Zeena Parkins: Captiva

About

For Zeena Parkins, the harp is an infinite challenge and the specificity with which she can hear a new angle of inquiry or a new trajectory of sound has an unabashed creative license. In the Captiva Pieces, this is manifested within a closed system of simple rules, that finds unlimited access to exploration. Parkins’s approach is without dogma. It is not describing a system, determining one or representing a system outside of itself. It is generating a way of listening and sensing within new systems. Each sound action is absolutely specific and placed against the next, propels our listening into a space of intricate and complex tension. “The playing pulls me in and out of the texture of the gesture, an embodied experience of moving towards and listening to the distance. I hear the thick, curly sensation of fingers on strings moving from plucked to muted. Each sound shaping the space for the next event to land in. Following a cosmic, muted pattern. It holds its history of being played and of playing, arriving into itself as a trace of its future possibility.” Jennifer Monson

This concert celebrates the release of Parkins’s project for acoustic harp and electronics Captiva on Good Child Music. A duo improvisation with trombonist Jim Staley will follow the Captiva Pieces.