better
Annea Lockwood: Maybe, Because I need to preserve time for actually doing the composition itself. (laughs) It’s like people forget a composer has to have time to compose”
Ruth Eddy: I was scared for this to be our last conversation.
Annea Lockwood: It’s been a pleasure being in touch with you . Have a very good summer and maybe my last connection to Ruth.
Ruth Eddy on phone: ok thanks, you too.
Annea Lockwood: Thanks, bye Ruth.
Ruth Eddy on phone: Bye.
Ruth Eddy: Before our conversation ended, I told Annea I’d love to see the house they built in person. It’s not too far from my grandma’s place. She also lives on that lake and I still visit her every summer. Supportive, she sent me an email with names and contacts for some family in the area. Eventually, I was there.
Ruth on tape: Hello!
Martin Anderson: Are you Ruth?
Ruth on tape: I’m Ruth. Are you Martin?
Martin Anderson: Yeah, I thought I’d come out. I’ll drive down with you cause it’s kind of a walk.
Ruth Eddy: That’s Martin Anderson, Ruth’s nephew.
Martin Anderson: From the outside you can understand it’s really a music house.
Ruth Eddy: Not just a music house. A home built for two composers. Being there was like no other house I’d ever been to. It’s long. With two rooms on either side of the house, both only accessible from the outside, their studios. It was so like what I had learned about these two, that they had separate careers in a related field and here was their house reflecting that, right up against a beautiful lake in a place that Ruth loved so much. In this house, they were together and apart, too. It was built one room at a time, over more than a decade, fitting together like a collage, like a life.
Martin Anderson: So this is the original music room. This is where we’re staying . So we’re repurposing all these things. This is also soundproof. So whatever they did. They did on the inside and they put the pine paneling over it.
Ruth Eddy: They put so much work into this house – so much of themselves. But after Ruth died and maintaining two houses on either side of the country became too much for Annea, she sold the property to some of Ruth’s family. Martin, who lives the rest of the year in California, is a historian, and to my great fortune had been compiling family history and a large collection of family photos. That helped me fill in a different side of who Ruth was.
Martin Anderson: My other favorite picture, let’s see if I can find it really quick. Here we go. So this Annea, this is Ruth and this is myself, and this is right out there.}
Ruth Eddy: I got to see pictures of Ruth throughout her whole life and even before she was born, of her mother Lousie, climbing glaciers with a skirt and heels in Glacier National Park, before it even was a national park – and pictures of her mom at home.
Martin Anderson: This is Louie at the piano. Everybody had in their family a musician and they would have a family piano, and this person would play the piano and actually very well.
Ruth Eddy: Martin thinks that’s where Ruth’s love of music came from. Ruth came into her own on the flute. But Ruth wasn’t just playing in the school band and taking lessons. She ended up playing the flute professionally, touring European concert halls as a soloist. When I learned that, I imagined she must have played by the lake, that she’d bring it out on the deck and play next to the lapping waves. Ruth Eddy: But Annea had already burst my imagination and told me the truth.
Annea Lockwood: And by the time we met, no she had already long since sold her really beautiful flute. So, I never heard her play flute and I would have loved to.
Ruth Eddy: At the lake, Ruth was less interested in playing music and more interested in listening.
Trish Tavener: And then Ruth would say do you want to go on the deck and listen to the owls? Well of course we do, you know, where else are you ever invited that?
Ruth Eddy: I got to meet Trish Tavener, who owns a bookshop in Ronan, but used to own a shop in Big Fork, which is how she met Ruth.
Trish Tavener: She just walks in and she gave me a check for $250, and she says I will be buying a lot of books here , and I just hate having to carry around cash and she said I will give you this, and you keep track of it and at the end of the season, we’ll see. And of course at the end of the season, there was always something left in my account, and she didn’t come and collect it, didn’t want it. And that was Ruth.
Ruth Eddy: Ruth was boldly herself, and while she didn’t boast about her recognition as a composer, sometimes she’d offer glimpses of her professional life, like the time she put ping pong balls under Trish’s piano strings.
Trish Tavener: And the sound was just incredible. It was so funky, and so I was going through this feeling of total delight and amazement and also, I want you out of my piano! I don’t want you inside of it. And then she said, “Anyone have any quarters?” and she did the same thing, took away the ping pong balls and put quarters under there. Totally different sound.
Ruth Eddy: Trish described Ruth often having a twinkle in her eye. And, oddly, Trish told me she heard Ruth play the flute. It was after many trips Ruth had made to Spokane to get dental work done. And she stopped by Trish’s shop.
Trish Tavener: And she said my teeth are now complete, and she says I want to see if my embouchure has changed at all on a flute.
Ruth Eddy: Trish happened to have one. She’s a musician with a small collection of all sorts of instruments.
Trish Tavener: She never wanted to play the flute, never expressed that. I just assumed she had beautiful flutes in her possession. And she said, “I just would like to try it out.” So we go back and get the flute. It was okay, it wasn’t a fancy one, but it was ok. Front desk, amidst people just buying books, she puts the flute to her mouth. Comes out with… I’m going to cry …
[Music: Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun”]
Trish Tavener: The beginning of Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn.” And my god. I swear they could hear it across the lake, cause it was sooo…. Gorgeous and filled ,the whole… laughing…
Ruth Eddy: I sat across from Trish and I cried myself.
Ruth on tape: What is it about that, that feels so powerful, music just can do that?
Trish Tavener: Oh my god yes! And you hear the level that she did this, I just would have closed the shop for days and days just to listen to her and have her play play play.
Ruth Eddy: How powerful even the memory of one phrase could bring someone, two people, to tears.
Trish Tavener: Oh my gosh, the color she brought to our lives up here, that was just so unusual.
Ruth Eddy: When I was with Martin at the lake, he mentioned his dad had recorded an oral history of his family in the 80s. He had given the recording along with family photos to a local history museum. It felt like a portal had opened. I wanted that so bad, just to hear Ruth talking about her life. I hadn’t found that, really, anywhere. It took a bit of digging. But after a few phone calls to the Northwest Montana History Museum in Kalispell, they agreed to digitize the tapes to be able to send to me. A little while later a USB drive in a white envelope was delivered to my house in Bozeman. It had a small paper tag – “Interview: August 1988 Ruth, Harry, Lousie and Art Anderson.” As soon as I got the package, I flipped through the thick transcript that was also included. But I was scared to actually listen. To hear Ruth in her own voice, in her own home, the one that I had been in. It felt so intimate, for me to be able to listen to someone who never knew me. So, the USB sat on my desk. I also felt somehow like this audio was aging like wine, and in the process you don’t want to expose it to air before you’re ready, or it might lose its potency. I finally played it on my porch, next to the neighbors barking dogs, and a thunderstorm rolling in.
Ruth Eddy on tape: Ooooh, I just saw lightning. Wow, the thunder, how you feel it in your chest.
Oral history recording: It’s the 13th of August, 1988, and here are four Andersons sitting and having black coffee. At the lake. Decaffeinated coffee.
Ruth Eddy: I didn’t recognize her voice, as I had become much more familiar with hearing other people talk about her.
Oral history recording:
Ruth Anderson: I don’t know where I was born.
Louise: you were born in the Kalispell general hospital.
Ruth: No, I know.
Art: Do we want to know who our parents were and all that?
Harry: Does anybody remember their parents?
Ruth : Who is this for? I mean, I’m not so much interested in somebody else. I’d like to make it what do we want to know about us? I mean, do you want this for children? Who is our audience?
Ruth Eddy: Who is their audience? Is it me? Someone she never could have imagined? Is it you? This isn’t an art piece we’re listening to. It’s a just a recording of siblings around a kitchen table and it holds a different weight. It’s a record – an important one – something keeping this person alive, preserving the memory of the incredible and the mundane
Oral history recording:
Louise: And Ruthie was the city marble champion.
Ruth: They wouldn’t let me play with the boys.
Arthur: otherwise you would have cleaned up the whole city
Ruth: No, I would have had a contest, I mean what kind of a contest is it to have a contest for girls who play marbles? That’s not a contest.
Ruth Eddy: Audio is this gift that can make a moment last forever. You can’t touch it, but somehow, you can still feel it across distance and time. Listening makes me feel alive, open to whatever is coming.
Like tuning into a radio in the middle of the night, never knowing what’s gonna come next.
[Music, “For Ruth”– then it fades under last narration and then keeps going]
Ruth Eddy: Ruth Anderson, “pioneering electronic composer” born at the Kalispell General Hospital, died at 91. I’m so glad I got to know her.
Over the radio…
[Music, “For Ruth”: We’re really going to do everything together?]
Ruth Eddy: In stumbling phone calls…
Ruth Eddy on phone: Sorry about that voice (laughs) It’s fine.
Ruth Eddy: In her house…
Martin Anderson: The rest of it are music rooms.
Ruth Eddy: at a bookshop…
Thrish Tavener: This is the same piano. Hi Mary.
Ruth Eddy on tape: Hi, I’m Ruth
Ruth Eddy: In her own words…
Ruth Anderson on oral history recording: You could slide down the rain pipe and hit the electrical box.
Ruth Eddy: and through her art.
[Music, “So What” by Ruth Anderson]