Spring 1999 Volume XXVIII, No. 2

Defining American Music by David Nicholls Post-Canonical Ellington by Mark Tucker Elliott Carter at 90+ by John F. Link Persona non grata: Frank Zappa's Orchestral Subculture by Arved Ashby The Eclectic World of Tom McDermott by Edward A. Berlin ISAM Matters Reviews Twentieth-Century Originals by Wayne Alpern Cage, Notation, and Theatre by Jon Erickson Country and Gospel Notes by Charles Wolfe ISAM Home

Persona non grata: Frank Zappa's Orchestral Subculture The only thing common to Frank Zappa’s many styles in rock, pop, jazz, and “serious” concert music is a conflicted, aesthetically fractured, and unidiomatic quality–a quality matching social critic Dick Hebdige’s description of subculture as a way of “contradicting the myth of consensus and inevitability.”1 Subculture, for Hebdige, defines “a form of resistance in which experienced contradictions and objections to ruling ideology are obliquely represented in style.” One gets the impression that Zappa conceived his styles less as avenues of personal musical expression than as things negatively defined–as reactions to something; as forms of satire, protest, or alienation; as emblems of bitterness and non-participation in the culture and entertainment industries. Subcultural “resistance” is certainly less clumsily applied to Zappa than the -isms paraded by Ben Watson, who has been particularly promiscuous in calling Zappa a dadaist, surrealist, Marxist, situationist, and knight-in-shining-armor enemy to “the ‘mildness’ that has been noted as a feature of postmodern polystylism.”2 But Watson goes on to show that these labels and approaches, except for the Marxist interpretation (which teaches us a good deal about Zappa and his music), are as much a waste of time as their meanings are now ambiguous. The idea of a subculture-style in concert music is nothing new, at least if we believe Adorno’s account of early twentieth-century modernism. But Zappa’s orchestral works are remarkable for several reasons. First, his works in an atonal, academic style stand out for their belated modernism: he chose to re-fight Victorian sexual and musical battles in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. These works are not even informed by the kind of Darmstadtian, hegemonic voice one might expect of progressive music written in the 1950s or early 60s; they are instead imbued with the Ivesian, early-century voice of the modernist as embattled minority. Second, Zappa was a hopelessly conflicted practitioner of absolute-music aesthetics in a world that chose to hear him as a rock star–he was a “serious” composer who made it to the top ten and won a Grammy (for the album Jazz from Hell, 1986) at the very point in his career when he found such industry honors most hateful and embarrassing. Third, it is rare for a composer to choose orchestral music as a forum to contradict “the myth of consensus and inevitability,” when the test of idiomatic orchestration is usually the very place a composer drops modernist alienation and takes up traditional, centuries-old ideas of orchestral color. Zappa’s subcultural voice is most provocative and puzzling in the six large-ensemble works that he took on tour at least once with his own bands, and also took the trouble to publish separately and in his own orchestration: Strictly Genteel, Dupree’s Paradise, Sinister Footwear, Envelopes, The Dog Breath Variations, and Penis Dimension.3 One might consider these “crossover” pieces the “real” output of this composer, given his own account of his origins: “I didn’t write a rock-n-roll song ’til I was in my twenties, and the only reason I put a rock-n-roll band together is because I couldn’t get anybody to play any of the chamber music or orchestral music that I had written when I was a teenager.”4 Do we label Zappa as “serious” or pop musician, as electric or acoustic in sound, as critic of symphonic, absolute-music pretension or of the pop-song industry, as descendant of Johnny “Guitar” Watson or of Stravinsky? These various ascriptions are impractical and uninstructive. Zappa used a divisive and irresolvable collision between “symphonic-modern” and “pop-song-commercial” as a point of repartee for a song like “Teenage Prostitute,” just as he did for the twenty-five-minute orchestral ballet score Sinister Footwear. Both pieces criticize bourgeois ethics and common-practice ideas of musical texture in much the same way. As a song with painstakingly-rehearsed ensemble doublings and ironic lyrics sung in operatic style, “Teenage Prostitute” owes just as much to Rossini, Schoenberg, and Carl Stalling as Sinister Footwear owes to rhythm & blues. Someday, listeners will hear as profound an ambivalence in Zappa’s relationships with popular song and the concert orchestra as they now hear in Ellington’s connections with these same institutions. Never recorded commercially in its orchestral form, Sinister Footwear demonstrates just how resistant to contextualization a Zappa opus can be. This score, premiered in Berkeley in 1984, develops a long transitional passage from the 1977 song “Wild Love” and also includes a painstakingly transcribed and orchestrated version of a guitar improvisation (“Persona non grata”) that Zappa played before a New York concert in 1978. It is irrelevant in Sinister Footwear to speak of a central or “original” text, for the piece does not relate to its constituent, earlier material the way a pop song relates to its cover or a Ravel orchestration corresponds to the composer’s piano original. The replication does not supplant the original, nor does it serve to remind the listener of that original. Nor is the ballet an adaptation of basic material to new circumstances. Finally, there is the question–a common one when it comes to Zappa’s orchestral scores–of how idiomatic the music is to the forces at hand. When he orchestrated “Persona non grata,” Zappa fetishized the guitar-based events in his material (bends, slides, string-crossings) but the listener does not make these connections because Zappa did not try to recreate a guitar sound. The success of a long score like Sinister Footwear will partly depend on the degree to which the listener is willing to accept the texture of bass plus improvisatory leading line as a feasible orchestral texture. Was Zappa an inexperienced orchestrator, or perhaps simply a bad one? The idea that most of these double-duty pieces represent critiques of standard orchestral sounds and practices finds support in the orchestral skill displayed in a score like Dupree’s Paradise. Zappa prepared the orchestral version of this work for Boulez in 1984, incorporating all the new and written-out material one would need when revamping an improvisation-heavy chart for a “classical” orchestra that would have little rehearsal time on its hands.5 Whether because of the auspicious circumstances of its orchestral premiere or the simple need to do so much writing and rewriting, Dupree’s Paradise contains coloristic touches and nods toward textbook ideas of orchestration not heard in the five previously mentioned scores. Most prominent and also conventional here is Zappa’s tendency to write for pairs of instruments in thirds, to set off large sections of music in contrasting instrumentation (the long, chromatic passage for two pianos, for example), and generally to use instruments according to their traditionally-defined roles (mallet instruments for color, low brass for harmonic support). In this way, Dupree’s Paradise is the exception to Zappa’s rule of unidiomatic orchestration and arranging. Because they represent a reaction against mainstream practices and cultures, those Zappa works serving as both pop and classical music stake out a subculture more than they represent “crossover” in the accepted sense of reaching out to (usually wider) audiences. Zappa would have mistrusted the “subculture” label, calling it halfway to mainstream appropriation and corruption. But there is no other way to describe how he, and musicians like Ellington, Mingus, and Stalling, defined orchestral interests that will always resist any concert performance tradition. It is Zappa’s anomalous orchestral work, especially fairly literal “transcriptions” like Sinister Footwear and Envelopes, that show the Zappa subculture at its most radical. This will certainly be the last part of Zappa’s output to find its way into canons or libraries or hundred-best-ever lists. And for this reason, more than reasons of his training or original allegiances, they present the best musical basis for understanding Zappa as eternal provocateur. –Arved Ashby Ohio State University Notes Click on note number to return to its place in the text. 1Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Methuen, 1979). 2Ben Watson, The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); “Frank Zappa as Dadaist,” Contemporary Music Review, 1996. 3Scores and parts available through Barfko-Swill. Unless otherwise noted, all recordings are available from Rykodisc. Rock band versions: Strictly Genteel on 200 Motels (10513/14), You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol.6 (10571/72), and Make a Jazz Noise Here (10555/56); Dupree’s Paradise on You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol.2 (10563/64), and Make a Jazz Noise Here; part 2 of Sinister Footwear on Them or Us (10543) and Make a Jazz Noise Here; part 3 of Sinister Footwear on You Are What You Is (10536) and Guitar (10550/51); Envelopes on Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch (10539); The Dog Breath Variations on Uncle Meat (10506/07) and You Can’t Do That on Stage Anymore, Vol.2. Orchestral versions: Strictly Genteel on Orchestral Favorites (10529) and London Symphony Orchestra–Zappa (10540/01); Dupree’s Paradise on Boulez Conducts Zappa–The Perfect Stranger (10542); Envelopes on London Symphony Orchestra–Zappa; The Dog Breath Variations on Songs and Dances (Mark MCD-1116); Penis Dimension on 200 Motels. 4Interview, NPR Weekend Edition, May 1995. 5See Jonathan Bernard, “The Musical World(s) of Frank Zappa: Some Observations of His ‘Crossover’ Pieces,” Contemporary Music Review, 1999.