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.