Total Immersion:
Frank Zappa

11am FILM Cinema 1, Barbican
Zappa
2020, dir. Alex Winter (129 mins)
The perfect introduction to Frank Zappa: Alex Winter’s new landmark documentary explores the man, the music and the phenomenon – both on the stage and far from it.

Rated 15. Contains strong sexual images, sex references, language.

2.30pm CONCERT Milton Court Concert Hall
Zappa: The Yellow Shark
The Guildhall’s Ubu Ensemble pay homage to Frank Zappa’s iconic last album, harvested from his appearance at the 1992 Frankfurt Festival.

6pm TALK Frobisher Auditorium 1
Frank Zappa expert Ben Watson in conversation with BBC Radio 3’s Andrew McGregor.

7.30pm CONCERT Barbican
Zappa Goes Large
For Frank Zappa, the symphony orchestra was the consummate vehicle for musical storytelling. Brad Lubman leads this performance culminating in Zappa’s acknowledged orchestral masterpieces.

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Performances from today’s two concerts will feature in ‘Radio 3 in Concert’ on Friday 25 March at 7.30pm in ‘Total Immersion: Frank Zappa’. It will be available for 30 days after broadcast via BBC Sounds, where you can also find podcasts and music mixes.


Please note that some of the articles in this programme deal with themes of an adult nature.

A musician as boundary-defying as Frank Zappa can be hard to get a handle on, so this Total Immersion Day begins with the perfect primer. Alex Winter’s 2020 film employs extensive contributions from figures close to the musician, including his widow Gail, to interrogate some of the most stubborn Zappa myths, confronting the political turbulence the composer cultivated. It captures Zappa head and heart, and shines new light on his classical compositions.

The documentary benefits from unfettered access to the Zappa family trust and its wealth of archival footage. It examines the private life behind one of the most extraordinary musical careers of the last century – and the music it produced. Rolling Stone magazine wrote of the film: ‘you will learn way more about the man than you could possibly imagine’.

Rated 15. Contains strong sexual images, sex references, language.

Frank Zappa ^_(1940–93)
The Perfect Stranger ^{₍₁₉₈₄₎}

In 1983, journalists all over the world were amazed to hear Pierre Boulez had commissioned Frank Zappa to write pieces for his unpronounceable combo Ensemble Intercontemporain – and intended to conduct them in person for a record release in 1984. Boulez, the patriarch of ‘elitist’ modern composition ensconced in IRCAM (a sound lab in the Pompidou Centre in Paris), famed conductor of Wagner’s Ring cycle and canonised greats from Debussy to Stravinsky, in league with the goateed King of Smut Rock and Freak Guitar? The man who’d offended the entire Anglo-American rock press by dismissing punk? The man whose records divided opinion as soon as they were played? Frank Zappa as legitimate composer? It must be a hoax!

Not so. In his sleeve-notes for the initial release – a bizarre addition to EMI’s Angel series, which featured the likes of Prokofiev and Plácido Domingo (and titles such as Pleasure Songs for Flute and Karajan Conducts Strauss) – Zappa admitted his pieces were ‘preposterously non-modern’, but thanked Boulez for ‘having the patience to demand accurate performance of the killer triplets on page eight’.

Beginning with the sound of a ding-dong doorbell, which had been all the rage in homes with pretensions to style in the mid-1960s, the piece is a series of sonic gags based on a story about a vacuum-cleaner salesman and a slovenly housewife, all held together by Zappa’s ear for playing tension and his (recent) discovery of Olivier Messiaen’s way with instrumental combination. There’s also some – comically redacted – push-and-pull from Varèse’s Intégrales which now, following Zappa’s bent, sounds like cartoon coitus.

Anton Webern ^{_{(1883–1945)}}
Concerto for Nine Instruments ^{₍₁₉₃₄₎}

Anton Webern’s Concerto of 1934 for piano, six brass and woodwinds, violin and viola was hailed as a masterpiece by Luigi Dallapiccola, but remained unplayed for decades due to Nazi proscription, the Second World War and a global musical regression. In 1953, Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote about the piece in Melos (the music journal which had been taken over by the Nazi Party and renamed Neues Musikblatt, but reappeared in 1946, de-Nazified, with its former name restored). Arnold Schoenberg’s pioneering concept of Klangfarbenmelodie (‘sound colour melody’) is well to the fore, the whole piece sounding like a construction of different sonorities, as abstract and beautiful as a painting by Piet Mondrian. Listeners who’ve come to modern music via the portals of Free Improvisation may find it all spookily familiar; this is no accident, since, when everyone else was listening to the Rolling Stones, guitarist Derek Bailey was listening to the entire works of Anton Webern (a ‘minimalist’ in the sense that he compressed massive amounts of musical thinking into the tiniest time-spans) on a single reel-to-reel magnetic tape compiled from LPs he’d borrowed from the local public library. It is possible to celebrate the symmetry of Webern’s tone row (Milton Babbitt) or the ‘Latin Square’ of its Ode-to-Napoleon hexacord (Brian Alegant), but maybe we should follow Zappa in simply agreeing that it’s ‘saintly stuff’ … which founded an entire school of post-war ‘Boop Beep’ (Zappa’s name for scored and electronic composition ubiquitous in academia before the advent of Minimalism).

Igor Stravinsky ^{_{(1882–1971)}}
Pribaoutki ^{₍₁₉₁₄₎}

1 Kornilo
2 Natashka
3 Polkovnik
4 Staryewts i zayatsk 

Vladyslava Yakovenko mezzo-soprano

Igor Stravinsky wrote these settings of Alexander Afanasyev’s nonsense rhymes in 1914, just as the imperialist nations of Europe started their mass slaughter. There is no hint of le scandale unleashed by The Rite of Spring the year before, and the writing is spare, rhythmically charged and to the point. The solo soprano – singing at first in a low register, giving the piece a striking ritualistic menace – covers important and perennial themes such as alcoholic drinks (‘sunshine in a glass’), cockerels and chickens, old age, and home-made soup. Flute and clarinet pick up the vocal lines, while strings provide driving folk ostinatos. Some Zappologists may be reminded of ‘A Nun Suit Painted on Some Old Boxes’ from 200 Motels, but Theodor Adorno’s ‘Requiem for a Dead Cat’, from his musical The Treasure of Indian Joe, provides a closer fit.

Edgard Varèse ^{_{(1883–1965)}}
Intégrales ^_(1924–5)

When a 13-year-old Frank Zappa discovered Edgard Varèse, it was one of the purest aesthetic transmissions of the 20th century. He read in a magazine about an ‘unsaleable’ LP release: ‘a weird jumble of drums and other unpleasant sounds’, which promised everything the young R&B-obsessed Zappa craved. He found it in a record-store bargain bin. The photo of Varèse on the cover looked weird and B-movie: ‘it was great that somebody had finally made a record of a mad scientist’. He adored the music, even though his mother looked at him as if he’d gone insane. According to The Real Frank Zappa Book, he used the LP as an intelligence test on his friends. This is precisely what the New Modern Art of Stéphane Mallarmé and Kazimir Malevich proposed: direct communication outside semiotic systems and educational indoctrination, an appeal to the instinctual body. Varèse was a French modernist composer who relocated to New York in 1915. Hence his music was initially cast in the mould of Berlioz and Debussy, but he discarded these efforts in pursuit of modernist construction. He was a student of percussion instruments, and is one of the few European composers to feature in Alejo Carpentier’s groundbreaking Music in Cuba. Zappa declared he had no interest in tonal music and dissed the entire classical legacy. But he got Varèse at once, the key for Zappa to open up his interbreeding of world and commercial musics, where each sound is assessed for its emotional impact on the listening body. He told me he found Boulez’s interpretations of Varèse ‘weak’ … his own productions of Varèse’s music remain unreleased by the Zappa Family Trust, a bequest we all desire to hear.

Frank Zappa
The Yellow Shark ^{₍₁₉₉₃₎} – excerpts

The Dog Breath Variations
Uncle Meat: Main Title Theme
Get Whitey
Be-Bop Tango (Of the Old Jazzmen’s Church)
Outrage at Valdez
G-Spot Tornado

I was privileged to be with the dying Zappa in October 1993 when proof copies of the CD package of The Yellow Shark arrived at Woodrow Wilson Drive. I was there to read him passages from my book The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, but everyone in the house – family, studio personnel – stopped what they were doing and collected together to marvel at the new product. ‘Too dark,’ he said about the photographs. When I asked him about scores, and whether he thought they might have greater artistic longevity than recordings, he replied that they were simply a means to an end, so ‘the final artistic result is the master-tape’ (26 October 1993, Poodle Play p. 545). Zappa lived and died a record man. Nevertheless, it was fantastic for him towards the end of his life – dying of prostate cancer – to work with Ensemble Modern, and be granted concerts and accolades as an important contemporary composer. The CD release preserves the concert hall ambience and the jubilation of the audience at the concerts Zappa attended in Frankfurt (although we are spared the 20-minute standing ovation!). He finalised working scores with the help of arranger Ali N. Askin and the Ensemble Modern musicians, working from his archive of tapes, hand-written scores and print-outs from his Synclavier, an ahead-of-its-time sampler and digital music processor. In 1971, Zappa interrupted the version of ‘Call Any Vegetable’ on his album Just Another Band from L.A. to shout: ‘Aw, it’s f***ing great to be alive, ladies and gentlemen, and if you do not believe it is f***ing great to be alive, you better go now, because this show will bring you down so much.’ The scores Askin and Zappa worked out for Ensemble Modern convey this populist, optimistic credo with much gusto.

Conceiving time as a spherical constant, Zappa called calendar time ‘an affliction’. He saw ‘Fractional divisions of eternity’ as a heinous imposition by social hierarchies. Hence he did not see his compositions as biographical markers with opus numbers, but as ever-present vortices of energy; perhaps only Duke Ellington reworked the same tunes with such fecundity. ‘Dog Breath (in the Year of the Plague)’ and ‘Uncle Meat’ both surfaced on Uncle Meat in 1969, intricate shots of dada perversity achieved on the multitrack which also gave fans something to whistle. Unlike most post-tonal composers, Zappa never allowed serial procedures to inhibit instinctual reflex: from the guitar solos to the tunes, it’s an ecstatic, Dionysian body that speaks. ‘Get Whitey’ is languorously emotional and lovely – almost unbearably poignant – and could be something by John Carisi; ‘Bebop Tango (Of the Old Jazzmen’s Church)’ appeared on Roxy & Elsewhere (1974), seemingly a vehicle for Zappa and George Duke’s satirical take on jazz, though a sleeve-note to Zappa in New York pointed out that the metric spacings of its ‘The Black Page’ are actually ‘the missing link’ between ‘Uncle Meat’ and ‘Bebop’, composerly considerations rarely found on double albums of full-on rock played to ‘27,500 deranged fanatics’. ‘Outrage at Valdez’ nods to the Synclavier music Zappa produced for a Jacques Cousteau documentary about an oil spill in Alaska, but was really something new, whereas ‘G-Spot Tornado’ is a Synclavier piece from Jazz from Hell (1986) transformed into a concert score by Askin at the request of the Ensemble Modern musicians. It’s a wild and reckless peasant dance, and brings The Yellow Shark to a climactic conclusion.

^{Programme notes © Ben Watson
Ben Watson is author of Frank Zappa: the Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (1994), Art, Class & Cleavage (1998) and Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation (2004). In 2005, with the birth of his first child, he gave up print for radio, and now broadcasts twice weekly (Resonance 104.4FM and Soho Radio). His radio work reached similar spirits and led to the formation of a band, AMM All-Stars, who play together – Covid permitting – on a weekly basis, currently with a Friday lunchtime residency art the Betsey Trotwood, Clerkenwell.}

Biographies

Simon Wills conductor

Simon Wills began his career as a trombonist, including with the London Symphony Orchestra and principal trombone of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, holding the latter for 14 years. He was also for many years a well-known player on the contemporary scene, performing with London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, Endymion, Composers Ensemble, Critical Band and the Fires of London.  

He is a widely performed composer, particularly for the theatre, and is usually his own librettist. Recent works include Katz!!!, a set of ‘Symphonic Variations in the form of a fairytale’ and Concerto in Autumn for violin and orchestra, while a piece ‘for orchestra with a trombone sticking out of it’, provisionally titled Nora Barnacle Assumes Command, is scheduled for performance this year.  

He frequently conducts his own works, and has appeared as guest conductor with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, Cyprus State Orchestra, Turan Alem Symphony Orchestra in Kazakhstan and Stockholms Blasarsymphoniker.  

He has been on the staff at Guildhall since 1986 and, as well as teaching trombone, he conducts Ubu Ensemble, a long-running project dedicated to understanding and promoting the classics of 20th-century repertoire. He has been a visiting professor at the Paris Conservatoire, University of North Texas, Hyogo Performing Arts Center in Osaka, Tallinn Academy, Kurmangazy Institute in Almaty and the Kazakh National University of the Arts in Nur-Sultan.

His principal area of academic expertise is the London orchestral profession in the late Georgian and early Victorian eras, with a particular interest in the role of brass in popular and low-class entertainment.  He has contributed two chapters to the Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments and wrote a number of entries in the recent award-winning Cambridge Encyclopedia of Brass Instruments. 

Vladyslava Yakovenko mezzo-soprano

Vladyslava Yakovenko is a soprano from Kyiv, Ukraine. After showing an early interest in singing, she won many competitions in Ukraine and Russia, including the Elena Obraztsova International competition for young opera singers in St Petersburg.

She came to the UK to study at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and graduated in 2021. During this time, she sang in several productions, including Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Beginnings: New and Early Opera Project and took the role of Poppea in a third-year Monteverdi opera project. She is equally at home on the concert platform, with a keen interest in song repertoire and has given several recitals. She is currently a Masters student at GSMD and will continue to study under the tutelage of Marilyn Rees on the opera course from this September.

Igor Stravinsky ^{_{(1882–1971)}}
Aldous Huxley in memoriam ^{₍₁₉₆₄₎}

This late work by Stravinsky, written in 1964, shows the composer adopting the 12-tone procedures he’d rejected during his Neo-classical period. The piece was first conducted by Robert Craft, champion of Edgard Varèse and one of his best interpreters. Zappa loved Stravinsky – at the end of his life, Gail Zappa told me, they were listening to Stravinsky LPs just as they did when they first met – but it is references to the early works which pepper the records: Petrushka and The Rite of Spring (‘Titties N’ Beer’ owes a heavy debt to The Soldier’s Tale). Stravinsky’s adherence to atonality here serves to emphasise the preposterously non-modern nature of Zappa’s orchestral writing, whose resort to tunes, effects, jazz riffs and movie clichés is unprecedented in advanced composition (outside the work of undersung Third Streamers Hall Overton, Muhal Richard Abrams and Simon H. Fell).

Frank Zappa

Pedro’s Dowry
Bob in Dacron
Sad Jane
Envelopes
Mo ’N Herb’s Vacation
Strictly Genteel

‘Pedro’s Dowry’ has a story which Zappa recounted at a concert performance at Royce Hall in Los Angeles in 1975: ‘A woman with an ocean front property waits for someone named Pedro in a skiff. She will launder his burlap shirt in a splendid sunset. He will play an inexpensive guitar. She will make him a stimulating drink, and while he drinks it she will put on some more lipstick. Later, they'll have a cheap little f**k and accidentally knock over an ashtray. In the confusion, she might have misplaced her necklace. Within moments, Muriel has cleaned the rug.’ The piece ends with the sound of a ding-dong doorbell, providing symmetry with the start of ‘The Perfect Stranger’. It seems that orchestral composition, far from evoking the aristocratic and ecclesiastical splendours which gave it birth, encouraged Zappa to portray a world of petit-bourgeois domesticity, complete with absurd social rituals, furtive sex and theft.

‘Bob in Dacron’ concerns ‘an unpleasant urban scoundrel … in his quest for mid-life sexual gratification in a singles bar’. Like the previous piece, it was conceived as a ballet or puppet play, in which bodies are moved across the stage in graphic description of ridiculous social scenarios. Academia is currently awash with analyses of Zappa’s compositions which prove what fans have long known, that there’s an astonishing quantity of craft concentrated in his productions (check out Tyler Bartram’s YouTubes). As with Webern, time seems to stretch because more seems to happen during a tune than is possible. However, it would be a mistake to reduce it all to formal note choices; or, rather, the art is in the note choices, but these choices are determined by wider social and sexual considerations than the maths of rhythm and harmony. Zappa continually mobilises libidinal energies to direct his composing, never relinquishing a wish-fulfilling infantilism. While he was alive, this resulted in much disapproval from the righteous upholders of rock culture in Rolling Stone and New Musical Express, but this infantilism can now be credited as a source of untold creativity. If any 20th-century composer can be said to have accessed the ‘untrammelled id’ that Theodor Adorno praised in late Beethoven, it has to be Zappa.  Check out ‘Yo’ Mama’!

‘Sad Jane’ is a complementary piece to ‘Bob in Dacron’. In his PhD for the University of Stockholm (1999), Ulrik Volgsten quoted Zappa from Guitar Player (November 1983): ‘The last movement of “Sad Jane”, kind of a marching thing, is actually a transcription of a guitar solo from the Shrine Auditorium, 1968, that Ian Underwood wrote out back then, and I came across one day in a pile of papers. I played it on the piano and liked the tune, and proceeded to orchestrate it.’ This method of construction puzzles classical pundits, who demand procedural consistency, and so fail Zappa’s compositions (‘quite remarkably uninteresting and tedious’, as Dominic Gill put it in his Financial Times review of 12 January 1983 of the Barbican premieres), but it’s familiar to anyone who’s pursued Kurt Schwitters into the world of DIY-dada collage. A Zappa composition is a junk sculpture of motifs which are special to him, all arranged like a Calder mobile, where ‘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 danglement’. (The Real Frank Zappa Book, p. 163). Significantly, Zappa adds: ‘The material being “balanced” includes stuff other than the notes on the paper’, which includes the kind of buzz that induced Schwitters to place Hannah Höch’s discarded brassiere in a secret compartment inside a Merzbau.

‘Envelopes’ was originally written in 1968, but proved too difficult for the Mothers of Invention, and it was only in 1982 that Zappa considered he’d achieved an adequate rock performance for release (on Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch). His orchestral version appeared the following year on an LP sporting a grey, boring-looking ‘classical’ cover. On the inner sleeve, the maker and vintage of every string instrument in the orchestra were listed in full – not something classical releases do. Two views of the same music: Zappa’s assault on generic separations, which was easy to miss during the pandemonium of the counter-culture decades, was here polemical and pointed. The piece suspends development in a luscious consideration of sound, a question mark done like an illuminated capital from the Book of Kells, all interlacery and saturated colour with glints of gold leaf.

‘Mo ’N Herb’s Vacation’ attacked the misdeeds of a former manager, and employed a series of clichés signalling ‘nefarious activities’ in Hollywood movies. It has been pointed out that, unlike Edgard Varèse and a host of modernist composers, Zappa never used silence as a structural tool. In The Real Frank Zappa Book, he points out that as a lower middle-class kid he couldn’t afford LPs and had to make do with singles running at 78rpm and 45rpm. ‘Less is more’ is a style rule for the rich, and Zappa never lost his poor man’s feast aesthetic. Hence the ‘packed’ nature of both his rock and orchestral releases: the music of ‘Mo ’N Herb’s Vacation’ is no exception.

‘Strictly Genteel’ is a significant closer for a Frank Zappa concert. With the socialist folk-singer Theodore Bikel intoning its lyrics (‘God bless the mind of the man in the street … And every poor soul who’s adrift in the storm’), the tune closed Zappa’s cinema release 200 Motels, and an instrumental version closed Zappa’s epic 12-CD retrospective You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore. Modern art has been bought up wholesale by the super-rich. Seeming has replaced substance. Ideas and images filched from anti-racist and eco struggles allow the elite and its theoretical crumbsuckers to revel in moral correctness – versus us common sinners, who can neither afford nor understand the righteous, tokenistic icons they call Art. Banning mass-produced smoked salmon is the Big News at Tate Britain. In this context of neo-medieval hypocrisy, Zappa’s unabashed, middlebrow humanism still sounds like a battle cry. Because it is!

^{Programme notes © Ben Watson}

Biographies

Brad Lubman conductor

The American conductor and composer Brad Lubman is much in demand with major orchestras in Europe and the USA and has built up close partnerships with several well-known orchestras and ensembles, including the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, WDR Symphony Orchestra and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin.

Alongside his busy schedule in Germany, he frequently conducts leading international orchestras, including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC, Danish National, San Francisco and Shanghai Symphony orchestras, Filarmonica della Scala and the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.

He has also worked with major contemporary music groups, including Ensemble Modern, London Sinfonietta, Klangforum Wien, Ensemble MusikFabrik, Ensemble Resonanz, Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group and Steve Reich and Musicians.

This season he appears with the SWR Symphonieorchester, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra Hamburg, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra, among others.

He is founding Co-Artistic and Music Director of the New York-based Ensemble Signal. Their recording of Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians was awarded a Diapason d’Or in 2015. Four years later he led the ensemble in the premiere of Steve Reich’s Reich/Richter as part of the Reich Richter Pärt project at the opening of New York art space The Shed.

He is Professor of Conducting and Ensembles at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, as well as being on the faculty at the Bang on a Can Summer Institute.

In 2017 he was Composer-in-Residence at the Grafenegg Festival; his works have been performed by acclaimed ensembles such as the Tonkünstler Orchester Austria and musicians from the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The year 2020 saw the unveiling of a new piece written for pianist Rudolf Buchbinder, premiered at the Vienna Musikverein and subsequently recorded.