With her new album Lament for the Maker the harpist Zeena Parkins marks her ‘heart-wrenching’ departure from Mills College, which announced back in 2021 that it would end its degree programs owing to financial difficulties though it ultimately merged with Northeastern University and survives today in an abridged form.
Parkins had taught at Mills for thirteen years by the time she departed the college in 2022, with the New Yorker writing that the end of the old Mills College and its influential Center for Contemporary Music meant too an end to her life of switching between coasts.
For sixty years and then some Mills proved one of the most important centres in the United States for experimental music, including among its faculty the electronic pioneers Luciano Berio, Morton Subotnick and Pauline Oliveros who became the first director of the Centre for Contemporary Music when the San Francisco Tape Music Center relocated to Mills in 1966, the minimalist composer Terry Riley, the opera maverick Robert Ashley, the innovative guitarist and Henry Cow founder Fred Frith, the avant-garde jazz masters Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell plus contemporary composers like Maggi Payne, Chris Brown, James Fei and Parkins herself. A diverse array of artists from Dave Brubeck, Steve Reich and Laurie Anderson to Joanna Newsom, Holly Herndon and Sarah Davachi studied in the college’s music programme.
Knowing that her time at Mills was coming to an end, Parkins writes that she ‘requested of my colleagues works I could perform to mark this loss, honor the school’s great legacy and conclude the thirteen years I spent teaching there’. Lament for the Maker then – its title drawn from a 1963 poem by the San Francisco holdout Jack Spicer – comprises three pieces written for Parkins by Laetitia Sonami, John Bischoff and James Fei plus one of her own compositions, which she describes as an ongoing acoustic harp solo which she commenced all the way back in 2014.
Just like Berio and Oliveros all the way through her deep listening practice, Ashley and Frith and so many other artists and composers who came out of Mills, as a harpist and improviser Parkins utilises an array of extended techniques. Over the course of the nearly hour-long Lament for the Maker she combines acoustic harp and electronics, making use of bass bows and wooden bows, bolts, metallic paper, corks and crocodile or alligator clips, metal slides, felt, handheld microphones, friction mallets which are typically used to produce sustained tones and overtones or what are sometimes called ‘whale’ sounds on gongs and last but not least lighting filter sheets.
The opening piece ‘She is a Butcher in My Dreams’ by Sonami finds the harpist splitting and slicing, rubbing and striking her instrument as she produces a horrorscape worthy of a Foley artist, conjuring the buzzing of an old power meter and ghastly rumbles as her bowed strings are laden with distortion or scratch out messages which are lost in the enveloping mire. Banging upon her instrument, she summons the energy of a cajĆ³n with some of the breathy resonance of pan pipes.
Fond and fondly experimental, the second piece ‘pluck’ as composed by Bischoff is described as a duet between harp and electronics, with the electronic component running automatically and constantly varying in response to the harpist’s improvisations as Parkins makes distinctive choices of pitch. It reminds me of my introduction to Parkins almost a quarter of a century ago now as she accompanied Bjƶrk on the Vespertine outtake ‘Generous Palmstroke’, embodying some of the same limpid lyricism and pitting that in curious yet somehow comforting contrast with the eerie and airborne electronics. Moments of stark celestialism or ambient drift share a synergy with everything from Music for Airports to something like the Andreas Tilliander and Goran KajfeÅ” album In Cmin.
Lament for the Maker also recalls the harpist’s last solo heading for Relative Pitch in the form of last year’s two-parter Dam Against the Spring Tide. On that album Parkins jammed her elbows into the piano and contributed field recordings as William Winant and Brett Carson deftly navigated a series of vignettes, then took up with a fuller ensemble to explore coded systems, language games and lists all in response to the discoveries she made while combing through Walter Benjamin’s archives in Berlin. Despite the critical or fragmentary nature of much of Benjamin’s archive, the writer’s processes and his childhood reminiscences carried a certain intimacy which was palpable in the music.
‘In Such Circumstances of Miscalculations’ the third piece on Lament for the Maker is both coiled and restrained, private and cloistered yet still cordially intimate. After a couple of early deluges it hunkers down for most of the duration of its thirteen minutes, quiet and probing as Parkins begins to saw reticently at a string. In that sense then perhaps the early clatter of cross notes marks the moment of mistake or miscalculation, with the remainder of the composition like putting on whiteout or using a palette knife to trowel off the excess paint.
James Fei the composer of ‘In Such Circumstances of Miscalculations’ says he hoped the ‘open aspects’ of the piece would pose ‘musical problems’ that Parkins might find interesting, adding ‘it felt like a continuation of the exchange of ideas we’ve had in the over a decade of teaching together at Mills College’. Small gongs seems to reverberate in the middle section along with some spare keys. Then a studious or bookish passage conjures variously the folding or shuffling of papers, nib against paper or paper being wound through a typewriter and other such acts carried out by those with a penchant for letting the night oil burn, before with ripe melodicism Parkins delivers a lovely summation or peroration on the harp.
While these three pieces were recorded at the same esteemed venue, ‘berlin bedroom’ the acoustic harp solo which closes the album was actually captured as Parkins performed one last time in front of a live audience inside Littlefield Concert Hall, the crown jewel of Mills. Dated the tenth of February, 2024, on ‘berlin bedroom’ slinky wriggles of harp gradually suggest a folk motif, as though the melody was being put together by little pipe cleaners. Parkins writes that the ongoing composition tests the harp’s sonic limits in terms of its fixed pitches, noting that these ‘impossibilities are tackled by commandeering and repurposing the instrument’s inner mechanics’.
In this particular rendition of ‘berlin bedroom’ some of the more brittle or tinny plucks sound like a tambura while the thicker textures buzz and gnaw like the revving of a circular saw. And as solitary harp strings ring out ‘berlin bedroom’ proves a kind of plaintive and forlorn fare-thee-well to Mills College, with the atmosphere punctured at the end by a communal swell of applause.
