Frank Zappa: A Mother of Invention

There are many artists who are praised as being ‘ahead of their time’, but in Frank Zappa’s case, you begin to wonder whether the man possessed some kind of time-machine, so eerily prophetic were his musical innovations. These are just a few of the ways in which Zappa was a composer way avant of the garde

Feature by Joe Barton | 01 Jun 2009

Sampling
Long before the invention of the E-MU SP 1200, Zappa was swiping musical ideas and placing them into new cultural contexts; the very first song released under his name, 1966’s Hungry Freaks, Daddy, infamously nicks the riff from the Rolling Stones’ (Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. Motifs from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring were also frequently inserted into guitar solos with gay abandon. In addition, Zappa’s studio technique of xenochrony – splicing together sections from completely different tape recordings – allowed him to create songs from drum beats and guitar licks that had originally been played in different time signatures, and, in some examples, completely different decades.

Rapping
Ignoring musicological debates about the influence of African griots or John Lee Hooker’s Boogie Chillun, Zappa’s rhythmic, spoken delivery on Trouble Every Day predates the proto-rap of Gil Scott Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, as well as covering similar issues of civil unrest and racism in the USA. He would later note in an interview that speaking over a track, rather than singing, allowed him to express much more complex ideas than pop typically allowed for. If only 50 Cent was to have this revelation.

Sequencing
Nowadays, sequencers can be downloaded for free as part of music-making software, but in the mid-80s Zappa had to fork out thousands of dollars to acquire the Synclavier DMS, a machine which enabled him to bring to life the works of the eighteenth century composer Francesco Zappa, simply by loading the data of his scores into a computer. Interestingly, while sequencers are now often used to produce simple techno phrases, Zappa’s initial use of the Synclavier was to create music he deemed too complex for a human to ever perform accurately.

File Sharing
In 1983, within months of CDs becoming commercially available, Zappa essentially invented iTunes. In applying for a patent, Zappa proposed that it would be a good idea to “acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store” music, making it “accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user's home taping appliances”. In this case, Zappa was so ahead of his time that his proposition, somewhat unsurprisingly, failed miserably.

Zappa Plays Zappa play The Picture House, Edinburgh on 18 June.

http://www.zappaplayszappa.com