Zeena Parkins: Invention, Loss, and the Living Harp
From a Detroit high school full of concert grand harps to the experimental clubs of the East Village, Parkins traces the unlikely path that made her one of the most restless instrumentalists in contemporary music.
Today we’re putting The Tonearm’s needle on Zeena Parkins, composer, improviser, and one of the most singular forces in experimental music.
Zeena has spent four decades dismantling what the harp can do: through electronics, object preparations, and a series of custom electric instruments she built herself, she’s turned a concert hall fixture into something alive and unpredictable.
Her collaborators range from Björk to John Zorn to Pauline Oliveros. Last year, she released two records paying tribute to her years teaching at Mills College before its closure: Modesty of the Magic Thing and Lament of the Maker. And she’s performing this spring at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville. She’s also a Guggenheim Fellow and a three-time Bessie Award winner for her work composing for dance.
We cover all of it: her instruments, her process, and what it means to make music at the edge of what’s possible.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Zeena Parkins’ album Lament of the Maker)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Zeena Parkins at zeenaparkins.com and follow her on Instagram and Bandcamp
• Purchase Lament for the Maker (Relative Pitch Records, 2025) from Bandcamp or Qobuz, and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Purchase Modesty of the Magic Thing (Tzadik, 2025) from Qobuz or Squidco, and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Zeena Parkins — Wikipedia
• Review: Lament for the Maker — I Care If You Listen
• Review: Lament for the Maker — The Free Jazz Collective
Collaborators Mentioned:
• William Winant — percussionist and longtime collaborator; Parkins discusses finding Lou Harrison instruments in his studio and performing Modesty of the Magic Thing with him
• Fred Frith — guitarist and composer; Parkins replaced him at Mills and performed with him in Skeleton Crew
• Laetitia Sonami — sound artist and Mills colleague; composed “She is a Butcher in My Dreams” for Lament for the Maker
• James Fei — composer and Mills colleague; composed “In Such Circumstances of Miscalculations” for Lament for the Maker
• Jennifer Monson — choreographer; one of Parkins’s most significant long-term dance collaborators
• Chris Cutler — drummer; encountered Parkins in Europe and brought her into News from Babel
• Nayland Blake — artist who curated the San Francisco gallery show where Parkins gave her first solo concert
Ensembles and Projects:
• Skeleton Crew — experimental rock trio with Fred Frith and Tom Cora
• News from Babel — group with Chris Cutler, Lindsay Cooper, and Dagmar Krause; Parkins discusses joining after meeting Cutler in Europe
• Table of the Elements — American experimental music label; released Parkins’s first solo record
• Roulette Intermedium — Brooklyn venue where Parkins and Winant perform Modesty of the Magic Thing just before Big Ears
Institutions:
• Mills College at Northeastern University — Oakland institution where Parkins held the Darius Milhaud Chair in Composition for thirteen years; now merged with Northeastern University
• Bard College — where Parkins received her BFA; she credits its film department as a formative influence
• Cass Technical High School — Detroit public high school where Parkins first encountered the harp in room 101 annex
Artists and Figures Discussed:
• Jay DeFeo — Bay Area visual artist whose work, particularly The Rose and the Seven Pillars of Voice series, inspired Modesty of the Magic Thing
• The Rose at the Whitney Museum — DeFeo’s monumental painting, now in the Whitney’s permanent collection
• Lou Harrison — American composer whose handmade instruments, bequeathed to William Winant, are central to Modesty of the Magic Thing
• Daphne Oram — British electronic music pioneer who worked at the BBC; Parkins mentions her as inspiration for an upcoming electric harp record
• Pauline Oliveros — composer and deep listening pioneer; among Parkins’s early New York collaborators
• Roscoe Mitchell — composer and saxophonist; was at Mills when Parkins arrived
Festivals:
• Big Ears Festival — Knoxville, Tennessee; March 26–29, 2026; Parkins performs Modesty of the Magic Thing with William Winant
• Other Minds Festival — San Francisco; site of the West Coast premiere of Modesty of the Magic Thing
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
The Tonearm — Episode 296: Zeena Parkins
Lawrence Peryer: I wanted to start by talking to you a little bit about Mills College.
Zeena Parkins: Yeah.
Lawrence: The situation with Mills has hit home for me in a slightly different way. Within the last two weeks—I think it's been two weeks today—my oldest son attends California College of the Arts.
Zeena: Oh. And they just announced that they're closing. I saw that.
Lawrence: Yeah. I assumed you did. There's so much to say in terms of both these historic Bay Area institutions, and the role of those institutions for twentieth-century and postwar creative fields. Could you talk a little about the personal nature of that loss for you as an artist and an educator?
Zeena: Well, first I also want to say that it wasn't just the twentieth century—it definitely moved into the first twenty years of the twenty-first century. I was always really impressed at the stamp that all of the arts institutions in the Bay Area gave to the Bay Area. That includes the San Francisco Art Institute, the California College of the Arts, and Mills—they were a constant feeding into the cultural life and vitality of what was going on there. And of course that changed with various generations, but I still felt it in the time that I was at Mills, which was the last thirteen years—all in the twenty-first century. So I never really experienced Mills before that.
Lawrence: I struggle to think about 2026. I can't believe we're in the twenty-first century. I should get used to it by now.
Zeena: Yes, I know. I really did not have a very extensive experience with the West Coast before I started teaching at Mills. I had a very significant experience in the very early nineties, because a friend of mine—an artist named Nayland Blake—was curating a gallery in San Francisco and invited me to do a concert there. It was my first solo concert, and it was on electric harp. I did the show; it was a full house. I remember they had raked seating, and it was quite extraordinary for me because it was a first. At the end of the show, which was quite well received, this very tall gentleman came down and said, "I'm starting a record label and I want you to be my first release on the label." Of course I didn't believe him, because who would? But in the end, this person turned out to be a silent partner for the label Table of the Elements. And they did release my first solo record—and Table of the Elements went on to be a very important label for American experimental music.
Lawrence: It's quite a variation on the cigar-chomping record executive. "Kid, I want to put you on my label." (laughter)
Zeena: Exactly. So besides that, and a couple of other random gigs here and there up and down the coast, I didn't really have much experience, and I didn't really understand what the Pacific Rim actually meant—the kind of power of all the coasts, what significance that even meant. So when I started teaching at Mills, I got the job initially because I was first brought in to replace Fred Frith, who had been teaching there during a sabbatical semester. That went so well that when Fred was offered the chance to start an improvisation program in the music school in Basel—which he really wanted to do—he suggested that we share his position, which is how I got there in the first place. I had taught at other schools—specifically for two years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the SMFA. So teaching wasn't new to me. But I really cut my teeth on what it means to be an educator at Mills, because it was a long-term project. That school was such a special place—a hotbed of experimental music.
And the people who went through there, the students who wanted to come to Mills—you would often see their transformation into artists within the two short years they were there. It was extremely inspiring. Besides the absolutely beautiful campus—it's in the middle of Oakland, but they had 135 acres—it was a stunning place to go to work. The other thing is that they had two beautiful acoustic pedal harps there. So when I started teaching, I just dragged one of those harps into my office, and it stayed there for thirteen years. In other words, I didn't have to give up what I did because I didn't have an instrument when I was there. It was like it had been waiting for me.
With the way it ended, the ending of it is heartbreaking. I describe that in the solo record I just released, Lament for the Maker—this heartbreaking feeling of an ending. Some endings are hard.
Lawrence: I appreciate that context. It speaks to the fact that this was so much more than just a teaching gig—this idea that the harp was there waiting for you, and the lineage of postwar and twenty-first-century figures who came through there as students and teachers. I'm curious about the inclusiveness of that record, the commissioning of other Mills community members and colleagues into the work. It adds a certain gravitas to the project.
Zeena: I would add to what you just said that it's not just the history of Mills, which was very important—it was what it was in the present while I was there, which was always changing, as things do. When I first arrived, Roscoe Mitchell was there, which was extraordinary. Fred was there. And then my other colleagues: William Winant, the extraordinary percussionist, who became a very important collaborator for my work; James Fei; Chris Brown; John Bischoff; and Laetitia Sonami. These are all incredibly formidable musical minds, and I hadn't really worked with all of them. I'd already done a project with Laetitia, but I wanted, before I left, to get into the minds of some of my colleagues I hadn't had a chance to really connect with. That was one of the primary reasons—this last-ditch effort to connect musically with these important musical thinkers. So James Fei and John Bischoff wrote pieces for me, as did Laetitia, which was a continuation of a duo project we had just done. Fred, of course, I've worked with continuously since I was quite young. And Chris Brown had invited me and Nate to do a project with him. So I'd already had some experience working with him. The ones I picked were the ones I hadn't had that connection with yet. I wanted to continue something I had started with Laetitia, and I was really curious: how do they think about putting something together? What are they going to do with an acoustic harp? That was the impetus to ask.
Lawrence: I appreciate your insistent but gentle reminder that we're not talking about history in the past—that there was this vital current. The fact that I keep slipping into the past tense is, I think, very representative of a lot of the problems in the modern creative scene. There's a spectrum, right? There's a fetishization of what's happened in the past, a rightful glorification of it, but we don't always appreciate what we have in the moment—the scenes that are percolating now, the work that's being done now. That's reflected in everything from symphonies not having new music programs, to so much else. It's an important fact that you keep bringing back: we're not talking about history.
Zeena: Yes. And I will say that until our very last class—when we were informed that Mills would not be taking any more music students, no more graduate or undergraduate music students admitted into what became Mills at Northeastern, and now is simply Northeastern—even that very last class was extraordinary. It was important for me to be there and share my experiences with them. It wasn't a throwaway.
Lawrence: Honestly, that's what my son is worried about. He's a senior next year, so he'll be in the last graduating class. He's very concerned: won't every professor, every faculty member, won't everybody employed at the school be on LinkedIn updating their résumés? Who's going to be there to finish the work? He said he understands that's a genuine concern. And they haven't gotten a lot of information from the school yet.
Zeena: No, you don't. Believe me, you don't get information. You're often put on a trail that's not leading to where the situation is actually going. For instance, after we knew the merger was going to happen, each of the professors was asked to come up with three new classes that could possibly merge the interests of Northeastern University with our own. I doubt that any of those course descriptions were ever even looked at.
Lawrence: It's like a way to channel your energy so you don't make trouble.
Zeena: Oh yes.
Lawrence: You know, I speak with a lot of creative music artists—composers, improvised music performers who also teach. Something I've found really delightful in those conversations is hearing about the different experiences they have of being a teacher and how it interacts with, and perhaps informs, their own practice. I expected more people to say, "It's a gig—I can't make money as a creative music professional, so I teach." But that doesn't seem to be what I hear. There's a real—especially when you get into the jazz realm—this idea of lineage, of jazz as an oral tradition. Could you tell me a little about what you get from being a teacher, spiritually and artistically? What does it nourish for you?
Zeena: That's interesting, because I would say when I first started teaching, it was a gig.
Lawrence: Sure.
Zeena: When I was offered a full-time teaching position—which, who in their right mind would turn down—I turned it down. That was the job at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I was just not ready to be a teacher, and I knew it. And of course, four months later I got an email from Björk asking if I was interested in playing harp on some of her songs, and that led to a three- or four-year collaboration, record making, and touring. So I definitely made the right decision.
But when Fred asked me, I was interested in teaching again. It sort of came back around. The funny thing is, I was teaching mostly in the graduate program at Mills, with just a couple of classes in the undergraduate program. And I never went to graduate school. I had a very strained relationship with higher education—I'd never really been interested in it. I was fortunate enough to enter New York in the mid-eighties with an undergraduate degree from Bard, a BFA. And when I entered the scene at that point, I was immediately working with Pauline Oliveros, John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, Fred Frith, and Butch Morris. Why would I go to graduate school?
Lawrence: That is graduate school! (laughter)
Zeena: That is graduate school. And I took every advantage of having, at that moment, a skill set that all these incredible artists could use.
That was really extraordinary, and I didn't really know anything. I was a very hard worker, but I definitely learned as I went along. So I never had the graduate school experience. When I started teaching in graduate school, I was faking it in a lot of ways—many apologies to my early students at Mills. I didn't really know what I was doing. I remember those first few years, I would just give lectures—talk nonstop, study during the week, give these lectures, not let anyone speak—because I was terrified that someone who knew more than I did would trip me up.
But eventually something switched. I put the hours in, did the study. A light went on, and I was able to have exchanges that became so meaningful and important. And I don't have kids, so one really delightful thing was being able to have this kind of relationship with people of a different generation. I have nieces and nephews, but not my own children. I was able to have meaningful exchanges and working relationships with people of a generation that I might not otherwise have had that kind of connection with. That was very, very important to me. Being a nerd probably saved me—that's what allowed for this transformation to happen, because I was all in.
I don't know if that exactly answers your question, but—
Lawrence: You're under no obligation to exactly answer my questions. (laughter) I love the idea of the elder role in our culture—the imparting of experience, the guidance, the mentorship. It's always beautiful when young people have access to that, and it's always beautiful to witness it being practiced well. That's what I hear you saying: you get to play a different cultural role, one we don't talk about a lot, but it's important to have those nonfamilial elders in your life as a young person.
Zeena: And I would say that once I found the vitality of what it is to be an educator—once I understood what the components of that vitality were—that enabled me to become a better educator.
Lawrence: I have a couple of questions I wanted to ask you about Bard and about New York, but before I go there, you said something earlier I didn't want to leave unexplored. Could you talk a little about the Pacific Rim and what you learned, and what that meant?
Zeena: Oh yeah. Ultimately that has taken shape now. Gamelan is one huge thing.
It's not that these things aren't explored on the East Coast, but I certainly didn't understand them the way people on the West Coast understood them, once I started to really grasp who the musicians and composers were and how they were influenced by—let's say, gamelan—or by different kinds of tuning systems, and how that fed this connection to other cultures. It felt so present, this connection to the Pacific Rim as I encountered it. Someone like Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, or James Tenney—these weren't composers at the tip of my tongue when I was living in New York and always going to Europe. Sometimes I'd skip over to Japan, but it was always headed somewhere else.
All of this understanding sort of melted into me, you could say. That realization was expressed also in my focus on the one-off Lou Harrison instruments that William Winant—Willie—had in his studio, and in my interest in the work of the artist Jay DeFeo, who was an extraordinary Bay Area artist who actually taught at Mills for the last ten years of her life. So all these things began to fall in a huge coinciding pile in front of me, and this gained momentum around the idea of making a piece that merged the tuning systems and instruments that Lou Harrison had made—one-off instruments bequeathed to Willie Winant—that I would find, almost accidentally, in his studio collecting dust. I would pull one out and think: what's this?
Then, at the same time, there was an important retrospective of Jay DeFeo's work in 2012—one at SFMOMA and one at the Whitney. It was in that period that I was completely blown away by her. She's famous for the huge painting called The Rose. I don't know if you're familiar with it—it's floor to ceiling, paint on paint on paint, literally tons of it on this massive canvas. She calls it a painting, but I call it an opera. (laughter) She spent eight years working on it. After that process, she went on to make a lot of different kinds of work. I connected with the Jay DeFeo Foundation and its director, Leah Levy, based in Berkeley.
These two things—the instruments I kept finding in Willie's studio and this interest in Jay DeFeo's work, and how interesting it was that she had also been connected to Mills for ten years—all kind of fell into place. That became a kind of second homage to my life on the West Coast. Besides Lament for the Maker, which commissioned new works for harp, there was this other piece, Modesty of the Magic Thing, which merged some specific work of Jay DeFeo's—her series Seven Pillars of Voice—with one particular instrument of Lou Harrison's that I had remade. The piece was eventually released on Tzadik, and it's a work for metal percussion and acoustic harp. Since then, I'm working on a companion piece using another instrument of Lou Harrison's that I had made, along with other aspects of Jay DeFeo's work.
So they work in tandem—everything that, over the years, seeped into me about what it might mean to have connections to other parts of the world by way of this ocean. That's how it seeped in.
Lawrence: Again, very helpful context. It sets up what I wanted to ask you earlier—this idea of all these different inputs. You seem very sensitive to different artistic inputs and different creative people, and to integrating their work into your practice. As a young adult approaching Bard, what were your inputs then? What led you into that world?
Zeena: First of all, I grew up in Detroit. I didn't go to Bard right away—I went to the University of Michigan as a piano major. I actually went to a very important high school called Cass Technical High School, a public high school in downtown Detroit. You had to audition to get in. They had several extraordinary departments, including an amazing music department, and they assigned orchestral instruments to all the pianists because they felt sorry for us, alone in our practice rooms. So I was assigned an instrument. I had nothing to do with the choice, but I went to room 101 annex on the first day of school, opened the door, and there were eight concert grand harps—and a woman named Velma Froyd, a very old-fashioned but extraordinary pedagogue of classical harp training. I fell in love with the harp immediately. I was also dancing a lot and studying piano.
I was a workaholic even in those early days, and I was very shy, so I think I just channeled all that energy into practicing, studying dance, and going into that world. But when I graduated, I didn't have a harp—I'd just used the one at the school. So I became a piano major again, and that's what I auditioned as when I went to the University of Michigan's School of Music. Things are very different now, but in those days it was very much a Juilliard-wannabe kind of department. The world was closing in, not expanding. After two years I was done. That wasn't the direction I wanted to go.
I ended up at Bard, which was great in terms of just letting me do what I wanted to do. Also, the incredible film department was hugely influential—understanding what experimental film was really was a major new batch of input that I had no idea about before.
Lawrence: So you needed freedom from that classical conservatory rigidity?
Zeena: No, it wasn't quite that. I just didn't want to be a classical pianist. I was okay as a pianist—I was never going to be a concert pianist. If I had ended up in the classical world, maybe I would have done chamber music or focused on contemporary music. But that wasn't where I was going.
Lawrence: When you first met the harp that day in the room full of harps, did you have any preconceived notion or stereotype about it?
Zeena: Who would even think about a harp? It's the most impractical thing you could ever imagine having any kind of relationship with. I had no idea. All I know is that when I first sat behind the harp, I didn't even know it had pedals. I didn't know how complex the relationship was—it's like a choreography, managing the pedals compared to what your hands are doing at the same time. The fact that I had already trained as a dancer meant that kind of physical relationship with an instrument was attractive to me. I could get that. So there was no question I was going to study the harp with Velma Froyd—and that meant coming early to tune, staying late. She demanded it. It was a full commitment—in the summers, after school, before school. You had to, because how else do you learn a new instrument? You need that devotion from the beginning.
Lawrence: Especially at that age, right? Is that a relatively late age to start? Do harpists generally begin as young as players of other instruments?
Zeena: I think so. A lot of harpists have a parent who was a harpist. They start early.
Lawrence: I asked about stereotypes because I think it's easy to think of the harp as something delicate. You are known for a real physicality with the instrument, a presence that is much more—
Zeena: Much more killer.
Lawrence: Yeah. And hearing you talk about being a dancer, and also being a pianist—the multi-limbed aspect of piano playing—it seems like you were primed to embrace the harp.
Zeena: Yeah, I was. Had I continued with piano, I was definitely more attracted to contemporary music—things that were more percussive. I was very open to different kinds of sound palettes. A real revelation was hearing—not until after I graduated from high school—the Cage prepared piano pieces, or hearing Fred or Keith Rowe preparing a guitar. Those were real revelations in terms of what's possible with strings, or with a wooden sound body. All of a sudden that opened up a huge place to explore. Very inspiring.
Lawrence: And then there's the electric harp, which you've pioneered and spent a lot of time developing. When I was preparing for our time together, a theme I kept returning to was the idea of relationship—the relationships you have with the instrument, with collaborators, and even with the works of other people, how you revisit them as inspiration and material. Your relationship with the electric harp is fascinating to me because there's nothing static about it. It seems like a very living, breathing, ongoing—I don't know if "dialogue" is the right word—refinement. What's happening there with you and that electric instrument?
Zeena: Okay, so you have to understand—when I moved to New York, it wasn't right away after Bard. I really shied away from it for a bit. I wasn't quite sure how I was going to interface with New York right when I left Bard, because I didn't have a harp. Long story short, I ended up becoming part of a theater troupe—a kind of circus theater group—called the Janus Circus, which started as a school project with a friend of mine.
Lawrence: Sounds very Bard. (laughter)
Zeena: Very Bard. This troupe ended up going to Europe for six months to do theater performances for elementary schools in the Netherlands. My role was costume designer—and I was also a dancing bear who jumped through a ring of fire and played accordion. I started playing accordion there, which was fantastic—I had a little keyboard instrument I could just sling across my shoulder.
But there was also a circus band, and in that band was the drummer Chris Cutler. We became friends. At some point, in Ljubljana, on a walk, he said, "I'm looking for a harpist to do a project." He had no idea I played harp.
Lawrence: Wow.
Zeena: It's just one of those unexplainable things. But that was a bit of a turning point, because I told him I was a harpist and would love to do it. And just like the man who came down after that San Francisco show and said he wanted to put me on his label—I didn't really believe Chris either, that he was actually going to hire me to play harp in a project with Dagmar Krause and Robert Wyatt and all these incredible people. But it happened. That was News from Babel, and we ended up making two records.
As soon as that European tour was over, I had all I needed to go back to playing harp. I ended up moving back to Detroit, getting a job, finding a teacher—Marilyn Bartlett, an extraordinary harpist who was the harpist of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. I studied two lessons a week with her, was all in, and spent eight or nine months at home just playing constantly to get back to it. She helped me buy a small harp for when I came back to New York. I ended up working at a company that published harp music called Lyra International, which also sold harps—the Venus Harp. I worked during the day, and they would let me practice in their showroom in the evenings.
Lawrence: Wow.
Zeena: Everything was lining up. Eventually I got a pedal harp and started working with all the people we know I work with. One of the situations that arose—I was very interested in using the harp as an improviser, as a beginning improviser—was that I would bring my harps to all these various little tiny clubs in the East Village. What I noticed was that the harp is a quiet instrument, and I was often playing with electric guitarists or trombone players or drummers, and you really couldn't hear it. It wasn't designed to hold its own against that kind of volume or dynamic. So I tried a bunch of different ways to make the harp louder—various kinds of little pickups and amplifications. It was all basically inadequate. The sound became very tinny; none of the solutions were working.
Especially once I joined Skeleton Crew with Tom Cora and Fred Frith—they really wanted me to play harp, but it was clear we weren't going to tour with an acoustic harp. It was with Tom that I figured out I needed to make an electric instrument. And in the mid- to late eighties, you couldn't just go buy an electric harp. There was no place to get one. So Tom, with a friend, banged out a prototype, and I started playing that. As primitive as that instrument was, this was an idea that could work.
Then we went to Ken Parker, a guitar maker who recently passed away, who also made pickups. We came to him with the idea of making a real instrument, and he was totally into it. He made me my first real electric harp in twenty hours—we just went to his house in Connecticut and stayed for twenty hours. He would ask me questions, and I told him I wanted a whammy bar on it. And it was the right decision, obviously. He figured out how to put one on. That first one went through a number of changes, and it became my project from there: how do we make this a better instrument? What can I do with it? But that was the beginning, and it was made out of necessity. I needed to not be the softest person in the room.
Lawrence: Part of my ignorance with this question, but were there really no electric harps at that point? Or were they just custom-made for individuals?
Zeena: I'm sure I wasn't the first, but no. I think it was on the precipice of being a thing, but it wasn't quite there yet. Now you can get beautiful ones—I can't see it, but Camac made one of the first beautiful electroacoustic harps, with real attention to quality. They endorsed me using their harp for all the Björk tours I ever did, and eventually they gifted me one. Amazing. But no—we looked around and we couldn't find one.
Lawrence: Other than the issue of volume and standing out in a non-classical context, how do you view the limitations of the harp, and how do those limitations actually serve as catalysts? Most artists I speak with, regardless of their medium, are entranced by the idea of limitation—give me a box and I will work my way out of it, or decorate it. What limitations of the harp are actually exciting?
Zeena: The acoustic harp and my particular electric harp are very different beasts, for one thing. The acoustic harp—I've been entranced by what I would call certain impossibilities of the instrument: playing chromatically, because of the way the harp is designed; sustaining a tone, because you pluck it and then it decays unless you use a bow of some kind; doing any kind of smooth shifting from one pitch to another in a gliding way. These kinds of playing are not naturally available with an acoustic instrument. I've been very intrigued by those limitations—digging into them and finding out what it would mean to try to do something that isn't easy, or perhaps even impossible, and asking what that generates. That's the acoustic harp.
The electric harp is a whole different thing, because it doesn't have flexible tuning. There are no pedals, no levers to sharpen by a half step. It is what it is. You tune in the pitches, and that's your fixed tuning for a show. So you can focus on other things—textures, rhythms, whatever peculiar tuning you want to put into it, which will be your tuning for either a piece or a set. It becomes more like modular synthesis, almost: you put together different kinds of pedals that are going to change the sound, you see how those pedals interact, and you see how that affects the instrument. It becomes a completely different experience as a player.
And again, as I said at the beginning—I had this instrument made and then had to figure out what it could do. One of the huge upgrades to the electric harp happened when a friend of mine, the sound artist Doug Henderson—not an instrument builder by trade, but someone who knows materials and is an excellent maker—suggested that adding ebony wood to one part of the harp would completely change what's possible. Ebony is an extremely hard wood, and that change was profound. Just understanding what a difference in material is going to make—not only its moisture content and all the things instrument builders think about, but also the ergonomics: how we had to alter the shape of the instrument to make sure I could get my hands in there and do what I need to do, making it as light as possible so I'm not hauling a ton of weight through the Frankfurt airport. Even a change in the type of wood opens up an entirely new playing experience and a whole new range of possibilities.
Lawrence: It seems endlessly fascinating.
Zeena: I'm enjoying it. (laughter) I think it's a magic instrument, the one that got made. Every time I think I've reached a limit, it's an interesting moment to see what happens on the other side of that limit.
Lawrence: And the gratification of building such a modern and expansive repertoire for these instruments.
Zeena: I think of repertoire much more with my acoustic harp these days. I think of the electric harp—I make pieces for it—but really as an instrument for an improviser.
Lawrence: That's a great distinction.
Zeena: And it's a very different outcome. I don't want to think about the repertoire of the electric harp because there's only one, so who's going to play it? But that's something I've been thinking about recently—funny that you should bring it up—the pieces I'm making that could possibly be played by others beside myself at some point.
Lawrence: Amazing. Speaking of which, I'm also very intrigued by your compositional work for dance. How does composing for movement differ from other compositional work? What does it require of a composer that's different? How do the dancers fit into the compositional process?
Zeena: I was really, really fortunate. When I came to New York, one of the first pieces I did with John Zorn was a game piece called "Dark"—a piece for dancers and musicians. We did it at the Sculpture Center at MoMA.
Lawrence: Not a bad early gig.
Zeena: One of my first. That's when I began to understand—oh, there is a really interesting scene of experimental movers. Because I had danced, and I had also danced at Bard, I knew I wasn't going to be a professional dancer. But I was really attracted to movement, and especially watching bodies move. I ended up falling in with a group of people who were improvising, and we started something at P.S. 122—which doesn't exist anymore—called Music Dance. It was a Saturday morning, informal gathering where dancers and musicians would get together to improvise and talk about how we were communicating with each other. Not toward a performance, but as a kind of workshop. We did that for several years.
That was my entrée into understanding who this community was. I ended up working quite closely with several choreographers, and one important one was Jennifer Monson. When we started working together, we were both improvisers, and eventually she became a choreographer and I became a composer. And remember, I hadn't really composed before I moved to New York, so all this was really new. I was primed and ready for the challenge, but I didn't have experience with any of it when I first came. My training to become a composer came through this work with choreographers—first as an improviser, and then eventually setting material. There are topics for various pieces, and you work together to find the best solutions for those topics.
And it wouldn't have happened in some random way, with just any dancers or any choreographer—it's because of these particular people that I work with: Jennifer Lacey, Jennifer Monson, Neil Greenberg, Stéphane Dier. These were hugely important in helping me understand my own musical language and in supporting that. It was really in this dance world that I was able to understand how to be a composer. And eventually my interest in watching dancers move and responding to that compositionally emerged as an interest in sound moving. So I also became interested in multi-speaker diffusion in the context of making compositions for dance. That became a really important aspect of my work—and a particularly important aspect of my scores for dance.
Lawrence: What's the collaborative process like with a choreographer? Is it like film, where you watch the dance silently and then create a score?
Zeena: No, because we're making it together from scratch.
Lawrence: That's what I'm curious about.
Zeena: I'm not adding music to something that's already been made. In film, you do more of that—you get the final edit and work from there. That's not how I worked with dance. We would go on residencies and really make it together. Try things, see what worked, figure out the orchestration and the goals, then work together to realize it. For me, it wouldn't have worked to make music for something already finished—I probably wouldn't have known what to do. I had to be in from the very beginning, understanding what I was making sound for, having time to experiment, having discussions, seeing what worked and what didn't.
And then the luxury of working with dance is that you get multiple performances. You don't have to make it perfect for this one performance and that's it. By hearing something performed numerous times and seeing how it works, you understand something about the piece that you can't possibly understand from a rehearsal, and you can't possibly understand from just a single performance. That part of the process of making was hugely important.
Lawrence: At the risk of asking an overly general question: how many performances does it usually take before you feel like it's locked?
Zeena: Usually you get three or four performances—you get to see it—and then it goes on tour. By that point it's probably pretty settled; we know what it is. And then you have your good days and your bad days.
Lawrence: At the start of our call, you described yourself as shy. Is that something from the past? Because I don't see it. (laughter)
Zeena: I was incredibly shy. I think that coupled well with being a workaholic. But looking at it from this point of view, I can see those things working together. I guess I'm not so shy now.
Lawrence: Let's not play armchair psychologist. A couple of other quick things—I know our time together is coming to a close. This episode is going to air in the weeks right before Big Ears.
Zeena: Oh, fantastic.
Lawrence: I'm going to be there, and I'm looking forward to so much music this year. What can we expect from what you're going to be presenting?
Zeena: I'm doing Modesty of the Magic Thing with Willie.
Lawrence: Oh, incredible.
Zeena: I just love playing that piece so much. We premiered it on the West Coast at Other Minds Festival, and we premiered it on the East Coast at the Paula Cooper Gallery while they were showing Jay DeFeo's last ten years of work—paintings that had never been seen in New York before. The specific paintings or drawings referred to in the work weren't there, but there was an incredible synergy between everything in that room. So there's that. And then we'll do it at Roulette just before Big Ears, and then take it to Big Ears. I'm super excited.
Lawrence: That's incredible.
Zeena: And I'm going to Oakland on Thursday to rehearse the new piece—the sister piece to Modesty, you could say. I'm very excited to share this work at Big Ears.
Lawrence: Is that your only performance there? Are you part of Cobra this time?
Zeena: No, I'm just in and out this time.
Lawrence: In addition to this companion piece you mention, what are the artistic questions you're starting to ask yourself about what's next? What are you mulling?
Zeena: Oh, I'm already in the midst of things. I'm doing a new acoustic harp project that uses a new system in Max, which I'll be improvising with. It's sort of an acoustic-electric project, and it will also have a visual component—something I've never done before. I want to record it by the end of this year. I'm also making a new electric harp record, inspired by some of the work of Daphne Oram, the electronic musician who worked at the BBC. And I'm writing a piece for my sisters, who are in the Eclipse Quartet in California—a piece for the Eclipse Quartet and acoustic harp in four channels. And there's this new sister piece to Modesty. I have a lot on my plate—but that's what happens when you're not teaching.
Lawrence: When I was preparing, I found there's so much work to reckon with—
Zeena: I know. It's hard to pick what to focus on. Because we didn't talk about Lace.
Lawrence: Let's talk about Lace for a moment. I'm actually still integrating my experience of listening to it—I've been sort of inside the Zeena musical universe for the last week or ten days. (laughter) There's a lot. I wanted to tell you a story, at the risk of possibly offending you. Yesterday I was listening to Lament for the Maker in my earbuds while doing some housework—I was in the kitchen cooking. The sounds of my home were interacting with the sounds of the piece.
Zeena: Honored! (laughter)
Lawrence: It was so strange. For a moment I had this very light somatic experience—
Zeena: Yeah, that's beautiful.
Lawrence: I didn't know what was coming from where. It was really something.
Zeena: Yeah. That's beautiful. I love it. Not taken as an insult in any way. But I will say that the interesting thing about Lace is it started again out of necessity—to have a score to use with a group of improvisers. I was invited to do something at the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio, and it wasn't going to be a piece for dancers. They were just presenting music in their studio—a series called Music Mondays—and I'd been invited to be part of it. My group was George Lewis, John King, and Fast Forward, the percussionist. And I was in a quandary about what to do for these incredible improvisers.
Because I had done a lot of sewing in my past, I had scraps of fabric, and I happened to have five pieces of lace. I ended up—who knows why one gets an idea for something—slapping them on a board as if they were five short movements and making a set of conditions for reading them as an improviser. I had no idea if this was going to work. It happened to work, and it began a series of many movements using this idea—one that continues to this day, actually. When I say it worked, I mean it activated the improvisers to work together with something that had a kind of identity, a quality you could relate back to what the images were.
Electro-acoustic composer/improviser, educator, Zeena Parkins is a pioneer of contemporary harp practices. Using expanded techniques, object preparations, and electronic processing she has re-defined the instrument’s capacities. Concurrently, Parkins self-designed a series of one-of-a kind electric instruments. She leans into the harp’s physical limitations pushing its boundaries and impossibilities. In her compositions, Parkins utilizes collections, historic proximities, tactility, spatial configurations and movement. Sonic presence is revealed in explorations of timbral shifts, feedback, gestural configurations, and perceptual residues.
Awards include: Guggenheim Fellowship, Doris Duke Artist Award, Berliner Kunstlerprogramm/DAAD Fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts/Artist Award and FCA Emergency Grant, MAP Fund, NYFA Fellowship, Prix Ars Eletroncia/Honorary Mention, Herb Alpert/Ucross Prize and a recent (2022) Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Bard College.
Parkins has been awarded three Bessies: NY Dance and Performance Awards, for her groundbreaking work with dance. She has been devoted to her ongoing investigation and collaborative work with dance since the mid-80’s in NYC.
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In 2023, Parkins released her long-term project LACE on Chaikin to critical acclaim. (see review in The Guardian). In 2025, Parkins released two recordings in homage to her time teaching at Mills College on the west coast: Modesty of the Magic Thing on Tzadik Records and Lament of the Maker on Relative Pitch Records. Parkins taught in the Music Department at…Read More