My Little Grundgestalts

Published May 9, 2015

I'd like to begin with Frank Zappa's words of introduction to his “Be-bop Tango (Of The Old Jazzmen's Church)”, from the beautiful “Roxy and Elsewhere” album”

“... We have this very special highly evolved permutated tango. It's actually a perverted tango...”

One of the things that strikes me with Frank is that you never know whether he's serious or not. A second before he was joking about Nixon, and now this. “Highly evolved, permutated tango”. That's it, permutated. Here and there Frank casually brings in the discussion some clue about his vision, models, and concepts. Here we are lucky because Frank goes on and explains a little further:

“Now, as you might have noticed, Some of you with a musical education Can tell that the notes that George just sang when he went: << This is Be-Bop, even though you think it doesn't sound like that>>, Is actually A SORT OF A TWISTED FORM OF THE THEME OF THE TANGO ITSELF Which will get even more depraved as the number goes on. George will now attempt to dismember that melody, Play it and sing it at the same time while...”

Permutations — recombinations of a given set of elements — are a key tool in Zappa. Sometimes this is so important that the “mix” is even more important than what's in the mixture. It's the EMERGENCE that really counts — the quality of the Whole emerging from a set of parts. In this case, musical parts, though Frank was always interested in this concept even before music entered his life (see e.g. his chemical experiments, or his experimental movies). He considers compossibles (things that may be mixed together; see Leibniz's philosophy); chooses some of them; mixes them; hears; selects; and sorts. And this was done also with ABSTRACT CODES representing music, even before those codes had any sense to him.

He is a demiurge. Leibniz's God, if you wish. A scheduler, an ordinateur. I think it's this the foundation of what is known as Zappa's Conceptual Continuity. The true Composition is not (just) the development, the object; it is the process — the COMBINATORIAL process — that brings from the Parts to the Whole and from the Whole to a new Unity, a new Concept, which is all contained in the original Combinatorial Seed — the Theme. Something that we can find also in Schoenberg's writings: