LACE Zeena Parkins

By A Mystery Man Writer

Last updated 31 May 2024

*DOWNLOAD INCLUDES PDFS OF GRAPHIC SCORES TO COMPOSITIONS LACE 2. AND LACE 3. 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. Since 2008, she has composed four movements for the project. Each movement asks the player to approach the image from a different stance. LACE 1. is predicated on a far-gaze response to the stitch’s repetitive shapes and patterns, using only elements that you notice with a glance. The obvious differences and similarities between the five lace pieces become a tactic to understand densities, dynamics, scale, and pulse. The overarching scheme is made of three strategies: morphing repetitions, collectively shimmering pulses, and swaying between simple and complex. LACE 2. Action Cards consist of twenty-three individual lace cards that designate short bursts of an idea; the image is topographic and choreographic. LACE 3. Shetland Lace uses lace patterns from the Shetland Islands which are read in great detail— every stitch and every pattern is given a musical and relational identity. While composing these works, Parkins dove into the history and practice of lace-making. Another offshoot of her lace projects, Stitchomythia, which is a collaboration with French visual artist and designer Nadia Lauro, led her to visit a studio where they make lace in Magalas, a tiny village outside of Montpellier, France. There, she watched a group of women quietly craft lace. They were making bobbin lace, which is finely detailed work whose complex movements mimic musical gestures. These women spend months working on their patterns—it can take years to finish a design—and standing in that small room with these dedicated lace-makers was an intimate, illuminating experience. Before she dove into this long term project, Parkins felt lace was something too ornate and too bourgeois, but in looking deeper, she sees other ways of interpreting it. In an interview with Jenn Joy that accompanies the boxset, Parkins says: “In paying close attention to lace’s details: its twists and knots, interconnecting threads, variety of stitches, and the patterns that surface, I’m imagining a conspiracy with the lacemaker, usually a woman. My immersion into these embedded details evidences the unseen process of fabricating lace, and it’s my hope that this underscores the power and persistence of the lacemaker’s labor.”