Category Archives: MAM L&M

Zappa? …and Beyond!

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For lack of a better word you could call Frank Zappa a

MAXIMALIST

He made use of EVERYthing, all that came within reach.  In some ways he is a MAM dream come true.***

The seminal example is Lumpy Gravy, parts Varèse, Cage, Partch, R&B, surf music, theatre of the Absurd, concrète, électronique (and perhaps some Europeans too).

As a musical model, Zappa is great for teaching, as a demonstration of how influences can intertwine, how the rhizome can be noduled together, with great results and with great success.  However, the maximalists, having gathered together EVERYthing, leave little left for those who come after…

So, looking beyond Zappa, what comes next? What stones did Zappa unturn only slightly?

consider these examples:

1) “Promiscuous” from 1988

2)”Dumb All Over” from 1981

RAP, PUNK (?), POLITICS—were the Beastie Boys listening?

3) “Porn Wars” from 1985

COMPUTER MUSIC, SAMPLES, ASSEMBLAGE, POLITICAL, from senators to rock-stars. Was Public Enemy listening?

4) “Tinseltown Rebellion”

Is this PUNK? a commentary on LABELS? PASTICHE?

5) “Stairway to Heaven” (reggae/ska style!!) from 1988

SACRILEGE? PASTICHE? RE-IMAGINING THE CLASSICS?

Another thing to take from these examples is the ‘jump-cut’, that is the sudden changes in tempo, key, mood, timbre, instrumentation, with little respect for the traditional ‘cadence’. Often, such cuts were created in the studio, as was found on much of the second side of 1981’s You Are What You Is, cuts which were then re-learned and then performed live

ZAPPA through the 80s had thoughts on the stench of Jazz, the emptiness of 80s Americana in general.

On a different note, he seemed to have some interesting connections and influences with the American Hardcore-Punk Scene, specifically the Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys, Henry Rollins, the Butthole Surfers and the Minutemen.

 

***
Yet in other ways, since humor is the backbone for most of his musical deeds, most people tend to judge him by that “humor” and many find it wanting: too off-color, it cuts too deep—anger, homophobia, anti-feminism, the sexual mis-deeds of his musicians and road crew…

© 2014 Peter J. Evans, theorist

Monkisms

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1) start with a recording, not of a Monk tune, but rather a tune shamelessly inspired (in a good way…) by Monk, say “Monk’s Rec Room” by Jane Ira Bloom

2) What makes it Monk?  Do we know what those things are? What are those things it shares with the high priest of bop?  (Do we know who he is?)

3) Make a map…

PJE_Monk_Map_MAML&Mspring2014

PJE_Monk_Map_MAML&Mspring2014

4) Is this Monk?  That’s obviously the wrong question…  Are these the multiple things that constitute (some of what) we call Monkisms?

5) PLAY SOME ACTUAL MONK.

6) Findings confirmed?

7) How far Monk?

8) Extrapolations Confirmed?

© 2014 Peter J. Evans, theorist

ZAPPA’S LUMPIEST

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FIRST: What is gravy? Generally, it’s a sauce for meat made from it’s own juices with flavors and thickeners added to taste…  
Lumpy Gravy is the result of mis-mixture, or perhaps the abundance of flour, or the addition of cool water instead of warm water—
Typically, Lumpy Gravy is not a desired result, though some do crave it for nostalgia “Just like Mom’s!” or for the heterogeneous ‘pearls of flavor’…

SECOND: Zappa was initially commissioned to compose/conduct a work for Capitol Records, and as such Lumpy Gravy was actually recorded, printed, and briefly released ready early in 1967…

Shortly after MGM/Verve, the label for the Mothers of Invention, filled suit prohibiting its release on Capitol.  Zappa then re-edited the material for its subsequent official release in May 1968…

Though one can here many orchestral similarities, the original material has been re-cut and reordered, and there is now a vocal element, that is spoken bits of dialogue. Though basically random snippets of friends, family and hangers-on talking into a well-reverberating piano, the listener grows used to such voices and types of dialogue, perhaps creating a narrative where none was intended…
(BTW: Lumpy Gravy there is actually a third version, this one is also pre-1968, similar, yet different, with much more improvisation and generally jazziness:
)

THIRD: ANALYSIS, part 1: James Borders in his article “Form and the Concept Album: Aspects of Modernism in Frank Zappa’s Early Releases (Perspectives of New Music Vol.39nO.1 (Winter, 2011), pp. 118-160) analyzes the first side of Lumpy Gravy as a Rondo form, largely due to the recurrences of “Oh, No” throughout the album…

According to Borders this tune returns twice, though it has been sped up, retrograde, etc. (Ex.3, pp. 130-133).  Intermixed with this tune are tidbits of what Borders calls ‘Varesiana,’ ‘Weberniana’ and ‘Stravinksiana’ in hommage to Zappa’s three favorite classical composers, Edgard Varese, Anton Webern and Igor Stravinsky. There are also found samples of non-Zappa pre-recorded music and eletronic treaments of various sorts

FOURTH: ANALYSIS, part 1: Borders’s rondo-form analysis is tantalizing, especially given similar structures found in Charles Ives’ “General William Booth Enters unto Heaven.”  A drawback to this might make us think Zappa was using classical forms as such, but I  instead encouraging folks to think collage or montage, more like film or a plastic art OR remind folks the Rondo form was initially a popular vocal form before it was a serious classical form…

As a MAM—dude 4eva, I hear many influences beyond, the three mentioned above—Varese of course being the most important, as he was the premier sonic collage collagist par excellence…. For (some of) those influences, see the ‘map’ below, and no more need be said…
…except of course to note that however ‘serious’ we perceive Zappa to be, he was always at least equal measure ‘silly’…
…and Lumpy Gravy is perhaps the best example of… that…

 

© 2013 Peter J. Evans, theorist

Modern Nostalgia?

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Charles Ives is quite the twentieth-century composer…

  • Dissonance in all realms; rhythm, texture, language, color.
  • Carefully treading that fine line between the composer and improviser; see the controversy with Elliott Carter, or listen to Ives Plays Ives.
  • Fragmentary quotation—never the full tune, but rather snippets here and there, raggy fragments; hymns next to folk next to rags next to classical next to patriotic next to parlor next to…

And yet… his titles, subtitles and settings seem to look back—nostalgia…

  • Piano Sonata #2 (Concord, MA 1840-1860),
  • Putnam’s Camp
  • Symphony #3: The Camp Meeting,
  • Lincoln the Great Commoner…. etc.

Consider, however, the following anti-nostalgia quotation… “It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”—Frank Zappa.  As I get older the ‘nostaliga’ part of this makes more and more sense to me—so many people romanticize the past and never get beyond it, never appreciate where they are.  So many people (is it the same people?) map this into the creative area of other people, never allowing artists to move on, to change, to try something new…  Still, it’s a daunting idea, that the world would end this way, everything stuck in place, artists glued in time.

Is it possible for Ives to be both a modernist AND a nostalgist?  I recently stumbled upon a quote by George Steiner from his After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, p. 490, which sheds some light on this argument:

“The apparent iconoclasts have turned out to be more or less anguished custodians racing through the museum of civilization, seeking order and sanctuary for its treasures before closing time.  In modernism collage has been the representative device.  The new, even at its most scandalous, has been set against an informing background and framework of tradition.”

This definitely applies to Ives, as a musical collagist par excellence.  See General William Booth Enters Into Heaven as an example of successive collage, and Mvmt.2 from the Fourth Symphony as an example of simultaneous collage.  Steiner lists Picasso, Eliot, Joyce and others as well, and I’ve heard people link Ives to Joyce previously, which perhaps makes more sense now…  So our most forward looking artists are the ones most desperately clinging to the past?

Steiner’s quote is taken from the chapter entitled Topologies of Culture, and on p.448, he explains this title, and addresses our issues with these modern nostalgists….  “These manifold transformations and reorderings of relation between an initial verbal event and subsequent reappearances of this event with other non-verbal forms might be best seen as topological.  […]  Topology is the branch of mathematics that deals with those relations between points and those fundamental properties of a figure which remain invariant when that figure is bent out of shape.  The study of these invariants and of the geometric and algebraic relations which survive transformation proved decisive in modern mathematics.  It has shown underlying unities and assemblages in a vast plurality or apparently diverse functions and spatial configurations.  Similarly, there are invariants and constant underlying the manifold shapes of expression of culture.” (see interesting interpretation here!)

Ah!  So not just the stuff from the past, read ‘invariants,’ but that stuff twisted, distorted, stretched as far as possible across the framework.  That is, not rupture, but distortion…!

Thoughts?  Good night, Mr. Ives

 

© 2012 Peter J. Evans, theorist