Like a zealot, Zappa's widow guards his legacy

By Walter Tunis Contributing Music Writer

Before his death in 1993, Frank Zappa offered his wife many earnest bits of advice. One piece, in particular, was to be applied to the music business that the composer, guitarist and bandleader had worked within and battled against for much of his 30-year career.

”Get out.“

For Gail Zappa, who already had overseen the business affairs of her husband's music for more than a decade, getting out meant breaking ties with an industry, not the music itself and especially not the publishing copyrights that so many artists lose.

So although the audience that Frank Zappa cultivated during his lifetime might herald his work as an instrumentalist of keen but not flashy depth, his innovations in the rock, jazz and classical fields, and even his stand as a ­serious champion of the First Amendment, Gail Zappa's work as head of the Zappa Family Trust is to preserve perhaps the most vital ­aspect of her husband's work: artistic intent.

”It's like what they write on the side of the cars of the Los Angeles Police Department: "To Protect and Serve,'“ said Zappa, who will visit Lexington on Friday as the keynote speaker of the American Musicological ­Society's South-Central Chapter conference. The talk, followed by a concert of his music, is free and open to the public.

”My job is to protect the intent and the integrity of the work. That's the deal,“ she said.

Doing that could be a tough task, especially when bringing Frank Zappa's ­music back to the stage.

Dweezil Zappa has been performing an extensive repertoire of his father's more guitar-oriented rock music during the past year in a concert program titled ”Zappa Plays Zappa“ (subtitled the ”Tour de Frank“).

Recognition of Frank Zappa's orchestral music also has risen, but not as much.

There lies the foremost challenge for audiences and performers: to understand Zappa's profile not only as an uncompromising musician posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, but as a serious American composer.

UK the perfect setting

”I would say the vast majority of folks who know Frank Zappa will have the image of a guitar player playing a rock concert in the middle of some large venue,“ said Michael Yonchak, who will conduct the 30-plus members of the University of Kentucky Chamber Winds in a performance of Zappa compositions after Gail Zappa's presentation. ”But the underside is that he was also an American composer who started writing orchestral music while he was still in high school.

”Whether you love it or hate it, Frank's music has such a different sound. You can't compare it to anything.“

In many ways, a university setting might be an even more fruitful performance base for Zappa's music than a professional orchestral environment.

”At this point, I try to get as many (of them) as I can to understand he was really a composer before anything else,“ Gail Zappa said. ”The music is a vernacular in many ways. It's much more familiar to them than it was to orchestras in the time when Frank was trying to see if they would play his music.“

Zappa's rock and orchestral works might seem like the products of disparate artistic worlds, but there are numerous links between the styles and sounds. A pair of Zappa compositions scheduled for Friday's program enforce such unity.

The Dog Breath Variations, originally from Zappa's 1969 album Uncle Meat, has a glowing sense of playfulness and animation reflective of pop and even doo-wop.

”Frank was capable of writing Valley Girl (a pop collaboration between Zappa and daughter Moon that cracked the Billboard Top 40 in 1982) but was also capable of writing like a 20th-century American composer,“ said Ron Pen of UK's John Jacobs Niles Center for American Music and host of this week's American Musicological Society conference. ”The composers he cared about were (Edgard) Varèse and Charles Ives. He's in that company. And, frankly, our intent is to treat him that way — not as a rock god or a cool guitarist, but as the cornerstone of an academic conference.

”Frank wrote pop music, but it's elite music. It's American music, but I think Frank is part of a world of great composers. Period.“

A reason to be 
at a concert hall

Still, does that mean non-rock audiences will embrace Zappa's ”serious“ music more in the future? Have orchestras changed their artistic views even today of Zappa or any modernist who might disrupt a pat and conservative classical repertoire?

”Has the government changed?“ Gail Zappa asked in reply. ”People with rules, they never seem to change. They just add more.

”I think some people, in an effort to preserve the status of their sort of elitism, have this attitude that has prevailed and prevented anything really imaginative, interesting, wonderful or creative to occur in a concert hall. It's all more of the same.

”I would think they would pay more attention to the people they are terrified of. Historically, Americans have spent a lot of money annually at museums. I think they would spend it at the concert hall, too, if there was a better reason for them to be there.“