Presence requires intention, wakefulness, and awareness. Listeners
give their attention over to music because they love this directed
effort, but with serious music, presence is also requisite. Zeena
Parkins’s most recent album for Relative Pitch Records,
Lament for the Maker
, is serious music, and this is no weakness. Parkins leans here into
works that are as much about sound as they seem to be about loss.
Sound, physically speaking, involves pitch and frequency. Frequency.
That is, it is always arriving, but also always leaving. Always
vibrating away until the human body, no matter its intention, its
wakefulness, can no longer detect it. It becomes its own lament as it
passes out of the range of hearing and journeys from a world of
perceived time into an infinite space with no time bound restrictions
imposed upon it by human control.
If one did not know the circumstances involved around the making of
this recording, one could still perceive the tension here between
control and inevitable abandon. Zeena Parkins is the maker of the
sound, as she plays her unconventional acoustic harp with electrified
extended techniques using metal slides and bass bowing, but the works
are a constant duet of harp and noise, in addition to the duet of
composer and performer. Indeed, Parkins is listed as composer of only
one of the pieces on this collection while three of her colleagues from
Mills College, Laetitia Sonami, John Bischoff, and James Fei,
“graciously agreed” (Parkins’s words) to honor the closing of the
school by submitting compositions for harp and electronics. The
institution, famed for its advocacy for gender and trans rights as much
as for its innovations in arts and academics, closed in 2022 and,
following economic decisions in higher education across the nation, was
subsumed by a larger, more profitable entity. The closing of its music
department ultimately resulted in Parkins departing, ending her tenure
as Darius Milhaud Chair there, her close connections to students,
teachers, and friends, and to a way of life she had established for
thirteen years.
A representative experience for me here is my listening to “pluck,”
composed by Bischoff and listed as the second work on the album. The
work opens with traditional acoustic harp plucking. Open mid-range
resonances alternate with high pitch tight plucking of strings. Time
lingers as much as it attacks and abruptly ends. Shortly after the one
minute mark, however, legato electronics rise and fall like a celeste
being drained of fluid. After the three minute mark time itself is
challenged in lengthy organ-like holdings of single and double tones.
And, by eight minutes into the work, the piece feels entirely
improvised by Parkins. Except she, of course, is using a score composed
by another, and now must navigate a world where maintaining control is
as essential as relinquishing that control. There appears to be no
time signature, but even if there were, it would only offer a semblance
of order placed over a human negotiation of time passing. After
seventeen minutes the work ends with plucking, dampened, so that no
pitch arises from Parkins’s strings at all. Sound finally has only
frequency and disappears out of human perception into silence.
Lament is an intentional word choice. On December 5 of 2025,
Parkins wrote on Instagram that her “sad farewell to Mills College is
being released today. A heart wrenching one for me.” The album is
more acceptance than resignation, however, as it ends with “berlin
bedroom: littlefield feb.10.2024,” a time-stamped work that began in
2014 and is “ongoing.” Parkins struggles with “sonic limits…that are
impossible to bend by design.” The work starts at 0:01 and concludes at
12:42, and its perceived sound does end along with the sound of human
beings applauding, never to be assembled exactly the same again, but
the frequencies generated here move outward forever into circumstances
beyond even our dreams.
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