The present-day composer refuses to die . . . and his life supportsystem is a Synclavier.
This article originally appeared in the September 1986 issueof Electronic Musician.
While waiting to interview Frank Zappa, I overheard a phoneconversation with drummer Chad Wackerman. Zappa had just returned fromfilming an episode of TV's Miami Vice and was denigrating thescript--"It is so putrid"--his clothes--"It was like RonaldMacDonald"--his role--"What do you get to be on there? A cocainedealer. That's all that show's about"--and the "pastel policeman."
Afterall was said and done, however, Zappa waxed philosophical. "I'm reallyglad I did it though," he admitted, "because it was so sick. It'sreally one of the sicker things that a human being can do."
If anyone knows about the sick things a human being can do, it'sFrank Zappa. For over 20 years he's been garroting American culture,sub-culture, counter-culture, and culture clash in a string ofrecordings that began in 1966 with Freak Out! Hippies, punks,Valley girls, and Congress fall equally before his venomous pen.
For those who love to hate Zappa, he presents an easy target, butlaced between Zappa's satirical acid is an acute social consciousness,reflected in his longstanding voter registration pleas and his recentcrusade against the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC).
Also buried in there are Zappa's serious music aspirations. Whilesinging the praises of "Dinah Mo Hum," he's also sung the praises ofEdgar Varese, Anton Webern, and others serious 20th-century composersand pioneers. In recent years, he accomplished the goal of realizinghis orchestral works with recordings by the London Symphony Orchestraand Pierre Boulez' Ensemble Intercontemporain. But these were onlytemporary and expensive fixes for Zappa, who has found a more permanentsolution to his addiction, the Synclavier II.
In 1982, Zappa released Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar,athree-record set of guitar solos compiled in answer to his fans'demands. A similar refrain may soon be heard, not because Zappa'stalking too much, but because he recently put down his guitar in favorof the Synclavier II computer music system. Not just any Synclavier,but the $200,000 deluxe model.
The first releases of this music were heard in 1984 and 1985 onThe Perfect Stranger, Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers ofPrevention and Francesco Zappa, His First Digital Recording inover 200 Years. He calls his Synclavier the Barking PumpkinDigital Gratification Consort, replacing the Abnuceals EmuukhaElectric Symphony Orchestra and Chorus of Lumpy Gravy, and as you'llread, Zappa believes he's found the answer to his deepestdesires--recording orchestral music--even if the orchestra isdigital.
I spoke with Zappa at his home in Los Angeles, ushered into thesanctum sanctorum of his 24-track digital studio by Dweezil, with asullen, "Frank wants you to set up in here. "
As I neared the studio, the sounds of a crazed metallic malletorchestra lashed out, silenced by Zappa as I entered. He took the onlyarm chair in the room, with a microphone sticking mysteriously out ofthe wall overhead, lit up his everpresent Winston, took the phone callfrom Wackerman, and with the snide exuberance that only Zappa canmuster, proceeded to talk about his latest sonic assault.
EM: You said that you haven't played the guitar in twoyears.
FZ: Well, I pretty much haven't touched it for the last twoyears 'cause the last tour was '84, and after the tour I went to workright away on mixing the live tapes. I had to deliver a CD to EMI forthis live stuff (Does Humor Belong in Music), and finish thevideo editing on a television show. Then I got the extra components forthis machinery here (the Synclavier) and I just got into working withthat.
EM: You've said that when you play the guitar, you like tomake it talk. Can you do that with the Synclavier?
FZ: Oh yeah! Sure can.
EM: For the Francesco Zappa project, how did you put theperformance together?
FZ: I had an assistant at that time named David Acker. Thereare two ways of entering material into the Synclavier. One way is withthe Script language, which is all letters and numbers and stuff. Or youcan do it by playing, then editing what you played by a couple ofdifferent means. Anyway, I never learned how to type their Script entryand he knew how to do it. So he took the original manuscripts that we'dgotten from the Berkeley library and the Library of Congress and typedthem in. We also researched the ornamentation of the period andwhenever there was a little "chingus" over the note, we put in theright twirls . . .
So I just experimented around with orchestration to make it ascolorful as I could. That was all done with synthesized sounds. Itwasn't done with any samples. I didn't have any sampling stuff workingthen.
EM: You've spoken often about your frustrations workingwith studio musicians, particularly string sections. Are you using theSynclavier as a way around them?
FZ: Oh, it's better than a way around it. Because this allowsyou to make sounds that, although they can be very orchestral, surpassthe wildest possibilities of any kind of instrumental ensemble. It'smore than just alleviating the tension; it's opening up a whole newdimension.
EM: Do you think you can exist, or co-exist, in thisacoustic dimension with this instrument if you chose to?
FZ: Well, obviously you haven't heard what the machine can door you wouldn't ask that question. Yeah, it does it. What it soundslike in polyphonic sampling is determined by the quality of the samplesyou put into it. We do a lot of sampling right here under reallylaboratory conditions. So I've got one of the finest collections ofsamples anywhere, most of them in stereo.
For example, we have a big concert marimba. You set up twomicrophones over it and as you sample each note on the marimba and laythem onto the key, you automatically get the same kind of panning thatthe stereo microphones hear. When it plays back your sequence, youreally get the sensation that you are hearing a musician who is playingsomething utterly impossible.
EM: You've always used electronics in your music, one wayor another, but until recently you've never played much synthesizer onyour records.
FZ: Right, although I've always had other keyboard players.I'm not a keyboard player--although I've dabbled in it for littlecheezoid parts and stuff--and you usually have to be one to "play" thesynthesizer. That's not what I'm doing now, though, because you canenter data into this system by playing at a slow rate, and it'svelocity and pressure sensitive so you can put a lot of expression intowhat you play. Then you can crank the speed back up to where you wantit, and edit what you've played by several different means.
EM: So you played the Synclavier pieces on The PerfectStranger on the keyboard.
FZ: Yeah!
EM: Did you alter the parts once they were in?
FZ: Yeah, with the editing. You can also enter notes justfrom the typewriter. You can play something in and if you feelsomething's missing some place, you just type a few things and you havenotes there. The only drawback is that if you've played something withkeyboard pressure and velocity sensitivity, the notes you type in arealways at 100 percent so they will pop out.
EM: You seem to prefer very metallic percussive sounds andtimbres in the Synclavier music of yours that I've heard onrecords.
FZ: Well, that's not true of the recent stuff (Mothers ofPrevention), and even that doesn't bear any resemblance to what thestuff sounds like now since I bought extra memory for it that allows meto have instrumental ensembles that I couldn't have before. For theMothers of Prevention album, I had only six megabytes of RAM anda 20 megabyte Winchester (hard disk drive). How I have two 80 megabyteWinchesters, plus 20 megs of RAM. I can store quite a bit of stuff inthere and have more elaborate ensembles playing the material back.
EM: So if this is your way around or beyond and orchestra. . .
FZ: Forget about the orchestra. It's beyond the orchestra.Because what this enables me to do is the same thing a painter gets todo. You get to deal with the material in a real and instantaneous way.You go boop and it's there. You don't sit down and write it outpainstakingly over a period of years and have the part copied and hopethat some orchestra will have enough time to devote to a rehearsal sothey come within the vicinity of what your original idea is. There isno doubt about it that if you can play on this thing and hear whatyou're playing, you have total control of your idea. Good, bad, orindifferent, you get to take the rap for it without having to share anyblame with some malfeasance on the performance level when you write itout in a normal way.
The economics of the time being what they are, I see nothing butbleakness ahead for people who still have to write it on a piece ofpaper and give it to a human being to play it, because there's notenough money to pay for rehearsals. The tendency in most modern musicconcerts is, since they know there's no money for rehearsal, they writeincreasingly easier or more minimalist pieces requiring less and lessskill. That's what's getting funded. The economics took its toll on thecultural life of America for sure.
EM:You've had a few of your orchestral works performed by the LondonSymphony Orchestra . . .
FZ: Yeah! Right! And those pieces cost a fortune. I could'vebought two of these machines for what the LSO album cost me.
EM: And what about the pieces commissioned by PierreBoulez?
FZ: Well, that wasn't really orchestral. That was only achamber orchestra with only 27 pieces and there's a slightdifference.
EM: Are you doing outboard processing on theSynclavier?
FZ: You mean when it goes to tape? Sure! We add digital echoto it and there's some equalization that's done, especially on some ofthe synthesizer sounds that come out of it since there's no trackingfilter in there. It's digital synthesis; the synthesizer sounds in thatmachine are subject to aliasing noise and that often has to be filteredoff.
EM: On the track "Outside Now Again," was the solo on thatimprovised?
FZ: Yes. It came from the Joe's Garage album on a songcalled "Outside Now." That's why it's called "Outside Now Again" on theBoulez album.
EM: So this wasn't improvised on the Synclavier.
FZ: No, it was played on the guitar. Then it was transcribedby Steve Vai. Then the transcription was entered into theSynclavier.
EM: How does your current use of the Synclavier relate tosome of the musique concrete things you did on early Mothers'albums?
FZ: Well, I can do concrete there too, because of the way thesystem operates. They have these things called patches. A patch is listof what sound lives under each key. You can have a different soundunder each key and they can be any sound. It can be thunder undermiddle C and a frog on C# and a car crash on D and anything you want.If you play a normal piano part on there, you get very unusual thingscoming out. Or you could have the whole keyboard by the voices ofpeople from the Congress.
EM: Edgar Varese was an early influence on you and he wasan early pioneer of musique concrete with "Poeme Electronique" and"Deserts." I recall when we spoke before that you didn't think veryhighly of those works.
FZ: That could possibly be due to the timing of when I heardit. Since I had more or less grown up with the pieces on EMS-401(the first recording of Varese's works) and none of them wereelectronic, when I finally heard "Poeme Electronique" on the Columbiaalbum they did when he was around 80 years old, I had heard other typesof electronic music. His may have come first (it didn't) and it mayhave been the pioneering thing (it was), but my ear had already beenexposed to other albums. So it wasn't as shocking or extreme as hearing"Octandre" or "Ionizations" for the first time.
EM: What were some of those other electronicworks?
FZ: "Vale of Orpheus." There was an album out of early Frenchmusic and I believe it was Pierre Schaeffer. Also there was a guy (TodDockstader) who was a disc jockey out of Denver, Colorado. He wasn't acomposer in the normal sense of the word. He had a number of releaseson an obscure label called Owl. One of them was calledQuatermass, and I think I have three of those. He was more of anengineer than a composer, but to me some of those compositions workbetter than the supposedly serious big shots from Europe.
I remember reading about a thing called the Mixtur-Trautonium. Allthe things that this musicology book said about it the Synclavier nowdoes. One of the things mentioned was chordal glissandos of kettledrums. You can have that if you want it on here.
EM: What's the difference in your compositions betweenmusic and sound effects?
FZ: It depends on the function. If I had my way, I'dorchestrate the sound effects on everything and the only thing thatkeeps me from doing that right now is the amount of digital storage inthe machine. If I extracted some examples from my sound effects libraryand loaded them in and wanted to build a composition out of them, Iwouldn't have enough memory storage for the samples of the otherinstruments.
EM: They also have a guitar interface for the Synclavier .. .
FZ: I don't speak highly of it.
EM: Why?
FZ: Because of the way it works. The problem with making aguitar trigger a synthesizer is that it can't start doing thecalculation to determine what the pitch of the string is until afterthe burst of white noise that the pick produces has died off. So theyhave a variable delay that keeps the computer from listening to thepitch until after the white noise is gone. That means that if you'replaying fast on it, nothing comes out. So it makes it a little bitawkward to play it as if it was a guitar. You have to baby it along.Some people can get around on it, I can't. It's just too awkward tome.
EM: It seems like the people I've heard using it don't getthe feel or flexibility of sound of a guitar in terms of expression,attacks . . .
FZ: Well, I hear a guitar a different way than most otherpeople hear it. Unless you can get the feeling of the instrument anduse it like an instrument, it seems like a waste of time. And theirinstrument is not a good-feeling instrument.
EM: In the early days of the Mothers, almost all of youreffects were tape effects.
FZ: Yeah, razor blade edits. I still do razor bladeedits.
EM: Even with the Synclavier?
FZ: Sure! If you've got 16 tracks and you have a complicatedorchestration in there and you suddenly want to make a drastic changefrom one section of the music to another, the only way to do it, unlessyou have more channels or more RAM, is to print the two sections ontothe tape and cut them together.
EM: You're in a position where you can have anyone youwant playing on your records. Yet you've been working solo recentlywith the Synclavier. Do you think that cuts you off from . . .
FZ: From humanity?
EM: No, but other musicians' inputs, the sort of feelingsthat other people can bring to your music and the collaborative aspectof music.
FZ: Well, my music has never been very collaborative. It'sbeen accommodative, because when you hire a musician you can't alwaysget that musician to play what you thought up because musicians are notuniformly expert in different fields. You put together a band, you haveto average out the assets and liabilities of each musician and thenfind what the style of that band is going to be. So you have tocompromise the pieces because you might have a drummer who can playanything, but a rhythm guitar player who might sing great but can'tcount and couldn't play any parts. Or a piano player who has a certainamount of technical expertise but doesn't know what it means to play awhole note rest and leave some space in the music. So everything getsadjusted for the personnel. But with this, the only thing I have toadjust for is how much RAM I've got in the machine.
EM: What about live performances? Would you go out withthe Synclavier?
FZ: I've been trying to figure out whether it's practical.I've talked to an agent about it and discussed the possibility of atour in the fall, but without a major advertising campaign to create aninterest for what the machine can do or what I'm doing with it, I doubtwhether a tour like that would attract much attention. I'm certainlynot going out and playing "Dinah Mo Hum " or the rest of that stuffanymore because that's like--what?--that's a million years ago.
EM: You don't think your audience would come outfor it?
FZ: A certain number of them would and the rest of them wouldbe disappointed because I wasn't playing songs off the SheikYerbouti album. The thing about live performances is that peopledon't come to hear what you played on the record. So everybody's got adifferent idea of what their favorite record is and an audience for myshow thinks, "I want to hear songs off that one, I want to hear songsoff that one."
That's one of the reasons why, when we do a tour, the pieces thatare familiar pieces are all rearranged because they have to accommodatethe instrumentation and the playing techniquies of the guys on the roadat that time.
EM: Does this mean you'll have two separate musicaldirections now or are you saying you're not touring with the bandanymore?
FZ: Well, if I take this thing out, there's two ways to doit. One is me and a technician and this machine and that's it. Theother way is to take a rhythm section and have a few musicians playingalong with it. I've done some experiments with that. I've got a bassplayer and a drummer who can keep up with it, but then you askyourself, does that make it better or what? Because the machine can doit all by itself.
EM: But what about the idea of a live performance beingpeople playing live . . . Wouldn't that eliminate any spontaneity youmight have in a live performance?
FZ: Well, what can I say? I'm doing this kind of music thesedays. If somebody wants to see this kind of music manifested live,there's no other way to do it. Human beings cannot play this music. Itcan only be played by a machine.
EM: This means you'll be going towards the instrumentalmusic of The Perfect Stranger instead of something likeThingfish?
FZ: Thingfish is done, it's history.
EM: Did you play with the 4X Real Time Synthesizer atIRCAM?
FZ: Sure did. I'm disappointed that they didn't make itavailable commercially because the 4X, magnificent as it is, isactually cheaper than this machine by at least half. At the time I wasthere, the price that was quoted for a full-bore 4X system was about$100,000. What's sitting behind you there is about $200,000.
But it does some things that the 4X won't do. At the time I saw the4X, it had no music printing or music editing program that came closeto what the Synclavier has. However, now that it has MIDI ports on itand can be interfaced with other devices, if they ever do make the 4Xavailable commercially and there was a way to MIDI the two together,that would be an incredibly frightening piece of machinery.
EM: What can the 4X do differently?
FZ: The 4X has the equivalent of a thousand oscillators init. It has a little fader panel that controls different parameters andyou can operate it like a mix and you can control the nuances of tempoand dynamics after your sequence is loaded into the thing. For thedemonstration they gave me of the musique concrete possibilities, a guyplayed this strange garbling weird sound and said "Do you recognizethat?"
I said "No!"
He pulled the fader back down to take it out of its process and itwas playing "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?" from the Joe's Garagealbum. Another thing it did was take a speaking voice and make it sounddrunk, pitched it, made it whisper and a lot of neat things likethat.
EM: Are you MIDIing the Synclavier to othersynthesizers?
FZ: Yeah, you can go in and out on this machine. You can dointeresting things with this Roland device called an Octapad, which isjust this little set of plastic squares that you hit with a stick andit has a MIDI output on it. So if you have any percussion technique atall, you can do rolls on the pad, and roll a percussion sample in themachine; or if you have a mandolin sample, you can trill the mandolin.This keyboard doesn't speak very well for fast repeated notes, but onebuzz roll with sticks on an Octapad will let you enter that kind ofdata into the sequencer.
EM: I understand you've redone some of Lumpy Gravywith the Synclavier.
FZ: I digitally remastered all the early Verve albums.They've been released in a box called The Old Masters.
EM: But I understand that you replaced some of that partson Lumpy Gravy with the Synclavier.
FZ: The version that went out on The Old Mastersdidn't have any of the new souped-up stuff because I figured that theaudience for that probably wouldn't enjoy it. They would probablyrather have a cleaned up digital remaster of the original. But I did doa bunch of work on it and I don't know whether it will come out.
EM: You record digitally and you're reissuing old Mothers'records on CD. What differences have you discovered with the digitalprocess?
FZ: With digital, you find out how noisy your microphonesactually are. You find out how much noise actually lives in the board.In order to clean that stuff up, you have to be more careful about theway you record things. Everything shows. We gate audio as much aspossible and for sounds that don't gate well, we use either Burwens orDynafex to minimize any kind of unwanted stuff. You can't make it goaway, but you can disguise it to the point where it's notoffensive.
EM: Do you sample just for kicks or do you go into aproject and decide you need certain sounds you don't have?
FZ: We have sampling sessions, like I hired a saxophoneplayer to come up here because as far as I know, none of the samplelibraries that Synclavier puts out has a stereo tenor sax playingsubtone notes. I've got that and I've got all the tenor saxophonehonking notes, squealing notes and special effects tenor saxophonenoises. Then we did the clarinet: short notes, long notes, the wholerange of the instrument, closed-miked, distant miked.
Then we did a session with all the different components of the drumset. Ordinarily when a drum kit is sampled, you have the drum kit setup with the ordinary miking and the guy goes, okay, here's the tom-tomand boom, he hits the tom-tom. He hits the snare, the kick, and soforth. But along with that, you have all the resonant noise of all therest of the components of the drum set, all the metal, all the unwantedstuff that's in there.
We sampled all the components of the set isolated from everythingelse. So I've got pure roto-toms, pure snare drum, pure tom-toms, purekick, pure high-hat, pure cymbal crashes. It's a very startling soundwhen you hear real drums in real stereo with none of the reflectedsound, none of the sound you'd get if you just turned the mikes on adrum set. It's surrealistic, totally surrealistic.
EM: Have you gotten involved with resynthesis?
FZ: Yeah! The difference between resynthesis and ordinarysynthesizer sound is in normal synthesizer sound you build a waveformand that's your sound and it remains static over time. Withresynthesis, the computer will look at a sound and divide it up intothings called frames that go by in time, and each frame is a totallydifferent waveform. So the effect, when you hear it, is different froman ordinary synthesized sound.
It's not quite as realistic as a sample, but it avoids some of thebad features of a sample. With a sample, as you move it to the extremesof the keyboard, it goes Mickey Mouse at the top and gets aliasingnoise at the bottom. You can avoid some of those nasty effects byresynthesis for certain types of sounds which translate well, likebrass, for instance. It resynthesizes very nicely. Clarinet is fair,bassoons are shady, and flutes are fair. We've done vocalresynthesis.
EM: You talk about solving musical problems. Why do youhave different problems than a composer did 200 years ago?
FZ: It's the same problem. It's the blank page problem. It'sthe same problem a painter has with a blank canvas: what are you goingto do with it and why?
EM: Why do you need all this technology to solve theproblem and back then they just needed a few musicians?
FZ: Because back there they didn't have the musician's union.It was a different world. Maybe they had more rehearsal time and theycould write things that would get played.
EM: So you think that the musician's union is holding backyou and other artists?
FZ: No! I think all unions are. I don't mind saying that I amanti-union. The union mentality has affected the arts drastically inthe United States. The worst example would be the stage hands union,which in many instances earns more than the musicians who areplaying.
EM: The music that you've done on the Synclavier has beenoutside and avant-garde. It's tonal, but it's jagged, disruptive, withodd rhythms. Where do you think the audience is for that?
FZ: I don't know. The first audience is right here in thischair. If I don't like to listen to it, I'm certainly not going toshare it with anybody else. If somebody else happens to like it, it'sterrific. I'm prepared to have everybody on the planet hate what I do.I simply don't care.
Some people like it, the same way I liked Varese when I heardVarese, and other people hate it the same way many people hated hismusic when it first came out. I used to bring friends over to the houseand say "Listen to this," and they'd say "Are you crazy" What isthat?"
EM: They used to do the same thing to me when I playedFreak Out!
FZ: It's a vicious cycle. [Laughs.]
John Diliberto is the producer of Totally Wired:Artists in Electronic Sound, a weekly program on electronic musicproduced for Pennsylvania Public Radio Associates and broadcast onpublic radio stations across the United States.