francesco Zappa

[jelle]

I'm searching information about the composer of the FZ album 'Francesco Zappa'. (I have the feeling Francesco Zappa does not exist). Am I right on this? Is Frank Zappa the real composer of this album, or does Francesco Zappa exist

[slime]

that francesco zappa existed is now a well proven fact...

read more here --->THE MUSICAL TIMES OF FRANCESCO ZAPPA by David Ocker

[jelle]

I' m familiar with the texts of David Ocker, but he is not an neutral source (he has been working for Zappa). I'm looking for a source that is complete independent from Zappa. (I didn't find any so far).

I can find some texts about Francesco Zappa, so its possible he did exist, but there are no texts available, written after the album was released. And if he existed, there is no proof that he did compose the music (there is no worklist or other information available)

[Salty]

I am not an authority but I believe this to be one of the best hoaxes / parodies Zappa created.  The only source I have ever seen is the ephemeral Grove Music reference.  I too would be glad to see a bona fide source for the elusive Francesco.

I cannot access Grove Music Online from here - but there is a trial signup if you pretend to be an institution.  Maybe someone near a real library could check out the text version.

The liner notes are a hoot though....

http://ftp.catalog.com/mrm/zappa/html/francesco.html


http://www.connollyco.com/discography/frank_zappa/francesco.html

I looked through many links to composers and even the links to obscure composers tend to have only Frank and not Francesca....

Take care,

Salty


http://www.harmone.com/resources/composers/composers.html

[SOFA]

I'm searching information about the composer of the FZ album 'Francesco Zappa'. (I have the feeling Francesco Zappa does not exist). Am I right on this?

Francesco existed. After a numbing Google search, here's the best reference I could find to his existence:
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/dmmc/Music/MackaySmith/mackay9.html

Is Frank Zappa the real composer of this album, or does Francesco Zappa exist

Whether or not FZ was the composer of the pieces on the Francesco album remains to be seen, but Francesco, the Milanese Cellist, and minor composer, lived...

The only source I have ever seen is the ephemeral Grove Music reference.

There is nothing ephemeral about the Grove's Dictionary(s). They are one of the world's most respected sources for info on musical antiquities.
http://www.grovemusic.com/
If you've got $300 to spare, you can subscribe to their online edition. Otherwise, a self respecting, university music library should have a set...

I don't think Francesco is a parody. FZ was composing music far superior to Francesco, why would he want to put out an album of inferior compositions? Even his Ruben stuff was better written than the original genre he lampooned.
SOFA

[jelle]

thanx,

I think I have discovered some clous.
The original score of Francesco Zappa (at the virignia University library) has no opus numbers, the liner notes of the  FZ album do have opus numbers (so where doe they come from?)
The original sonata's by Francesco are in the following keys:
sonata I (Eb), sonata II (C), sonata III (G), sonata IV (Bb), sonata V (D) and sonata VI (Eb). These keys do not match with th keys of the Zappa album (S I: in G, S II: in C, S II: in Eb,...)
When you compare the tempo indications and metre, there are no matches.
Therefore I think that the manuscripts do not contain the music that is on the disc.

[slime]

here's some more references:

---> zappa-analysis

referenced in slaven's electric don quixote...to paraphrase:

not really a

gail discovered francesco while browsing thru grove's dictionary of music & musicians, they typed up opus1 into the synclavier, frank liked it, got a grunt to spend a month typing up the rest of them (all string trios/2 violins & bass), frank added a little technicolor, and poots forth francesco's 1^st digital recording in over 300 yrs

i.m.h.o. the compositions on francesco are not close enough to frank's other synclavier or orchestral works to conclude he wrote them himself

[Dunk]

For the records this is the full article from Grove's.

============

Zappa, Francesco


(b Milan; fl 1763–88). Italian cellist and composer. The dedication of his six trios for two violins and bass (London, 1765) shows that he had given the Duke of York, the dedicatee, music lessons in Italy (the duke had been in Italy from late November 1763 to mid-1764). By 1767, the year of the duke’s death, he had entered his service as maestro di musica, as shown by the title-page of his trio sonatas op.2. He then apparently took up residence in The Hague as a music master. He was still there in 1788, according to the place and date of a manuscript Quartetto concertante (inD-Bsb). He had a reputation among his contemporaries as a virtuoso and he toured Germany in 1771, playing in Danzig and, on 22 September, in Frankfurt. According to Mendel, he made another concert tour of Germany in 1781 (though this may be an error for 1771).


Zappa’s writing is lyrical, but tends towards a seriousness of manner in which thegalant elements are tempered by a Classical dignity. His works with obbligato cello demonstrate an easy familiarity with thumb position fingerings, slurred staccato bowings and idiomatic string crossing patterns.



WORKS


Duos: 6 Sonatas, kbd/hp, vn, as op.4a (Paris, n.d.); 6 duos (v, vc)/2 vn (Paris, n.d.)

Trio sonatas, 2 vn, b: 6 Trios (London, 1765), as op.1 (?The Hague, n.d.); 6 as op.2 (London, c1767); 6 as op.3 (Paris, n.d.); 6 as op.4 (London, n.d.); 6 sonates (The Hague, n.d.)

Other works: 6 kbd sonatas, op.6 (Paris, 1776), mentioned in MCL; 6 syms. (Paris, n.d.); 2 romances, 1v, pf, as op.4 (The Hague, n.d.); 27 pieces, 2 for pf, 5 for 1v, pf, op.11 (The Hague, n.d.); 2 Sonata à tre, v, vc obbl, b, ed. in Early Cello Series, xxiii (London, 1983); other works, A-Wgm, D-Bsb, I-Mc


BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

GerberL

MCL

E. van der Straeten: History of the Violoncello (London, 1915/R)

O. Tajetti: ‘Francesco Zappa: violoncellista e compositore milanese’, Antiquae musicae italicae studiosi, iii/6 (1987), 9–12


GUIDO SALVETTI/VALERIE WALDEN


© Oxford University Press 2003
=======================

HTH :-)

[Dunk]

This is the article in the Grove Music  section of Grove's:
 
Zappa, Frank [Francis] (Vincent)


(b Baltimore, 21 Dec 1940; d Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, 4 Dec 1993). American composer, rock musician and guitarist. His family moved to California in 1950, where Zappa played the drums and guitar in high-school bands with, among others, Don Van Vliet (later to become Captain Beefheart). He studied briefly at Chaffey College, Alta Loma, but left to write music for B-movies. In 1964 he formed his band the Mothers of Invention (originally the Soul Giants); the personnel changed frequently and Zappa disbanded the group in the 1970s to work with musicians selected for particular projects, including Ian Underwood (keyboards, saxophones, brass, guitar etc.), Ruth Underwood (percussion), George Duke (keyboards and trombone), Aynsley Dunbar (drums), Sugar Cane Harris (organ, electric violin and vocals) and Jean-Luc Ponty (violin).


The Mothers of Invention’s first release was Freak Out! (Verve, 1966), which savagely parodied both corporate America and hippy counter-culture in such songs as ‘Hungry Freaks, Daddy’ and ‘Who are the Brain Police?’, culminating in ‘The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet’, an extended improvisation using avant-garde techniques. It was followed by Absolutely Free (Verve, 1967), the experimental orchestral album Lumpy Gravy (Verve, 1968), the parody of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper in We’re Only in it for the Money (Verve, 1968), and the doo-wop pastiches of Cruising with Ruben & The Jets (Verve, 1968). They developed a cult following on both sides of the Atlantic, having made their UK début in 1967, and Zappa was releasing on average two albums a year, a level he was to sustain throughout his career. He toured extensively, with a stage act involving props and interaction with the audience, and developed a system of hand signals which enabled him to initiate rapid switches of style, rhythm and tempo, lending a spontaneity to what were otherwise tightly-controlled structures. In 1970 Zappa performed 200 Motels (U.A., 1971) for rock band and orchestra in Los Angeles at a contemporary music festival organized by Zubin Mehta, and the following year made a film of it: this is one of a number of Zappa large-scale multi-media projects.


Zappa’s music is eclectic and draws freely on the popular music of the 1950s and early 60s, embracing rhythm and blues, rock and roll, doo-wop, middle-of-the-road ballads, the world of Hollywood film music and of TV advertisements, treating them as objets trouvés; at the same time it also draws on the soundworlds of Stravinsky, Ives, Varèse and Stockhausen, creating multi-layered textures and employing montage techniques and abrupt stylistic juxtapositions which have the effect of Brechtian alienation and Dadaist confrontation, as in Burnt Weeny Sandwich(Reprise, 1970) and Over-Nite Sensation (Discreet, 1973). Zappa wanted his music to achieve the autonomy associated with high art music while subversively working from within the popular music industry. In the 1980s this was accentuated by the increasing esteem in which Zappa was held as a serious composer, so that his performances and two albums with the London SO (LSO: Zappa, 1983–7) and with the Ensemble Intercontemporain (The Perfect Stranger, 1984) appear at the same time as his bizarre synthesizer recreations of pieces by his 18th-century namesake (1984). He set up his own record company (Barking Pumpkin) and, after lawsuits, gained control over the master-tapes of his albums released in the 1960s and 1970s by MGM/Verve. In his final decade he worked at his home studio, using a Synclavier synthesizer to create such albums as Jazz From Hell (Capitol, 1986), and to remix much of his earlier work and, in effect, to re-create, through intercutting, a body of previously unissued recordings. His last public appearance was in Frankfurt in 1992 at a concert of his works by the Ensemble Modern, recorded as The Yellow Shark(Barking Pumpkin, 1993), a few months before his death. The first posthumous album appeared in 1994, Civilization: Phaze III, on which Zappa had been working since the late 1980s.


Zappa’s importance lies less in any obvious influence on rock music than in the way in which his music embraces American popular culture while simultaneously maintaining a critical distance from it, and in the way in which his musical critique at the same time constitutes a political and social critique. He saw the music business as concerned with the manipulation of music and its consumers and dedicated to profit. His own material is always calculatedly secondhand, disposable and ephemeral; his approach to structuring it is critical, ironic and self-reflective. The result has a richness of allusion, wealth of detail and a consistency of thought reminiscent of James Joyce. The comprehensive study by Watson (1993) is part of a large and expanding interpretative literature.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

D. Walley: No Commercial Potential: the Saga of Frank Zappa (New York, 1980, 2/1996)

F. Zappa and P. Ochiogrosso: The Real Frank Zappa Book (London, 1989)

B. Miles: Frank Zappa: a Visual Documentary (London, 1993) [incl. discography]

B. Watson: Frank Zappa: the Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play (London, 1993) [incl. discography and bibliography]

F. Zappa and B. Miles: Frank Zappa: in his Own Words (London, 1993)

R. Kostelanetz ed.: The Frank Zappa Companion (London, 1997)

B. Watson: The Complete Guide to the Music of Frank Zappa (London, 1998) [incl. discography]


MAX PADDISON


© Oxford University Press 2003

[Dunk]

This is the article from Grove Jazz section of Grove's...

Zappa, Frank [Francis Vincent, Jr.]


(b Baltimore, 21 Dec 1940; d Los Angeles, 4 Dec 1993). American electric guitaristand composer. He moved with his family to California at the age of ten, began playing drums when he was 12, and took up the guitar soon afterwards. While in his teens he sang blues and rock, and for six months he studied theory at Chaffey College, Alta Loma, California. Although he is best known as a rock songwriter and guitarist, his work often included elements of jazz. His group the Mothers of Invention, which he led from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, involved such jazz-rock musicians as the saxophonist Ian Underwood (on a regular basis) and George Duke and Bruce Fowler (both periodically during the early 1970s). In 1969 Jean-Luc Ponty recorded an album of Zappa’s compositions (King Kong, PJ 20172), and in 1972 Zappa led the Grand Wazoo, a jazz-rock big band of which Jay Migliori, Charles Owens, and David Parlato were members. Around 1973 he recorded the album A-pos-tro-phe (Discreet 2175), with Ponty, Duke, Fowler, and Jack Bruce among his sidemen. Among later members of his groups were Vinnie Colaiuta (1978–82) and Chad Wackerman (1981–8). Always a highly eclectic musician, as a soloist Zappa incorporated blues, rock, raga, and jazz licks into his improvised lines. From the mid-1970s his work was much more closely related to rock and to contemporary classical music than to jazz, but connections with the jazz aesthetic remained on, for example, the albums Jazz from Hell (c1986, Barking Pumpkin 74205) and Make a Jazz Noise Here (c1990, Barking Pumpkin D2AS74234).


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Feather–Gitler ’70s

L. Kart: “Frank Zappa: the Mother of Us All,” DB, xxxvi/22 (1969), 14

H. Siders: “Meet the Grand Wazoo,” DB, xxix/18 (1972), 13

D. Walley: No Commercial Potential: the Saga of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (New York, 1972, 2/1980) [incl. discography]

J. Schaffer: “The Perspective of Frank Zappa,” DB, l/15 (1973), 14

R. Denyer, I. Guillory, and A. M. Crawford: The Guitar Handbook (London and Sydney, 1982), 28

M. Davis: “Frank Zappa Makes a Jazz Noise,” DB, lviii/7 (1991), 29

Obituaries: J. Pareles, New York Times (6 Dec 1993); D. Ouellette, DB, lxi/3 (1994), 20


BARRY KERNFELD


© Oxford University Press 2003

[Salty]

Hey great references!!   I stand / sit / corrected!   Enough links there to keep me surfing for a month.  

I hope this answers Jelle's question to his satisfaction.

Thanks  Slime, Sofa, Dunk.

(Btw I meant  'esteemed' Groves, not 'ephemeral' ... must have more coffee..... must proofread.....

Happy New Year to all,

Salty


ephemeral about the Grove's Dictionary

[Barry]

Great research Dunk, thanks!
Apart from that, what does everybody think of the Francesco Zappa album? Dig it? I for one hardly ever play it, and actually I wonder why FZ spent some time on this release at all...

[zardoz]

Surprisingly I like "Francesco Zappa". I'm not a fan of classical music except I will listen to Mozart occasionally. I was brought up being taken to listen to opera, symphany, and even saw the Bolshoy Ballet do "The Nutcracker Suite" it bored me to death. Mabey getting older has produced a better tolerance and respect.  

[SOFA]

I play it rarely; tho often enough around Christmas time. I dunno, it sorta sounds like christmas music to me...

[zardoz]

I play it rarely; tho often enough around Christmas time. I dunno, it sorta sounds like christmas music to me...

Yerah, That's what most have said about it. It has become Christmas Music. One of those albums just occasionally played.