Uneasy listening
ZutboF
Composer Edgard Varèse was father to Frank Zappa's iconoclastic ways
as well as the focus of the rock and jazz hall of famer's swan song --
which may finally get to be heard
FRANK ZAPPA - composer, rock star, satirist, visionary, curmudgeon,
iconoclast - would have turned 65 on Dec. 21.
That milestone did not receive nearly as much attention as another sad
reminder of mortality, the 25th anniversary of the murder of John
Lennon. But the symbolism was just as poignant, for both Lennon and
Zappa were unfinished portraits, cut off in midcareer. Born in the same
year (1940), they spent their lifetimes saying plenty of pointed,
trenchant, often humorous things about the human condition and left
plenty unsaid upon their premature deaths.
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In the case of Zappa - who died of prostate cancer in 1993, less than
three weeks before his 53rd birthday - one crucial piece of his
portrait remains partly hidden: his touching reverence for the French
American avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse (1883-1965). Indeed, the
last completed project of Zappa's life - an album of Varèse's
compositions selected, supervised and, after a fashion, "conducted" by
Zappa - has yet to be released.
Recording sessions for the Varèse album took place over 10 days in
July 1993, five months before Zappa's death, on a Warner Bros.
soundstage in Burbank not far from Zappa's home in the Hollywood Hills.
The musicians involved were members of the German new music group
Ensemble Modern, which had greatly impressed the demanding Zappa on a
recording of Zappa's classical compositions, "The Yellow Shark." The
Varèse album was to include "Hyperprism," "Octandre," "Intégrales,"
"Density 21.5," "Ionisation," "Déserts" and Varèse's original tape of
"Poème Électronique" - which is roughly half of Varèse's total
published output.
The Zappa Family Trust, which controls Zappa's musical legacy,
announced the impending release of the album on its website back in
1997, complete with a listing of the selections and even brief sound
bites from each composition (except "Poème Électronique"). Little has
been heard about it since.
Yet fear not, oh Zappa legions. The long-awaited Varèse album may be
coming out after all, possibly by the end of this year. "The Varèse
album is on hold for a very specific reason," Zappa's widow, Gail, said
in December. "We documented three recording sessions with a film crew,
and they absconded with the film and tapes, and it took me eight years
and lawsuits to get the sucker back. And even so, they did not return
the DAT. They were bad guys. I would never call them men; men don't
behave that way.
"Now my plan is, I would love to get it out next year [2006], to put
out a recording and a film on DVD because I really believe in the power
of the music as a visceral experience without the visual aids."
Why is the Varèse project so significant amid the miles of unreleased
tapes of original Zappa music still locked up in the vault? (Zappa was
a congenital workaholic; one person who has combed through the archive
claims that a new album of studio or live Zappa music could be released
every year for the next 100 years.) The answer is that this may have
been the project that was dearest to Zappa's heart, for it was
Varèse's music that had made Zappa want to become a composer in the
first place.
In his quirky autobiography, "The Real Frank Zappa Book," and in an
article written for Stereo Review in 1971, Zappa vividly remembered how
a 13-year-old R&B fan living in El Cajon discovered this then
relatively obscure cutting-edge composer. It was in a chance reading of
a magazine article about record retailer Sam Goody, who bragged that he
could sell anything, even a crazy, noisy thing like Varèse's
"Ionization," as it was spelled. A nonconformist even at that tender
age, Zappa figured that this stuff was right up his alley but soon
found that apparently no self-respecting dealer in San Diego would
stock it.
Finally, after searching for the record for more than a year, while
approaching the checkout counter at a hi-fi store in La Mesa, Zappa
spotted an LP with a picture of what he thought was a "mad scientist"
on the jacket. It was the coveted album he had sought, "The Complete
Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume One" on the tiny EMS (Elaine Music
Shop) label - the only album of Varèse works available in the 1950s.
(There was no Volume Two; the owner of the label, Jack Skurnick, died
in 1952 before he could continue the project.) The shop had been using
the record to demonstrate hi-fi systems, but shoppers were driven away
by the percussive racket it made. So the cashier let Zappa have the
album for whatever he had in his pocket (the price was $5.95 and the
boy had only $3.80) - and he devoured it, playing it over and over,
gleefully alienating some uncomprehending friends along with his
mother.
Zappa's subsequent devotion to Varèse never flagged. When he turned 15
or 16 (there is some question about the exact age), his idea of a
birthday present was a long-distance phone call to Varèse, who was
listed in the Manhattan phone book. On the inside jacket of his first
album, "Freak Out!," Zappa prominently printed a Varèse saying
(slightly misquoted): "The present-day composer refuses to die!" The
younger man's compositions used Varèsian techniques such as the
electronic manipulation of real-world sounds on tape (musique
concrète, or "organized sound" as Varèse called it), big blocks of
dissonant orchestral writing and novel deployment of percussion - and
he saw no distinction between using these techniques in classical or
rock contexts. He was invited by conductor Joel Thome to host a Varèse
tribute concert in New York City in 1981, and even appeared as a
conductor in an Edgard Varèse Centennial Memorial Concert at San
Francisco's War Memorial Opera House in 1983.
Zappa may not have been the first to put Varèse on the map; Robert
Craft's spectacular-sounding pair of LPs for Columbia in the early
1960s gave the composer some big-time exposure before his death. But
Zappa was certainly Varèse's most prominent advocate, spreading the
word to places that otherwise would never have heard of the composer.
*
A pleasure amid the pain
ZAPPA'S Varèse album was to be his most direct homage to his idol,
undertaken while he was struggling with the painful later stages of his
terminal illness. "He never intended to do the recording of Varèse,"
says Gail Zappa. "But I just said, 'Let's take the quantum leap and do
it,' because I wanted him to have something to do to get up every day
for. This was a really inspirational opportunity to do right by Varèse
- to get him [Zappa] up and going."
Rip Rense, a journalist and friend of Zappa's, was present at the
session that yielded "Ionisation" and some Zappa improvisations with
the Ensemble Modern that remain unreleased. "He was in great discomfort
and had difficulty getting through the sessions," Rense recalls. "The
cancer had spread to his bones. It was obvious that his love of Varèse
and the opportunity to realize the music with Ensemble Modern was
sustaining him. He eschewed pain medication, because he wanted his mind
clear. He only made one exception. As he told me, 'Motrin has been my
friend.' "
The noted new music conductor Peter Eötvös actually wielded the baton
at the sessions, while Zappa rested on a couch directly in back of him,
conferring frequently with the conductor, speaking directly to the
musicians, using facial expressions to get what he wanted.
"Frank shaped the interpretations as much as one can without actually
wielding a baton," says Rense. "I do remember Frank stopping the
proceedings a number of times and more or less encouraging the players
to have a little more fun with their parts, to be more playful. Frank's
term was 'putting the eyebrows upon the music.' "
Not exactly a secret, the sessions were attended by some celebrated
contemporary music figures. John Adams showed up at the "Ionisation"
session and according to Rense looked "utterly delighted" by the
goings-on. And the 99-year-old Nicolas Slonimsky, who had conducted the
premiere of "Ionisation" in 1933, briefly took the baton and led the
musicians in the piece, an event that was captured on film (Slonimsky
would ultimately survive Zappa by two years).
The result is an album that is bound to stir up some controversy, for
Zappa and Eötvös put a spin on Varèse that differs from that of
almost every other Varèse recording. Humor was always a part of
Zappa's musical lexicon, even in his most serious and stupefyingly
complex pieces, and he lets his irreverence spill over into Varèse.
You can hear Zappa's slapstick touch in the way the trombones wobble
comically at the beginning of "Hyperprism," the abruptness of some of
the attacks and releases in "Octandre" and other pieces, the madcap
percussion and saucy clarinet and oboe in "Intégrales." It's as if
Zappa were merging his unique persona with that of Varèse, fusing them
together in a throwback to a time before the Jet Age when performers
routinely stamped their personalities onto the music they played.
Yet there is some textural justification for a humorous approach to
Varèse. The composer sometimes put weird instructions in his scores
(for example, in "Amériques," after an orchestral cataclysm, the solo
trombone line has the words "Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!" written underneath
the notes). Also, if you listen to the 1950 LP that introduced Zappa to
Varèse - which was supervised by Varèse himself - you can detect
some of the roots of Zappa's humor in the rough-and-ready performances
of "Octandre" and 'Intégrales." Something has gone out of our
understanding of Varèse in the half-century since that record came
out, and Zappa can be seen as trying to turn the light back on.
"That's the true taste test for me - if I hear Frank's music that
made me laugh," says Gail Zappa. "It's not that he wasn't serious about
his art - he just didn't take himself seriously."
*
Channeling Varèse's style
THE mix is unusual too, with sometimes extreme separation of the
instruments on the stereo channels, and the sessions were recorded with
all-tube microphone preamps connected to a digital tape machine in
another studio. Zappa "wanted to record it the way he thought Edgard
would want it to be recorded had he been a record producer," Gail Zappa
recalls. "We had to find a place that could record the way Frank
intended and mike it the way Frank intended. Warners had one old studio
that we could set up the instruments in, but the control room wasn't up
to the task, so we built a special snake [a cable that accommodated all
the wires] from a brand-new control room to the old studio with the
wood floors."
Did Zappa want to record the complete Varèse? His widow doesn't think
so. ("His days were severely numbered at that point, and he couldn't
manage the larger pieces," she says.) In any case, the remaining works
demand either huge, expensive orchestras ("Amériques," "Arcana"),
voices ("Offrandes," "Ecuatorial," the unfinished "Nocturnal") or some
hard-to-find instrument such as the obsolete electronic ondes martenot.
So, like the Varèse album of his youth, Zappa's thank-you letter to
his idol was limited by fate to one volume. But if it manages to raise
Varèse's profile to a new level - and show us a good time in the
process - Zappa's mission will have been fulfilled.
*
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
The essential Varèse, in its available interpretations
For those who cannot wait for Frank Zappa's Varèse tribute to come
out, there is a distinguished, if limited, selection of recordings of
Varèse's music. Varèse's published works are compact enough to fit on
only two CDs, making a thorough immersion in his unique sound world
possible in only half an afternoon.
Essentially, the top Varèse choices come down to three conductors:
Pierre Boulez, Riccardo Chailly and Kent Nagano. Chailly's two-CD
collection with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and ASKO Ensemble
(Decca) gives you all 12 published works and some invaluable extras
available nowhere else - the only surviving fragment of Varèse's
pre-American output, the song "Un Grand Sommeil Noir" (in piano and
orchestral versions); "Tuning Up," a hilarious sendup of American tunes
and Varèse's own music; and the tiny, antic "Dance for Burgess." There
is also a reconstruction of the original massive version of
"Amériques" by Varèse expert Chou Wen-Chung. Chailly's performances
are bright and explosive - the best things he's ever done on
recordings - and the sound is terrific.
Boulez's two CDs with the New York Philharmonic and the Ensemble
Intercontemporain (Sony, available separately) contain 10 of the 12
works, leaving out "Nocturnal" and "Poème Électronique." His
rendition of "Déserts" uses the composer-authorized
instrumentalportions-only version, which robs the piece of its
contrasting tape interpolations (Boulez claims that Varèse's tape is
no longer usable, but that's not true - it sounds perfectly good on
the Chailly set). Nevertheless, Boulez's superhuman ear for color and
pitch produces performances of razor-sharp precision and often enormous
power. Boulez also remade "Amériques," "Arcana," "Déserts" (again
without the tape) and "Ionisation" with the Chicago Symphony (Deutsche
Grammophon); these performances are more refined and better recorded
but not quite as viscerally thrilling.
Nagano's Varèse discs with L'Orchestre National de France (Warner
Apex) have recently been reissued as a bargain-priced two-disc import.
This is Varèse for those who might want a less extroverted, more
elegant approach; the essential explosive violence is present but not
in such heaping quantities as in the Boulez and Chailly recordings. The
set contains 11 of the 12 pieces (omitting "Poème Électronique").
Out of print, but worth seeking out: Zubin Mehta's exciting,
blunt-force performances of "Arcana," "Ionisation" and "Intégrales"
with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (London).
- R.S.G.
ZutboF
to put out a recording and a film on DVD because I really believe in
the power of the music as a visceral experience without the visual
aids."
She talked about "The rage and the fury" YESSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Fhqwhgads!
news:1138422323.8...@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
This is the best news I've heard in a long time. I was more excited for this
than for the Petit Wazoo project. I really hope they do a good job of this,
even if it doesn't come out until 2007.
Bill
"ZutboF" <zut...@hotmail.com> wrote:
She forgot to mention the overdubs Ahmet (voice) and Dweezil (guitar)
are doing.