Ockerian Addenda

In response to my posting on Zappa the other day, David Ocker made some interesting comments I'd like to address. (His comments are in block quotes below.)

The original title of the piece (for the first, oh, week or so) was "Blow Job". But eventually he made it a narrative about Mo and Herb charging Frank for their vacation in Pamplona. Sarcastic is exactly the right word. Don't forget the airhorn at the end.

The original title is too funny. "Blow Job" sounds like the closest thing to a generic Zappa title he ever came up with. And the sarcasm, I don't know whether it came through as such to my girlfriend -- she seemed rather baffled by the whole thing.

But if you can appreciate Zappa's sense of humor and the peculiar physicality of his music -- I don't know if this makes sense, but Zappa referred a lot to the physical processes involved in making music (e.g. the air moving around a room), to the extent that I sometimes get the feeling he did think of himself as almost like a kind of scientist. I feel like a scientific attitude informed much of the way he approached music. In any case, when I listen to Zappa's music I feel a strong sense of the physical world, of an appreciation of sounds in themselves, rather than the intellectual, abstract music of most composers in the European classical tradition.

In other words, although I'm sure there are exceptions one might think of, I feel like in general when Zappa composed, he was thinking about sound itself more so than he was thinking about things like harmony, melody and "meaning". Not that he didn't possess a lot of technical knowledge, but it was being used in ways that the people who canonized Western "music theory" would not have intended (or even have been able to conceive of).

Perhaps it isn't too much of a stretch to say that Zappa took the tools of Western music and basically used them to negate the purposes for which they had been designed. However, if this is an accurate statement, I believe it was only a means to an end: to subvert people's expectations and allow them to really LISTEN, at least for a little while. Once he had done this, they would be ready to hear the true content of his music: raw, uncensored imagination, translated into the physical world through the medium of sound.

You wrote "We still do not know why Zappa wrote music like Mo 'n Herb's Vacation." - he wrote music of all kinds because that's what he did; it was fundamental to him, like eating or breathing.

I would be foolish to argue that writing music was not fundamental to Frank Zappa's nature. However, as I am at times an exceptionally foolish person, I'll go ahead and do it right now. I think composition was fundamental to his personality -- but I think it could as easily have been something other than music that captured his interest. It was the physical immediacy of the sounds of Varese and R&B music that drew him, I believe. Had those two types of music not been there for him to absorb as a teenager, he might have turned out quite differently.

Are you wondering why this piece didn't come out sounding like Bobby Brown or Dynamo Hum. It's trite but also true to say "because he was a good composer" - he picked the beginning materials (guitar licks for sure and some people say even a quote from Varese) and he developed the ideas creatively until the piece said what he wanted it to (in the Zappa language) and until he liked the way it sounded.

I don't have much to add here, except to say that I agree, and to emphasize the last part: liking the way it sounded was crucial for him. I think Zappa had a large variety of sounds that he enjoyed and wanted to hear expounded in certain ways. So for him, the sounds inherent in the formation of "Bobby Brown" were important enough, in their own way, for him to complete its composition. He may not have enjoyed playing that song (or "Dinah-Moe Humm") dozens (hundreds?) of times, but he recognized its appeal and felt it was a small price to pay for being able to continue his career.

What I want to know is - did your girlfriend enjoy the music - or did she just wonder why he had even bothered?

I don't think she enjoyed it. I think Zappa is really baffling to her. She's a musician but she loves music that is complex in very different ways: Carlo Gesualdo, Monteverdi and J.S. Bach, for example, are three of her favorite composers. Mind you, I really enjoy that stuff too, but Zappa will always be closer to my heart, I think, because it is what I listened to when I was young and impressionable. Even when I don't listen to Zappa's music for many months at a time, I feel like it's still right there with me.

A Brief Message of Thanks

When I wrote my last post, I never imagined it would be read and commented on by anyone, let alone David Ocker himself. I started this blog as an outlet for my arts-related thoughts and opinions. Only recently did I think about the idea of other people reading and appreciating what I'm doing here. As a teenager I thought of myself as a writer and a wannabe musician/composer. For the past 5 or 6 years I haven't thought of myself as anything other than a person trying to get over my personal problems and earn a living doing whatever I can stomach for eight or ten hours a day.

Anyway, my point is that I'm glad that not only am I writing again, but that, thanks to the magic of blogging, it's possible for what I write to be read by others. Hopefully I can keep this up.

In my next post, which should be following this one within the next hour or so, I want to address the comment Mr. Ocker left. As you might imagine, he supplied some interesting information and raised some good points/questions to which I'm itching to respond.

Frank Zappa: Tools & Methods of Composition

I was listening with my girlfriend to a recording of Frank Zappa's orchestral piece Mo 'n Herb's Vacation when she suddenly asked a very interesting question: "Why did he write this?"

To really answer that question would require skills of a psychoanalytical nature I do not possess. However, it did get me to thinking. Just this morning I listened to a Zappa show from the autumn of 1978, when he was apparently still working on Mo 'n Herb. At that point in its evolution, Zappa referred to it simply as "Mo's Vacation" and it was performed as a trio of marimba, bass and drums.

On this particular night, "Mo's Vacation" was followed directly by "The Black Page #2" and I found the juxtaposition of these two compositions both striking and instructive. They are constructed in roughly the same manner: a polyrhythmic melody is stated and repeated, with variations, over a steady, metronomic pulse. Zappa was fascinated by complex rhythms; perhaps he felt this was unexplored territory, a place where he could stake his claim as far away as possible from "normal" rock music.

His particular interest was the generation of polyrhythm by the superimposition of an unrelated rhythm over an underlying pulse (usually explicitly stated on a drum or other percussion instrument). This is evident in much of his music, including guitar solos -- Zappa claimed it felt more natural for him to play phrases of fives and sevens (and higher, more complex ratios) than to improvise within strict subdivisions of the beat. Perusal of The Frank Zappa Guitar Book, a collection of transcriptions of guitar solos (often including drum transcriptions as well), appears to bear this out. While some of the rhythms are certainly accidental (indeed, in a few cases they are the result of overdubbing a pre-existing solo, played in a different tempo/meter, onto a studio backing track) and some of the transcriptions might be considered overly fussy, it is clear that Zappa was not a rhythmically traditional player.

As related as they might be in terms of rhythm, harmony is where these two works diverge most widely. For all its rhythmic complexity, "The Black Page" is an essentially tonal piece. It might shift around between different tonalities in unorthodox ways, but the melody is still fairly hummable. One of Zappa's gifts that, to me, still seems widely unrecognized, was his gift for melody. He had a knack for writing lines that are tricky to play and/or sing yet are capable of sticking in one's head as tenaciously as a Top 40 AM hit.

"Mo's Vacation" is another story. It exists in a completely atonal harmonic environment. This makes it tougher to absorb for ears unaccustomed to the ways in which pitch-relationships are handled in such music. I don't know the exact origins of this music. It seems likely that Frank had originally written it for orchestra and arranged it for his rock band just to see what it sounded like. He seemed to instinctually steer away from atonal music in his rock compositions, no matter how complex they might get in other ways. So this seems to have been a rare experiment.

Indeed, "Mo's Vacation" was not played again by any of Frank's bands before or after this tour. In placing it in the setlist next to "The Black Page", Frank may have been performing a kind of experiment on his audience. By carefully gauging their responses to each composition, perhaps he could confirm a pre-existing hunch that most people would tolerate polyrhythmic complexities much better in a tonal environment.

Ultimately, the composition performed that night became the first movement of Mo 'n Herb's Vacation, a kind of concerto for clarinet and orchestra, given its premiere performance and recording by the London Symphony in 1983, with Kent Nagano conducting. The contrast between the staccato, "objective" sound of the marimbas versus the expressive, sarcastic clarinet could hardly be any wider. Frank had clearly made the correct choice in terms of instrumentation. What I don't know is whether Zappa knew all along that a clarinet, or any woodwind for that matter, would be necessary in order to bring out the particular character of this melody.

We still do not know why Zappa wrote music like Mo 'n Herb's Vacation. The question is probably unanswerable as such -- why does anyone do anything, really? -- but by thinking about how he may have gone about solving particular compositional problems, we can draw some interesting conclusions, or at least make some interesting conjectures.

Death Metal Jamboree

For the past week or so, all I've been listening to is metal, mostly death metal. I was driving my poor girlfriend nuts playing this stuff day in and day out. She left on Thursday to run another workshop with the Western Wind at Smith College, so I'm left to my own devices for the next 8 days. I'm hoping to get the metal itch out of my system by the time she gets back.

Anyway, I thought this would be a good place to talk about the bands I've been listening to and the impact (or lack thereof) they've had on me.

Arsis: Insanely fast melodic death metal duo from Virginia. Very intense music but worth checking out. The oddest thing is that it's all done by two guys: a drummer and a multi-instrumentalist/vocalist. I assume they would have to hire people in order to play live, but the album is quite a feat. The only problem is the intensity really never lets up so it tends to fatigue your ears, but hey, this IS death metal we're talking about here.


Carcass: One of the classic death metal bands, this English group set new standards for melodic death metal. Their debut album, like a lot of early death metal, is totally unlistenable due to the abysmal production. Their reputation is mainly staked on two albums: Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious; and Heartwork. The former is the last and best Carcass album to feature those ridiculously erudite and pun-ridden lyrics about dismembering corpses, making musical instruments out of the dead, etc. All rather tongue-in-cheek and consciously ironic, especially considering the band were all vegetarians! Heartwork, on the other hand, is a more personal statement and considered one of the first melodic death metal albums.

Cynic: Progressive metal from the late 80s. Features those ridiculous sounding synthesizer vocals you might remember hearing on old Kraftwerk albums. Except on Kraftwerk they sounded cool and German, and here they just sound silly and out of place. People praise this band, which broke up after making one album, but I don't think they live up to their legend.

Daath: I really don't understand the hype behind this band. Supposedly the head of Roadrunner Records heard their demos and was so blown away he signed them, the first death metal band he's signed in 10 years or something like that. Well, I listened to an advance copy of their Roadrunner debut, The Hinderers, and I don't get it. Apart from a couple of tracks with some techno beats there doesn't seem to be anything new or innovative here. In fact I have to say it's downright boring. Plus I hate their vocalist, who sounds more like he's clearing his throat than trying to actually growl.

Death: God bless Chuck Schuldiner, RIP! For those who don't know, Chuck was the mastermind behind Death, which never really had a stable line-up but also never made a bad album. One of the originators of the genre who never was satisfied with staying within its boundaries. Each release seemed to build upon the last one and the musicianship and songwriting kept improving up to the very end. Unfortunately cancer robbed us of any further work from Chuck, but his legacy certainly will live on. I most highly recommend the last 3 Death albums: Individual Thought Patterns, Symbolic, and The Sound of Perseverance.

Hypocrisy: Peter Tatgren deserves credit for thinking of combining death metal with Pink Floyd, certainly not something that would've occurred to me. His band Hypocrisy has so many albums it's hard to keep track of them all. For me the best of the bunch is the self-titled album, although Abducted is pretty good too. Unless you absolutely love pure death metal to the core, skip Penetralia and Osculum Obscenum, which came out before Tatgren took over on vocals and started experimenting with his songwriting.

In Flames: Apparently a very popular and influential band. This is perplexing because the songwriting is so incredibly repetitive. Just about every song is based on the exact same chord progression. I'm not usually a stickler about this sort of thing, but come on! I can't justify listening to an entire album multiple times if at least 80% of the songs are harmonically identical.

Lamb of God: I love these guys. Through four albums (five if you count the one released under their old name, Burn the Priest), they have maintained the right amount of heaviness, catchiness and originality. I highly recommend them to any fan of metal, although I doubt that would be necessary given their popularity right now.

Mastodon: I fell in love with these guys right from the get-go. A ridiculously talented metalcore-influenced band from Georgia, Mastodon is a favorite of both critics and metal fans, and for good reason: with energy and talent to spare, they rip into imaginative, hook-laden songs about such potentially nerdy topics as Moby Dick and put them across with such utter heaviness and conviction that any idea of laughing at these guys for being pretentious immediately exits your mind, never to return.

Meshuggah: This legendary quartet from Sweden resembles a team of long-haired mathematicians more than a metal band. Their intensity and precision is completely beyond belief. The release of Chaosphere, now almost 10 years old, set new standards for technical metal that have yet to be surpassed, let alone even reached, by others. They have left thousands of their fans, many of whom are musicians themselves, perplexed as to how some of their music is even humanly possible to perform. The relentless assault of their songs combined with the cold, inhuman, anti-melodic sound they have honed to perfection mean that Meshuggah is definitely not for everyone. But for those brave enough to accept their challenge, the experience can be highly worthwhile.

Obituary - Slower and more groove-based than most "traditional" death bands, they've been around since nearly the beginning of the genre so they do demand a certain measure of respect. John Tardy's vocals, while clearly death metal, are also totally unique and instantly recognizable. In fact, Obituary as a whole is one of the most easily recognizable bands in a genre that is overstuffed with bands who tend to sound disappointingly similar.

An Obituary riff can be recognized usually within about 2-3 seconds. Steadfastly avoiding implying a tonal center, the typical riff will sound "seasick," alternating between moving up and down the scale. It will also have a marked tendency to go up a major (or minor) third and then down (or up) a half-step. There will also be fifths (both natural and flatted). Leaps of intervals wider than a fifth are fairly rare. Rhythmically, the quarter and half note (crotchet and minim) are used much more than in most death metal riffs. There are slow sections consisting almost entirely of crotchets and minims in some songs. A typical pattern is four sixteenth notes (semiquavers) followed by a quarter note. Sometimes this is augmented to four quavers followed by a minim. Naturally, this basic pattern is varied and plenty of Obituary riffs are not of this rhythmic type. There are the more genre-typical double-time riffs consisting entirely (or almost entirely) of palm-muted 32nd notes, but these are used more for contrast and relief than to beat the listener over the head.

If all this sounds obscure and technical, the end results are quite direct, uncomplicated without being monotonous (for the most part) and so uniquely theirs that in my opinion they should have a patent on this formula!

The classic Obituary albums are considered to be Cause of Death and The End Complete, although I would place World Demise right alongside these two. Their debut album, Slowly We Rot, is worth a listen too although the production is fairly bad and the guitars are much too muffled.

Opeth: Ok, these guys are good. Really good. Basically Opeth are a melodic death/prog metal band with the ability to write satisfying 10-15 minute songs while somehow managing to sound as unpretentious as possible. They even made an entire album with no metal riffing whatsoever -- and a damn fine album it is -- just to prove that their use of the genre wasn't a crutch but a deliberate choice. If you're a prog-metal fan, think of Opeth as everything Dream Theater reached for but could never grasp -- in a word: tasteful.

Quo Vadis - These guys are from Canada and are extremely talented. They deserve to be a lot more well-known. The songs mostly fit into "melodic death metal," which means growly vocals and fast riffs within a framework of mostly traditional harmonic progressions. As opposed to traditional death metal which is much more atonal. There are some progressive elements such as the use of odd meters and some orchestral instruments here and there.

Someone Please Kill The Killers

The Killers are my new favorite band to hate. Not that it's too difficult. They make it so easy. From their boring, over-hyped albums full of mediocre synth-ridden pop-punk, to their pathetic faux-Gothic teenie-bopper rebellious image, to their idiotic frontman, Brandon Flowers, who says he thinks his band's new album is as good as Achtung Baby or OK Computer, they've really got it all, as far as the lameness factor goes.

And yet somehow, perhaps simply to infuriate people like me, they are popular. They can sell out Madison Square Garden. How can a band whose every song, down to each individual guitar riff and vocal melody, sounds so utterly derivative, possibly attain such a high level of success? Is this how it felt to be a black rhythm and blues musician in the 50's and 60's hearing countless bands and players ripping off your very soul?

Call me old-fashioned, but I liked these songs better when The Cure wrote and sang them twenty years ago.