Which album was Frank Zappa the most proud of?
It’s often debated whether Frank Zappa was pretentious, a contrarian, or simply just an eccentric who thought differently from all of his peers. His zany sense of humour that always shone through in his music was often countered by his acid tongue and outspoken nature, where he would often poke fun or outright ridicule other music that he thought was not of the same value as his own or what he enjoyed.
We’ve discussed whether Zappa was actually so curmudgeonly that he actively hated everything in music that was happening around him as his career began to blossom, but considering how bizarre his music was and how many different genres it always straddled, it’s always been clear that he had a wide range of influences.
Quite often, his favourite came from the more unusual or less-trodden paths of the music world that others don’t tend to talk about, and while the rest of the world might have been soaking up the pop and rock music of the 1970s, Zappa was busy digesting what the worlds of jazz and contemporary classical music had to offer.
One of his favourite composers was the French avant-garde musician Pierre Boulez, a man best known for his works in serialism, controlled chance music, and having been among those responsible for starting a shift towards electronic innovation in instrumental music. Like Zappa, Boulez was a thinker and a man who never shied away from trying out new ideas and confronting what was considered the norm in order to further expand the horizons of his sound.
Zappa was allegedly turned onto the music of Boulez after purchasing a recording of Le Marteau Sans Maître that was paired with fellow avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Zeitmasse on the other side of the LP. At the time, Zappa was in his final year of high school, and after becoming obsessed with the record, he managed to acquire a copy of the score for the piece so that he could follow it as he listened.
This infatuation had grown to the point that Zappa decided he would send Boulez some orchestral scores of his own, with the aim of him taking note and wanting to conduct them. Zappa said that his initial response was no, on account of the fact that he “didn’t have a full-size symphony orchestra at his disposal in France.” Despite this, the two would eventually collaborate on The Perfect Stranger, a 1984 album that sees Boulez conduct the first half of the record alongside his own ‘Ensemble InterContemporain’, with the second half being performed by Zappa on a Synclavier.
Undoubtedly, this would have been one of the highlights of Zappa’s career on a personal level, as he got to work alongside someone whose music he had cherished for many years, but unfortunately, it’s far from being one of his more recognised works. Even more disappointingly for Zappa is the fact that he seemed to think that others didn’t understand the works of Boulez.
After seeing him conduct the New York Philarmonic Orchestra in the late ‘80s, he complained that the audience had been extremely rude throughout the performance. In a typically grumpy rant about the performance, Zappa recalled that “after the intermission, the audience came back in and waited for him to begin his piece, which was very quiet compared to the first two, and then about half the audience got up noisily and walked out.”
Outraged that anyone would do this to his favourite composer, he continued by stating how he would have set the audience straight. “I would have enjoyed the opportunity to grab a microphone and scream, ‘sit down, assholes! This is one of the real guys!’”
