Eclectic composer
Zeena Parkins will bring her unique sound to Orlando on Monday.
Zeena Parkins doesn’t think about how her music is going to be labeled when she’s writing.
Jazz. Classical. Experimental.
“Those terms tend to be more important to other people,” says the composer, who is completing an artist’s residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach. “There are sources of inspiration that fall into all those categories. There’s a lot of gray area into where the boundaries lie where my music falls in that.”
The Brooklyn-based harpist will perform Monday, at Orlando’s Timucua White House, home of Cirque du Soleil music director Benoit Glazer. (The venue is at 2000 S. Summerlin Ave. Show starts at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free but donations are requested. Details at timucua.com.)
Parkins has brought the harp into a number of unlikely contexts. She has collaborated with such highprofile artists as pop singer Björk, jazz composer John Zorn and Courtney Love’s rock band Hole.
Parkins even invented an electric harp with a whammy bar, a device usually reserved for guitars.
She was also a member of avant-garde bands such as News From Babel and Skeleton Crew.
“They could have had songs, but they were never quite normal,” she says of her band projects. “They were never going to be a Top 40 hit.”
A self-described improviser, Parkins likes to incorporate other kinds of artistry into her compositions, such as lighting or dancing. In her time at the Atlantic Center, she has worked with fellow artist-in-residence Jennifer Monson, a choreographer. “My work involves a lot of collaborative process, working with people in other fields to generate hybrids,” she says.
The scores that Parkins will perform in Orlando began life in 2015 during a residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation on Captiva Island.
She describes the acoustic harp works as “ascetic pieces that really dig into continuing to push boundaries on the acoustic harp and how the acoustic harp can be played. These are all pieces that take different approaches to the instrument.”
Film, literature, urban ecology and more serve as inspiration for Parkins’ writing. “I see something that interests me,” she says. “Researching or incorporating it with a language I’m more familiar with, I’m able to come with something that I didn’t necessarily expect to come up with.”
Parkins was first assigned the harp when she was attending high school in her native Detroit. She is an advocate for keeping music programs alive.
“Public school music education is so fundamentally important,” she says. “I think just the beginnings of people being open to listening to different kinds of music comes from a place of being able to play an instrument themselves. Even if it’s just for a semester or a summer. … It changes the relationship to your ears.”
In her 60s, Parkins encourages what she calls the “physicality of listening, which includes … a kind of openness and generosity” toward new kinds of music.
“It’s like beginning to understand a language that’s not your mother tongue. All of a sudden meaning is revealed. And with that meaning comes a huge amount of emotional satisfaction and intellectual satisfaction.”