Modesty of the Magic Thing
- Zeena Parkins
- William Winant
Western Front is pleased to present a concert by composer, harpist, and improviser Zeena Parkins, with her close collaborator, percussionist William Winant. Together they will perform work from Parkins’s album Modesty of the Magic Thing (Tzadik Records, 2025).
Composed by Parkins for harp, percussion, and electronics, Modesty of the Magic Thing pays tribute to American visual artist Jay DeFeo and her series The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1989). These drawings iterate a seven-sided shape derived from a pink cup gifted to DeFeo by sculptor Ron Nagle, rendered in charcoal and metallic powder to create a meditative field of mysterious power. This central form becomes the conceptual core of Parkins’s composition, providing a framework for its line, rhythm, texture, and form.
The work will be performed on acoustic harp, wooden bows, tracer microphone, metal percussion, and several just-intoned instruments, including a unique metallic tubophone designed by Lou Harrison and played by Winant. The instrumentation will also include microtuned bells, a hanging cymbal, and a giant tam-tam. Together, the instrumentation melds to ring with unexpected rubbing, resonance, and reverberation.
Recorded at the Littlefield Concert Hall at Mills College in summer 2024, Modesty of the Magic Thing also pays homage to the experimental traditions supported by Mills College, where Parkins, Wiant, and DeFeo were longtime professors.
About the Artists
Zeena Parkins is an electroacoustic musician, composer, and instrument designer based in New York, United States. Recognized as a pioneer of contemporary harp performance and a mainstay of the New York downtown music scene, her work engages extended techniques, object preparations, and electronic interactions to expand the instrument’s possibilities. Working within a shifting constellation of improvisation and composition, Parkins’s interstitial practice explores translations of sound, often in multichannel environments that are at once architectural, emotional, topographical, and social. Her work draws on collections, lists, historical proximities, tactility, spatiality, and movement, revealing a sonic social presence through timbral shifts, feedback, dynamic extremes, and gestural configurations in and out of the body, as well as psychoacoustic residues.
William Winant is an avant-garde percussionist based in Oakland, United States. He is principal percussionist with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and the John Zorn Chamber Ensemble, and since 1995 has performed with the avant-rock band Mr. Bungle. Winant has served as timpanist with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, principal percussionist with the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, and has been a featured guest artist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Library of Congress, with appearances at major venues and international festivals throughout Europe and North America. He has made more than 200 recordings across a wide range of genres, including works for live performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and soundtracks for feature films.
Accessibility
The Grand Luxe Hall is located on the second floor of Western Front, which is accessed by a flight of 26 stairs. While plans for a full building upgrade to facilitate access for wheelchair users are still underway, events in the Grand Luxe Hall are made available virtually via high-quality livestream (see link above). Further details about accessibility at Western Front can be found here.
Acknowledgements
Presented with support from the Government of Canada.
Western Front is a non-profit artist-run centre in Vancouver.
We acknowledge the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations as traditional owners of the land upon which Western Front stands.