CREATIVE CONTROL:

Morton Feldman, Lars von Trier, and Frank Zappa

Nathan John Michel

A DISSERTATION

PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY

OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE

OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE

BY THE DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC

SEPTEMBER 2007
© Copyright by Nathan John Michel, 2007. All rights reserved.
 iii

Abstract

This dissertation explores the relationship between creativity and control. How

can the creative process be controlled? When does too much control make the

creative process confining and predictable? When does lack of control dissolve

creative activity into meaningless noodling? We look at three artists—Morton

Feldman, Lars von Trier, and Frank Zappa—who struggle with these questions in

different ways. Their work reflects this struggle.

Morton Feldman values intuition over calculation. In many of his

compositions—as well as in essays, lectures, and interviews—he rejects music

that follows any kind of pre-compositional design too closely. Yet his piece Why

Patterns? is full of precisely such pre-compositional design: first, in the layout of

the score itself; second, in structural parallels between Why Patterns? and the

Jasper Johns painting Scent; and third, in stretches of systematic, interlocked

patterning, which pervade the piece. Chapter 1 explores the contradiction

between Feldman’s rhetoric and the reality of Why Patterns?.

Danish director Lars von Trier works within the confines of strict, self-imposed

rules; but his films push these rules to the breaking point—testing, along the way,

the limits of both his characters and his audience. In his film, The Five

Obstructions, von Trier tries testing the limits of his mentor, Jørgen Leth. Von

Trier asks Leth to remake five times Leth’s short 1967 film, The Perfect Human,
 iv

under increasingly restrictive rules, or “obstructions”, which von Trier himself

devises. Chapter 2 examines the conflict between these two directors—a conflict

rooted in opposing views of art and control.

Chapter 3 examines Frank Zappa’s record Uncle Meat, which jumps at will

between music that is highly controlled—through traditional notation and careful

studio editing—and music more spontaneously created—through improvisation

and live performance. We focus, in particular, on conflicting themes of the

organic and mechanical, which, throughout Uncle Meat, serve as metaphors for

Zappa’s own creative struggle between control and spontaneity.

A concluding chapter considers Feldman, von Trier, and Zappa side-by-side.

Two compositions of my own are also included with this dissertation: The Beast1

and The Beast Transcriptions.

1
Nathan Michel, The Beast. Sonig Records, 2005.
 v

Table of Contents

List of Tables vi

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 4

Composing Possibilities: Morton Feldman and the Question of Why Patterns?

Chapter 2 44

Rules of the Game: Lars von Trier and The Five Obstructions

Chapter 3 63

The Art of Distraction: Frank Zappa and Uncle Meat

Conclusion: Three Characters 98

Appendix 105

Bibliography 121
 vi

List of Tables

Figure 1 Why Patterns?, system 1, score layout

Figure 2 Why Patterns?, system 1, time signatures

Figure 3 Why Patterns?, flute part - page 1, system 1

Figure 4 Why Patterns?, piano part – page 1, system 1

Figure 5 Why Patterns?, glockenspiel part – page 1, system 1

Figure 6 Jasper Johns, Scent (1973-1974)

Figure 7 Why Patterns?, page 1 - time signature patterns

Figure 8 Why Patterns?, flute part – page 1, system 1 – Meandering Theme

Figure 9 Why Patterns?, piano part – page 9, system 2 – Stuck Theme

Figure 10 Why Patterns?, flute part – page 6, system 2 – Zoo Theme

Figure 11 Why Patterns?, flute part – page 8, system 2 – “Music” Theme

Figure 12 Why Patterns?, piano part – page 11, system 3 – “Music” Theme

Figure 13 Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors (1533)

Figure 14 Frank Zappa, Uncle Meat (1969) front cover

Figure 15 Uncle Meat, Main Theme

 vii

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following: Paul Lansky, my advisor, and Steve Mackey,

second reader, for giving me encouragement and insightful feedback throughout

the writing of this dissertation; Greg Smith, for guiding me through the process of

setting up my defense; and Tom Myernick at the Princeton Record Exchange, for

his excellent musical recommendations. I’d also like to thank Marilyn Ham, Cindy

Masterson, Kyle Subramaniam, Dan Trueman, Dmitri Tymoczko, and Barbara

White. Special thanks go to my friends, parents, and Amber Papini.

 1

Introduction

This dissertation explores the relationship between creativity and control. How

can the creative process be controlled? When does too much control make the

creative process confining and predictable? When does lack of control dissolve

creative activity into meaningless noodling? We look at three artists—Morton

Feldman, Lars von Trier, and Frank Zappa—who struggle with these questions in

different ways. Their work reflects this struggle.

Morton Feldman values intuition over calculation. In many of his

compositions—as well as in essays, lectures, and interviews—he rejects music

that follows any kind of pre-compositional design too closely. Yet his piece Why

Patterns? is full of precisely such pre-compositional design: first, in the layout of

the score itself; second, in structural parallels between Why Patterns? and the

Jasper Johns painting Scent; and third, in stretches of systematic, interlocked

patterning, which pervade the piece. Chapter 1 explores the contradiction

between Feldman’s rhetoric and the reality of Why Patterns?.

Danish director Lars von Trier works within the confines of strict, self-imposed

rules; but his films push these rules to the breaking point—testing, along the way,

the limits of both his characters and his audience. In his film, The Five

Obstructions, von Trier tries testing the limits of his mentor, Jørgen Leth. Von

Trier asks Leth to remake five times Leth’s short 1967 film, The Perfect Human,
 2

under increasingly restrictive rules, or “obstructions”, which von Trier himself

devises. Chapter 2 examines the conflict between these two directors—a conflict

rooted in opposing views of art and control.

Finally, Chapter 3 examines Frank Zappa’s record Uncle Meat, which jumps at

will between music that is highly controlled—through traditional notation and

careful studio editing—and music more spontaneously created—through

improvisation and live performance. We focus, in particular, on conflicting themes

of the organic and mechanical, which, throughout Uncle Meat, serve as

metaphors for Zappa’s own creative struggle between control and spontaneity.

My examination of these three wildly different artists is essentially a look into the

process of making art—what me might call the “creative process.” The creative

process is an “ongoing and circular process of exploration, selection,

combination, refinement, and reflection” that often—but not always—yields a

creative product, a finished artwork.2 I am interested in what the creative product

tells us about the creative process, and vice-versa. I use the term “creativity” to

encapsulate this intertwining of creative process and creative product. In this

sense, creativity is like a feedback network between an ongoing process and the

products it creates.

2
BC Education – Appendix F: Glossary.1999.<http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/irp/dan11_12/apf.htm>
(accessed February 22, 2007)
 3

My interest in creativity is easy to explain: I grapple with issues everyday in my

own attempt to make music; when I see evidence of other artists grappling with

the same issues, I feel a certain kinship. This dissertation is, essentially, an

exploration of this kinship. Because the most challenging issue I encounter in my

own creative process is a struggle between control and spontaneity, this is what I

focus on in works by Feldman, von Trier, and Zappa—three artists whose

creative process is captured in the final creative product.

 4

Chapter 1

Composing Possibilities: Morton Feldman and the Question

of Why Patterns?

When you are involved with a sound as a sound, as a limited yet infinite thought
to borrow Einstein’s phrase, new ideas suggest themselves, need defining,
exploring, need a mind that knows it is entering a living world not a dead one.
When you set out for a living world you don’t know what to take with you because
you don’t know where you’re going. You don’t know if the temperature will be
warm or cold; you have to buy your clothes when you get there. Wasn’t there a
renowned anthropologist who insisted one must go into the field alone,
unobtrusive, in order to enter the environment without disturbing it and discover
its true essence? That’s not quite the way the Princeton University Music
Department embarks on its expeditions into the new sound world. There are such
crowds of them, they take so much with them. All their equipment, all their
machines. They come to hear; but all they hear are their own machines.
Morton Feldman, “Conversations Without Stravinsky” (1967)

As an artist, Morton Feldman travels light. He doesn’t want the burden of fancy

compositional systems, a la Schoenberg, or historical references, a la Stravinsky.

These things interfere with what matters most to him: the physical reality of

sound—how it moves from instrument to ear. This theme provides a kind of

mantra throughout Feldman’s writings and lectures. Yet in his 1978 piece Why

Patterns?, there are clear instances of pre-compositional planning: first, in the

layout of the score itself; second, in structural parallels between Why Patterns?

and the Jasper Johns painting Scent; and third, in stretches of systematic,
 5

interlocked patterning, which pervade the piece. Is there a contradiction between

Feldman’s rhetoric and the reality of Why Patterns??

To address this question, we first look at Feldman’s mistrust of compositional

systems—a mistrust also expressed in Abstract Expressionist painting, with

which Feldman acknowledges a deep affinity. Both seek to avoid overtly

referential gestures, and both try to construct meaning from the ground up, using

the physicality of their respective mediums—paint and sound—as building

blocks. This then leads to a discussion of Feldman’s ideas about time in

music—particularly his concept of “Time Undisturbed”. Next, we tackle the

connection between Why Patterns? and the Jasper Johns painting Scent, paying

particular attention to the role of patterns in both works. Finally, we compare

Feldman’s use of patterns to the use of patterns by Steve Reich. Unlike Reich,

Feldman refuses to let any single pattern create the dominant “grand narrative” of

a piece. This has radical implications on the discussion of form in Why Patterns?.

Since Feldman refuses to fix the piece with his own narrative, the listener is

forced to supply their own. As a coda, therefore, I offer a subjective reading of

Why Patterns? as a kind of “semantic creation narrative”.

Part I

Stretching the Canvas

Why Patterns? is scored for flute (doubling on alto and bass flute), glockenspiel,

and piano. It is approximately thirty minutes long. Typical of Feldman, the piece
 6

is to be played slowly—the metronome markings are quarter note = 63 and

quarter note = 80—and uniformly quiet, although no dynamic is notated. The

piano pedal is to be left down throughout the piece, creating a haze of

resonance, which is also typical of Feldman’s music.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of Why Patterns? is that the instruments

are not synchronized with each other. Just as painters stretch a canvas before

painting, so Feldman clearly drew his barlines and grouped his systems before

committing any notes to paper. The score is 15 pages long. There are 4 systems

per page, with the exception of pages 12 and 13, which have 3 systems per

page—and page 15, which has 1 system. Each of the outer instruments, the flute

and glockenspiel, has 12 measures per system. The middle instrument, the

piano, has 17 measures per system. (Again, pages 12 and 13 are an exception

since all three lines have 12 measures per system.) The prime number 17 is

therefore framed by the composite number 12, creating a symmetrical

framework.

Perhaps Feldman saw narrative possibilities in this framework? Even before any

notes are filled in, Feldman’s page starts to tell a story (see figure 1).

Figure 1 Why Patterns?, system 1, score layout

 7

Will the piano be more active because it has more barlines per system than the

flute and glockenspiel? Since they share the same number of measures per

system, will the outer instruments “gang up” against the piano? Will they exploit

their similarity with each other and their difference from the piano? Why are the

flute and glockenspiel separated by the piano and not grouped together? Why is

the glockenspiel—the instrument with the highest register—on the bottom, where

one might normally put a bass instrument? (My instinct would be to put the piano

on the bottom for this reason.) As you see, just these empty measures are

pregnant with meaning.

So what does Feldman actually do? To start, he gives each instrument,

throughout the piece, its own time signature (see figure 2).

Figure 2 Why Patterns?, system 1, time signatures

Note first that the barlines are not equivalent.3 For example, in the first measure,

the 2/2 in the alto flute and the 2/4 in the glockenspiel parts share a common

barline in spite of the fact that one measure (the flute) contains twice as many

beats as the other measure (2/2 has four quarter notes; 2/4 has 2 quarter notes).

3
In my examples, I have tried to preserve, as accurately as possible, the spacing of barlines in
the Universal edition of Why Patterns?, which is copied in Feldman’s own hand.
 8

This supports the argument that Feldman drew his barlines and systems first,

without regard for time signatures.

These uniform barlines point to one of the most important aspects of Why

Patterns?: the parts are not coordinated; each line moves independently of the

others; there is no overall grid. Put yet another way, the parts are non-divisible,

i.e., no common metric unit exists to which all parts can equally be reduced. In

the first system, for example, the flute line has a total of 123 sixteenth notes; the

piano has 102 sixteenth notes; and the glockenspiel, 168 sixteenth notes. If there

were a common denominator—if the music were isochronous—the beats would

match up at some point. They don’t.

There are precedents for such unsynchronized notation in early Western

polyphonic music, which was notated in score format. The shift during the

Renaissance from this score notation to partbook notation presupposes an

abstract sense of time, in which each part, in principal, if not in performance,

shares a common pulse. The presence of this shared abstract pulse coincided

with developing notions of divine time and temporality—notions of omniscience,

which the composer sought to emulate in his composition by maintaining global

control over temporal aspects of the composition.4

4
Justin London, “Rhythm”. Grove Music Online, Ed. L. Macy (Accessed 6 December, 2006)
<http://www.grovemusic.com>
 9

There is no such underlying, abstract pulse in Why Patterns?, and, like early

Western polyphony, there are no parts for the performers; they read from score.

While there is a common metronome marking in Why Patterns?, the constantly

changing time signatures in each part as well as the slow tempo make that

marking seem more a formality than a real performance indication. So how do

the performers stay together? How do they keep from completely drifting off into

their own orbit? Isn’t this notation highly impractical? To begin answering these

questions vis-a-vis Why Patterns?, we should first look at Feldman’s ideas about

notation in general.

Feldman’s Notation

In the fifties and sixties, greatly influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting and

John Cage, Feldman experimented with different kinds of graph notation, which

gave general guidelines for performers without controlling every parameter. In

Projection II from 1951, for example, only register (high, medium, low), time

values, and dynamics (soft throughout) are indicated; choice of pitch is left to the

performer. With this indeterminate notation, Feldman wished to “project sounds

into time, free from a compositional rhetoric.”5 But graph notation did not satisfy

Feldman; he felt it gave the performer too much freedom to improvise, and he

didn’t always like the results. For Cage, “not liking the results” wasn’t a problem

with the results themselves; it was a problem with one’s own discriminating taste.

But Feldman doesn’t buy this; he is very concerned with results. Feldman once

5
Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000), 6.
 10

told Cage: “John, the difference between the both of us is that you opened up the

door and got pneumonia and I just opened up a window and got a cold”.6 For

Feldman, in other words, indeterminacy and flexible notation is a means to an

end; for Cage, it is a means to avoid an end, a way to perpetually generate

questions, rather than answers. Ultimately, what matters most here is that

Feldman, throughout his life, oscillated between the openness of indeterminate

notation—as in Projections II—and the precision of conventional notation, which

became predominant in his work by the 1970s.

The notation for Why Patterns?, then, can be seen as a middle-ground between

these two positions. The piece primarily uses conventional notation, but lack of

exact synchronization between parts shows remnants of indeterminacy in

Feldman’s desire to achieve “a more flexible pacing of three very distinct colors”.7

Indeed, if Why Patterns? were notated along a fixed grid, the piece would most

likely be very different; it would not achieve the “flexible pacing” that Feldman

was after, and it would overemphasize vertical relationships and underemphasize

the independence of parts. Before moving further, let’s look at how—in addition

to the notation—Why Patterns? creates this independence of parts. Perhaps the

best way to start this discussion is to jump right in and look closely at the first

page of the piece.

6
Steven Johnson “Jasper Johns and Morton Feldman: What Patterns?,” in The New York
Schools of Music and Visual Arts, ed. Steven Johnson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 218.
7
Feldman, 139.
 11

Searching for Syntax

Like most of Feldman’s pieces, Why Patterns? begins in medias res, as if the

music exists before the piece actually starts. The alto flute part opens in its

lowest register with a chromatic line that wanders around a set of adjacent

semitones B, C, C#, D [0,1,2,E]. Each note is separated from its preceding note

by a rest, which frustrates our attempt to hear this opening gesture as a

connected line, in spite of the close chromatic pitch content (see figure 3).

Figure 3 Why Patterns?, flute part - page 1, system 1

Octave displacements are introduced in the second system, compounding this

wandering quality: not only does the opening flute line fail to establish a clear

melodic profile, it also seems uncommitted to a single register. With this octave

displacement comes a transposition of the first system cluster to F#, G, G#, A, B

[6,7,8,9,E]. There is also a decreased density in systems 2 to 4, which gives the

impression of slowing down: system 1 has 13 notes in it; systems 2 through 4

each have only 6 notes.8 All of these factors—the chromatic wandering, the

octave displacement, the decrease in density, as well as the rests that separate

each note—work together to give the impression that the flute line is trying, but

failing, to organize into some cohesive shape. Trying is the operative word at this

stage.

8
Refer to Appendix A for a look at density and register throughout Why Patterns?
 12

If the flute’s opening music is meandering and searching, then the piano’s music

is stubborn and obsessive. As already noted, the piano maintains one time

signature throughout the first page—unlike the two outer instruments, which

change time signature every measure. In terms of pitch, throughout the first page

the piano plays an F#, G dyad, which alternates, somewhat irregularly, between

minor ninth and major seventh inversions (see figure 4).

Figure 4 Why Patterns?, piano part – page 1, system 1

In the second half of the second system, this dyad is expanded for four measures

to include other adjacent semitones—E, F, G#—often voiced as two minor

second dyads separated by an octave (E/F, F#/G). This adjacent semitonal

segment overlaps with the F#, G, G#, A segment used by the flute on page one.

In spite of these shared pitches and the shared decrease in density, the piano

line and the flute line seem worlds apart. The flute is characterized by

wandering—perhaps trying to organize itself into a cohesive linear shape,

whereas the piano dyads oscillate between two poles. But just as the octave

displacements in the flute line give the illusion of motion to what is, in fact, a

reordering of the same set of pitches, so the piano oscillates not between

different dyads, but between the same pitches in different inversions. If the flute
 13

line at times seems to succeed in organizing itself into descending chromatic

lines (flute, system 3), the piano seems to be stuck in a kind of hall of

mirrors—perpetually reordering the same materials, but not getting anywhere.

Another important difference between the flute part and the piano part is

resonance from natural instrumental decay: the piano has it; the flute does not.

The rests that interrupt the flute line create holes in the texture—holes filled in by

the piano’s resonance. This resonance acts as syntactical glue for the piano as

the decay of each dyad dissolves into the next attack. It is as if Feldman

conceives of the piano as being, first and foremost, a sustaining instrument,

rather than a percussive instrument. Feldman tries to make the piano into a kind

of Aeolian Harp—a steady flow of resonance. Each new articulation of the dyad

is just a way to perpetuate this flow of resonance.

The third character in this little drama is, of course, the glockenspiel. Sounding

two octaves above the piano dyads, the glockenspiel opens with three

tetrachords, which encompass the entire aggregate and share the same

semitone-based intervallic profile as the pitches used by the flute and piano (see

figure 5).

Figure 5 Why Patterns?, glockenspiel part – page 1, system 1

 14

Chords 1 and 2 are based on adjacent semitonal segments (chord 1: F/Gb/E/G

[4, 5, 6,7]; chord 2: C/Db/A#/B [0,1, T, E]). Chord 3 is based on semitones

separated by a tritone (G#/D/Eb/A [2, 3, 8,9]). While the piano chords are voiced

with large intervals—major sevenths and minor ninths—the glockenspiel chords

focus on smaller intervals, mostly minor seconds and tritones. Systems 1 and 2

build from these intervals a mix of dyads and tetrachords, while systems 2 and 3

use only tetrachords, giving the impression of a thickening texture.

Like the piano, the glockenspiel has natural resonance, but this resonance is

much thinner—more “tinny” sounding—than that of the piano. The close voicing

of the glockenspiel chords exaggerates this tinny quality since the faster

“beating” of these minor seconds creates a more complex—a more noise-

like—overtone series than less dissonant intervals. In this sense, harmony is

directly related to instrumental timbre—and it is timbre, more than any other

parameter, that distinguishes the three instruments from each other. I imagine

each instrument as a different type of brushstroke. The flute—especially the alto

flute in its lowest register—is like a thick, round blot, while the resonance of the

piano provides a thin, transparent layer of background haze over which the

glockenspiel etches sharp, fine lines. In a way, this piano resonance—and to a

lesser extent the resonance of the glockenspiel—provides a unifying ether—an

“overall hue”—in which the attacks of the instruments pop around, like fireflies.
 15

Resonance as Syntax

This resonance or “unifying ether” could also be thought of in less tactile, more

semantic terms as “syntax”. The concept of resonance as syntax may illuminate

Feldman’s desire—already quoted above—to “project sounds into time, free from

a compositional rhetoric”. Essential for the production of meaning, syntax is a

kind of glue that binds two or more isolated events into a larger semantic unit. It

allows us to make the leap from the materiality of language (musical or linguistic)

to what that language actually means. By “materiality of language”, I mean the

abstract shapes and sounds which are as much part of language as the meaning

those sounds produce. One comes face to face with this materiality when

listening to someone speak an unfamiliar language: the sounds heard have no

relationship to their intended meaning; they are pure, abstract sonic

shapes—envelopes, timbres, rhythms, and pitches.

Of course, these “pure, abstract sonic shapes” are not entirely without meaning.

We may appreciate the flow of their contours and rhythms; we may marvel at

their range of tonal variation; we may even get a kind of elemental, primitive

meaning from this foreign language. Someone yelling “Fire!” in Swahili, for

example, will at least convey a sense of urgency, even if we don’t know what has

caused this urgency. In many ways, I feel that Feldman wants to create this kind

of elemental, primitive meaning in his music. Listening to this music is sometimes

like listening to someone speak a completely foreign language: you know they

are communicating something, you just don’t know what that something is; you
 16

know they are conveying a sense of urgency, for example, but you don’t know

exactly what it is they are urgent about.

This sense of conveying meaning, without conveying meaning—if you will—is, I

believe, what Feldman wishes to do by “project[ing] sounds into time, free from a

compositional rhetoric”. The “compositional rhetoric” is language and syntax,

something learned and regulated by rules. Artificial and arbitrary, these rules are

part of culture. Sounds, on the other hand, are part of nature; they are material,

and behave according to their own rules. The resonance of the piano, for

example, is a physical property of the instrument—a natural result of sympathetic

vibrations. Feldman wants to allow this physical, acoustic reality to speak for

itself—to tell its own story. He doesn’t want to impose his story—his own

compositional rhetoric— on this reality. He wants to replace a rhetorical syntax

with a kind of physical syntax.

Perhaps then, the wandering and reticence of the flute line could be read as a

metaphor for Feldman’s own reticence to impose this compositional

rhetoric—this syntax—on his music. He is reluctant to provide that artificial glue

needed to bind isolated gestures into larger, coherent statements. Each gap

between flute notes could represent the absence of this glue, without which the

flute is “on its own”—left to wander around, aimlessly. Feldman is reluctant to

step in and push the flute this way or that. Perhaps that is why his pieces

became so long: he was waiting, within each piece, for his materials to organize
 17

themselves. It is as if Feldman puts three strangers in a room, sits back, and

observes their behavior.

Searching for Surface

Though not as momentous as Stravinsky’s “conversion” to serialism, Feldman’s

growing interest, during the 1970s, in the use of patterns as a compositional

device goes against the myth of Feldman—largely created by Feldman himself—

as a purely intuitive composer. Throughout his writings and lectures, Feldman

argues passionately that art should rely solely on this intuition and not hide

behind systems (Babbitt), process (Reich), chance (Cage), historical models

(Stravinsky), or anything else that stands between the composer’s ear and the

sounds of the instruments. For Feldman, there is no need for these middlemen;

the instruments themselves—the sounds—already contain the necessary

ingredients for making music. Composing is a matter of listening to what these

sounds have to say. Systems, process, and historical models all create

noise—noise that prevents the composer from hearing what it is these sounds

are trying to tell him. Perhaps this is why Feldman’s music is so quiet and slow:

he is listening to what the sounds are saying, and he invites us to listen with him.

But what does this mean anyway? Sounds don’t really say anything. Without

some sort of externally imposed structure—the kind provided by sonata form,

serialism, or 4 minutes and 33 seconds, for example—sounds are random and

meaningless. There is no hierarchy, no road map, no narrative to tell us what is

 18

foreground and what is background; what is a theme and what is a variation;

what is a beginning and what is an ending. In short, there is no differentiation.

This in fact sounds very much like the first page of Why Patterns?: the confusion

between piano articulation and piano resonance questions our assumptions of

foreground and background; the wandering flute line can barely form itself into a

four-note chromatic scale, much less a musical “theme”; and the in medias res

beginning gives no hint of introduction or exposition. And yet Feldman’s point is

that we are looking for this differentiation in the wrong places: we assume it is

hidden beneath the surface, in the structure of the music, but it is the surface

itself that we should be looking for.

In a 1969 essay, “Between Categories”, Feldman investigates this search for the

surface in both painting and music. He notes a parallel between the development

of perspective in Renaissance painting and the increasing use of dynamics—of

both loud and soft sounds—in music of the time. Both techniques create an

illusion of depth. By the nineteenth century, Cézanne becomes for Feldman, a

kind of crossroad where such illusionistic techniques come into conflict with the

surface of the painting itself—a surface that must be ignored if the illusion of

something “behind” the painting is to be maintained. One direction at this

crossroad is represented by Cubism, the other by Abstract Expressionism.

Cézanne, according to Feldman, gave Picasso permission to break with the

illusion of depth, but the latter’s development of Cubism represented a

 19

systematization of this splintering of perspective. Feldman draws a comparison

between Cubism and Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, calling them both a

“summing up…the last significant organizational idea[s] in both painting and

music”.9 Feldman seems to feel the same way about Picasso and Schoenberg

as Debussy felt about Wagner—a glorious sunset that was mistaken for the

dawn.

For Feldman, it is the Abstract Expressionists who caught on to Cézanne’s more

far-reaching contribution by insisting in their work on what art critic Arthur C.

Danto calls “the paintiness of paint, its fluidity, its viscosity, the way it forms a

skin, the way it wrinkles when it dries too quickly, the way it conceals and

reveals, the way it pours, spatters, splashes, holds the hair marks of

brushes—and the way it drips.”10 How these painters—Pollock, De Kooning,

Guston, Rothko, and others—found their way to the “paintiness of paint”—to the

surface of the painting—was by abandoning the tried and true techniques of

perspective altogether and by surrendering, at least partially, to the whim of their

materials. Just as Feldman tries to listen to what sounds say to him, so the

Abstract Expressionists observe the behavior of their paint, and then act

accordingly.

“Act” is a crucial word here. A consequence of this new relationship between

painter and paint is what you might call the “verbification” of painting. Note how

9
Feldman, 86.
10
Johnson, 175.
 20

Danto’s description of Abstract Expressionism is full of verbs: “wrinkles”, “dries”,

“pours”, “splashes”, “conceals”, “reveals”, etc. Descriptions of visual art (and

music) are more usually reserved for what Roland Barthes calls “the poorest of

linguistic categories: the adjective”—this painting is blue; that painting is large,

etc.11 The difference between the adjective and the verb is, of course: time.

“Blue” is not something that takes place over time; “pours” is. In other words—as

Danto’s description reveals—the Abstract Expressionists seem to have moved

the discussion of painting out of purely spatial terms, toward temporal ones.

Indeed, Pollock described his work as “action painting”—painting as

performance—painting as documentation of a performance. Like the track marks

of an animal, the Abstract Expressionist painting is proof that the painter was

there, in the painting, for a period of time. This could of course be said about any

painting, regardless of period or style, but Pollock and crew make this being-with-

paint-in-time the subject of their work. The Abstract Expressionists then, take

great steps along the imposingly abstract trajectory of Space and Time—a

trajectory which must be explored when moving from a discussion of surface in

painting to a discussion of surface in music, and one which was, according to

Feldman, sidestepped by the technique and systematization of analytical

Cubism. Feldman writes:

Picasso, who found Cubism in Cezanne, developed from this a system. He failed to see

Cezanne’s more far-reaching contribution. This was not how to make an object, not how

this object exists by way of Time, in Time or about Time, but how this object exists as

11
Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 179.
 21

Time. Time regained, as Proust referred to his work. Time as an image, as Aristotle

suggested. This is the area which the visual arts later began to explore. This is the area
12
which music, deluded that is was counting out the seconds, has neglected. [emphasis

in the original]

Feldman further pursues this distinction between an object existing “in Time” or

“about Time”—which he refers to as Timing—and an object existing “as

Time”—which he refers to as Time, or more poetically, Time Undisturbed.

Timing versus Time: what a great way to think about the difference between

Feldman and, say, Stravinsky. Montage, cut-and-paste, and the impression—so

exhilaratingly evident in Stravinsky’s music—of a highly precarious, but virtuosic

balancing act, all illustrate an acute and precise sense of Timing. Like Dr. Seuss’

Cat in the Hat, with his acrobatic attempt to balance a fishbowl on top of an

umbrella while standing on a basketball, Stravinsky’s music always seems on the

verge of imminent collapse. But it captures the tension this threat of collapse

generates—a tension that reenacts the excitement—and also the anxiety— of

the creative process itself—a process that, even for the most rigid of artists,

involves a great degree of uncertainty and waiting. Feldman makes a similar

argument vis-à-vis Beethoven:

One would think that music more than any other art would be exploratory about Time. But

is it? Timing—not Time, has been passed off as the real thing in music. Beethoven, in

such works as the Hammerklavier, illustrates this perfectly. All the mosaics, all the patch

12
Feldman, 86-87.
 22

quilt juxtapositions of ideas happen at the right time. One feels one is being continually

saved. But from what? Boredom perhaps. My guess is that he is saving both himself and
13
ourselves from anxiety.

Feldman then asks, “what if Beethoven went on and on without any element of

differentiation? We would then have Time Undisturbed…an awesome state that

would induce anxiety in any of us. In fact we cannot even imagine this kind of

Beethoven.”14

Or can we? Is Feldman—particularly late-Feldman— “this kind of Beethoven”?

Well, I’m not so sure Feldman wants to have such a Frankenstein-like—and

ultimately Romantic—distinction; nor does it seem that music itself is even

capable of containing Time Undisturbed. “I am interested in getting to Time in its

unstructured existence”, Feldman writes. “That is, I am interested in how this wild

beast lives in the jungle—not in the zoo. I am interested in how Time exists

before we put our paws on it—our minds, our imaginations, into it.”15 But, of

course, this moment before thought and imagination is inconceivable. The act of

writing and performing music is constitutively barred from “Time in its

unstructured existence”, since all art—all human thought even—must draw some

boundaries—some structure—around the object of pursuit. But once this

boundary is drawn—this structure created—the object vanishes. This is what

Feldman means when he says, “everything we use to make art is precisely what

13
Feldman, 87.
14
Feldman, 87.
15
Feldman, 87.
 23

kills it”, and it is at the heart of his mistrust of systems and faith in intuition. 16

But we now find ourselves—and Feldman—in the cul-de-sac of Philosophy. How

does Feldman escape this endless circle?

As the title of the essay under discussion indicates, Feldman’s answer is to

operate “between categories”— “Between Time and Space. Between painting

and music. Between music’s construction, and its surface.”17 Clearly, Feldman’s

constant experimenting with the length of his pieces, with notation, with

instrumental combinations, and with an “all-over”, undifferentiated approach to

form, represents his attempt to occupy this in-between position. The introduction,

in the late 1970s, of patterns into this compositional palette can also be seen in

this light. If the title “Why Patterns?” indicates some ambivalence about this new

interest in patterns—as if they represent a betrayal of his commitment to

intuition—the piece itself remains respectful of Time Undisturbed.

Part II

Patterns and the Jasper Johns Connection

Feldman acknowledges two sources in particular that inspired him to explore

patterns in his own work: Middle Eastern rugs and Jasper Johns’ “cross-hatch”

paintings from the 1970s.18 I would like to focus on the latter influence because

16
Feldman, 23.
17
Feldman, 88.
18
Feldman, 138-139.
 24

there are some fascinating parallels between Why Patterns? and Johns’ work

from this period. Steven Johnson uncovers a number of these connections in an

essay called “Jasper Johns and Morton Feldman: What Patterns?”. I will

integrate some of Johnson’s points with my own observations about the

Feldman-Johns connection, in particular, and Feldman’s approach to patterns, in

general. Then I will see if the introduction of these patterns into Feldman’s work

in any way alters his desire to “project sounds into time free from a compositional

rhetoric”. Do the patterns provide precisely the kind of artificial, rhetorical syntax

that Feldman wishes to avoid—the kind of syntax that interferes with natural

properties of sound? Do the patterns interfere, for example, with what we called

resonance as syntax? Do they disrupt Time Undisturbed? Do the patterns fix

Feldman’s work in a way that forces us to privilege one reading over another?

In an article entitled “On the Scent of Jasper Johns”, which appeared in the

February 9, 1976 issue of New York Magazine, Thomas B. Hess shows that

Johns’ painting, Scent, from 1974, although at first appearing to be a static, “all-

over” composition of casually arranged cross-hatch marks, is, upon closer

inspection, a rigorously structured, highly systematic distribution of these

marks.19

19
Thomas B. Hess, “On the Scent of Jasper Johns,” New York Magazine 9 February 1976, 67,
cited in Mark Rosenthal, Jasper Johns Work Since 1974 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of
Art, 1988), 20.
 25

Figure 6 Jasper Johns, Scent (1973-1974)

The painting is divided into three equally sized panels, each made with different

materials: the left panel with encaustic, the middle in oil without varnish on

unsized canvas, and the right with varnish on sized canvas. This gives each

panel a unique texture, which immediately undermines any first impression of an

entirely uniform field. The cross-hatches are grouped into different sized bundles

and are themselves divided into three colors—red, green, and purple. These

bundles are arranged so that no bundle of the same color is ever adjacent. What

Hess notes are further vertical subdivisions within each panel—subdivisions of

approximately 12, 171/2, and 12 inches wide. The arrangement of these vertical

subdivisions could be represented as a, b, c, c, d, e, e, f, a. In other words,

subdivisions 3 and 4 share the exact same pattern (c), as do subdivisions 6 and

7 (e). That the final subdivision returns to a suggests a cylindrical movement, as

 26

if the entire pattern repeats endlessly (see figure 6). Hess also discovered further

“secret” shapes—four squares and a rectangle—embedded into this nine-part

vertical pattern, suggesting a kind of isorhythmic structure in which cross-hatch

bundles belonging simultaneously to different subsets overlap each other.20 One

does not see every shape simultaneously but can move between shapes by

changing focus of the eye. (This is not unlike those computer-generated images

that appear at first glance to be a uniform field of dots, but, when looked at with a

certain blurred vision, reveal the image of a spaceship or some other

recognizable shape.)

What attracted Feldman to this Johns painting was process—not the process of

construction, but the process of perception—the way our eye “reads” the patterns

of the painting without ever being able to understand, with one look, the overall

pattern.21 We sense system and process, but that process and system remains

perpetually one step ahead of our ability to comprehend it. Feldman writes:

Johns’ canvas is more a lens, where we are guided by his eye as it travels, where the

tide, somewhat different, somewhat the same—brings to mind Cage’s dictum of imitating

nature in the manner of its operation. These paintings create, on one hand, the

concreteness we associate with a patterned art and, on the other, an abstract poetry from
22
not knowing its origins.

20
Rosenthal, 20.
21
Johnson, 224.
22
Feldman, 139.
 27

Scent was the first entirely non-objective painting that Johns made. In other

words, no objects are represented; the painting is entirely “abstract”. This is a

significant departure for Johns, who, in the 1950s, was busy painting targets and

American flags while the Abstract Expressionists were busy painting paint. It is

appropriate then, that Feldman took inspiration from this particular Johns painting

since Why Patterns? marks a significant shift in Feldman’s own work as well.

One final note about this painting: in spite of the rigorous structuring of the

patterns, the painting-style itself—the brush strokes—have a very “homemade”

quality. The catalog for the Philadelphia Museum of Art Jasper Johns

retrospective notes the relationship in Scent between system—which is

impersonal and quantifiable—and the act of painting itself, which is more

idiosyncratic: “armed with a ‘map’ of actions to be taken, [Johns] could then revel

in the process of making”.23

Now that we have seen the role these systematized patterns play in both Scent

and the larger trajectory of Johns’ work, we can now ask this question: did

Morton Feldman have a subscription to New York Magazine? Remember, Hess’

article came out in that publication’s February 1976 issue. As far as I can gather,

it was the first detailed, structural analysis of Johns’ painting. Why Patterns? was

completed in April of 1978. Is it possible that Hess’ article inspired Feldman to

start working with patterns? There is one tantalizing clue in particular that

23
Rosenthal, 20.
 28

suggests a direct relationship between Why Patterns? and Hess’ analysis of

Scent: the vertical dimensions of the subdivisions of 12, 171/2, 12 inches within

each panel of the painting correspond approximately to the number of measures

per system for the majority of Why Patterns?. As you will recall, the flute has 12

measures per system; the piano, 17 measures per system; and the glockenspiel,

12 measures per system. Unless Feldman measured Johns’ painting himself, it

seems entirely possible that he learned of these dimensions from Hess’ article.24

There are other parallels between Scent and Why Patterns?. Most obviously,

both works focus on three colors—red, green, and purple in the Johns painting

and the instrumental “colors” of flute, glockenspiel, and piano in the Feldman

piece. As already discussed, the relationship between painting and music is

ambiguous. Yet we can’t help wondering: was Feldman trying to “translate”

Johns’ colors from Scent into musical colors? Does, for example, the flute

represent green; the glockenspiel, red; and the piano, purple? In terms of color

theory, purple is made from the combination of red and blue, green from the

combination of blue and yellow, and red is a primary color—meaning it cannot be

made from the combination of other colors. Purple and red are therefore related

to each other because they both contain blue. Green is the anomaly in this

sense. The piano and glockenspiel are also related: both are percussion

instruments; both have resonance with natural decay. The flute is the anomaly in

24
While Johns and Feldman had been friends since the 1950s, they saw very little of each other
in the 1970s, and Johns claims to have never discussed his cross-hatch paintings with Feldman,
nor was Johns aware of Feldman’s interest in his work during this time. (Johnson, 247).
 29

this case. Yet such analogies between visible color and instrumental color only

go so far. As I suggested earlier, the relative “thickness” of the sound of the flute,

glockenspiel and piano overrides—to my ear— each instrument’s “color”. I

likened each instrument to a different sized paintbrush. This is in contrast with

Scent, where all lines, regardless of color, have similar thickness.

I don’t mean to suggest a direct, synesthetic correlation between the instruments

in Why Patterns? and these specific colors, as if Feldman “hears” the piano as

purple and the flute as green. Instead, I see a more general motif of

triangulation—a grouping of 2+1— recurring in both Why Patterns? and Scent at

a number of different levels: the primary color red is contrasted with two

secondary colors, purple and green; the similarly resonant glockenspiel and

piano are contrasted with the flute; and the symmetrical proportion of 12-17-12

provides a common structural framework for both Scent and Why Patterns?.

Perhaps Johns’ even imagined a parallel between the prime number 17 and the

primary color red?

There is also a recurrent diagonal motif in both Why Patterns? and Scent,

represented in the latter by angular cross-hatch marks, which provide the basis

for the painting. These marks dominate Scent, and they remain an important

theme throughout Johns’ work of the period. This diagonal motif is found at many

levels of Why Patterns? as well. Steven Johnson focuses on how the motif
 30

appears in descending pitch class skeins.25 The descending chromatic line in the

flute part, page 1, system 3 is one example of this.

This diagonal motif also appears in the “notational imagery” of Why Patterns?,

seen most clearly in repeated time signature patterns. On the first page, for

example, the flute line begins a 12 measure series that repeats three times (the

third repetition is slightly varied). Within this longer series, the glockenspiel

weaves a 5 measure series. These different sized time signature patterns

themselves weave between the unchanging 3/8 meter in the piano, creating a

visual effect that may be directly inspired by the interlocking of various sized

cross-hatch marks in Johns’ work as well as the weavings in rug patterns. It also

further suggests that Feldman drew his “frame” of measure numbers (12-17-12),

within which he overlayed further patterns of time signature groupings (figure 7).

25
Johnson, 233-235.
 31

Figure 7 Why Patterns?, page 1 - time signature patterns

There are even more connections between Why Patterns? and Johns’ cross-

hatch paintings, which Steven Johnson examines in great detail. Particularly

interesting is what he calls the “sixth piano segment”, a stretch from pages 4 to 5

of rigorously structured music—“the most regulated music, perhaps in all of

Feldman”—that applies a simple rotational ordering of dyads, very similar to

schemes used by Johns.26 Also interesting, is Johnson’s more general analysis

of pitch in Why Patterns?. He suggests that the piece has four different kinds of

harmony, which can be conceived on a continuum: chords built from semitones

on one side, chords built from whole-tone scales on the other. Chord A includes

the all-adjacent semitone collections of [4567], [9TE0], and [0123]; Chord B

includes split-adjacent semitone collections of [12/89], [23/89], [01/45]; Chord C

26
Johnson, 235-240.
 32

is comprised of the semi-tone dyads and tri-tones of [23/17], [E0/T4], [01/28]; and

Chord D is made of the whole-tone dyads of [4T], [79], [1E], [06]. Johnson likens

this harmonic continuum to a “color chart”.27 Just as Feldman “stretches” his

canvas by drawing barlines, so he “mixes his colors” in advance by designating

different classes of harmony. This harmony is not applied systematically; it is—to

continue the painting analogy—a palette in which Feldman can dip his brush at

will. Just as he chooses very specific instrumental colors, which he can then mix

in a more or less ad-hoc fashion, so Feldman limits his harmonic palette to

certain chord groups, which he can also mix intuitively.

Feldman and Reich

In the essay “Crippled Symmetry”, Feldman writes the following about Why

Patterns?:

The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is

not one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no

one pattern ever takes precedence over the others. The compositional concentration is

solely on which pattern should be reiterated and for how long, and on the character of its
28
inevitable change in to something else.

It seems clear then, that Feldman’s emerging interest in patterns—an interest

directly inspired by the cross-hatch paintings of Jasper Johns and by Middle

Eastern rug patterns—does not represent a new-found faith in compositional

27
Johnson, 232.
28
Feldman, 139-140.
 33

systems, at least to the extent that Feldman’s patterns remain completely local.

Unlike, say, Piano Phase, by Steve Reich, the patterns in Feldman’s late music

do not determine the large-scale form of the piece. In Piano Phase, the structure

of the piece is inseparable from tension between patterns that are “locked” and

patterns that are “phasing”. In an article entitled “Music as a Gradual Process”,

Reich writes: “the distinctive thing about musical processes is that they determine

all the note-to-note (sound-to-sound) details and the overall form

simultaneously”29 For Reich—and for other composers associated with classical

musical Minimalism—form and content exist at the same level; they are both

equally regulated by the same process. The process of “phasing”, for example,

determines both the form of Piano Phase—an A/B opposition between music that

is in phase and music that is out of phase—as well as the content of the

piece—the patterns themselves, which arise when the instruments go out of

phase with each other and then lock-in at an increasingly staggered distance. For

Reich, it is critical that this process be heard. He writes:

The use of hidden structural devices in music never appealed to me. Even when all the

cards are on the table and everyone hears what is gradually happening in a musical

process, there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all. These mysteries are the
30
impersonal, unintended, psychoacoustic by-products of the intended processes.

On the one hand, we have Reich, who insists on working with “all the cards on

the table”; on the other hand, Feldman, who actually pursues the very “hidden
29
Steve Reich, Writings on Music 1965-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 34.
30
Reich, 35.
 34

structural devices” that Reich avoids. Perhaps akin to the anecdote that Joyce

wrote Finnegans Wake “to keep the critics busy for the next three hundred

years”, Feldman seems to intentionally obscure his patterns, which at times are

regular and consistent, at other times random and unpredictable. These patterns

emerge, seeming to obey their own internal logic, but then Feldman comes along

and cuts them off without warning. It is as though Feldman toys with our desire to

find consistency—to find some overriding, grand narrative, in the work of art.

It is ironic then, that Reich speaks of the “impersonal mysteries” in his own

process pieces because it is Reich who does fix his pieces within a grand

narrative—the narrative of Process. We can enjoy the “mysterious”

psychoacoustic experiences of phasing and pick out our own patterns as the

process unfolds, but Reich is always right there, holding our hand, assuring us

that the process will inevitably work itself out. Reich’s process music is therefore

very much akin to observing a tiger in the zoo: it may be thrilling, but there are

always clear limits regulating the experience. As we have already discussed,

Feldman is more interested in “how the wild beast lives in the jungle, not in the

zoo”, and it is precisely by refusing to impose any grand narrative on his work

that Feldman at least approaches this wild, unpredictable—and sometimes

boring—animal. But that is the risk Feldman is willing to take and Reich is

unwilling to take.
 35

We have seen then, that Feldman’s use of patterns is neither a “conversion” to

Process a la Reich, nor an attempt to provide a unifying structural principle, a la

Babbitt. In fact, Feldman’s reluctance to let any single narrative dominate the

entire piece—his commitment to existing “between categories”— actually reveals

his difference from, and a similarity between, Reich and Babbitt—two composers

often seen as diametrically opposed. Both Reich and Babbitt value clarity and

order, and both work under the limits of their system—process for Reich,

serialism for Babbitt. Feldman—even when using preconceived patterns—

refuses to take shelter in such unifying principles. He refuses to provide a grand

narrative. With an eye towards concluding, I would now like to look at where this

refusal to provide a grand narrative has its most radical implications: large-scale

form.

Coda: The Creation of Meaning

But what was this pursuit of meaning, in this indifference to meaning?

Samuel Beckett, Watt

Feldman’s music has a kind of indifference. It is indifferent to our desire for clarity

of form, for clear harmonic movement, for melodic development, and for rhythmic

motion—all hallmarks of clear, communicative music. It is also indifferent to the

strength of our memory, to our ability to grasp a musical “theme” and recognize

its return or transformation later in the piece. It is even indifferent to basic bodily

needs: sitting in a concert hall for a six-hour string quartet is physically taxing.

Perhaps most of all, Feldman’s music is indifferent to meaning. It rarely

 36

references other music in the way, say, Stravinsky’s Apollo plays on our

knowledge of Tchaikovsky, or the way Ob-La-Di-Ob-La-Da, by the Beatles, plays

on our knowledge of English dance hall music. For artists like Stravinsky and The

Beatles, this shared cultural knowledge is a powerful compositional object which

can be shaped and reshaped in the same way colors can be combined and

recombined in painting or a piece of music. The sounds of Stravinsky and The

Beatles do have a purely material—a purely acoustic—quality, but they also carry

with them this residual, cultural meaning. Feldman wants to strip his sounds of

this a priori, cultural meaning so other meaning can be allowed to form. Listening

to his music—and as a metaphor for this creation of meaning—I often imagine

microscopic single-celled protozoa bumping into each other, occasionally forming

into a larger organism, like an amoeba. I imagine four stages of this process in

Why Patterns?, which I call Meandering, Stuck, Zoo, and “Music”.

The Meandering theme first occurs in the opening flute line and is a clear

example of Feldman’s attempt to disrupt meaning (see figure 8).

Figure 8 Why Patterns?, flute part – page 1, system 1 – Meandering Theme

As already discussed, the rests prevent us from hearing the close chromatic

pitches of this opening material as part of a larger gesture. By disrupting syntax,

these rests make each note seem like an isolated, self-contained entity without a

larger shape. This feeling of shapelessness is also reinforced by the length of

this passage—it goes on for over four minutes before changing to a different kind
 37

of gesture—and by the staggered, asymmetrical rhythm. Even the notation

seems designed to frustrate any attempt at continuity, as changing note values

are superimposed over changing time signature patterns, without any clear

relationship between the two.

Another instance of this isolated, monadic type gesture is what I call the Stuck

theme. It consists of stretches of music where a single pitch or small group of

pitches is repeated, as if the instruments “forgot” what they were doing and so

resorted to a kind of mechanical, absent-minded repetition of their last gesture

(see figure 9).

Figure 9 Why Patterns?, piano part – page 9, system 2 – Stuck Theme

Or perhaps these passages could be read as the opposite—an attempt to really

focus—almost pathologically—on a single gesture, even a single sonority.

Feldman writes that his own concentration is what guided his work. Perhaps

these Stuck passages represent a certain state of Feldman’s own

concentration—a kind of petrification of the creative act. Feldman writes: “I work

with the pen and that’s a very interesting phenomena because when I work with

the pen everything is crossed out. Some pages there is nothing crossed out and

it’s usually those pages when there is something in a continuity, you see.”31 Do

31
Feldman, 162-163.
 38

these Stuck passages represent moments of continuity—moments of high

concentration—or are they moments where concentration and continuity lapse?

Along these lines, it is interesting to note that the most static passage in Why

Patterns?—the music from page 4 to 5 in which the flute plays the note Db in the

same register 54 times—also contains the piece’s most rigorously structured

music—the “sixth piano segment”—analyzed, as already discussed, by Steven

Johnson. Perhaps this passage could even be read as a critique of such

rigorous, systematic writing. Feldman shows how strict control over his materials

actually prevents the music from “moving forward”, rather than enabling it to do

so. If such rigid systematization suffocates the music, perhaps this passage

represents Feldman’s notion that “everything we use to make art is precisely

what kills it”.32

These two themes—what I have called Meandering and Stuck—both represent

the isolated gesture, the single-celled protozoa, the single letter. If there is any

“progression” in Why Patterns?, perhaps it is a movement from these monadic

gestures toward more complex, compound gestures. An example of one of these

compound gestures occurs in the flute part right after the long static stretch of

repeated Db. It is as if the flute “wakes up” from a long 2-page hibernation. There

is even a kind of birdcall quality to this passage, which is also the first time the

32
Feldman, 32.
 39

flute (as opposed to the alto and bass flute) is used. Perhaps because of this

animal-like association, I call this type of compound gesture, Zoo (see figure 10).

Figure 10 Why Patterns?, flute part – page 6, system 2 – Zoo Theme

In terms of pitch, this gesture is similar to the opening Meandering theme: both

use adjacent semitone segments and both frame musical events with silence.

The rests separating the isolated notes in the first theme become entire

measures of silence in the Zoo theme. And yet within each measure of the new

theme there is now a more complex musical figure, rather than a single pitch.

These figures also move rapidly to other contrasting figures—contrasted by

register, rhythm, and pitch. If the single notes of the Meandering theme are

analogous to single letters, then the compound figures of the Zoo theme are like

complete words. These words are trying to join together to make a sentence. At

this point, the discontinuity between these gestures suggests that this sentence

is still a kind of nonsensical string of unrelated words, but it is certainly a

development from the seemingly endless line of single letters that opens the

piece, and it is a definite progression towards what we might recognize as a kind

of commonly understood “meaning”.

The final theme, which I call “Music”, does in fact manage to at least hint at this

“commonly understood meaning”. First occurring in the flute part near the middle
 40

of the piece, this theme uses the same adjacent semitone pitch relations as the

other themes, but unlike these previous themes, the pitches are not separated by

rests or octave displacement. Instead, they are joined together by a slur,

suggesting the gesture be played in a legato, cantabile manner, which marks this

passage as a more conventionally “musical” gesture. It even seems singable

(see figure 11).

Figure 11 Why Patterns?, flute part – page 8, system 2 – “Music” Theme

The piano tries to play its own version of this “Music” theme, but it transposes the

line to the piano’s lowest register, turning the flute’s cantabile song into a murky

growl (see figure 12).

Figure 12 Why Patterns?, piano part – page 11, system 3 – “Music” Theme

Nevertheless, this line does manage to convey a sense of unity, which makes it

stand out from the other themes. If Meandering is analogous to a string of

unconnected letters, and Zoo is like a string of unconnected words, then the

“Music” theme manages to form a complete, albeit rudimentary, sentence. In this

sense, Why Patterns? could be thought of as a kind of “semantic creation

narrative” whereby individual, isolated monads form to create a more complex,

 41

meaningful entity. I don’t mean to suggest, however, that this creation narrative

takes precedence over other narratives; it is simply one path through the piece.

Feldman’s music is like a vast landscape. Our goal as listeners is to find our

place in this landscape. But that doesn’t mean one path is better than another.

The Real Question

In an essay called “Some Elementary Questions”, Feldman writes:

All activity in music reflects its process…But the question here is not predeterminate or

indeterminate. If I have a resistance to process, it is because I don’t want to give up

control. Control of the material is not really control. It is merely a device that brings us the

psychological benefits of process—just as relinquishing control brings us nothing more

than the psychological benefits of a nonsystematic approach. In both cases, all we have

gained is the intellectual comfort of having made a decision—the psychological comfort of

having arrived at a point of view. The question at hand, the real question, is whether we
33
will control the materials or choose instead to control the experience.

What does Feldman mean by making this distinction between controlling the

materials and controlling the experience? What experience is he talking about?

He is talking about the experience of composing itself—not just mundane details,

like what kind of chair you sit in or what kind of pen you use—but how you as an

artist choose to interact with the music you are writing, the ideas you are thinking

about.

Feldman seems to imagine two different kinds of artists in this respect. The first

keeps the experience of composing—and more generally, the creative

33
Feldman, 65-66.
 42

experience—at arms length. Like a scientist working with hazardous materials,

this composer tries to remain separate from the building blocks of his

composition—pitch, rhythm, texture, structure, etc. The compositional equivalent

of a hazmat suit is, according to Feldman: compositional systems. These

systems absolve you from having to make decisions on the fly because the

decisions are made in advance. The advantage of making these decisions in

advance—the advantage of compositional systems—is that they give you “the

intellectual comfort of having made a decision, at having arrived at a point of

view.” In short, they relieve what Feldman, in another essay, calls “the anxiety of

art.” But Feldman is clear about his thoughts on this matter: “Where in life we do

everything we can to avoid anxiety, in art we must pursue it.”34 Feldman seems

to believe that making these decisions in advance is a kind of creative

laziness—even dishonesty. To avoid this laziness, Feldman wants to confront the

creative process head on. He wants to respond to his materials in an active,

dynamic way. In short, he wants to be spontaneous when composing; he doesn’t

want to be controlled by the predetermined script of any compositional system.

What this means, essentially, is that Feldman relies on his own instinct—and

instinct is not something that can be established in advance, but something

improvised and ad hoc.

In conclusion, I have argued that Feldman’s mistrust of compositional systems is

part of a larger desire to avoid fixing meaning within any single controlling

34
Feldman, 32.
 43

narrative. Instead, Feldman wants to create a situation in which any number of

possible narratives can coexist. We have seen how Feldman achieves this in

Why Patterns? by replacing conventional musical syntax with gestures that grow

out of physical, acoustic properties of instruments, such as the resonance of the

piano. Even instances of systematic, pre-compositional planning—inspired

directly by Jasper Johns’ cross-hatch paintings—fail to establish hegemony over

other competing narratives, and therefore, do not threaten the polysemous form

of Why Patterns? Perhaps the best evidence of all for Feldman’s wish to keep

meaning open is found in the title—Why Patterns?—which, like the music itself,

takes the form of a question.

 44

Chapter 2

Rules of the Game: Lars von Trier and The Five

Obstructions

When life gets too threatening, you have to create some sort of fantasy existence, a life
where you can control the things you can’t control in real life. That’s a fairly good reason
for creating fictions, I think.
-Lars von Trier

In the film The Five Obstructions, Lars von Trier asks his mentor, Danish

filmmaker Jørgen Leth, to remake five times Leth’s short 1967 film, The Perfect

Human, under increasingly restrictive rules, or “obstructions”, that von Trier

himself devises. The first obstruction, for example: no shot can last longer than

12 frames. Although at first certain such a severe restriction could only create a

“spastic film”, Leth turns the limitation to his advantage and creates a vibrant,

syncopated work that forces von Trier to concede: “the twelve frames was a gift”.

More obstructions follow. The second film must be made in what von Trier calls

“the worst place on earth” – the red light district in Bombay. The third obstruction

is no obstruction or “complete freedom”. The fourth obstruction: the film must be

a cartoon; and the fifth, perhaps ultimate obstruction: von Trier makes the film,

although Leth is credited as director. The entire movie then, becomes a kind of

duel between the two directors, with von Trier essentially trying to force Leth to
 45

trip up and make a bad film. Leth’s refusal to do so is at the heart of The Five

Obstructions.

Rules

Both Leth and von Trier make films using strict, self-imposed rules. Von Trier, as

leader of the Danish film collective Dogma95, eschews cinematic illusion in favor

of handheld cameras, natural lighting, and purely diegetic sound. The Perfect

Human by Leth, on the other hand, highlights artifice by using a completely white

set, uniform lighting, symmetrically framed shots, and voice-overs. Both directors

then, work under strict, self-imposed rules, but the rules are meant to create

opposite results: von Trier wishes to avoid artifice; Leth wishes to avoid realism.

As he explains in The Five Obstructions, von Trier, as a young film student, was

directly inspired by Leth to impose these rules on his own work:

In my filmic upbringing what Jørgen calls the rules of the game have always been vital.

They are something he introduced to my universe. They are limitations or self-flagellation,

if you like. I wanted to impose this flagellation on Jørgen.

As a teacher, Leth did not force his own rules on von Trier; he inspired the young

film student to police himself. And while Dogma95 was a direct attack on what it

considered the “bourgeois romanticism” represented by 60s cinema (Leth

included), it nevertheless, failed to make a true break, in part because it

 46

continued to privilege the self-regulating “rules of the game”. In short, the rules

were changed, but the game was the same.

The Five Obstructions then, represents von Trier’s attempt to confront these

rules head on, by going after their source, Jørgen Leth. Of course, Leth did not

invent the idea that art should be governed by rules; nor did he force von Trier to

self-regulate (or “self-flagellate”, as von Trier kinkily describes it). But he clearly

represents an authority figure to von Trier, and one the younger director feels

compelled to confront.

Yet von Trier and Leth also have enormous respect for each other. Just as von

Trier lashes out at his mentor, he also describes The Five Obstructions as “a

help Jørgen Leth project”. We learn in the film that Leth suffers from bouts of

depression, which inhibit his work. Von Trier’s obstructions were a way to get

Leth to snap out of his depression and make another film. The obvious affection

the two have for each other adds an entertaining, touching aspect to the film, just

as it complicates von Trier’s motives. On the one hand, von Trier wants to help

his mentor; on the other hand, he wants to attack his mentor—particularly that

characteristic of his mentor that von Trier himself inherited: the need to self-

regulate. By attacking Leth’s need for rules, von Trier is also attacking his own

need for rules. Ironically, the obstructions von Trier imposes on Leth reproduce

the very thing they seek to challenge: he tries to break free of rules by imposing

more rules.
 47

The Perfect and the Human

Let’s look further at von Trier’s motivation for the project, which he states to Leth

outright near the beginning of the film:

My plan is to proceed from the perfect to the human, right? That’s my agenda. Actually I

want to banalize you. But how the hell do we do that?

The opposition between the “perfect” and the “human” is a crucial theme

throughout The Five Obstructions. The perfect is the world of artifice and

abstraction—a world measured in gradations of color, durations of time, and the

play of ideas. It is a world viewed from the security of objective distance. The

human, on the other hand, refers to needs of the body and the less quantifiable,

more subjective world of emotion. The perfect can be controlled; the human is

less predictable. Rules invoke the world of the perfect by drawing a line between

what is acceptable and what is unacceptable. In this sense, rules are instruments

of control: formal, orderly, and rational. That von Trier and Leth impose such

rules on their work suggests they both desire this sense of control.

Yet both directors know that too much control stifles spontaneity, yielding

predictable results. Without a sense of spontaneity and the potential for

discovery, the creative process becomes tedious—something to avoid, not

pursue. Needed then, is a balance between control and spontaneity—a balance

between the perfect and the human. Von Trier’s obstructions seek to redistribute
 48

this balance in Leth by taking some control away from his mentor and keeping it

for himself. But we must return to the question: is this a selfless or selfish act?

Let’s first imagine the former—that von Trier’s obstructions are motivated entirely

by a selfless wish to help his mentor make more films—part of the “help Jørgen

Leth project”. At times, von Trier portrays himself in this nurturing role. Near the

end of the film, for example, he casts himself as an almost Christ-like figure,

telling Leth: “all your guilt I have taken upon me. You are guiltless. You are like a

little child.” Both directors laugh at this statement; it is clearly not meant to be

taken at face value. Their laughter, though, reveals a poignancy in von Trier’s

remark: both directors know such a guiltless, innocent state is irretrievable—a

purely selfless act, impossible. The rules they impose on their work may give the

illusion of a perfect, guiltless, innocent, ordered state, but they can never actually

arrive at that state.

On the other hand, von Trier’s obstructions could be viewed as selfishness born

out of a sadistic desire to dominate another artist whom he feels threatened by.

Perhaps von Trier identified so strongly with The Perfect Human as a young film

student, he could not bear the fact that somebody else had made it. His

obstructions are an attempt to write himself into the film—to hijack authorship of

the film. He comes closest to this position in the final obstruction when he forces

Leth to read a letter that he, von Trier, wrote as if written by Leth addressed to

von Trier. He literally puts his own words into Leth’s mouth.
 49

It seems then, von Trier’s motives remain mixed: a genuine desire to help

someone he admires, on the one hand, a selfish grabbing of control, on the

other. Another way to think about this: are von Trier’s obstructions only targeting

Leth or are they in some sense directed at von Trier himself? Von Trier says he

wants to “proceed from the perfect to the human”. Ostensibly, the obstructions

are meant to humanize Leth—with von Trier in the role of passive, objective

observer—but maybe it is von Trier himself who wants to be humanized? In his

final letter, von Trier concedes: “it’s the attacker who really exposes himself”,

acknowledging that his position in the obstructions was far from neutral or

objective.

Crucially, this blurring of lines between subject and object is an important theme

in The Perfect Human itself, which is basically a mock anthropology: two

subjects—“the perfect man” and “the perfect woman”—are scrutinized by an

observer as they perform mundane, everyday activities like getting dressed,

eating, and sleeping. The observer is not seen; we only hear his voice. Impartial

and objective, the observer represents the gaze of the anthropologist, director, or

audience. The narration opens:

Here is the human. Here is the human. Here is the perfect human. We will see the perfect

human functioning. How does such a number function? What kind of thing is it? We will

look into that. We will investigate that.

 50

The formal, scientific tone of the narration is supported by specific cinematic

techniques that create the impression of a sterile, controlled environment. The

entire film, for example, is shot in front of a completely white background, and the

lighting casts little or no shadow, making it hard to see any lines. It is impossible

to tell, for example, where the floor ends and where the wall begins. Without

these lines to provide perspective, the illusion of depth—of three-dimensional

space—is avoided, and the subjects seem to float in the screen, as if under a

microscope.

Of course, this impartial and objective gaze is a bluff. The controlled, scientific,

“perfect” environment depicted in the film is always being subverted by

unpredictable, “human” details. At the beginning of the film, for example, the

perfect man is shown lighting a pipe. His first match doesn’t ignite so he throws it

aside and fumbles for another match. Already, in the first 30 seconds of the film,

the element of chance creeps into the controlled environment. We immediately

become suspect of the perfect man: is he really perfect? We ask the same

question of the narrator: is he truly objective? Clearly, Leth’s film adopts the

perspective of the objective, distant observer and at the same time critiques this

perspective.

Before proceeding, let’s summarize what we have discussed so far: both The

Perfect Human and The Five Obstructions deal with the relationship between

object and subject, observer and observed, perfect and human. In The Perfect
 51

Human, Leth is in the role of observer. He makes the rules. He is in control. In

The Five Obstructions, Leth himself is observed. Von Trier makes the rules and

is in control. Yet, as we have seen in both films, this clean distribution of

power—this split between subject and object, observer and observed, perfect

and human—is not really possible. It is not possible because the observer

himself has desire. That desire inevitably influences what he chooses to see and

what he chooses not to see. It makes true objectivity impossible. So far we have

been unable to pinpoint von Trier’s desire to undertake this project—he seems to

have conflicting motives. Perhaps then, we can look at the obstructions from

Leth’s perspective.

Quality Control

“Make something that’s crap”, von Trier tells Leth. “You always try and be too

good. That’s what you musn’t do. This is therapy not a film competition with

yourself.” Later in the film, Leth explains his objection to von Trier’s advice: “we

can’t help becoming involved instinctively and looking for a solution that

nevertheless satisfies us, so I’m afraid it won’t be a load of crap”.

Let’s begin with these questions: Why does Leth resist being “banalized” by von

Trier throughout The Five Obstructions? Why does he resist making “something

that’s crap”? Is there not some resonance, regardless of motivation, in von Trier’s

desire to dirty up Leth’s aesthetic a bit? Judging from The Perfect Human and the

films he makes during The Five Obstructions, Leth does seem inclined towards a
 52

controlled, clean aesthetic. So why not introduce a little dirt—a little bit of the

human—into this airtight world?

A brief aside: at Princeton, second year composition graduate students present a

“Generals Concert” in which we choose a composer whose artistic perspective is

different from our own. We then write a piece in response to that perspective.

The assumption is that exposure to views different from our own is a good thing.

On the one hand, it can introduce fresh ideas into a closed creative universe. It

can also confirm and strengthen views already held. Von Trier’s obstructions are

similar to our Generals assignment. They pose a healthy challenge Leth should

have no problem accepting, if only as an experiment. And while he does accept

von Trier’s obstructions by agreeing to do the project, there is a definite line

throughout the film that Leth is unwilling to cross, in spite of von Trier’s constant

nudging. Where is this line and why won’t Leth cross it?

Distance and Empathy

The following exchange, which occurs before von Trier sends Leth to India to

make the second obstruction, may provide an answer:

VON TRIER: The highly affected distance you maintain to the things you describe—that’s

what I want to get rid of in my next obstruction.

LETH: It’s not merely a pose.

 53

VON TRIER: Not at all. But I’d like to put your ethics to the test. We talk so much about

the ethics of the observer. I’d like to move you on from there. To make you empathize.

Can you think of any places, any themes one cannot exploit?

LETH: No, not off hand. But I’m not uncivilized.

VON TRIER: Would you film a dying child in a refugee camp and add the words to The

Perfect Human?

LETH: No, I wouldn’t. I’m not perverse.

VON TRIER: There is a degree of perversion in…

LETH: maintaining a distance?

VON TRIER: …in the way you do things.

The line is clearly drawn between distance, on the one hand, and empathy, on

the other. Von Trier’s hope is this: if he were to film in a truly miserable

place—like a refugee camp with dying children— Leth would be so overwhelmed

with compassion for the suffering of these children he would be forced to admit

that the “highly affected distance” he maintains between himself and his subjects

is not only artistically limited, but flat-out, ethically wrong. Unable to control the

outpouring of empathy he feels for these suffering refugees, the distance

between Leth and his subject would be forced shut—a triumph of emotion over

reason—the human over the perfect.

It would also be a triumph of von Trier’s rebellious desire to break “the rules of

the game”—the rules he learned from Leth as an impressionable film student. If

The Five Obstructions is a kind of Oedipal struggle between the two

directors—with von Trier-as-child seeking to abolish internalized parental values

 54

by symbolically murdering Leth-as-father—then forcing Leth to empathize with

his subject amounts to Von Trier committing the bloody deed. This is, of course,

von Trier’s fantasy—one that Leth dismisses as “pure romanticism”:

Lars von Trier has this romantic notion that I’ll be so affected by being placed in a

situation where a social drama is going on beside you [sic]. He wants to quantify how

much it rubs off, how much it affects me. Will it be visible? Will it be quantifiable? But I

think it is pure romanticism. Obviously there is no physiological law. There is no physical

law that states that you can witness so much that you reach the limit where you break

down.

Here we have located a definite line between von Trier and Leth. Unlike Leth,

von Trier believes this “limit where you break down” does exist—that there is a

point, when confronted with intense human emotion, where objective distance

becomes impossible to maintain. In his own films, von Trier, controversially,

pushes his characters—and by extension his audience—toward this limit: Bess in

Breaking the Waves, Selma in Dancer in the Dark, and Grace in Dogville are all

forced to endure gratuitous, needless suffering. In all three films, this suffering is

systematically ratcheted up beyond the point of plausibility—almost to the point

of absurdity—and we, the audience, begin to feel as though its purpose is no

longer solely dramatic, but ideological. We begin to feel manipulated by the film

and manipulated by von Trier. The film asserts an emotional control that runs

counter to what our reason tells us: we rationally know the suffering of the
 55

characters is absurd—even manipulative—but we are moved by this suffering

nonetheless.

In the New York Times review of Dancer in the Dark, A.O. Scott writes that Lars

von Trier “seems to be conducting a diabolical experiment, to determine if the

virtuosic brutality of his style can manipulate the audience into feeling what it

cannot believe”.35 In many ways, The Five Obstructions is von Trier’s attempt to

conduct this same “diabolical experiment” on Leth. Because Leth refuses to be

manipulated into “feeling what [he] cannot believe” von Trier’s experiment

ultimately fails. And yet the outcome of the experiment is not so important. What

remains after the movie ends, is a stalemate: two artists who, for whatever

reasons, have taken differing views on the limits of art. Leth refuses to cross the

line between art and “perversion”—as he calls it; von Trier yearns to cross this

line.

35
A.O. Scott. “Universe Without Happy Endings”. The New York Times. September 22, 2000.
 56

Chapter 3

The Art of Distraction: Frank Zappa and Uncle Meat

I have my father’s original copy of Frank Zappa’s 1969 record, Uncle Meat. A few

years ago, I dusted it off and put it in a plastic sleeve. Before that, it lived in a box

at my dad’s house, unlistened to for at least fifteen years. When I was very

young, my dad played the record for me. He wasn’t a Zappa fanatic; it was

played alongside other records: Tommy by The Who; Copland: Billy the Kid;

Stravinsky: The Firebird; Holst: The Planets; Cream: Disraeli Gears; Wendy

Carlos: Switched on Bach—to name a few. Exposure to this eclectic mix of music

in my formative years, without question, shaped the development of my musical

taste. Yet, once I got a bit older, bought my own copy of Thriller by Michael

Jackson, Zappa’s Uncle Meat was forgotten.

Then in 2003, some reviews drew comparison between Zappa’s music and my

own record, Dear Bicycle. I decided to get Uncle Meat from my dad’s house and

give it a spin. I was astonished at the similarities between my interests and the

old Zappa record. Sped-up percussion workouts, cheap trumpet jingles, weird

twelve-tone marches, bursts of white noise, mechanical xylophone tremolo,

snatches of recorded conversation, bootleg live recordings, expansive modal

improvisations, stylized pop songs: these are all present throughout my own

music; they also describe just the first side of Uncle Meat. What astonished me

was not just that so many of my own idées fixes were already present in the
 57

Zappa—no doubt a result of my early exposure to his music—but that Zappa

molds these disparate ingredients into a compelling compositional shape, and

makes a virtue out of what, in other hands, might be described as dilettantism,

lack of focus—even a kind of artistic ADD.

Indeed, to his critics Zappa comes off as a smart-ass, cynical trickster who

superficially appropriates wildly different styles just for shock-effect. I dismissed

Zappa for many years on similar grounds. But this re-examination of Uncle Meat

left me with the distinct impression that behind the sarcasm, cynicism and

juvenile humor lies a very serious work concerned, above all, with conventional

musical issues—formal balance, instrumental texture, melody, harmony,

rhythm—as well as more general artistic—even philosophical—concerns about

the relationship between art and society, art and commerce, and the process of

creativity itself.

Fast-forward a year or so after my rediscovery of Uncle Meat. As I began thinking

about dissertation topics, I battled a deluge of grand, philosophical ideas—my

own, personal theories of everything. Like a moth flickering from light to light, I

moved, almost daily, between such broad topics as “Music and Cultural Codes”

(the title of my dissertation proposal), “Music and Failure”, and “Music and

Control”. Failing to follow Paul Lansky’s advice to work from the inside, outward, I

filled two notebooks trying to create some framework that could contain the

diversity of my interests—from the Beatles, Morton Feldman, Zappa, Stravinsky,

 58

Samuel Beckett, Glitch Music, Outsider Music, Louis Andriessen, and others. I

clinged to the idea of some unifying thread running through all this work, but that

thread eluded me.

Then it occurred to me that within the two LPs, booklet, and gatefold of Uncle

Meat itself, many of the ideas I was wrestling with were already contained:

Stravinsky and Andriessen in the melodic writing, harmony, and rhythm;

electronic music in the pioneering production techniques; pop music in the

stylized doo-wop songs; outsider music in the cultivation of “freak” culture as an

alternative to the “straight” mainstream. The Joycean ambition of Uncle Meat

even represents precisely that artistic stance against which Beckett and Feldman

carved their own reductive visions. Indeed, Uncle Meat is perhaps best

approached through a framework of oppositions: life/art, freedom/control,

stage/studio, improvisation/notation, organic/mechanical, art/entertainment,

pop/classical, fiction/documentary, amateur/virtuoso, public/private. Far from

seeking resolution to these oppositions, Uncle Meat pits them against each other.

Zappa becomes a kind of cultural alchemist—mixing musical styles and forms

into sometime explosive combinations.

Yet this is not a purely formal concern. Zappa recognizes that a musical style

always invokes a range of extra-musical issues: class, race, gender, sexuality,

nationality, etc. By mixing musical styles, Zappa also seeks to counter the

homogeneity of the post-war suburb in which he was raised and which had
 59

become emblematic of 1950s America in general. In a sense, Zappa’s mix of

musical style is also a very deliberate mix of race and class. One example from

Uncle Meat to illustrate this point is the juxtaposition of American Rhythm and

Blues with European avant-garde: music of largely poor, black Americans sits

beside music by largely middle-class, white Europeans. By orchestrating such

cultural dissonances, Zappa also challenges the authenticity of identity itself: who

has authority to speak from a certain subject position and who lacks that

authority? Zappa’s insistence on speaking from both black R&B and European

avant-garde introduces a fluidity that threatens to break down barriers that define

both categories: if a self-taught, long-haired rock guitar player from LA can write

music like Boulez, the concept of “composer as specialist”, proposed by Milton

Babbitt, is threatened. On the other hand, performing complex “new music” with

members of the LA Philharmonic at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go also risks one’s Rock

& Roll street credentials. Rather than avoiding such awkward, contradictory

positions, Zappa sought them out.

Just as Zappa’s work challenges existing social structures, it also questions

existing formal structures, asking, for instance, where the line between a pop

song and avant-garde concert music lies. A song like “Dog Breath in the Year of

the Plague”, from Uncle Meat, asks just such a question: 50s Rock & Roll tropes

such as the “yeaahh” bass vocal line, the guttural saxophone solo, and the naïve,

chipmunk-like “la-la-la-la-la” section bump into an atonal bridge that is more

Edgard Varése than Chuck Berry. More than pastiche or collage, such
 60

techniques question the vicissitudes of the recorded medium itself, which had

become the conduit of the illusionism and escapism of 50s and 60s pop, on the

one hand—the domain of avant-garde tape music, on the other.

One of my primary motivations is to uncover how these contradictions function

within Uncle Meat itself, but I am equally interested in using the album to discuss

larger conceptual issues important to Twentieth Century art in general. Take, for

example, the opposition—which, as we will see, is crucial to Uncle

Meat—between the organic and the mechanical. As Peter Bürger argues in

Theory of the Avant-Garde, such an opposition is a crucial fault line separating

what he calls the classical and the avant-garde. Bürger’s discussion of montage

techniques—particularly the use of “reality fragments” in early Cubist paintings of

Picasso and Braque—is applicable to techniques used in Uncle Meat. Indeed, it

is possible to situate Zappa’s work firmly in a European avant-garde tradition, just

as we remember that his records were distributed by the decidedly non avant-

garde corporate giant, Warner Brothers.

This conflict between the commercial and the artistic permeates Zappa’s work.

Far-removed from the ivory-towered isolationism of Babbitt’s “composer as

specialist”, Zappa refused to separate his work from the reality of business and

money. Uncle Meat itself is full of mundane talk about money—often band

members complaining to Zappa that they aren’t making enough of it to live on;

and Zappa’s biography is full of lawsuits with record labels, managers, and band
 61

members—often related to Zappa’s desire to control all aspects of his

work—musical as well as business. “I am the slime from your video, oozing

along on your living room floor”, Zappa proclaims on his 1973 album Overnite

Sensation. This is Zappa cultivating the persona of “sleezy entertainer” as

opposed to “serious artist”; and yet it is my sense that Zappa thought of himself

as the latter just as he felt compelled to play up his role as the former. Contrary

to popular belief, for example, Zappa never used drugs; yet his early albums,

such as Freak Out! and Absolutely Free, were closely associated with the LA

“freak” scene, whose free attitude toward drugs, sex, and personal expression

actually preceded the more famous San Francisco hippie scene. And though he

encouraged—even inspired—the LA freak scene, Zappa was more control freak

than proto-hippie. A workaholic by all accounts, Zappa exhibited all the

characteristics of the isolated artist, working late hours in his basement studio,

dubbed “The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen” (UMRK). With the creation of his

own record labels in the 60s and 70s and his unique distribution deal with

Rykodisc in the 80s, Zappa increasingly was able to control all aspects of his

music’s production and distribution. In his last decade, he wrote much of his

music using the Synclavier music computer, further increasing his creative

autonomy and isolation.

And yet, in spite of this tendency toward solitude, Zappa’s life was full of diverse

activity and full of diverse people. Crucially, his music reflects this diversity, and

his creative process frequently blurred the lines between his art and his life.
 62

Similar to Steve Mackey’s concept of “music as an action sport”, composition for

Zappa incorporated a wide range of activity: improvising on the guitar, writing out

arrangements using conventional music notation, splicing tape, making field

recordings, using the studio to create electronic sounds—even writing out film

plots, complete with ideas for elaborate sets and costumes.36 Zappa also filled

his albums with “real life” recorded conversations between band members about

money and mundane details of touring. Essentially, anything within Zappa’s radar

was up for grabs and could be absorbed into whatever artistic project he was

working on at the time.

This blurring of the lines between art and life draws comparisons to Joyce, as an

apocryphal story about Beckett and Joyce illustrates: Joyce is dictating

Finnegans Wake to Beckett. There is a knock at the door, and Joyce says, “come

in”. Thinking it is part of Joyce’s dictation, Beckett includes the words “come in” in

Finnegans Wake. Later that day, while rereading the section, Joyce asks Beckett

where the “come in” is from. Beckett explains; Joyce decides to leave it in.37

Zappa’s work clearly has this Joycean sense of sprawl between art and life, but

this sprawl is tempered by a more Stravinskian— perhaps Cagean— impulse to

control and contain. “The most important thing in art is The Frame”, Zappa writes,

sounding very much like the composer of 4’33”. “Without [The Frame], you can’t

36
Steve Mackey, “Music as an Action Sport,” Current Musicology 67/68, 2002. 269–288.
37
Richard Ellman, James Joyce. Rev. Ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 649.
 63

know where The Art stops and The Real World begins.”38 So perhaps, for Zappa,

there is not complete fluidity between art and life, but rather an attempt to control

“The Real World” through art.

If, as seen in our discussion of Why Patterns?, Feldman compares his own

creative process to watching a large animal move slowly through its natural

habitat, Zappa’s creative process is analogous to throwing a bunch of animals—a

chicken, a pig, a parrot, a fox, a shark, perhaps—into a cage and watching them

freak out. But the important thing is that they are freaking out within the confines

of a cage. In order to look closer at this freak out (which, appropriately, is the title

of Zappa’s first album), we will look at Uncle Meat from the perspective of these

different, but overlapping, oppositions, focusing at first on the opening two-minute

track—the “Main Title Theme”. Like surrounding the cage with many stationary

cameras, rather than attempting to capture the action with a single camera, this

approach will work with the heterogeneous, ADD aspects of Uncle Meat, rather

than against them.

The Mechanical

Uncle Meat opens with a jaunty, mechanical march for vibraphone and snare

drum that seems to move of its own accord, like a wind-up toy monkey playing

drums and cymbals. The presence of harpsichord also adds a mechanical quality

and gives the opening a pompous and official air that connotes the “classical”,

38
Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book, with Peter Occhigrosso. New York: Poseidon,
1989, 140.
 64

“quaint”, and “dainty”. But it also undercuts the march-like quality of the music:

how many marching bands have a harpsichord? The harpsichord itself is a very

mechanical instrument without the Romantic, expressive connotations of the

piano. You can hear, for example, the mechanism of the keys plucking the

strings on a harpsichord, not on the piano. The oom-pa-pa bass line that begins

at 15 seconds is also march-like. The instrument has a slow attack response, as

though it has to work very hard to keep up with the acrobatics of the crisp

vibraphone and snare. This bass line also enters a beat late, catching up to the

other instruments a measure later and adding a little drama to the

instrumentation: you sort of empathize with the big slow bass line trying to keep

up with the showy, virtuosic vibes.

In the liner notes to Uncle Meat, Zappa writes: “things that sound like trumpets

are actually clarinets played through an electric device called ‘Maestro’ with a

setting labeled ‘Oboe D’amore’ and sped up a minor third with a variable speed

oscillator”.39 This explains why the notation for the “Main Title Theme”, which

accompanies the LP, is a minor third lower than it sounds on recording. Zappa

and his band—“The Mothers of Invention”—must have recorded everything a

minor third lower and at a proportionately slower speed and then raised the pitch

and tempo. The trills in the vibraphone and some of the rolls on the snare drum,

for example, are too even to have been played at the sounding tempo. At times

39
Liner notes to Uncle Meat, 1969.
 65

they even sound like MIDI (a good ten years before MIDI, of course). Raising the

pitch gives the music a cheap quality that also suggests a toy instrument.

Another way Zappa calls attention to the artificial and mechanical is with

distinctive production techniques. The first section, for example, uses very little

reverb, creating a sterile, lab-like quality. This reminds me of Robert Craft’s 1958

recording of Boulez’s Le Marteau Sans Maitre, which is no coincidence: this is

the very recording Zappa listened to when he was in twelfth grade.40 Perhaps

Zappa got his fondness for vibraphone and xylophone from Le Marteau also? In

any event, the Craft recording is very closely miked— especially the xylophone,

violin pizzicato, and drum trio movement near the beginning, which also sounds

like a toy monkey drummer!

Zappa had a strange relationship to classical music. He also had a strange

relationship to popular music. How many 1950s pop musicians or composers

asked to make a long distance call to Varèse for their fifteenth birthday?41 Zappa

first became interested in Varèse when reading a Look magazine interview with

record store owner Sam Goody who bragged he could sell any record—even a

record called Ionisation, which Goody described as “nothing but drums—it’s

dissonant and terrible; the worst music in the world.” Zappa thought this sounded

40
Zappa, 195.
41
This was in 1955 and Varèse wasn’t home, although Zappa did speak to Mrs. Varèse who
explained that her husband was in Europe working on a project—the Poème électronique for the
Brussels World Fair. (Zappa, 33).
 66

right up his alley. Shortly after this, the young Zappa was in a record store

flipping through the discount LP bin for R&B records: “I noticed a strange-looking

black-and-white album cover with a guy on it who had frizzy gray hair and looked

like a mad scientist. I thought it was great a mad scientist had finally made a

record, so I picked it up—and there it was, the record with Ionisation on it”.42

The taste for music beyond mainstream pop extended to the young Zappa’s

other primary musical diet: black R&B. Ben Watson suggests this interest grew,

in part, out of Zappa’s feeling of isolation from mainstream popular culture—an

isolation aggravated by Zappa’s own Greek/Sicilian background that made him

the object of WASP racism.43 One of Zappa’s high school bands—“The Black

Outs”—included three black members and two Mexicans. Zappa claims his “ little

integrated band” received numerous threats from angry high school lettermen.44

Perhaps his fondness for the artificial and mechanical, which began with early

work like Uncle Meat and continued until his late pieces for Synclavier, stems

from this early sense of marginalization. This created, in turn, a life-long desire to

expose the inner-workings of both commodity culture, i.e. mainstream pop, and

the exclusivity of the avant-garde.

42
Zappa, 31.
43
Ben Watson, Frank Zappa as Dadaist: Recording Technology and the Power to Repeat. In The
Frank Zappa Companion, Richard Kostelanetz, ed. New York: Schirmer, 1997, p. 177.
44
Zappa, 47.
 67

The metaphor of the toy monkey drummer I have used to describe Uncle Meat’s

opening march could be read as a critique of conformity. Whether a teenager

listening to nothing but the Billboard Top Ten, or a composer writing in strict

accordance with academic trends, Zappa’s march parodies those who fall into

lock-step with received wisdom. This critique is built into the music of the Uncle

Meat “Main Title Theme” itself: in contrast to the peppy march material in the

vibes and snare drum, the underlying drone in the bass, played by pitched-down

clarinets, grounds the opening with a weight—a gravitas— that undermines the

peppy acrobatics of the vibes and snare. A musical equivalent to the Vanitas

perhaps, the drone here is a stark reminder that all wind-up toy marches will

come to an end, no matter how jaunty. I’d now like to explore further this link

between Uncle Meat and the theme of vanitas, as it points to a key opposition

throughout the album between the organic and the mechanical.

The Organic

Vanitas is Latin for “vanity”. The term refers to paintings depicting a collection of

objects symbolizing the brevity of life and meaninglessness of earthly

possessions. The most common vanitas symbol is a human skull. Other symbols

include bubbles, symbolizing the suddenness of death; rotting fruit, symbolizing

decay; and musical instruments, also symbolizing brevity and the fleeting nature

of pleasure. “The Ambassadors”, painted by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1533,

is an example of the vanitas in painting. Two men stand next to a table filled with

books and instruments of learning: a celestial globe, a terrestrial map, a portable

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sundial, two lutes, a box of flutes, a Lutheran hymnal. These are instruments of

cartography, astronomy, mathematics, and music—instruments used to measure

time and space; instruments used to make music and study acoustics. The men

proudly frame their hi-tech collection of gadgets, which are symbols of their

education and knowledge. The silk and fur clothes they wear also reveal wealth

and power.

Figure 13 Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors

(1533)
 69

Yet in the foreground of the painting, there is a strange object. At first it is difficult

to make out. The French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan

describes the experience of looking at this object:

What, then, before this display of the domain of appearance in all its most fascinating

forms, is this object, which from some angles appears to be flying through the air, at

others to be titled? You cannot

know, for you turn away, thus escaping the fascination of the picture, You begin by

walking out of the room in which no doubt it has long held your attention. It is then that,
45
turning round as you leave…you apprehend in this form…What? A skull.

The strange object in the foreground is a skull, but it is painted in such a way that

the viewer only recognizes it as a skull when viewed from an indirect angle. If

viewed directly, the skull appears distorted, while the men and their instruments

are in focus; if viewed from a skewed angle, the skull takes a recognizable

shape, but the men and their instruments appear distorted. The skull is a typical

memento mori—a reminder of mortality and of the limitations of human

knowledge. The painting suggests that human knowledge can be pursued

directly through rational, calculated, measured thought, but knowledge of God

can only be achieved indirectly, in mysterious ways beyond our control. This is

the warning of the vanitas in Renaissance painting. Of course, the religious

overtones of “The Ambassadors” can be transposed to non-religious themes: the

mystery of death or the fleeting nature of creativity, for example.

45
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan
(London: Penguin Books), 88.
 70

There are elements of the vanitas theme throughout Uncle Meat. First, consider

the cover of the album itself, which is a collage made by artist Cal Schenkel. The

back shows a large skull—the classic vanitas symbol— with the date 1348

printed on it. This was the year of the Black Death in Europe. The skull is

embedded in the album design by a thick glob of paint and chewing gum. This

rather disgusting substance has an organic quality, as if it is growing on the skull.

The paint is, therefore, a kind of metonymic substitution for dirt, drawing a link

between art—represented by paint—and death, represented by the skull. The

back cover also shows the names and photos of Zappa and his band members.

Below three of the band members’ names are x-rays of teeth, instead of photos.

This is another metonymic substitution: the smile of a photograph is replaced by

an x-ray of teeth.

On the front cover, this theme of teeth is more developed. The center image is a

crude collage of two hands prying open the lips of a disembodied mouth. We see

the teeth and gums, and we see hands prying the mouth open. The right hand

looks as though it is holding up an x-ray of teeth, with the help of a mechanical

contraption and some string. As on the back cover, sploches of paint—and what

appears to be mold and blood—are eating away at the bottom of the image. Just

as the back cover suggests some relationship between paint and dirt, the front

cover establishes a thematic tension between the mechanical contraption holding

the mouth open and the organic substances eating away at the bottom of the

image.
 71

Figure 14 Frank Zappa, Uncle Meat front cover

The teeth on the front cover form a kind of anti-smile. Just as the mechanical

music that opens Uncle Meat parodies the uncritical march of consumer culture,

these teeth parody the shiny white-toothed smile of pop—the smile of The

Beatles and Herman’s Hermits; the smile of the nice boy you would bring home

to mom; the smile of cookie-cutter, airbrushed 1950s America. The Uncle Meat

smile is a behind-the-scenes look at this illusory, airbrushed smile. It reveals the

 72

mechanism propping up this smile, and—like the vanitas—it reminds us of the

encroaching threat of decay and death: the globs of paint, glue, mold, and blood

are lurking just below. This theme of “looking behind the scenes”—of exposing

the mechanism of production, as well as the product itself—occurs throughout

Uncle Meat. It is essential to Zappa’s aesthetic, and it is at the root of his social

views as well. Let’s first consider the aesthetic perspective.

Zappa’s work is characterized by a collage aesthetic. Bits of disparate material

are assembled to form a whole composition, with little attempt to hide the edits.

In fact, the edits themselves become part of the composition. On the Uncle Meat

cover, for example, there is a clear line demarking the two sets of teeth being

held up by hands. These images of teeth also have a flatness that contrasts the

textured look of the paint and mold. Just as we see “behind the scenes” of the

shiny white-tooth smile of pop, we also see “behind the scenes” of the

construction of the album design. We see where the scissors made their cuts,

where paint dripped on the floor.

The same thing happens in the music throughout Uncle Meat. In the opening

“Main Title Theme”, for example, there is an abrupt cut at 1:27 from the natural

resonant decay of a harpsichord chord to electronically generated noise. Like the

visible edits on the cover of the album, Zappa makes no attempt at a smooth

transition between these very different sonic worlds. By making such an abrupt

cut, Zappa keeps the listener on their toes: at any moment, the rug can be pulled
 73

out from under you by a radical change in musical mood and texture. By letting

us hear the sound of the edits, Zappa externalizes his own creative process, and

we hear the music as an artificial assemblage of disparate materials, rather than

a logical, organic progression of events. No attempt is made to portray the

creative process as smooth and inviolable. The music questions itself. It

incorporates the doubt and anxiety of the creative process into the work itself.

Before looking further at the relationship between Uncle Meat and Zappa’s

creative process, let’s examine some of the more conventional musical issues

explored in the record.

Some Musical Concerns

One of the things that impressed me on my recent re-examination of Uncle Meat

is that it is full of good notes. Here is the notation of the main theme, transposed

to the sounding pitch:

       
 
           
   

Figure 15 Uncle Meat, Main Theme

I have added dotted slurs and bar lines to show the asymmetrical phrase

structure of the main theme and how it deviates from the 3/4 time signature: it’s

more like 3/4, 3/4, 2/4, 4/4, 3/4, 3/4. Although Zappa doesn’t notate an accent on

the third beat of the third bar, it is played this way on the recording. There is also

something about the C on the third beat of the third measure that makes it seem

like a downbeat. Perhaps it has a dominant function, suggesting the melody is in

 74

F major. It is also the lowest note of the main theme. The melody seems to fall to

that C and then turn around and rise back up to the highest note of the melody,

an E.

The high C on the second beat of the third measure is fantastic. A more standard

thing to do would be to just go down the scale, substituting that C for an E.

Another nice melodic feature of the main theme is the way the G to F in the third

beat of the fifth measure ends the penultimate phrase and then immediately

begins the final phrase. The melody is then elided with itself in the repeat. This

kind of writing is very Stravinskian in its ability to achieve a kind of melodic

disorientation with very simple diatonic notes. Louis Andriessen and Elmer

Schönberger write in their book, The Apollonian Clockwork, about how

Stravinsky’s melodies start off very hummable, but by the third bar lose the

listener in a maze of twists and turns. They call it “ordeals of the memory”.46 Try

and sing to yourself, for example, the opening fugue theme of the Second

Movement of the Symphony of Psalms. I think the Uncle Meat theme offers a

similar challenge.

Zappa wrote most of his melodies on the guitar.47 I tried playing the opening

theme on the guitar and it felt very natural, especially the classical turn in the

second measure. I could imagine, though, that the Uncle Meat theme was written

46
Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger. The Apollonian Clockwork: On Stravinsky.
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006) 39.
47
Zappa, 97.
 75

at a piano. For an untrained pianist like Zappa, plopping away at the same chord

with the weaker left hand and playing more complicated figures in the right hand

comes very naturally (I do it all the time). This way of writing could also explain

the abundance of parallel suspended chords: Zappa puts his hands in one

position and then moves it up and down the keyboard or guitar fretboard: voila,

parallel suspended chords. These chords compound the melodic ambiguity with

a vertical harmony that can’t decide if it wants to be a V chord or a I chord.

Although the March section of the “Main Title Theme” is brief, there is a clear

ABA form. After two statements of the main theme, the melody is extended up to

a Gb. Adding triplets and sixteenth-note rhythmic figures, the phrasing of the

vibes and snare drum melody increasingly gets out of step with the harpsichord,

which tries to keep things orderly by plodding out the same quarter notes from

the beginning. The oom-pa-pa bass that was discussed earlier gets tired and

moves down chromatically to sit on another pedal until dropping out all together,

leading the vibes and snare toward increasingly asymmetrical phrases. Although

the harpsichord tries to keep the ensemble together, it eventually slips

chromatically between suspended-second chords. This is probably another

reason the bass drops out: it would be too cumbersome for the bass to follow the

more rapid chromatic harmonic movement of the remaining instruments. By the

time the vibes and snare get to the most asymmetrical part of their melodic line,

the trumpet/oboe/clarinets jump in with a restatement of the main theme, and the

snare joins the harpsichord with regular quarter note rhythm. The vibes then shift
 76

to steady eighth notes and fade out with the snare, leaving the harpsichord to

play a little imitative two-part solo beginning at 1:04. It cadences at 1:24, letting

the instrument resonate for two seconds (audio example 7, Main Theme,

harpsichord solo).

At 1:27 a purely electronic sound of filtered noise and pitched down percussion

bursts in. It ricochets around the stereo field, and is then extinguished,

concluding the opening track (audio example 8, Main Theme, electronic noise).

Because the harpsichord solo already introduces a flexible temporal field, which

lacks the regularity of the opening march, the cut to purely synthetic noise –a la

electronic music from WDR Cologne studios circa 1955 or perhaps the

soundtrack to Forbidden Planet—is not as much of a non-sequitur as at first

seems. There is a clear break between “music” and abstract “noise”, but in terms

of pacing and density, there is a more natural, cadential transition between these

two poles. The relationship between the mechanical march, the harpsichord solo,

and the electronic sound leads me to my next analytic perspective.

Weights and Balances, Tension and Release

The Uncle Meat “Main Title Theme” exhibits Zappa’s acute sense of proportion:

there is approximately one-minute of march music, thirty seconds of harpsichord

solo, and thirty seconds of synthetic noise, with a decrease in density and weight

in the progression between these sections. In a section of The Real Frank Zappa
 77

Book called “Weights and Measures”, Zappa addresses the issue of

compositional balance:

In my compositions, I employ a system of weights, balances, measured tensions and

releases…A large mass of any material will “balance” a smaller, denser mass of any

material, according to the length of the gizmo it’s dangling on, and the “balance point”

chosen to facilitate the danglement. The material being “balanced” includes stuff other

than the notes on the paper. If you can conceive of any material as a “weight” and any

idea-over-time as a “balance”, you are ready for the next step: the entertainment objects
48
that derive from those concepts.

Throughout Uncle Meat, Zappa indeed shows a real sensitivity to, and

understanding of, abstract principles of large-scale composition and form. The

opening march, as we have seen, is very dense and full of tension—both in

terms of musical activity and tempo. Even the tape itself is sped up—literally

more tense. The harpsichord solo breaks with the steady rhythm and introduces

an element of rubato. In terms of instrumental density, the sparseness of the solo

harpsichord passage contrasts the busy ensemble playing of the beginning.

Finally, the electronic part enters with far less tension; it is sort of flopping

through the stereo field.

Zappa also creates tension and release through mixing and panning. In the

opening march, for example, the vibraphone is panned far left and far right; the

snare drum is panned directly in the middle. This makes the vibraphone sound
48
Zappa, 163.
 78

not like a solo instrument, but like an impossibly accurate unison (this also recalls

my earlier discussion of mechanical music). The harpsichord is panned hard left,

and the bass drone, which is probably overdubbed pitched-down clarinets in

octaves, is panned in the center. The octave drone provides a resonance and

depth that contrasts the dryer vibes, percussion, and harpsichord, which are

mixed more to the front. When the electronic noise enters, it moves freely around

the stereo field, contrasting the hard-left, hard-right panning of the mechanical

music section.

Perhaps the most radical way Zappa achieves formal balance, is by contrasting

different genres. In this case, mechanical march music and “classical”

harpsichord writing are contrasted with electronically generated sounds that

recall avant-garde tape music. This brings to mind Rauschenberg’s “combine”

paintings, in which there is a representation of something along with a thing-

itself—like a real chair—painted into the painting. The electronic sound that cuts

into the harpsichord resonance at 1:27 could be considered analogous to

Rauschenberg’s chair. The electronic sound interrupts the world of the opening

march—the world of “music”—with an entirely different world of “noise” in much

the same way as Rauschenberg’s three-dimensional chair interrupts the two-

dimensional space of the painting. Zappa, like Rauschenberg, is therefore

balancing different levels of meaning and perception in much the same way he

balances instrumental textures and production techniques.

 79

The Nine Themes

Let’s now move from the opening track and consider the album as a whole. To

begin, I have identified nine “themes” in Uncle Meat. These are not musical

themes like the opening of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. They are more like

different worlds. Think of them as sets for a play: each set has a different

feel—different colors, different furniture, different textures, different lighting. One

set could be a forest in the moonlight; another could be a dreamscape—an

absurd space with abstract colors and shapes that don’t reference the physical

world; still another set could depict the interior of an 18th Century parlor where

Mozart might have played harpsichord.

Keeping with Zappa’s concept of “Weights and Balances”, you could also think of

these themes in sculptural terms, as material objects: one theme is a cast iron

bathtub; another theme is a feather; another theme is a bicycle wheel; another

theme is a circuit board. By this account, Uncle Meat looks like a giant Rube

Goldberg machine, a junk sculpture, or that image at the end of Dr. Seuss’ The

Cat in the Hat, where the cat is trying to juggle a birthday cake on his head, a

bottle of milk with his toe, books and a goldfish jar with his thumbs. The

precariousness of the Cat in the Hat’s effort to balance all these objects is

present in Uncle Meat, which also conveys a sense of imminent collapse. But this

threat of collapse creates a compelling tension; there is a kind of virtuosity is

Zappa’s compositional and creative juggling act.

 80

I have given each of the nine themes a name: Mechanical, Electronic, Speaking,

Snorks, Modal Improvisation, Songs, Live Recordings, Free Jazz Solos,

Percussion Solos. For a sequential analysis of where each theme occurs within

the record, refer to Appendix A. For now, let’s look at each theme in some detail.

1. Mechanical

The mechanical theme is characterized by motoric, march-like rhythm. Although

largely instrumental, the speed of the tape is often raised, giving the instruments

a tinny, high-pitched quality that makes them sound like mechanical toys. As

already discussed, I use the metaphor of a toy monkey drummer to describe this

music. Ostinati also characterize this theme, giving the impression of an

assembly line. The assembly line could be a metaphor for capitalism and mass

production.

Another key aspect of mechanical music: it is controlled and precise. Largely

notated, rather than improvised, different sections are pieced together in the

studio through overdubbing and tape-splicing. In short, the mechanical music is

highly artificial—highly constructed—even though much of it began as

instrumental music played by humans (as opposed to electronically generated

music). Examples of the mechanical theme occur in the following tracks:

(1) Main Title Theme [0:00 - 1:27]

(4) Zolar Czakl [0:00 - 0:45]
(5) Dog Breath in the Year of the Plague [2:30 - 3:30]
 81

(6) The Legend of the Golden Arches [0:00 - 1:52]

(8) The Dog Breath Variations [0:00 - 1:46]
(11) The Uncle Meat Variations [0:00 - 3:30]
(13) Prelude to King Kong [0:00 - 3:24]
(15) A Pound for a Brown on the Bus [0:00 - 1:29]
(21) Project X

2. Electronic

The electronic theme is characterized by sounds generated electronically, and by

musique concrete sounds— recorded acoustic sounds that are processed

through filtering, pitch shifting, and other studio techniques. The electronic

sounds often have a cadential role, frequently occurring at the end of tracks as a

kind of punctuation to the preceding material. The electronic sounds are at once

abstract and referential. They are abstract “noise” compared to more

conventionally “musical” passages—passages that have what Steve Mackey

calls “tunes and chords”; but they also recall the science fiction movie sound

effects familiar to anyone growing up with Star Trek and Forbidden Planet. It is

possible that Zappa is also playing with certain tropes from avant-garde tape

music in the same way he plays with tropes from doo-wop and psychedelic

music. “Avant-garde tape music” becomes another genre, just as “doo-wop” and

“psychedelic” are recognizable genres. Occasionally, electronic sounds also

have a Foley effect function, as in the skidding sound that occurs at the end of

“Prelude to King Kong”. In this case, the electronic sound gives the impression of

motoric, mechanical music skidding off-track. Examples of the electronic music

theme occur in the following tracks:

 82

(1) Main Title Theme [1:27 - 1:55]

(4) Zolar Czakl [0:45 - 0:54]
(7) Louie Louie (Live at the Royal Albert Hall in London) [2:15 - 2:18]
(8) The Dog Breath Variations [1:46 - 1:48]
(9) Sleeping in a Jar [0:49]
(13) Prelude to King Kong [3:24]
(21) Project X [4:46]

3. Speaking

The speaking theme features recordings of people talking. Sometimes these

recordings seem like scripted skits, as in the tracks featuring Suzy Creamcheese,

who was a real-life friend of Zappa’s and a groupie of the band. Other recordings

seem more informal, as if a tape recorder is capturing random backstage

conversation. The conversation is usually about mundane details of

touring—money problems, gossip about managers, etc. Still other recorded

passages seem more like interviews from a documentary film. An example of this

is when Ian Underwood recounts how he got to audition for The Mother of

Invention in the track Ian Underwood Whips It Out (Live on Stage in

Copenhagen). Finally, there are moments when Zappa is talking directly to the

audience during a live performance. He introduces the song “Louie Louie”, for

example, at the Mothers’ Albert Hall performance in London. In many of these

examples, the speaking theme introduces “reality fragments” into the collage of

Uncle Meat. The quality of these recordings often contrasts the highly artificial,

studio-manipulated material of the mechanical themed music, as well as the

synthetic noises of the electronic themed material.

 83

There is also an aspect of surveillance in these recordings, as if Zappa, who was

a control freak and notoriously strict bandleader, is recording his band members

and groupies in an attempt to monitor what they are saying. The theme of

surveillance also relates to Zappa’s own fear of authority—a fear that stems, in

part, from Zappa’s brush with the law when he was younger.49 As suggested

earlier, this mistrust of authority manifests itself as mistrust of capitalism. This is

the dark, Orwellian, dystopian, paranoid side of Zappa and Uncle Meat. Indeed,

Zappa was paranoid from all sides: he mistrusted the pop-music industry, but he

mistrusted equally the world of classical composition, to which he felt like an

untrained outsider. The avant-garde aesthetic police were, according to Zappa,

to be viewed with as much skepticism as those hunting for gold records. The

theme of mechanical music also relates to this pessimistic vision, as if capitalism

threatens to turn everyone into mindless, marching automatons (but at least

they’d be cute toy monkey automatons in Zappa’s universe!). The speaking

theme occurs in the following tracks:

(2) The Voice of Cheese

(6) The Legend of the Golden Arches [3:16 - 3:27]
(7) Louie Louie (Live at the Royal Albert Hall in London)
(10) Our Bizarre Relationship [0:00 - 1:05]
(12) Electric Aunt Jemima [1:38 - 1:45]
(13) Prelude to King Kong [3:26 - 3:38]

49
As he explains in the Real Frank Zappa Book, when in his early 20s, Zappa was framed by an
undercover cop for making pornographic tapes. The cop asked him to make the tape, offered
Zappa money, Zappa made the tape as a joke with his friend, then Zappa was arrested, and
actually spent time in jail.
 84

(15) A Pound for a Brown on the Bus [1:27]

(16) Ian Underwood Whips It Out (Live on Stage in Copenhagen) [0:00 -
0:35]
(18) We Can Shoot You [1:35]
(19) If We’d All Been Living in California [0:00 - 1:14]

4. Snorks

This theme is characterized by bodily or animal-like sounds. Sometimes these

sounds are made electronically; sometimes they are made vocally. What is

interesting about these sounds is that they are all pre-language. The sound of

someone snoring or slurping on something has meaning (someone is tired or

bored; someone is thirsty, etc.), but it is not tied to language. Animal sounds are

similar.50 In Uncle Meat, these snores, snorks, and slurps are closely related to

the theme of electronic music: many of the sounds are themselves produced

electronically, as in the electronic noise that ends Zolar Czakl. Also, like the

electronic theme, these sounds sometimes have a cadential function, occurring

at the end of a track or section. Finally, these snork sounds often offer

commentary on the music itself. At the end of “The Legend of the Golden

Arches”, for example, there is the sound of someone snoring. This sound

provides a cadence for the preceding motoric, mechanical music. But the snoring

sound also introduces a critical gloss on the record, as if the perspective of the

(presumably bored) listener is captured on the record itself. Criticism of the

record is therefore incorporated back into the work itself, introducing a level of

self-reflexivity. The snork theme is found in the following tracks:

50
See my discussion of meaning in Chapter 1.
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(2) The Voice of Cheese

(4) Zolar Czakl [0:45]
(6) The Legend of the Golden Arches [0:45]
(9) Sleeping in a Jar [0:49]

5. Modal Improvisation

This theme is characterized by—no surprise— modal improvisation, usually over

a pedal harmony. This harmonic pedal has a stabilizing effect, creating a plateau

that contrasts the faster harmonic rhythm of other themes. These passages of

modal improvisation are expansive, which also contrasts the concision and

tension of the mechanical music material. In this sense, the modal improvisation

passages contribute to the “weights and balances” of the overall composition, as

moments of high instrumental activity—where there is great economy of

material—contrast moments where the material has time to grow in a more

organic way. These sections often feature Zappa’s guitar solos, providing a

picture of Zappa’s improvisatory creativity. This contrasts the more controlling

side of Zappa’s creativity, which deals with precise notated music and studio

edits. Overall, the most important feature of the modal improvisation theme, is

that it allows for a more expansive, flexible temporal world that contrasts the

concision and controlled rigidity of other themes, particularly the mechanical

music. The following tracks use the modal improvisation theme:

(3) Nine Types of Industrial Pollution [0:00 –6:00]

(13) Prelude to King Kong
(21) Project X
(23-28) King Kong
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6. Songs

The songs theme is characterized by, well, songs. By “songs” I mean: music with

a verse-chorus structure, regular—often blues-based—chord progressions,

lyrics, a regular drumbeat, etc. Just as Uncle Meat plays with tropes from avant-

garde electronic music and free-jazz (as we will see), so the record plays with

various song genres, particularly “doo-wop” and “psychedelic” music. Zappa has

a knack for capturing the essence of a given style: the guttural saxophone solo

and the bass voice “yeeeeah” on “Dog Breath in the Year of the Plague” perfectly

captures the doo-wop style, while the plodding drumbeat of “Mr Green Genes”

recalls the psychedelic music of The Jefferson Airplane. The lyrics of these

songs also play with their respective genres: “Dog Breath in the Year of the

Plague” talks about teenage obsessions with cars (“Going to El Monte Legion

Stadium, Chevy 39”), while “Sleeping in a Jar” links psychedelic music and B-

horror movies: instead of Alice in Wonderland acid trips, Zappa’s song explores a

kind of improbable nightmare scenario in which the parents are “sleeping in a

jar”. You can almost see the cheap sets and makeup in this song. Songs are

here:

(5) Dog Breath in the Year of the Plague [0:00 - 2:30]

(9) Sleeping in a Jar
(12) Electric Aunt Jemima
(17) Mr. Green Genes
(20) The Air
(22) Cruising for Burgers
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7. Live Recordings

This theme is characterized by recordings of live performances given by Zappa

and The Mothers of Invention. The quality of the recordings is poor—blown-out

and distorted. This contrasts the clean, dry studio recordings of the mechanical

and electronic music. Just as these studio recordings show the Mothers of

Invention as a virtuosic ensemble, playing precise, turn-on-a-dime avant-garde

music, the live recordings show the band as sloppy ruffians—a cover

band—belting out “God Bless America” at the Whiskey a Go-Go in LA, playing

“Louie Louie” on the “mighty and majestic” pipe organ at London’s Royal Albert

Hall—as if the kids broke into the church for the night to get drunk on wine. The

live recordings theme is related to the speaking theme. Both document slices of

real-time, which stand in direct contrast to the precisely pieced together studio-

time of the mechanical music: real-time is unedited; studio time is polished,

trimmed, and perfected. The Live recordings theme occurs in the following

tracks:

(7) Louie Louie (Live at the Royal Albert Hall in London)

(14) God Bless America (Live at the Whisky a Go-Go)
(16) Ian Underwood Whips It Out (Live on Stage in Copenhagen)

8. Free Jazz Solos

The theme of free jazz solos features squawky saxophone improvisations

reminiscent of Eric Dolphy’s playing and foreshadowing the playing of John Zorn.

These improvisations are recorded live (tracks 7 and 16), as well as in the studio

(track 13, 21, 25). Like the live recordings theme and the speaking theme, the
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free jazz solos are a messy counterpart to the clean, dry studio recordings of

mechanical music. They are about the spontaneous release of creative energy.

They are the equivalent, perhaps, to a Jackson Pollock “drip” painting, while the

mechanical music passages are more akin to carefully pieced-together Joseph

Cornell boxes or Rauschenberg combines. Free-jazz solos occur here:

(7) Louie Louie (Live at the Royal Albert Hall in London) [1:27]
(13) Prelude to King Kong
(16) Ian Underwood Whips It Out (Live on Stage in Copenhagen) [0:35]
(21) Project X [3:48]
(25) King Kong III

9. Percussion Solos

Finally, the theme of percussion solos is related to mechanical music. Both are

characterized by jittery, angular music recorded in a studio, often without reverb.

The percussion solos are also the thematic inverse of the free jazz solos: if the

free jazz solos represent spontaneous release of creative energy, the percussion

solos represent a kind of controlled release of this energy. The percussion solos

recall the music of Varèse and Stockhausen. They occur here:

(3) Nine Types of Industrial Pollution

(14) God Bless America (Live at the Whisky a Go-Go) [0:34]
(18) We Can Shoot You

Control and Spontaneity

By looking at each of these nine themes, two clear categories emerge: control

and spontaneity. The nine themes fall into the following two camps:
 89

Control Spontaneity
Mechanical Live recordings
Electronic Snorks
Percussion solos Free-jazz solos
Songs Modal improvisation
Speaking

It should be said that no theme belongs one-hundred percent to either category.

We discussed, for example, how the recordings of speaking, at times resemble a

kind of surveillance. Surveillance is, of course, a mechanism of control, not

spontaneity. Conversely, the mechanical music, while highly controlled, seems at

times to be sputtering out of control, as if the mechanism is short-circuiting.

Nevertheless, the arrangement we have is useful, for the following reason. As

already discussed, Zappa is concerned with “weights and balances”. We saw in

our analysis of the opening “Main Title Theme” how different types of material fit

together in a sculptural way, with moments of high activity—such as the opening

mechanical march—balanced by moments of temporal flexibility—such as the

harpsichord solo and electronic noise material. This issue of balance is a purely

formal and abstract concern, but it is, in my opinion, what saves Zappa’s work

from being mere cynical social commentary. As we have seen, Zappa is deeply

concerned with formal issues of balance, instrumental color, rhythm, harmony

and melody—the building blocks of much music. It is on top of this formal

framework that Zappa’s thematic concerns are then allowed to play out.
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Chief among these thematic concerns are opposing poles of the creative process

itself: control and spontaneity. As discussed, Zappa is by nature a control freak.

The controlling Zappa is the Zappa carefully splicing together the mechanical

music; it is Zappa recording his band members’ casual conversation in an

attempt to surround their “real life” with his art. But Zappa is no fool. He knows

that art can’t be controlled entirely. That is why Uncle Meat is also full of sloppy

live recordings, expansive modal improvisations, and cathartic free jazz solos.

Like two rams locking horns, the record sets in motion a giant dialectical tension

between these profoundly different creative pulls. And just as formal balance

depends on carefully juxtaposing objects of different weights and sizes, so the

creative process oscillates between opposing needs for control and spontaneity.
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Conclusion

Three Characters

In some ways, this dissertation sounds like a joke. Instead of a priest, rabbi, and

Buddhist monk we have Morton Feldman, Lars von Trier, and Frank Zappa. It’s

hard to imagine what this cast of characters is doing in the same story. But, as

we have seen, these artists are united by a struggle to find balance in their

creative process, and their work reflects this struggle. In Feldman’s work, the

primary struggle is between what we might call sound and composition. Feldman

wants sound itself to control the composition; he doesn’t want the act of

composition to control sound. In The Five Obstructions, we saw opposing views

on the limits of art: Leth accepts certain boundaries that art should not cross; von

Trier refuses to accept these boundaries. This opposition between Leth and von

Trier is an opposition between the perfect—which is the world of controlled,

formal abstraction—and the human—which is the domain of unpredictable

emotion. Finally, we saw how Uncle Meat captures opposing tendencies of

Zappa’s creative process—specifically control and spontaneity— by tenuously

balancing an eclectic variety of compositional and production techniques. What

conclusions can we draw by considering these artists side-by side?

Feldman, Zappa, and Varèse

Let’s first look at Zappa and Feldman together. One would be hard-pressed to

find two composers more different. Zappa’s music is often fast, brittle,
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condensed—even schizophrenic. Feldman’s music is almost always slow and

quiet. His late pieces unfold over long spans of time with relatively little change.

Zappa’s music opens the window and lets the world in. It engages politics and

social trends and is full of references to other types of music: rock, avant-garde,

doo-wop, R&B. Feldman keeps art separate from politics, and he avoids

references to other music. Feldman is interested in art with a capital A. Zappa, as

we have seen, is also interested in art with a capital A, but the persona he

creates through his music is “strictly commercial”, interested only in

entertainment with a capital E.

But there are also curious similarities between Feldman and Zappa. First, both

count Edgard Varèse as a major influence on their work. As discussed, when he

was 15 Zappa first heard Ionisation and was so impressed, he wrote a fan letter

to Varèse. A few years later, Zappa famously included the Varèse quote “the

present day composer refuses to die” on the back of his first album cover,

undoubtedly introducing countless rock musicians to the elder composer. Zappa

was drawn, in particular, to Varèse’s sculptural approach to composition. Like

Varèse, Zappa composed by juxtaposing blocks of sound. As we saw in Uncle

Meat, these blocks are often distinguished, not by purely sonic features, but by

reference to other styles of music, as well as by more conventional contrasts in

musical texture.
 93

Feldman also deeply admired Varèse, whose music spoke with “its incredible

tenacity rather than its methodology.”51 Varèse provided Feldman with an

alternative to the Stravinsky/Schoenberg dichotomy with a tactile, sculptural

approach to sound. Feldman was also deeply concerned with the tactility of

sound, with sound as material. This is something he learned from Varèse.

Walking down the street one day, Varèse reminded Feldman to always consider

the time it takes for sound to travel from instrument to audience.52 Feldman took

this advice to heart throughout his career.

Another thing Feldman and Zappa share with Varèse is an aversion to

conventional musical development. “Conventional music development” refers to

organic music with a dialectical, logical relationship between musical themes.

This is the Beethoven model par excellence. Both Feldman and Zappa have

problems with this kind of conventional development, but they deal with this

problem in opposite ways. Zappa cuts and pastes fragments into a larger

compositional whole. The differentiation between parts is always “on view”; the

edits are visible; they are the main subject of the work. Feldman also juxtaposes

fragments, but through orchestration, harmony, tempo, dynamics, and scale he

seeks to blur this differentiation, like colors in a Rothko painting. Indeed, this

notion of differentiation may be the fork in the road, with Zappa going one way

and Feldman another, but both started on a path paved by Varèse.

51
Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2000), 41.
52
Feldman, 170.
 94

There is one final, curious similarity between Zappa and Feldman: in writing and

lectures, both preferred a vernacular, informal kind of language to something

more formal and academic. Why is this? Again, Varèse may provide an answer.

An outsider to academia, Varèse personified the image of composer as

maverick, rebel, and outsider. This image of the artist as maverick appealed to

Zappa and Feldman who—along with von Trier—had rebellious streaks. Each

saw his work as, above all, different from the mainstream—whether that was the

mainstream of popular culture or the mainstream of academia.

Utopian / Dystopian

In spite of this Varèse connection, differences between Zappa and Feldman

should not be underestimated. Their contrasting musical surfaces do indeed give

way to fundamentally differing views on the relationship between music and

meaning. For Feldman, meaning is painful and untrustworthy. Postwar

composers, from Babbitt to Cage, focused on structural rigor, trying to build an

ordered world out of the ashes of the Second World War. Feldman saw their

unbending faith in positivism and rationality as the very thing that sent everyone

to war in the first place. Feldman became attracted to the sensuality of the

Abstract Expressionists precisely because they escaped this meaning. They

created an abstract world of color, shapes, and textures—a world that for a short

time allowed an escape from a world poisoned by the Holocaust. Feldman, like

the Abstract Expressionists, creates a utopian and nostalgic look at a pre-

Holocaust time. He wants to create through his music another world without the
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painful memories of the past. But Feldman knows this nostalgic, utopian project

is impossible, so he goes about tediously “unfixing” meaning; he confronts it

head on, quietly tip-toeing around meaning and dismantling it at night, while it is

sleeping. “Only by ‘unfixing’ the elements traditionally used to construct a piece

of music”, Feldman writes, “could the sounds exist in themselves—not as

symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.”53

The ultimately affirming thing about Feldman—as well as Beckett—is that they

don’t just dismantle meaning and leave it undone. This is the procedure of the

existentialists. Beckett and Feldman go one stop further: they take baby steps

towards building it back again. This is a quietly tragic occupation—“post-tragedy”,

perhaps. Feldman and Beckett know their projects are fatally flawed, but they go

on—not for immortality, but to celebrate the nowness of mortality. That is why

both dwell on their materials—words and sound. However flawed, these

materials are what they have left. Both Feldman and Beckett create a quiet

apotheosis. They accept their limitations and flaws and just do whatever they can

do, however compromised or rusty. This is Beckett’s “little block heart beating

face to endlessness.”.54

Zappa’s project comes out of a different worldview: darker, more cynical,

dystopian. For Zappa, meaning is like scraps of trash on the highway. It’s a dirty

53
Feldman, 35
54
Samuel Beckett, Lessness. In Gontarski, S. E., ed. The Complete Short Prose,
1929-1989. (New York: Grove Press) 197.
 96

job, but the role of the artist is to pick up this trash and rearrange it—to make

junk sculpture out of the crap on the side of the road. Uncle Meat is a rickety,

sonic junk sculpture assembled from hyper-active mechanical marches,

swooshing electronic noises, snippets of conversation, animal sounds, expansive

modal improvisations, lo-fi live recordings, stylized pop songs, free-jazz freak-

outs, and avant-garde percussion solos. Zappa’s assemblage of these cultural

scraps is a detached procedure. He is not personally invested in his materials.

His work just reflects his external environment, not his “inner-self”. In some ways,

Zappa even portrays himself as a victim of society. Through his work, he says:

“Hey it’s not my fault my music is full of clichés about teenagers, bathroom

humor, and making money; my art is just a reflection of the junk that’s around

me.” Zappa deals with his predicament through scatological jokes, sarcasm, and

detached irony. Yet in spite of this cynicism, Zappa’s project is redeemed, in my

view, by a genuine concern for conventional issues of composition: good notes,

good rhythm, orchestration, and an acute sense of timing and form. In Zappa’s

music there is a sense of virtuosity in making these junk sculptures.

Both Feldman and Zappa, therefore, deal with a crisis of meaning: what do we do

after the horrors and injustice of the early Twentieth Century? Both see meaning

as contaminated, but neither buys the existentialist idea that meaning is dead.

Zappa’s response to this crisis is dystopian. He holds a mirror up to the world,

making sonic sculptures out of the junk that surrounds him. Feldman’s response

is utopian. He seeks to undo meaning and begin the slow process of rebuilding,
 97

but with awareness that this effort will never be finished. This sense of

continuation, in spite of the knowledge that an end will never arrive, contributes,

in my view, to the sense of longing—even sadness—in Feldman’s music.

If Zappa’s work reflects the cultural junk that surrounds him, Lars von Trier’s work

reflects—as we discussed in Chapter 1—the violence and brutality that surround

him. Von Trier creates characters with utopian ideals—Selma in Dancer in The

Dark, Bess in Breaking the Waves, Grace in Dogville. These innocent

characters—and by extension these utopian ideals—are, in each film,

systematically destroyed by the cruelty of the society in which they live. But the

key question becomes: are von Trier’s characters innocent martyrs, or is their

blind commitment to their utopian ideals just plain stupid?

By asking this question, von Trier essentially corners the audience and forces us

to choose sides: if we believe von Trier’s tormented characters are genuine

martyrs for their ideals, then the possibility of utopia is sustained; if we see von

Trier’s characters as fools for allowing themselves to be manipulated by the

selfishness of others, then the impossibility of utopia is reaffirmed.

Ultimately, what we have called a “crisis of meaning” is also a crisis of faith.

Putting faith in something outside oneself is a kind of “letting go”—a surrendering

of control to some higher power. That “higher power” is often thought of in

religious terms, as some form of God, but this is not the only way to conceive of

faith. Morton Feldman puts his faith in sound; Frank Zappa puts his faith in
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“weights and measures”—in the ability to arrange and rearrange his

compositional junk sculptures; Lars von Trier seems unwilling to put his faith in

anything, and his films dramatize this crisis of faith.

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Appendix A
100
101
 102

Appendix B

Text from The Perfect Human by Jorgen Leth

NARRATOR: Here is the human. Here is the human. Here is the perfect human.
We will see the perfect human functioning. How does such a number function?
What kind of thing is it? We will look into that. We will investigate that. Now we
will see how the perfect human looks and what it can do. This is how an ear
looks. And here is a pair of knees. An here a foot. Another ear. Here is an eye.
Look at this humans eye. Then, a mouth, a mouth and another mouth. Look. The
perfect human moving in a room. The perfect human can move in a room. The
room is boundless and radiant with light. It is an empty room .here are no
boundaries. Here is nothing. Walking running jumping falling look now he falls.
How does he fall. This is how he falls. Look. Now she lies down. How does she
lie down? This is how she lies down. Like this. Yes there he is. Who is he? What
can he do? What does he want? Why does he move like that? How does he
move like that? Look at him. Look at him now. And now. Look at him all the time.
Now the music is gone. No music anymore. The perfect human in a room with
now boundaries and with nothing. And a voice saying a few words. This voice
saying a few words. Look at him now. Look at him all the time. Now the perfect
human undresses. The clothes come off. Bowtie. Coat shoes, trousers, boots,
socks, dress, nylons, bra, pants.The clothes come off. How is it to touch the
perfect human? How is the skin? Is it smooth is it warm? Is it soft is it dry? Is it
well cared for? How is the skin of the chin? How is it on the legs? The arms? The
throat? Here is the bed. Here is the bed. Fresh fragrant sheets. A soft spring
mattress. A bed in this room .the room is no longer empty. There is a bed in this
room. The bed in which the perfect human sleeps and makes love. Listen to the
human getting ready. Listen to the perfect human living listen to its sounds. What
is this human thinking?
 103

MAN: “today, too, I experienced something I hope to understand in a few days.

Around my left hand was shining a ring of hazy white flames. I considered
carefully the left side of my own dark coat. In the middle of my heart there was a
small white spot. I don’t know what its’ supposed to mean.”

NARRATOR: Now there is a table too in the room. And chairs and the human,
the music and the voice. The perfect human is going to eat and to drink. We will
see a meal./ how does the perfect human eat? We will see its eyes and its mouth
eating. We will hear the sound of knife and fork we will see the fish being carved.
And the wine being poured into the glasses. Dinner is served. Lovely boiled
salmon with boiled potatoes and sauce Hollandaise. With it, a bottle of Chablis.

What is he thinking? What is he thinking? Is the perfect human thinking of the

room he is in? The food he eats? Happiness? Love? Death? What is the perfect
human thinking? Look at him. What is he thinking?

MAN: (quietly singing a song to himself)

What is fortune so capricious? Why is joy so quickly done?
Why did you leave me? Why are you gone?
Very, very delicious! (sarcastically)
Today, too I experienced something I hope to understand in a few days.
 104

Appendix C
Uncle Meat Notes and Analysis

SIDE 1

1. Uncle Meat Main Title Theme

[0:00] Mechanical
• Toy monkey drummer
• Sped-up tape
• Cheap, “tinny” fidelity
• Inhuman accuracy
• Ostinato as metaphor for mass production, assembly line
• March as metaphor for fascism and rigid control (metaphor for
Zappa’s control of band)
[1:04] Harpsichord solo
• Contrasts busy ensemble playing of mechanical march
• Harpsichord is mechanical instrument, but has natural acoustic
resonance
• Referentiality of instrument as “classical”
[1:27 – 1:55] Electronic
• Contrasts natural resonance of harpsichord
• Abstract noise, contrasts referentiality of harpsichord
• But is itself referential: WDR or Forbidden Planet (“Sci-Fi” or
“avant-garde electronic music”)
• Structural consolidation – temporal flexibility balances rigidity of
previous mechanical section

2. The Voice of Cheese

[0:00] Speaking
• Introduces Suzy Creamcheese
• Ambiguity: is this a skit or an interview?
• “Hello Teenage America [chuckle]. I’m Suzy Creamcheese”
• Suzie Creamcheese as groupie, spokesperson, outsider,
character
[0:05] Snort
• Electronic or organic sound?
• Misogynistic?
[0:06] Suzy Creamcheese (continued)
[0:19] Snort (longer)
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[0:21] Suzy Creamcheese (continued)

[0:24] Snort (faster)
[0:25 – 0:26] Suzy Creamcheese (”I’ve come home to my mothers”)
• Mothers of Invention and Zappa as shelter for dispossessed,
outsiders

3. Nine Types of Industrial Pollution

[0:00] Modal Improvisation

• Asynchronized percussion, guitar, and bass solo
• Three solos or trio? Hard panning separates instruments (guitar:
center channel; percussion: left and right; “bass”: hard left
• Modal improvisation over harmonic pedal
• Bass solo in left channel is actually a guitar solo pitched down
(bends aren’t idiomatic to bass)
• Synchronicity, illusion of live band improvising, created in studio
• Fast versus slow: solo is fast, underlying drum beat and Rhodes
is slow and bluesy. Like a collage of different temporal worlds.
[2:00] Solo continues with an intensification of percussion solo
[5:40] Begins winding down
[5:56 – 6:00] Blues guitar bend fades out (reverb added at end)

4. Zolar Czakl

[0:00] Mechanical
• Angular, atonal ensemble piece
• Mechanical March
• Regular rhythm recalls opening Theme
[0:45 – 0:54] Electronic
• Sounds organic, bodily
• Also recalls snort
• Cadential

5. Dog Breath in the Year of the Plague

[0:00] Song
• “Rock n’ Roll” song
• Traditional song form
• Plays with tropes from 50’s Rock n’ Roll: bass voice “yeaaaah”,
gutteral saxophone solo, voices pitched up chipmunk-like,
acoustic guitar
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• Naïve pleasure of pop: “la la la la la” (although this is not

entirely sarcastic; Zappa does love this music. This shows in the
care he puts in the details of the song)
• Lyrics: “Going to El Monte”, “Primer me Caruca Chevy 39”,
“Fuzzy dice”
• Lyrics refer to teenage car culture
[2:30] Mechanical
• Atonal bridge
• Development of Main Title Theme
• Strange percussion loop, ostinato (what is the difference
between a loop and an ostinato?)
[3:30 – 4:00]
• Gil Evans-like brass/wind arrangements
• Fanfare

6. The Legend of the Golden Arches

[0:00] Mechanical
• Ostinato bass in the harpsichord and Rhodes
• Stravinsky-like isorhythmic ostinato over steady drum-beat
recalls L’Histoire du Soldat
• New theme stated in winds
[0:42] Theme restated supported by harmony (harmony filled-in)
[1:00] Klezmer-like clarinet solo over ostinato, drums
[1:35] Return to theme (key returns)
[1:52] Snort, Snork, Snore
• Laugh, snore, celeste sounds (recalls Lumpy Gravy)
• Comments on music: as if the listener is obliviously sleeping
during the mechanical ostinato
• Music cadences into laugh
• Bridge between musical material and concrete material
[1:54] Celeste plays Uncle Meat theme (slower)
• Harpsichord continues solo passage from Main Title Theme
• Celeste/winds augment harpsichord solo; reharmonize it
• Provides formal recap, sense of recurring themes, sense of
structure
[3:16] Speaking
• Suzy Creamcheese
• Her monologue/conversation also returns after recap of Uncle
Meat theme
• She talks about music: “the first thing that attracted me to the
Mothers’ music…”
• “Everybody was hissing and booing…”
• Incorporates gloss, criticism into work
[3:27] “…Turn down their amplifiers…”
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7. Louie Louie (Live at the Royal Albert Hall in London)

[0:00] Live Recording

• Zappa talking to audience at live performance in London
• Mothers as raucous, uncontrolled, sloppy, ruffians
• Mothers as live cover band is direct contrast to controlled,
studio-manipulated, virtuosic “avant-garde” that precedes it
• Amateur versus Virtuoso
• “This man’s trumpet”: mix of sexual suggestion and formal
propriety
• Points to hidden agenda under daily discourse
• Zappa as irreverent; but audience loves it
[1:15] “Louie Louie”
• Begins with pipe organ, then mothers join in, like impatient kids.
• Quality of recording is very poor, levels blown out
[1:25] Free Jazz Solo
• Splice to free jazz, Eric Dolphy-like sax solo
• Free jazz is another kind of contrast to “Louie Louie”, but also
contrasts strictness of studio control (see Attali’s discussion of
free jazz in Noise)
[1:40] Speaking
• Zappa: “Let’s hear it for the London Philharmonic Orchestra”
• Swipe at both his audience and the LSO audience classical
establishment
• Applause, feedback (same thing?)
[2:15] Electronic
• Transitional
• Recalls Poeme Electronique
• Cuts from cadential audience clapping to noise of live stage
• Transitional signal that changes recording space

8. The Dog Breath Variations

[0:00] Mechanical
• Acoustic guitar, electric guitar, synthesizer
• Melody expanded harmonically
[0:40] Marimba, vibraphone enters
• Further development
• Mix of avant-garde instrumentation with commercial, jingle-type
theme
• Theme as jingle
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[1:46] Electronic
• Single electronic noise
• Acts as cadential figure, like end of previous track

SIDE 2

9. Sleeping in a Jar

[0:00] Song
• Links “Psychedelic” song genre to B-movie horror genre
• “Sleeping in a jar…mom and dad are sleeping” B-movie, horror
movie, twilight zone
• Zappa uses certain stylistic tropes—just enough the capture the
essence of a genre (drum beat, for example)
[00:49] Slurp/Snork/Snore
• Slurp/electronic sound

10. Our Bizarre Relationship

[0:00] Recorded Conversation

• Zappa and Suzy Creamcheese (more monologue for SC)
• Behind the scenes of “Rock n’ Roll”: groupies, sex
• exposes mechanism of show biz
[1:05] “ha ha” as cadential figure

11. The Uncle Meat Variations

[0:00] Mechanical
• Slower than “Main Title Theme”
• Not as mechanical as opening? Or just different mechanism?
• Augments, stretches out Main Theme
• Harpsichord plodding and steady percussion out of sync (also
recalls L’Histoire ostinato)
[0:54]
• Winds return with main theme faster, but over new, plodding
background rhythm
• Instrumental variations: marimba, synthesizer, and harpsichord
take theme and develop it
• Great notes
[2:48] “ya ya ya ya ya” recalls “la la la la la” of “Dog Breath”
• “Fuzzy dice and bongos” sung by operatic soprano
[3:30]
• Eruption of “Rock n’ Roll” psych sound, a la Hendrix
• Hammond organ
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• The Who guitar solo sped up clean

[4:30] Acoustic guitar solo
[4:37] Metal cowbell punctuation

12. Electric Aunt Jemima

[0:00] Song
• “Doo-wop” song
• Voices pitched up
• “Caress me Aunt Jemima”: sexualizes a brand
[1:35] Fade-out
[1:38 – 1:45] “I can’t tell when you’re telling the truth…I’m not…How
do I know anything you’ve said to me is true…you don’t”

13. Prelude to King Kong

[0:00] Mechanical + Modal Improvisation + Free jazz solo

• Motoric ostinato (Stravinsky with faster drumbeat)
• Squawky, improvisation over drone
• Sax/winds heterophony, melody degenerates into heterophony,
kazoo?
• Formally, the track has s stabilizing effect, not as much stopping
and starting as preceding track
• Steady ostinato gives it plateau quality
[3:24] Electronic
• Interrupted by electronic sound
• Almost like a skidding sound foley effect
• Like the machine of King Kong or the mechanism of the music
skidded off the road (humorous?)
[3:26 – 3:38] Speaking
• Salesman’s voice, selling high school yearbook

14. God Bless America (Live at the Whisky a Go-Go)

[0:00] Live Recording

• Drunk, sarcastic bar rendition of “God bless America”
• Send-up of drunken, masculine nationalism
• Mothers as motley ruffians
[0:34 – 1:09] Percussion Solo
• “New music” percussion solo a la Stockhausen
• Dry recording and precision contrasts sloppy live recording of
“God Bless America”
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15. A Pound for a Brown on the Bus

[0:00] Mechanical
• Faster version of “Legend of the Golden Arches” and “Uncle
Meat Variations”
• Sped-up on tape
• Instruments have a chirping, birdlike quality: sounds very
electronic
[1:27] Speaking
• Voice says “fade”
• Semantics, structuralism, production conventions
• Meaning in music conventions
• Use word “fade” instead of fading instruments out

16. Ian Underwood Whips It Out (Live on Stage in Copenhagen)

[0:00] Speaking
• Monologue or documentary-like interview about how Ian
Underwood got to be in Mothers of Invention
• Like Suzy Creamcheese’s talk about groupies: shows behind
the scenes of band
• Brings mechanism of production to surface (Marxist)
• Provides narrative context for music
• Phrase “whip it out” is juvenile, phallic joke
[0:35] Free Jazz Solo
• Eric Dolphy-like solo
• Live concert recording
• Drums and saxophone
[2:00] Bass and organ fade in to harmonize solo
[4:11] Drums stop
• Organ drone
• Sax still squawking in high register over slight organ sound
• Ligeti-like cluster (relates to feedback?)
[5:04] Ends (no electronic or spoken cadence)

SIDE 3

17. Mr. Green Genes

[0:00] Song
• Melody also has “Psychedelic” feel until chorus
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• Organic, bodily theme “eat your greens”

• “Mr. Green Genes”: play on word “genes”
• Instruments play vocal theme, gives theme iconic quality
[2:50 – 3:14] Coda
• Melody arrives on high point to form a proper musical cadence

18. We Can Shoot You

[0:00] Percussion solo

• Free rhythm
• Bicycle horn
[0:32] Mechanical
• Serial sounding, atonal counterpoint
• “New music” jittery
[0:51] Pitched higher
[1:35] “dr dumm pa pa pa”
• Interruption of music with sounds of rehearsal
• “Three, four”
[1:47] Theme
• Held notes/ homophony
• Contrasts earlier counterpoint
• Music less jittery
• Chorale-like

19. If We’d All Been Living in California

[0:00] Speaking
• Zappa arguing with band members about money
• “To get your name in magazines he wants $500 a month!”
• Zappa as boss
[1:14] “This fucking band is starving!”
• Discontent among band members
• Like mechanism propping up Uncle Meat smile, we see the
reality of being in a band
• California as frontier

20. The Air

[0:00] Song
• “Doo-Wop” song
• “The air escaping from your mouth”
[2:57] Second verse becomes more surreal
• Also personal anecdotal: “I got busted” relates to Zappa’s arrest
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• Outsider vs. straight society

21. Project X

[0:00] Modal Improvisation

• Acoustic guitar strumming open suspended chord
[0:28] Mechanical
• Vibraphone and marimba
• Clarinets and trumpet enter with angular, atonal melody that
recalls the “Main Title Theme
[0:52] Instruments drop out
[1:00] Instruments enter again
• Tremolo in mallet instruments is an idée fixe for Zappa
• Tremolo gesture of commercial music (car commercial)
[1:48] New section
• Flute clusters (recalls Requiem Canticles)
[2:12] Electronic-sounding
• High-pitched fluttering material
• Angular, but also has sustained material
[3:47] Free jazz solo
• Zorn-like saxophone solo
[3:56] Returns to jittery material
[4:46] Electronic cadence

22. Cruising for Burgers

[0:00] Song
• Song with many changes
• Recalls songs from Freak Out
[0:22] Zappa sings verse
[0:32] Chorus
[0:55] “My phony freedom card brings to me instantly, ecstasy”
• 6/8 theme
• Acoustic guitar
• Theme/jingle, ends on high note
[0:59 – 2:14] Theme

SIDE 4 (King Kong)

23. King Kong Itself

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[0:00] Modal Improvisation

• Proto-fusion
• Continuity, drone, modal expansive
• Jazz/rock kazoo sound
• All the instruments play the same theme (Shows they know how
to play their instruments)
[0:51] End

24. King Kong II

[0:00] Rhodes/ Wurlitzer solo

[1:19] End

25. King Kong III

[0:00] Free Jazz Solo

• Gong
• Ian Underwood saxophone solo (panned across stereo field)
• Recalls Eric Dolphy free jazz solo
• Sounds of him making screaming noises also
[1:45] Guitar solo starts

26. King Kong IV (long)

[0:00] Modal Improvisation

• Zappa solo? (what instrument is he playing?)
• Statement of theme in clarinet, piano, pitched-up kazoo sound
• Solo becomes unison (electronic manipulation, illusion of
togetherness)
[6:17] Jazz comping on guitar

27. King Kong V

[0:33] Breakdown
• Out of tune synthesizer or harpsichord?

28. King Kong VI

[0:00] long
• Gong drum solo
• Noise
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• Smooth groove breaks down

[0:30] Theme returns with a slower groove
• Now a 6/8 shuffle
• Zappa guitar solo (also filtered)
• Or saxophone solo? Or Jean Luc Ponty violin?
• Zappa wah-wah guitar solo
[5:49] Silly drum solo
• (Sped up) too fast
• Recalls Toy Monkey Drummer
• Also a send up of virtuosity
[6:21] Theme played by squawking pitched up winds
• Out of control toy monkey drummer loop that is pitched up
[7:24] Fade out
 115

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