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“Writing a song about why somebody left you – that’s just stupid.” – Frank Zappa
“Zappa sticks to 12 different notes and 11 different intervals,” the musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky once wrote. “What he does with them in terms of organisation is… the secret of his greatness… He is a classicist and a constructionist.” Indeed, Frank Zappa did see himself as a composer, simply yielding a guitar as a response to the times.
Moreover, by the time the 1980s arrived, he thought that in terms of musicology, the extent of human dexterity had been reached, and in order to surpass it, machines had to become the new engine to plough the progression of art forward. This futurist approach was radical; it still is. “You see, when I’m composing,” he told Sound on Sound in 1987. “My main idea often starts with various musical theories, and I ask myself what happens if I do this or that, and what are the physical limits of what a listener can comprehend in terms of rhythm?”
In essence, he wanted to begin with every possibility in music and slowly whittle that down to the most complex limit that people would still enjoy as a ‘song’. “How big is the ‘data universe’ that people can take in and still perceive it as a musical composition?” he asked. “That’s the direction I’m going in.” The easiest and most efficient way to do this was via machines.
This philosophy led him directly to the Synclavier, a digital synthesiser that aligned perfectly with his ambitions. It allowed Zappa to consolidate instrumentation, manipulate sound at a microscopic level, and even generate written scores from his compositions. More importantly, it opened the door to a new kind of authorship, one where he could capture the essence of a performer and reshape it entirely on his own terms.
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By sampling individual tones and textures, Zappa could effectively deconstruct human performance and rebuild it into something far more intricate. A vocalist or instrumentalist might provide the raw material, but within the machine, those fragments became part of a broader, highly controlled musical architecture. For Zappa, this wasn’t a loss of humanity in music, it was an expansion of what composition could be.
So, he familiarised himself with the Synclavier. The beauty of this synthesiser was that it not only allowed you to reduce old analogue instrumentation into formatting on a single device, but it also enabled you to print the score. Finally, he could also sample the “timbre” of musicians to serve as a sort of reverse sampling. In other words, he’d get Tom Waits to grovel a few notes, record them, then input them into the Synclavier and reconstruct all of it as he wished.
While many people would argue that the formulaic mechanisation of music stripped it of its soul, Zappa opined that quite the opposite was true: most music was formulaic anyway. He explains: “As a person who writes music, I know about these standard techniques, and if I wanted to write something that would make you cry, I could do it. There’s formula stuff that you can stick in here and there so the song falls neatly into place and elicits the desired response – but it’s cheap, and it’s not what I’m about.”
However, that didn’t mean that the emotion of music was an unworthy pursuit. “I think it’s quite a challenge to reach somebody emotionally without having to use words. Anyone who can perform expressively on a musical instrument I have respect for,” he clarifies. “Particularly for those people who get to a level of performance where they are no longer thinking about operating a piece of machinery but projecting something emotional through that machinery. That is really worthy of respect.”
It’s just that this venture was no longer his obsession. Having created 40 albums, 32 compositions for choral and orchestral groups, four ballets, and a slew of scores, his attention now turned to creating music that even masters of their machines couldn’t play. He wanted to create music beyond the capabilities of human technicians. So, he got to work with Synclavier, created Jazz from Hell, and poured every complexity he could into the song ‘G-Spot Tornado’.
In an ironic fashion befitting of Zappa, and no doubt something that amused him no end, this song garnered a great deal of attention, not because of its ground-breaking musicology, but because its title resulted in Jazz for Hell being the only entirely instrumental album to be slapped with a parental advisory warning. Hidden behind this prudence to profanity was a huge statement regarding the rise of tech and its endless capabilities. While the record’s title itself encapsulated other issues in society, as Zappa explained: “Things in America can be from hell. Right now, we have a president from hell [Ronald Reagan] and a National Security Council from hell, so we should add Jazz from Hell also.”
In time, however, Zappa would be proved wrong about his assertion that the song was too complex for humans. In 1992, Ali N. Askin arranged the piece for an orchestra, and it was performed by the Ensemble Modern as part of their recital of his final album, The Yellow Shark.
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