Zeena Parkins

Tip! There’s music inside of lace stitching, and electro-acoustic composer, improviser, and harpist Zeena Parkins has spent years finding it. Her lace pieces use images of lace as musical scores for ensembles to play, building webs of sound that emerge from its contours.

LACE is a boxset of artifacts including an LP of two of Parkins’ multi-movement works, “LACE I.” and “LACE II.,” presented for the first time on recording. The pieces were performed by percussionist William Winant, electronic musician James Fei, cellist Maggie Parkins, and Tilt Brass, a sextet led by Chris McIntyre. Alongside this recording, the boxset features interviews, scores, and poetry, highlighting the arc of Parkins’ lace works and showing the different ways each piece responds to lace. It also represents the culmination of this chapter of Parkins’ lace project and marks a turn for the artist back to recording and releasing music.

Parkins’ interest in textiles dates to before she began composing with lace. Upon first moving to New York, she made her own clothes, and when she started touring Europe, she would occasionally visit fabric stores to collect buttons, trimmings, and pieces of border lace, finding herself particularly attracted to geometric patterns. Then, in 2008, she needed to quickly come up with a score for a piece commissioned by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which led her to create her first lace piece. To make the composition, she glued five pieces of lace to a black poster board and wrote out a set of conditions for the ensemble to follow as they played. That early performance showed Parkins the possibility of lace—its patterns and texture was ripe for making more music. She became interested in giving the scores more conditions and expanding them, creating more music that branched off from that initial idea.