199 - Zappa Nailed It

I don’t normally use this blog as an actual “blog,” it’s more of a venue for throwing these short tunes out which I’d be composing daily regardless, whether or not they end up here, but today I saw a quote from Frank Zappa I was unfamiliar with in an article about how Frank Zappa will be considered one of the great 20th century composers (an opinion with which I agree):

In a 1992 interview, The Simpsons creator and lifelong Zappa fan Matt Groening asked the composer if he thought music should make progress, if a composer should do things that hadn’t been done before.

Zappa argued that, rather than be progressive, it was more important that music should be personalized. Music, he said, “should be relevant to the person who writes the music. It has more to do with the composer than with the style of the times or the school that might have generated the composer.”

Okay, this is more of a paraphrase than a quote, but I’ll take it as a given Zappa actually said this to Groening.

I found the quote surprisingly relevant to me and thought it worthy of discussing.

The tunes that show up here daily are the result of a metamorphosis of my trajectory as a composer. Though I have always had a soft spot for tonal simplicity, the music I used to compose was anything but tonal, or simple.

Here’s a sketch of mine from when I started composing, I can barely figure out what I was trying to do here:

Over the course of decades plowing away at this highly abstract and ephemeral art form I’ve come to appreciate the pointlessness of trying to do something new or relevant. Kind of what Zappa is saying here.

When I returned to UMKC’s conservatory of music to get my DMA in composition after retiring from public education in 2010 I had a few epiphanies. One was in the class Music since 1945 - probably the most difficult course I took (which surprised me). We were examining the music of George Rochberg, a highly serial composer who, following the death of his teenage son in 1964 claimed this compositional technique was inadequate to express his grief, finding it empty of expressive intent, so as a result began turning towards tonality, culminating in his somewhat famous Ricordanza for cello and piano which we listened to in class. Immediately one student, a fellow composition student actually, objected that the piece did nothing new, broke no new ground - I asked him why did he find that important(?), which sort of brought him to a stop. I further observed that by composing this way Rochberg was, in fact, actually doing something “new” considering how serial music was all the rage at that time.

Another time was in a class teaching various eastern musical instruments most of us, as westerners were not familiar with. When we were given the opportunity to work hands on with some of them many students were only interested in finding unfamiliar performance techniques, using bottles to slide on a koto for instance. I found this odd. I thought it way more important to first learn how to make the sounds the instrument were designed for before trying anything experimental.

And then there was the overreaching seriousness most of them brought to their music. I’m not saying music can’t be serious, but hey, a little variety isn’t a bad thing. The majority of what I heard from my fellow composers was, frankly, kind of gloomy and depressing, which doesn’t make for a pleasant listening experience over the long term. I began to buck the system by deliberately trying to express humor in my works, not through cliched funny sounds like some kind of mutant Spike Jones, but through purely musical techniques. That’s when I discovered how easy it was to use music to make people cry, but making them laugh, that’s tough.

My brief career in comics as a colorist actually provided valuable insight into the art of composition. Essentially, I discovered the fewer colors committed to a panel, the more impact it had - it was that simple. The job of a colorist is akin to lighting in a movie or stage production. When you mix all the colors, you get white light or a black blob. When you limit yourself to a few choice colors, you get dramatic lighting and visual interest.

In music, when you use all the notes equally, you get the aural equivalent of white or black, a tone cluster, essentially musical white noise, which, it doesn’t matter how you voice all those notes, the aural effect is flatness. When you strategically remove some of the notes and limit yourself to a choice handful, aka, when you use some kind of tonality, you get drama / emotion / call it what you like. This is what it took George Rochberg decades of composing serial music to discover. Luckily for me, all I had to do was color comics for a living for a few years to discover the same thing.

And all this was summed up nice and succinctly by the Zappa quote which started this post in the first place. Zappa wasn’t trying to be “new,” he was, with a few unfortunate detours in the middle of his career which I try to ignore, primarily concerned with entertaining / being himself first and foremost. It’s a loss to the world he died right at the point in his career where he was finally beginning to become recognized by the world of “classical” music, which is all he really wanted to compose in the first place anyway.

So, basically, when one spends their time trying to come up with something “new,” they’re missing the boat.

Which brings me to this blog. Are these tonal chunks I post daily “new?” Do push the envelope? Does it matter? Do I even care?

I don’t know. My observation is, and I may be wrong, but I don’t really know of anybody else doing something quite like this right now, so I guess it qualifies as “new” or “new-ish.”

Not that I care.

Postscript: When I realized anytime I post a text only entry it pushes the daily tune off the top I decided I’d go ahead and combine it with today tune, a somewhat morose little ditty which I’ve retitled appropriately.