Do you notice a mistake?
Frank Zappa is one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century. A wide-ranging and prolific composer, Zappa created a catalogue over the course of his lifetime that includes several hundred titles in a vast array of genres, ranging from pop music to classical music1. The fiercely independent Zappa (he categorized himself politically as a “Practical Conservative2”) composed, wrote the lyrics for, and performed (mostly on guitar) works with his own band, as well as with other formations, which he directed and recorded in his own studio, and distributed mostly through his own label. The impressive number of interviews he gave over the course of his career constituted a kind of “customer service” for his music, and through them he made a name for himself as a scathing critic of American society in general and of mass culture in particular. Toward the end of his life, he even considered entering electoral politics.
While Zappa’s critical stance may be linked to the Pop Art movement, he is above all known as one of the figureheads of the “freak scene” – a movement that emphasized marginality and embraced the idea of defining oneself outside the bounds and mores of a mainstream society whose values it refused. Zappa’s work nurtured eclecticism in all its forms, and was characterized by the tensions that emerged by placing contradictory elements in relation with one another – he often compared his approach to composing (a piece, a program, etc.) to the work of the American sculptor Alexander Calder, whose mobiles balanced large, lightweight objects against smaller, very dense ones: “So in my case,” Zappa explained, “I say, “A large mass of any material will ‘balance’ a smaller, denser mass of any material, according to the length of the gizmo it’s dangling on, and the ‘balance point’ chosen to facilitate the danglement3”. Rejecting the idea of a hierarchy of values, Zappa spent his life mixing and playing with wildly diverse aesthetics, ultimately producing a singular body of work that remained steadfastly faithful to its own conceptual continuity, despite the seeming miscellany of its constituent parts.
It would be impossible to judge Zappa’s catalogue from a single work, or even an entire period; indeed, the composer considered everything he produced (concerts, recordings, writing, interviews, film creations, etc.) to be part of a whole: a single, large-scale work threaded through with returns to and revisions of and variations on recurring themes, a concept he called “Project/Object.” In 1971, in a text published in Circular4, he wrote, “The basic blueprints were executed in 1962-63. Preliminary experimentation in early and mid-1964. Construction of the project/object began in late 1964. Work is still in progress”.
These blueprints, of course, were sketched against the background of Zappa’s personal education – a music lover from an early age, he took just as keen an interest in Edgard Varèse’s explorations of timbre as he did in the performance techniques of Johnny “Guitar” Watson, and marvelled at the virtuosity and humor that Spike Jones wove into the classical music spoofs he arranged for his City Slickers. By 1962, Zappa had joined several bands, performing as a guitarist with such groups as the Boogie Men (1961), the Masters (1961), and Joe Perrino & The Mellotones (1961-1962) – none of which played original material. Their set lists bored Zappa so thoroughly that he abandoned his instrument for nearly a year. In the early 1960s, Zappa began working at Pal Recording Studio, which he bought a few years later and renamed Studio Z. The recording studio quickly became an “instrument” for him, one that he mastered in all its subtleties: he was renowned throughout his career for his tremendous virtuosity in that field.
At the same time, Zappa began to make a name for himself as a composer; he wrote film scores (The World’s Greatest Sinner and Run Home, Slow – see the “biography” tab) and was a guest on the Steve Allen Show, a popular television variety show, where he conducted the show’s orchestra in an improvisational piece titled Concerto For Two Bicycles, Pre-Recorded Tape & Instrumental Ensemble (March 1963). A few weeks later, he organized a concert of his experimental music (19 May 1963), whose program hints at his influences at that time:
• I. Variables II for Orchestra
• II. Variables I for Any Five Instruments
• III. Opus 5, for Four Orchestras
• IV. Rehearsalism
• V. Three Pieces of Visual Music with Jazz Group
The concert was broadcast live on KPFK Radio (Los Angeles), and in the recording one can hear Zappa presenting a piece by explaining, “The pianist will perform these fragments in any order he feels necessary, and will improvise freely upon them”. During the question and answer session that followed the concert, John Cage and Edgard Varèse were evoked, both of whom remained major influences for Zappa (as were Stravinsky and Webern), and in response to a question about “the great masters of the past of music” the young composer explained candidly:
“I know absolutely nothing about any composers before the twentieth century. I have a very unusual type musical background. It’s practically nil. I taught myself what I know—whatever that is—about music. And my own personal tastes and what I listen to do not include very much tonal music of that type. But I’ll tell you what I do like. I’m a great fan of rhythm and blues, and I like rock & roll. And I like folk music. But I don’t like Schubert, and I don’t like Brahms, and I don’t like things like that. I don’t like Beethoven—a whole lot5”.
In 1964, Zappa headed a R&B trio called The Muthers; in 1965, he fronted a quintet called The Soul Giants, which soon became a quartet and was renamed The Blackouts (using the name of his first band, formed during his high school years), and then Captain Glasspack & His Magic Mufflers. Finally, on Mother’s Day (9 May 1965), the band officially changed its name to The Mothers.
It was at this point that Zappa’s career as a public figure really began: at twenty-four, he had already developed a firm understanding of how the music business worked, and while he was aware that the greater public did not share his taste in experimental music, this awareness did nothing to dampen his desire to compose it; quite to the contrary. Throughout his life, he looked for ways to “educate” his audiences6 by introducing them to the composers he so admired. In a similar vein, he maintained a kind of Brechtian distance from them, remaining in constant dialogue with his audience as a way to shorten the distance between the stage and the audience members, between the “great musician” and his public.
Zappa lived on the West Coast in an era when the entertainment industry was beginning to take notice of Western youth culture, in large part thanks to the growth of the hippie movement. This receptiveness made the times particularly favourable to Zappa and his bandmates, in concert and on record. Freak Out! (1966), his first album, released with what was now The Mothers of Invention, was a double album7 that offered a taste of nearly everything that would define him as a composer: pop music parodies (“Go Cry On Somebody Else’s Shoulder”), vitriolic critiques of American society (“Hungry Freaks,” “Daddy”), guitar-heavy blues (“Trouble Every Day”), and highly contemporary experimental music (“The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet”). In the 180 names listed as influences for the Mothers in the liner notes, Zappa also noted his desire to abolish hierarchies, citing composers of “serious music” (Pierre Boulez, Charles Ives, Mauricio Kagel, Luigi Nono, Leo Ornstein, Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schoenberg, Roger Sessions, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Igor Stravinsky, Edgard Varèse, Anton Webern), alongside pop singers and jazz musicians (Richard Berry, Eric Dolphy, Bob Dylan, Buddy Guy, Charles Mingus, Elvis Presley), producers and managers (Brian Epstein, Phil Spector, Tom Wilson), painters and authors (Salvador Dali, James Joyce) and many others, a number of whom remain unknown.
In 1966, Zappa began dividing his time between months-long international tours and periods of intensive daily rehearsal with whatever ensemble he was playing with at the time. With the Mothers of Invention (who went back to being The Mothers in 1971) and, starting in 1976, with an ensemble of musicians that accompanied him under no particular name, Zappa developed highly unusual techniques as a musical director and conductor: his musicians played works with no scores that were highly codified, but contained improvisational sections. These pieces might be modified at any moment depending on Zappa’s inspirations (following a principle he named AAAFNRAA, or “Anything, Any Time, Anywhere, For No Reason At All8”). The fact that his musicians were not always trained to read music forced Zappa to develop a language of gestures and instructions (blow like this, play in the style of so-and-so, etc.) that colors his whole catalogue, almost as if he were attempting to establish a unified field theory of musical genres. About the album Cruising With Ruben & The Jets (1968), in which he returned through his own compositions to the R&B and Doo-Wop of his teenage years, Zappa explained, “I conceived that album along the same lines as the compositions in Stravinsky’s neoclassical period. If he could take the forms and clichés of the classical era and pervert them, why not do the same with rules and regulations applied to doo-wop in the fifties9?”
And indeed, the album seems at first listen to be composed in the style Zappa purported to imitate, but the attentive ear cannot miss numerous anachronisms in, for example, the production and the chord progressions. One also notes a certain playful misappropriation, in a sung quotation of the beginning of the Rite of Spring at the end of Fountain of Love. Speaking of the album Uncle Meat (1969 — linked to a film project realized much later, in 1988), Zappa mentioned the influence of Conlon Nancarrow, whose shadow hovers over the work Zappa did later on with the Synclavier, a sampling system designed in the late 1970s by Jon Appleton and his colleagues at Dartmouth College, and which Zappa was one of the first people to acquire (1982). He used the Synclavier to compose works much closer to the world of contemporary art music than to pop music, particularly after the abrupt end of what would turn out to be his last rock music tour, in 1988.
The Mothers in their various iterations were a part of the “pop world,” discussed in the “pop media” and performing “pop concerts,” but the constant references to “serious music” running through their “pop music” meant that Zappa and his bands remained marginal, eccentric – freaks, in other words, for fans of either type of music.
Zappa’s major projects that called on classically trained musicians were:
200 Motelsis part of what is known as Zappa’s “vaudeville period”, when Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan were the lead singers in the Mothers. With their extensive improvisational abilities and surprising vocal talent, the duo made it possible for Zappa to play with a highly personal form of musical theatre. Probably the best example from this period is the epic “Billy The Mountain” (from the albumJust Another Band From L.A., 1972), and the composer’s greatest success in this genre wasThe Adventures Of Greggery Peccary, an extraordinary feat of studio production for which he performed all the vocals (Studio Tan— reprised in 2002 by the Ensemble Modern, conducted by Jonathan Stockhammer, with vocals by David Moss and Omar Ebrahim). This vocal work, which he worked on extensively with his rock band, led Zappa to compose the operaJoe’s Garage(1979) and the musicalThing-Fish (1984), both of which offered radical new takes on their respective genres – and neither of which Zappa ever succeeded in staging, due to high production costs.
“Does humor belong in music?10”, Zappa demanded in the title of an album (and a film) in 1985 that documented the concerts in his 1984 tour. There is no doubt that the composer acquired many detractors when he answered with a resounding “Yes!” It was this humor that allowed him to spoof and play with so many musical forms that many of his contemporaries believed to be immutable (and incompatible!) – but it was also this humor that held up a clown mask that succeeded in hiding Zappa’s talent from many observers. “Without deviation (from the norm), progress is not possible11”, Zappa said, and it was indeed transgression, pastiche, satire, and all forms of deviation and redirection that became his norm. Zappa’s rock band was just as likely to perform Bartók, Stravinsky, or Varèse as it was to premiere compositions that would later be recorded by the Ensemble intercontemporain or the London Symphony Orchestra.
With one foot in the world of rock and roll and the other in the world of “serious music,” Zappa lived the close of the twentieth century as a kind Doctor Jekyll – but one who was good friends with his Mister Hyde: each of his productions bore the mark of both worlds and all of them defy any attempt at categorization. As he explained in his autobiography:
“Thanks to songs like “Dinah Moe Humm,” “Titties & Beer,” and “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow,” I managed to accumulate enough cash to bribe a group of drones to grind its way through pieces like “Mo ‘n Herb’s Vacation,” “Bob in Dacron,” and “Bogus Pomp (eventually released on London Symphony Orchestra, Volumes I and II) […]12”.
Postmodern icon, star of jazz and progressive rock, iconoclastic artist, and eternal freak, Frank Zappa built a catalogue that is terribly difficult to describe in a few paragraphs and that richly deserves the interest that it has increasingly sparked since his death. This posthumous recognition is more than a little ironic for a composer who systematically included this quote from Edgard Varèse on the covers of his early Mothers of Invention Albums: “The present day composer refuses to die13”.
Do you notice a mistake?