The genuine genius of Zappa’s Bogus Pomp
OSM CONCERT sees Nagano reciprocate the kindness shown to him by the composer
“Inever had any intention of writing rock music,” Frank Zappa once confessed. “I always wanted to compose more serious music and have it be performed in concert halls, but I knew no one would play it. So I figured that if anyone was ever going to hear anything I composed, I’d have to get a band together and play rock music. That’s how I got started.”
Zappa will forever be remembered for his scabrous and scatological — some say juvenile and smutty — view of human nature: the sex act in all its variations, televangelists, celebrities and politicians, reefer-smoking hippies, cocaine-snorting businessmen, and Jewish princesses, Catholic girls, disco boys and Valley girls, in such songs as Plastic People, Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow, Jesus Thinks You’re a Jerk, When Yuppies Go to Hell and Why Does It Hurt When I Pee.
And then there is his “classical music,” which OSM director Kent Nagano said “gave me my first break” in the early 1980s. Nagano also had much to do with Zappa’s “serious” music finding a lasting place in the modern canon.
On Saturday, just over a month before the 20th anniversary of Zappa’s passing, at age 52 of prostate cancer, Nagano will conduct the OSM in a Canadian première performance of Bogus Pomp, one of the composer’s longest and most difficultto-play pieces. Nagano first conducted and recorded it with Zappa in 1983 with the London Symphony Orchestra, Nagano’s debut with a major orchestra.
Bogus Pomp “is a parody of movie music clichés and mannerisms,” the selftaught Zappa once wrote. “Built into the composition is a little psychodrama based on the idea that in an orchestra, the principal violist never gets a good solo. What happens in the minds of the other principal string players when the lowly viola gets all the hot licks? Something stupid, of course, culminating in the principal cellist’s improvised emotional outburst near the end of the piece. All of this is supported by cheesy fanfares, drooling sentimental passages and predictable ‘scary music.”
In 1981, Nagano spied some sheet music by Zappa at the Paris office of prickly composer-conductor Pierre Boulez, who had commissioned the musician to write the Grammy-winning The Perfect Stranger. Nagano contacted Zappa, and the young conductor was invited to his concert in Berkeley, Calif. — Nagano’s first rock show — and handed some scores.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” he told the East Bay Express, “but I didn’t expect to see a work of the difficulty of an Elliott Carter score, the complexity of a Boulez work, the sincerity of Takemitsu and the driving intensity of Varèse.”
The music took Nagano more time than usual to get through and, he told British Zappaphile Andrew Greenaway, was of “extraordinary quality. … (It was) very surprising that anybody could write something so original, much less someone who wasn’t known in the classical music field.”
The real Zappa, Nagano once told me, referring to the rock maestro’s “outrageous” image, was “very serious, uncompromising, meticulous, with clear thought — just a genius. That’s not an understatement. He has a brilliant mind, brilliant sense of creativity that simply does not stop.” He quietly but em- phatically added: “History will be kind to Frank Zappa.”
And, it turned out, Zappa was kind to Nagano. After investigating the budding career of the conductor of the part-amateur Berkeley Symphony, Zappa asked him to conduct the London Sym- phony Orchestra for a recording. “When you stop and think about it,” Nagano said, “someone in his position could have hired anybody he wanted, and the fact that he gave me a chance, I never, ever will forget that.”
Zappa invited Nagano to his Los Angeles home studio — the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen — for some preliminary rehearsals. “I knew that for him it was just as important to have music performed as close to perfection as possible as it was for me. That’s one reason why I got my reputation — both negatively and positively: because I rehearse until its really very, very accurate.”
Nagano recalled of the London session, “I knew what the orchestra members were going to think: music by some rock musician — this is going to be an easy day. ... So we began with the most difficult score, and you could just see the panic set in when the players opened the parts.”
Bogus Pomp starts with a portentous brass fanfare, then explodes into the sort of melodramatic suspense themes heard in movies, eventually becoming a personal musical struggle, as Zappa described above, with plenty of side alleys taken with bizarre rhythms.
Zappa’s music contained “no virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake,” Nagano told writer Dan Forte. “This is not fusion in any way; this is totally uncompromised symphonic writing, written within that tradition. And built into it are so many dimensions that every time you go back and work on a piece, you see a new level of depth that you weren’t able to see before — which is one aspect of the great works. ... Another aspect of great works of art is that people of all levels of sophistication can hear it and relate to it on some level. ... And Frank’s music passes those two tests.”
Saturday night, Nagano will pair Bogus Pomp with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony because they “share certain similarities.” This could be an attempt to legitimize Zappa’s work for cultural snobs who might object to the contemporary canon being infiltrated by rock’s equalopportunity offender, whose reputation grows worldwide with increasingly frequent performances of his compositions.
Zappa’s classical work spans much of his output, which includes more than 60 albums released in his lifetime, plus many posthumous releases. In addition to the Nagano and Boulez collaborations, there’s Ahead of Their Time, featuring the Mothers of Invention, and Lumpy Gravy (both recorded in the late 1960s); Orchestral Favorites (1975), recorded with Los Angeles symphonic musicians; and The Yellow Shark (1992) by Ensemble Modern, a prestigious European group specializing in contemporary music, which released another stunningly recorded Zappa collection, Greggery Peccary & Other Persuasions, in 2003.
A Zappa classical “hits” compilation was titled, sarcastically or not, Strictly Genteel. Saturday night’s show—uh,concert—should be anything but. The OSM performs Frank
Zappa’s Bogus Pomp and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Saturday at 9 p.m. at the Maison symphonique. The performance is sold out.