Frank Zappa: “Status Back Baby” from Absolutely Free

Die-hard classical purists would say “Frank Zappa didn’t write classical music.” Or “He’s a performer, not a composer.” Zappa claimed in his autobiography that the reason he became a rock musician was so that he could bankroll his classical aspirations. In his last years, he focused less on rock concerts and spent his time writing pieces that saw performances by the London Symphony Orchestra, Pierre Boulez, and the German group, Ensemble Modern. The reason he is the subject today is because as a boy, I heard the second album he ever released and recently, as an adult, the last recorded during his lifetime. What strikes me now comparing the two is how he good a musician he really was, and in my mind, I put him in the category of Kurt Weill.

Zappa released Absolutely Free in 1967. I just happened to be in my brother Bob’s room one day when Tim Labuda, his best friend, burst in holding an album. Tim, who looked like a beat poet with a goatee (and I think he even wore a beret) said “You’ve got to listen to this.” They let me stay, and though I didn’t have a very highly developed sense of sarcasm back then, I was interested to hear lyrics making fun of high school cheer leaders along with quite interesting music that didn’t sound like your average pop record of the day.

As mentioned earlier, I used to sneak into Bob’s room when he wasn’t there and Absolutely Free was one of the albums I used to play again and again. One song became my favorite “Status Back Baby,” which lampooned vapid cheerleaders from the point of view of a boy who doesn’t fit in because he doesn’t care about high school spirit. At one point, the song breaks into an instrumental interlude, which sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. Seven years later in college, when I first heard Stravinski’s “Petrushka” I realized Zappa had lifted the first movement from that ballet score. That made me return to Zappa and I casually followed his career from then on, buying just a few albums of the scores that he released. Another song on Absolutely Free, “Plastic People,” became the anthem of the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia that brought an end to twenty years of communist rule.

During the 1980s, Zappa became interested in politics and free speech and even testified in hearings before congress against labeling rock albums with parental warning stickers. In the late ’80s he toured again, and I went to see him perform at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C. Though Zappa’s ensemble performed some rock standards, the concert seemed more like a cabaret show than anything else. At one point, they broke into a musical skit satirizing Ed Meese, head of the Justice Department, who had announced an additive that the federal government was going to start putting in prisoners’ food to keep them docile. Zappa saw this as fascistic, as he did censorship and big business.

Around this time, I read his autobiography, in which he described his early musical influences–Stravinski, Messiaen, and Varese. He bemoaned the fact that people writing serious music often couldn’t get their works performed. The reason is that new music is often difficult to play, which requires extra rehearsal time for orchestras and that makes the pieces prohibitively expensive to produce. Still at the end of his life, the Frankfurt Music Festival honored him, placing him in the same category as John Cage and Stockhausen. His last album Yellow Shark consists of a performance of his works by the Ensemble Modern at that festival. One of the pieces, “G spot Tornado” is so accessible that it could become part of the basic repertoire for orchestras.

Thinking about Zappa also makes me wonder what has happened to classical music. Before composers became cult figures, musicians often improvised. We’re told nowadays that renaissance musicians were kind of like modern jazz performers. They had a basic melody and some musical conventions, but they were free to do their own thing within that framework. Maybe that is why renaissance music has become popular of late: it is beautiful, but it also has a fresh spontaneity to it that you often don’t find in huge, ponderous, symphonic pieces.

European audiences and musicians took Frank Zappa more seriously than American, who didn’t quite know how to categorize him. Zappa was a kind of iconoclast, who never minced words when criticizing people he thought of as vain and stupid. Thus he angered just about everyone. For example, he referred to rock journalists as ”people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.” He also criticized what he thought of as stodgy classical musicians, orchestras, and conductors who didn’t perform his work. Still, he never seemed to compromise his principles, and he did get through to a number of people. Rarely do you get a chance to laugh at rock music; it takes itself so seriously. Even more rarely do you find popular musicians that aren’t a “product” targeted at a specific market segment, and who actually have talent. Rarest of all are “serious composers” who are also virtuoso performers, articulate champions of free speech, and who maintain a sense of the absurd. Among some people, me included, Zappa finally got his “Status Back Baby.”

Alexander Borodin: Polovetsian Dances

“Take my hand, I’m a stranger in paradise…” Looking back over some of the entries on my blog, it seems I’ve given the impression that music played no part in my life until stumbling upon classical music. This would be misleading, and today’s piece made me realize that music played an important role in my life at an early age, in a way that it seems is rarer in our culture than it once was.

In truth, music surrounded me as a child. My parent had bought an old mono, console hi-fi record player about the time that stereo arrived on the scene in the early 1960s. They also collected 78 and 33 rpm records at garage sales. My older brothers and sister, by the time they hit puberty, were buying 45s and LPs around that same time period. The console had two large compartments for storing records, and I used to delight in going through the albums, studying the artwork on the covers, and playing them on the old turntable.

Bob, my second oldest brother had some very “cool” jazz albums by Dave Brubek, and he once brought home a copy of that hot-sounding party favorite “Tequila!” Joan, my sister, collected Beatles albums and owned a myriad of 45s (which seemed to be released every 30 seconds after the “British Invasion.”) My parents had a number of old crooners–Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Mario Lanza and Tony Bennet. They also owned sound tracks to many of the big musicals of their day–Oklahoma, Brigadoon, South Pacific, and Annie Get Your Gun. Everyone in my family liked everything in our collection and I remember all of us delighting in listening to that music. But we didn’t just passively listen to music; singing was also pervasive in our lives. My father was my cub scout master and an  assistant scout master when I joined the boy scouts. We sang lots of songs around the campfire at our weekly meetings and at Christmas parties.

We also sang in church. I loved standing next to my father, who had a rich tenor and sang beautifully. He hit all the high notes and could sing harmonies, and it used to thrill me to hear him sing “Ave Maria.” I always tried to stand as far as possible away from my mother for the opposite reason. Still, she appreciated music and once in high school I was very surprised to find she knew a lot about opera. I had come home with a copy of La Traviata from the library, and when she saw it, she started singing an aria from it. When I asked incredulous how she knew it, she said “Oh, I used to listen to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio every Saturday.”

How the pervasiveness of music in our lives changed remains a mystery to me. Perhaps television had something to do with it. When I was younger, friends and relatives of my parents used to come over to play cards or just visit. Music always played in the background. Socializing like that broke down when television arrived and we started spending evenings glued to the television. Then when the Beatles arrived on the music scene, the whole music industry changed. Performers became superstars, the gap between professionals and amateurs deepened, and songs became preoccupied with different themes—narcissistic, ones often far away from the goals and aspirations of normal people.

Church music also changed after Vatican II, which allowed folk music into church. All those great hymns like “Adeste Fideles,” and “Tantum Ergo,” gave way to such bland pap as “Kumbaya” or “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” or some other mind-numbingly hackneyed tune. This “folk” music, I later discovered, was a twisted travesty and perversion of the socially relevant work of Woodie Guthrie, Pete Seager and early Boby Dylan.

So what does this have to do with Borodin? Well one of the records in that old hi-fi console had the melody, which Tony Bennet popularized, called “Stranger in Paradise.” The songwriters Wright and Ferre, had taken a melody from Borodin’s Polvetsian Dances, which were extracted by the composer from his opera Prince Igor. The crooner’s version was sweet and seductive. The Polvetsians, my Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music tells me, were a nomadic people who had invaded Russia. How you get from invading, nomadic hordes to Tony Bennett, I haven’t a clue. Less even how you get from “This land is my land” to “Kumbaya.”

One last interesting note about Borodin. He suffered the shame of being an illegitimate son of a Georgian nobelman, but he later went on to become a physician and professor of chemistry. He also founded a women’s medical school. Once upon a time, it was OK to excel in more than one discipline, even quite unrelated ones. So beware specialization.

Franz Josef Haydn: Paukenmesse (Missa in Tempore Bella)

It puzzles me that music education in public shcools is not considered part of the core curriculum. When there are budget cuts, often the music programs suffer. This does not happen to sports programs. Why? Because they bring money into the schools. When I was a kid, music programs had to rely on “Music Boosters” that is, parents who held bakes sales and fund raisers for their kids. When my kids were young we lived in hyper “my-kid-is-gifted” Montgomery County, Maryland, and parents would rather the money went to enrichment programs in math and science.

This seems like a perversion of our entire educational system. In a study reported in 1998 by the American Psychological Association, researchers found that taking music lessons and playing an instrument correlates positively with higher I.Q. levels. They also observed that participating in music utilizes many parts of the brain that control a wide range of abilities. It is a holistic activity in that it stimulates both the right and left brain (which control feeling and logic). Performing requires both gross and fine motor skills. Finally, music also involves at least three senses–auditory, visual, and tactile.

Other learning researchers have established that involving more than one sense at a time makes learning more efficient and speedy. A Bulgarian researcher even based an entire educational program on that–I think it was called Suggestopedia. By combining music and a highly structured curriculum, they claimed feats of super learning. Students learned a foreign language in one week, reportedly.

The misplacement of our priorities in the American educational system, reminds me of a bumper sticker I once saw on a car: “Wouldn’t it be nice if schools had billions of dollars and it was the Army that had to hold bake sales?”

Here’s one final factoid I think is relevant. The two men who invented Kodachrome were concert musicians, who taught themselves chemistry so they could work on an idea. Kodak gave them a laboratory and they spent years perfecting their method. When they got stuck, they would pull out their instruments and play a sonata together. The “real scientitsts” used to laugh at them. They also kept up an intense performance schedule. Finally they succeeded. I wonder how many un-musical scientists could write a symphony.

This relates to Haydn’s Paukenmesse because I sang in school choirs in grade school, but it wasn’t until hearing that album that I became interested in vocal music. The pieces our choir teachers chose were for them most part ghastly and really had nothing to say to me. In college, I once saw the Vienna Choir Boys, small little cherubs who belted out pieces by Strauss and other great composers. I was stunned. How did they get little kids to do that?

Haydn’s Paukenmesse was in that stash of records I found at a garage sale. Though this disk was ruined when an apartment I lived in flooded, I still remember its upbeat, snappy orchestral sections, the lovely choral and beautiful vocal solos. My father used to whistle, and I picked up the habit from him. The opening to the Paukenmesse, with its baroque trumpets and kettle drums (in German pauken), was very whistle-able, indeed. From this mass I went on to start listening to baroque oratorios and eventually opera.

The subtitle for this mass is “Mass in Time of War.” I don’t know which war, or who was winning or why they were fighting, but you won’t detect a bellicose note in the whole piece. It sounds joyous, like a lot of baroque music. Perhaps it was written as a piece of propaganda, to buck up national spirits and mobilize the masses. As such, maybe I should disdain the mixing of religion and war. I would hate to do so, however. I’m not going to say in hindsight that had my choir teachers expected us to sing great works of music that I’d now be singing in the Met, but it would have been nice if the pieces chosen had been beautiful and challenging. Haydn, as I found out researching this piece, started out as choir boy in the Cathedral of Vienna, and when his voice broke, he became a teacher. He went on to write over 100 symphonies and gained renown as the greatest composer of his time. See the value of good music education in the schools now?

Antonin Dvorak: The Golden Spinning Wheel

In my last post, I wrote about a stash of classical albums I picked up at a garage sale when I was in high school in the 1970s.  Another record in the “classical cache” of albums held a little gem–a tone poem called The Golden Spinning Wheel by Antonin Dvorak. I don’t believe I had ever heard of Dvorak before, but it interested me that he was Czech, since my grandfather came from Eastern Europe. The music didn’t sound at all like any of the gypsy melodies we listened to every Sunday on the Hungarian Hour, though.

When I first started listening to classical music, half the fun was seeing the mental images each new piece evoked for me. Later in college, I read a lecture by Stravinski, in which he criticized composers who wrote visual or onomotopoeic music for popular tastes. In the liner notes to Rite of Spring, Igor let it slip that the Disney Studios only offered him a pittance for the right to use that piece in Fantasia. They supposedly told him that if he didn’t like it, too bad–they didn’t have to pay him anything since the Russian copyrights weren’t valid in the United States. So I don’t think Stravinski was completely unbiased on the issue of visual music. (He also once wrote he thought the gramophone was generally a bad idea.  More on that below.)

Several years ago, my daughter asked me to let her take violin lessons. The teacher followed the Suzuki method, and owning an old violin I bought in high school with the hopes of one day learning, I was happy when the teacher encouraged me to learn as well. As a result, I understand a little more now about what’s going on in a piece musically, and so sometimes listening to music is more an intellectual activity than a visual/emotional one for me. That, by the way, was why Stravinksi didn’t like gramophones–he thought it would expose music to people who had no musical training, who would therefore not understand. Another example of the Western schism between mind and body. Learning researchers find we remember better when we involve more of the senses. And to try to turn shut your mind’s eye to visual images seems a bit pointless (and boring, too!) Thinking back on all the pieces I’ve so far written about, they remain vivid and still beloved precisely because I formed visual associations with them.

The Golden Spinning Wheel starts out with the French horns quietly puffing out a loping melody. Today it still makes me imagine myself standing in a field in the English countryside. It is a foggy morning and in the distance a pack of hounds and red-clad horsemen ride by, in hot pursuit of a fox. Following this introduction, the full orchestra swells up dramatically into a romantic melody. The piece alternates between these two themes until the end. What this has to do with a dove I don’t know, and I can’t find the old vinyl anymore, which I had probably worn out anyway.

I haven’t told my daughter about the images The Golden Spinning Wheel conjures up for me. She’s an animal rights activist, vegetarian and she volunteers at a local no-kill animal shelter. She’d cry “Poor Fox!” Sometimes her extremism rankles me a bit–as does extremism of any sort. Which is why I’m happy to have been reminded, in writing this, of how important it is to just take your mind on a visual vacation, with the music cranked up.

Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovsky: Serenade for String Orchestra in C Major

Sometimes, I have discovered works of classical music in the strangest places, and that has humbled me a bit. My three older brothers went to a college, which lay about 100 mile south of my hometown. From 1961 until 1972, we spent a number of Sundays driving the two hours to visit them. For me as a child, these little trips were like mini-vacations. The university, a land-grant college, which specialized in agriculture and technology, looked like something out of a DiChiruco painting. It sat on a billiard table flat plain and consisted of a number of huge, red-brick cubes that had a sinister air about them.

To get to the University, we had to head due south for about 50 miles, through flat Indiana cornfields and small Midwestern towns. At a small county seat called Rochester, the road forked and then started to climb and wind in a southwesterly direction through a series of small foothills and valleys. The hills were covered with thick deciduous forests and dotted with small ramshackle houses, abandoned gas stations and other languishing small businesses. It had a kind of backward, “hillbilly” feeling to it.

In the mid to late 60s a craze for antiques and flea markets swept through the United States. In every city someone turned an old barn or storefront into a second-hand shop, and every Saturday the suburbs sprouted signs saying “Garage Sale.” Those were the golden days–when people sold real antiques and household effects from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Nowadays, you only find ’80s and ’90s mass-produced trash at garage sales.

On one of our Sunday trips to visit a brother, my father spotted a table of junk in front of a broken-down car repair shop, and he pulled the car over. This was instinctual behavior for my parents–they had been teenagers during the great depression of 1929. We all piled out of the car to inspect the goods, which consisted of old tools, broken lamps, and other “treasures.” A pile of albums sitting on the table caught my eye, and I was flabbergasted upon inspecting them to find they were all classical LPs. The proprietor had put a sign on them “Records 25 Cents.”

I scooped up the whole set–about 12 in all–and so began my classical music collection. I was immensely happy to have found these albums, which I came to refer to as my “classical cache.” Most were on budget labels–Nonesuch, Vox, Vanguard and Everest. Some had familiar pieces–Tchaikowski’s 1812 Overture. Others had composers I had never heard of–Dvorak and Borodin. But, to me they were genuine treasures and since they were “classical” they had to be good. I ended up listening to them all again and again.

The one that I remain fondest of to this day, and which I just recently found on a CD, was Tchaikowski’s Serenade for Strings. Whenever I hear this piece, my mind’s eye conjurs up pictures of ballet dancers. I don’t know whether it’s ever been choreographed, but it seems perfect for a pas de deux. It just sounds so sweet and lush and passionate. True, it holds a touch of sadness, and you can’t think of Tchaikowski without thinking about his tortured life of self doubt and his struggles with his homosexuality. Despite his trials, however, he managed to give us Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, The Nutcracker, a great piano and violin concerto and the Serenade for Strings. It seems odd that I could have discovered this incredibly sweet piece of music amid a pile of junk on a table in a ravine in rural Indiana, thousands of miles away from its source. And strange too, that it would spring from the mind of a troubled soul. Another contemporary troubled soul of Tchaikowski–Oscar Wilde–entitled the book he wrote in prison De Profundis, which is a quote from the Bible: “Out of the depths, I call to you, oh Lord.” The trick in life is learning to find the flower growing in the dung-heap.