Shut Up and Play the Zappa!

Frank Zappa is a man whose work is iconclastic, political, virtuosic, scatological, and brilliant.  An outspoken advocate for the rights of musicians and artists to express themselves free from government intervention, he often stretched and broke through the boundaries of good taste in his own work.  His career was one of a mix of popular music, 20th century art music, theater and humor,  independent and unique.  He was also an acute and careful observer and commentator of politics and humanity, and often cloaked his observations in scathing humor.

His extraordinarily demanding music left him often unsatisfied with the efforts of live classical musicians, until near the end of his life, when collaborations with Kent Nagano, Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble Modern left us with a legacy of demanding, quirky and fascinating works for chamber ensembles. Our program includes much of this zany ensemble music of Zappa but will also showcase his two main classical influences, Igor Stravinsky and Edgar Varese.  Intensely compelled by both composers, one famous story unfolds:  During a period as a child, he listened non-stop to the music of Varese.  He couldn't figure out why his mother wanted him to move into another room to listen to this music.  "But mom, listen to the siren!" 

“A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians. […] In my compositions, I employ a system of weights, balances, measured tensions and releases—in some way similar to Varese’s aesthetic. The similarities are best illustrated by comparison to a Calder mobile: a multicolored whatchamacallit, dangling in space, that has big blobs of metal connected to pieces of wire, balanced ingeniously against little metal dingleberries on the other end.”

-Zappa

Program to include: G-Spot Tornado, Outrage at Valdez, The Perfect Stranger, Be-Bop Tango, Peaches En Regalia, rock covers as well as Varese's Octandre and the Stravinsky Octet.

When: Jan 22, 2012 8:00 PM

Where: 20th Century Theater, 3021 Madison Road, Cincinnati, OH

Tickets: $35 General / $20 Students

Purchase HERE