“I’ve always thought of rivers as alive, as live phenomena,” she said by phone from her current home, in Westchester County, N.Y. “It became very clear to me that rivers create their sound by the way they interact with the materials in their banks through friction.”

Living in England by the mid-1960s, she began assembling a “River Archive,” soliciting recordings from around the globe. She began corresponding with the like-minded composer Pauline Oliveros, who not only contributed a recording of a Massachusetts creek, but also helped Ms. Lockwood secure a teaching position at Hunter College, which brought her to New York in 1973.

Like Oliveros, who died in 2016, Ms. Lockwood’s sonic attention to the body and environment has been interwoven with her life as a feminist. Through the 1970s, Ms. Lockwood taught courses on women and music, participated in consciousness-raising groups, and immersed herself in writers like the ecofeminist Susan Griffin, who suggested that the impulses to dominate nature and women grew from the same patriarchal root.

Out of this period came “Womens Work,” a 1974-76 score collection edited by Ms. Lockwood and the pioneering Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, and recently reissued by Primary Information. The multidisciplinary collection includes scores like Beth Anderson’s “Valid for Life,” a trio for large drums and strung instruments struck with “huge velvet beaters,” and Ms. Lockwood’s intense “Piano Burning”: “set piano upright in an open space with lid closed. spill a very little lighter fluid here and light.”