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.
Lament for the Maker by Zeena Parkins