SHIP ARRIVING TOO LATE TO SAVE A DROWNING WITCH - THEM OR US: THE MODERN ROCK BAND AND INSTRUMENTATION

At the same time as Zappa was busy preparing the recording of his orchestral scores, he was more than ever behaving as the conductor of his rock band on tour, giving highstanding and technically impressive performances. Some of the orchestral pieces also found their way on the rock albums from this period, the "Drowning witch" album (1982) including "Envelopes", "You are what you is" and "Them or us" (1984) both including sections from "Sinister footwear". The latter composition hasn't been recorded yet in it's orchestral form, but the scores are available at Barfko Swill.
"Ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch" begins with two normal popsongs and then proceeds with an awe-inspiring combination of Zappa's compositorial skills and improvising capacities on guitar. The instrumental parts of the title track are an example of a composition made up of several motives and variation parts, played in different tempi as in "Debra kadabra" from the Bongo fury subpage. Other then in the mostly unisono "Debra kadabra" track, the bass part in "Drowning witch" is frequently used for counterpoint movements. It's abstract atonal music, the second example being played in a thrilling high tempo.

Drowning witch, 2:30 till 2:38 (midi file)
Drowning witch, 2:47 till 3:03 (midi file)

Drowning witch, 2:30 till 2:38 (transcription).
Drowning witch, 2:47 till 3:03 (transcription).

On the album liner notes Steve Vai gets credited for the playing of "impossible guitar parts". Vai commented that Zappa would frequently come up with try out score to see if it was feasable for him to do things on guitar that Zappa himself thought was impossible. Zappa himself in Guitar Player, February 1983, confides to us: "What usually happens is this: if I put another guitarist on my album, I hire that person because he can play things that I can't play. And if the music requires a certain type of performance, and the compostition is the real crux of the biscuit, then you don't want to be unfair to the composition and play it yourself if you're going to play it wrong. So I get people who can do it. It's not a matter of being lazy; if there's something on a given song that I think is in my department, I'm going to play it. But if it's something that will be difficult or impossible for me to do, I'd just as soon get somebody who feels comfortable with that style and have them do it." I can only take this for granted, I'm a lousy pianist and I can't play guitar at all. I can only transcribe deducing things - like apparently it goes as such or so -, but don't ask me to play it.
Next are regular and unorthodox rock 'n roll, following upon each other on the album. The first is "Valley girl", a piece for which Zappa's daughter Moon suggested the lyrics. Frank took the bait. It has two short rock themes and a vamp, over which Moon is doing her Encino accent. Moon took an acetate to a radio station and it got that much attention, that it was released as a single shortly after. It climbed up to number 32 in the billboard top 40, Zappa's only serious U.S. hitsingle. The other is the opening of "I come from nowhere", rhythmically differentiated and using an accentuated dissonant G sharp plus A. Varying meters come along, normal 4/4 and some odd ones. The 27/16 bar is a fast pattern breaking atonal movement, possibly an "impossible one" for Steve Vai. The middle of the song contains an unusual chromatic melody formation, sung over counterpoint bass lines and an ongoing rhythm guitar. A strong guitar solo rounds of this piece.

Valley girl, opening (midi file)
I come from nowhere, opening (midi file)

Valley girl, opening (transcription)
I come from nowhere, opening (transcription)

It's embarrassing to see that some of his own fans didn't follow him during this time. Dominique Chevalier concluded in "Viva Zappa" that "Ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch" was second rate and the 1982 Geneva concert, released on "You can't do that on stage anymore vol. V", was stopped just before it's scheduled ending because of things being thrown on stage.

"Sinister footwear II" on "Them or us" contains a section related to "The black page", harmonically and rhythmically unpredictable. Like "The black page" it includes irregular rhythmic groupings, that in this case are played over 3/4.

Sinister footwear II, 6:08 till 6:32 (midi file)

Sinister footwear II, 6:08 till 6:32 (transcription).

"Sinister footwear" in total is a three part orchestral work. Its first movement is still waiting for it's premiere on record; part III is built around a written out guitar solo, that appeared on "You are what you is". "Sinister footwear" got performed in 1984 by the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra, but Zappa wasn't satisfied with this execution. It is this last part III that causes most performing difficulties. On "You are what you is" the guitar part got doubled by Ed Mann on percussion. This guitar part, with all its irregular rhythmic groupings, went literally that way into the orchestra score. Here again there are doublings prescribed for this part. The best way to get it correctly on CD is in my opinion to proceed the same way as Zappa did for "You are what you is", namely by overdubbing the second instrument. To have two people play it at the same time and be synchronous, that's asking a lot.
"Them or us" opens and ends with a cover song, as earlier on "Burnt weany sandwich". The ending song in this case is a Gregg Allman composition, called "Whipping post". Zappa continues in Guitar Player, February 1983:
FZ: "It started out ten or twelve years ago when some guy in the audience at a concert in Helsinki, Finland, requested it.
GP: "In English?"
FZ: "Yes. He just yelled out "Whipping Post" in broken English. I have it on tape. And I said: "Excuse me?". I could just barely make it out. We didn't know it and I felt bad that we couldn't just play it and blow the guy's socks off. So when Bobby Martin joined the band and I found out that he knew how to sing that song, I said "We are definitely going to be prepared for the next time somebody wants "Whipping Post" - in fact we're going to play it before somebody even asks for it". I've got problably 30 different versions of it on tape from concerts all around the world, and one of them is going to be the "Whipping Post" - the apex "Whipping Post" of the century."
And so it was done on "Them or us" and "Does humor belong in music" (1985), the latter with Dweezil joining FZ on guitar. The Helsinki guy requesting it also reached a CD with "What you can't do on stage anymore, vol. II", introducing "Montana". Zappa's recollection here wasn't perfect. He actually replied with "maybe can you sing us a few notes so that we can play it". So the guy in the audience sang "woo woo woo" and Zappa answered that it must have been a John Cage composition.

Marque-Son's chicken is an example of using various themes in odd numbered metres. Melodically he's mixing atonal and diatonic material, as well as traditional and untraditional chords. The written out theme consists of:
- Bar 1: a guitar riff in 13/16, repeated four times, written out for Steve Vai. It's an atonal progression with some counterpoint and harmony.
- Bars 2-3: an atonal arpeggio figure. Bar 2 in 14/16 gets repeated three times, bar 3 is a final repetition slightly different in 15/16.
- Bars 4-5: a diatonic chord progression in normal 4/4. The higher keyboard chords are regular 5th chords. The bass however is playing a counterpoint line and extending the harmony to larger chords.
- Bar 6: a short bass riff in 9/16, combining D#-E-F# and repeated four times.
- Bars 7-18: a sequence of arpeggio figures in 10/16, all diatonic and using various scales and chord types. It's a series of six variations upon a movement going up and down in the shape of something like a W upside down. The idea reminds me of the first two preludes from The well-tempered clavier I by Bach; it sounds more modern because of the use of enlarged chords.

Marque-Son's chicken, opening (midi file)

Marque-Son's chicken, opening (transcription).

SOUND AND INSTRUMENTATION

"Nothing beats two guitars, bass, drum", Lou Reed says in his "New York" CD liner notes, describing the basic rock band sound. By just looking at Zappa's rock group through the years you'll always see that Zappa wanted more than the basic sound. He would only go on tour with at least a five piece band. You can mostly see keyboards, wind instruments and percussionists added to the basis of guitar, bass and drum. What is specifically Zappa is that the less common instruments are not there to fill in the sound, but to play lead melodies and solos all equally important as the standard instruments.
Many Zappa compositions have a single melodic line as their origin, a written out lead sheet. The "Uncle meat" and "King Kong" scores as presented in the "Uncle meat" CD booklet are two examples: the plain melody with pedal notes. For each band that played these pieces the instrumentation got redefined anew. All "Uncle meat" executions have a different set up. The pitch may differ, the pedal notes may differ, the harmony and counterpoint are filled in each time anew. First Zappa often doubles the melody by having more people play or sing the same part. It can be unisono, parallel octaves and sometimes thirds and fourths. Every now and then other intervals can be encountered as well. Charateristically he doesn't want the doubled parts to blend, but to remain individually audible, like guitar and vibes or keyboards and brass. For the singers you'll hear that they usually don't sing unisono, but in parallels. Secondly you get a harmony fill in, like the on beat chords in "Uncle meat" as shown in the corresponding section in this study. Thirdly there are counterpoint figures. When I started this study I took over "Uncle meat" from the Songbook (melody, chords and pedal notes), doubling the melody for the stereo effect. When I relistened and wondered why the CD version sounded so much better, I noted I missed a complete part, namely the counterpoint melody that's now included.

When Zappa wrote for an orchestra he took this same attitude with him. In the 19th century orchestras were getting bigger and bigger and orchestration was becoming a discipline by itself, involving which groups of instruments could be combined, which instruments could be used for certain effects within a context and which instruments shouldn't be used at the same time. Richard Wagner was in expert in intoxicating his audiance with infinite variations upon his main themes, at some points intimate, elsewhere leading to a big orchestral blast as with the 2nd theme from Parsifal in bars 69-72 of the Overture. From this romantic perspective most people are used to, Zappa's orchestration can be seen as careless, not making full use of the possibilities of a symphony orchestra.
It is this subject an article by Arved Ashby in The Musical Quarterly, winter 1999, is about. It carries the title "Frank Zappa and the anti-fetishist orchestra" and demonstrates how Zappa deliberately departed from the traditional orchestra sound. You'll have to wrestle through the pile of intellectual baggage some academics deem necessary, but otherwise this article is sincere and worthwhile. In pieces as "Bogus pump" (called cheesy fanfare music by Zappa on the L.S.O. vol. II cover) or "Striclty genteel", a big closing waltz, Zappa still had an eye for traditional orchestration. In his later completely atonal works as "Mo 'n Herbs vacation" and "Sinister footwear" this is mostly gone. Next is a section from Sinister footwear I in a reduced form. See Ashby's article for the full orchestra sheet.

Sinister footwear I, bars 20-27 (midi file)

Sinister footwear I, bars 20-27 (notes).

The set up shows what Zappa does a lot in his later orchestral works. There's a lead melody led rapidly over various instrumentation groups, that are individualistic rather than moving fluidly from one group into the other. There are longer harmony notes, lasting over more than a bar. Dissonant strings in bars 21-23 ultimately are leading to a consonant combination of saxes and harp in bar 27. There is some counterpoint movement present in the bass guitar part in bars 24-27.