Zappa & Ravel
I got bogged down by work so I didn’t have time to write a newsletter last week. In light of that, here’s a paper I wrote in grad school on Frank Zappa and Maurice Ravel.
One would not usually expect to see the names of composers Frank Zappa and Maurice Ravel in the same sentence. Their lives never overlapped. When Frank Zappa was born on December 21, 1940 in Baltimore, Maryland, Maurice Ravel had been dead for three years. They approached music in a very different manner. Ravel split the difference between classical music and the impressionism of his contemporary, Claude Debussy. Frank Zappa approached classical music from a sensibility couched in rock & roll, blues, and doo-wop.
Certainly, the music of the composer had an impact on Zappa, as he listed Maurice Ravel in the liner notes of his debut album, Freak Out!, in a section titled "These People Have Contributed Materially in Many Ways to Make Our Music What it is. Please Do Not Hold it Against them."
Frank Zappa selected Piano Concerto in G as on of his ten desert island discs on Castaway’s Choice, a radio show hosted by John McNally. Zappa was fond of Ravel’s Boléro, performing it frequently in concert. It’s featured on Zappa’s 1988 album, The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life, an album chronicling Zappa’s final tour in 1988. Some versions of the album did not feature Boléro, due to legal issues in Europe. The original European version of the album featured the composition but Zappa was forced to remove the piece for subsequent pressings. Zappa said this of the piece, “I always liked Boléro. I think that it’s really one of the best melodies ever written. Most people in the audience have heard it in one form or another over the years, so if you’re going to conduct an experiment in arranging technique and this is a reggae version of Boléro,it’s nice to be arranging a tune that people are already familiar with.”
This paper does not intend to argue that Maurice Ravel was the most important influence on Frank Zappa.
Instead, this paper will examine the life and work of Frank Zappa through the lens of Maurice Ravel in order to determine what common traits, if any, the composers shared and what this might indicate about the nature of composers of the 20th century.
Formative Life Experiences
Maurice Ravel was born on March 7, 1875 in Ciboure, France very close to the Spanish border. Ravel’s mother was of Basque descent and his father was a civil engineer, originally from Switzerland. The background of Ravel’s parents would have a formative influence on the composer’s work, particularly in L'heure espagnole. The opera was set in Spain and focused on the sexually unsatisfied wife of a clockmaker. While Ravel only composed the music, one can easily understand why the setting and story might have interested him.
Ravel biographer Arbie Orenstein wrote that, “Maurice Ravel’s attachment to his mother was undoubtedly the deepest emotional tie of his entire life. Among his earliest memories were the Spanish folk melodies sung to him by his mother, and through her, he inherited a love of the Basque country, its people, and its folklore as well as a deep sympathy for the music of Spain.”
Spanish dance rhythms are an important influence on Ravel’s music. His best-known work, Boléro, gets it title from a style of Spanish dance. Ravel was also interested in bells, clocks, and chimes. Like many composers Ravel’s life became a fertile source for his compositions. One of the most important influences on Ravel was his mother, Marie Delouart. Ravel never had any major romantic relationships that we know of, but he was very close to his mother and he was devastated when she died in 1917. Ravel’s father was also an important figure in his son’s life.
In 1928, the composer took time out from a whirlwind concert tour of North America to visit the Ford motor plant in Detroit and described it in glowing terms to his brother. Thus, from his father Ravel appears to have inherited a fascination with mechanically objects of all sorts, as a healthy, open-minded curiosity about all aspects of life.
Ravel’s childhood was very happy, the family was very close and Ravel would maintain a close friendship with his young brother Edouard all of his life. Ravel’s parents were very supportive of his interest in music and Ravel began taking piano lessons at the age of 7. Ravel would get further musical training at the Paris Conservatoire, though he would experience frustration, as he did not always play by the rules of the Conservatoire. The Conservatoire was a very conservative institution and often times Ravel’s compositional choices would cause him to clash with the establishment. This is a pattern that would repeat itself during Ravel’s several attempts to win the Prix de Rome.
Frank Zappa was born on December 21, 1940 in Baltimore, Maryland. Zappa’s mother was of French and Sicilian extraction and his father’s background was Greek-Arab. Like Ravel, Zappa’s ancestry would influence the content of his music, though to a much lesser extent than Ravel. There were a few songs and albums that reflected Zappa’s ethnic background, such as “Luigi & The Wise Guys,” “Dio Fa,” and “Tengo Na Minchia Tanta,” and Zappa’s 1979 album, Sheik Yerbouti, which featured Zappa on the cover dressed as a sheik. Zappa was far more interested in exploring his upbringing as a Catholic. For example, the first five tracks of Zappa’s 1974 album, Apostrophe (‘), “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow,” “Nanook Rubs It In” “St. Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast,” and “Father Oblivion,” are an indictment of the Catholic Church for its hypocrisy regarding sexual mores. A fur trapper is blinded in one eye, following a “vigorous circular motion.” This imagery calls to mind the myth about going blind from masturbation. The fur trapper heads to a church in order to have his affliction lifted. The trapper observes that many of the parishioners and the priest himself are engaging in deviant sexual behavior, while maintaining an air of piety. The hypocrisy arises from the fact that the parishioners and priest are engaging in behaviors they condemn in others.
Like Ravel, Zappa incorporated the music of his childhood into his compositions. Zappa was a huge fan of doo-wop and the blues as well as classical music.
Said Zappa in his autobiography, “ Since I didn’t have any kind of formal, training, it didn’t make any difference to me if I was listening to Lightnin’ Slim, or a vocal group called the Jewels (who had a song out then called ‘Angel in M Life’), or Webern, or Varèse, or Stravinsky. To me it was all good music.”
This attitude is key to understanding Zappa’s body of work, as he frequently references low art and high art in the same song. One can find an example of this in “Fountain Of Love,” from Zappa’s 1968 album, Cruising With Ruben & The Jets. “Fountain Of Love” quotes the opening theme to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring during the song’s fade out.
Probably the most important incident in Frank Zappa’s life was his arrest in 1965. At the time Zappa owned a recording studio in Cucamonga, California, called Studio Z. The local police believed that Zappa was making pornographic films due to an article in the Ontario Daily Report that referred to Zappa as “the Movie King of Cucamonga.” A policeman, undercover as a used car salesman, came to Zappa and asked him to create a stag film for a party. Zappa told him he could make one for $300. The policeman thought it was too high a price, so Zappa offered to make a tape recording for $100.
Unbeknownst to Zappa, the conversation was being recorded. Zappa created the tape as promised and the undercover cop returned for the tape. The tape Zappa created was completely artificial, he and girlfriend Lorraine Chamberlain had recorded grunts, moans, and bedspring noises, but no sex act was committed to tape. The undercover cop only wanted to pay Zappa $50 for it instead of the agreed upon $100. Zappa refused to hand over the tape and several cops and reporters came into the studio. Zappa was arrested on charges of pornography. Zappa was found guilty of a misdemeanor, sentenced to six months in jail, and was put on probation for three years. Zappa’s jail sentence was suspended for all but ten days. Zappa’s experience in the San Bernardino holding tank would inspire a song titled “San Ber’dino” on his 1975 album, One Size Fits All. The experience changed Zappa’s relationship with authority. He never trusted them again and would spend the rest of his career critiquing the faults of American society.
Compositional Techniques And Influences
As composers, Maurice Ravel and Frank Zappa shared similar approaches and their work contained similar stylistic traits. While the resulting compositions were very different, the similarities are worth noting. Pursuit of perfectionism is one trait both composers share. “Throughout his career, Ravel destroyed hundreds of sketches, which he probably considered to be of little importance to anyone. He apparently enjoyed giving the impression that his music was created effortlessly, magically, as if out of thin air. In reality, nothing could have been further from the truth.” Ravel would copy a new score, rather than merely correct an error in the score. The composer would continue correcting errors in the score even after the score had been published.
“In my own work of composition I find a long period of conscious gestation, in general, necessary. During the interval, I come gradually to see, and with growing precision, the form and evolution which the subsequent work should have as a whole. I may thus be occupied for years without writing a single note of the work – after which the writing goes relatively rapidly; but there is still much time to be spent in eliminating everything that might be regarded as superfluous, in order to realize as completely as possible the longed-for final clarity. Then comes the time when conceptions have to be formulated for further composition, but these cannot be forced artificially, for they come only of their own free will, and often originate in some very remote perception, without manifesting themselves until long years after.”
Ravel was very protective of his music. One can infer this from how much he worked on his music and his continued corrections of his scores. Another manifestation of this pursuit of perfection can be been in the instructions in Ravel’s scores. The scores contained precise instructions for the player. Ravel’s desire for perfection manifested in another way: performance. After the premiere of Ravel’s Sonata for Violin & Cello, Ravel was not happy with the way his piece was performed, so me made the musicians play it again.
Zappa was also a bit of a perfectionist. Before touring with his band, Zappa would rehearse them for two to four months. As a bandleader, Zappa was strict. Like his contemporary, James Brown, Zappa did not tolerate mistakes. Said former Zappa band member in Barry Miles’s Zappa biography,
“Frank Zappa was not a particularly fun guy to work for or with, for many reasons. He had a huge ego and he was definitely a workaholic who could rehearse hour after hour after hour and then make a critique and criticize after all that hard work, and also display a complete intolerance for anyone making a mistake while playing his music… I can still remember Frank Zappa walking around in a rage after many concerts because someone fucked up and made a mistake which Frank said was a lack of concentration and being tuned into him.”
During a performance of “The Be-Bop Tango” in Sweden in 1973, Zappa chastised the band on stage for playing the wrong notes. Following the end of the song, Zappa said to the audience, “I’m sorry we played so many wrong notes on the last part of that song. Maybe we should go back and do it again.” The invention of the Synclavier allowed Zappa to create music without the need for musicians and there was no longer concern that the musicians would screw up his composition. The Synclavier allowed Zappa’s music to be realized exactly as it was written on the page. Said Zappa about the instrument, “It allows me to do music the way I always wanted to do it, just go in there and do it. You can play that in, just it in there and then edit and tweak it.”
Dissonance is another feature of the music of Ravel and Zappa. Ravel was writing music in an era where the rules for dissonance had changed due to the work of composer Richard Wagner. Prior to Wagner, dissonance had to be resolved pretty quickly. Wagner delayed resolving dissonance, leading to a breakdown in tonality and one can trace the beginning of post-tonal music to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Ravel’s use of dissonance, particularly his use of seventh and ninth chords drew the ire of the Paris Conservatoire. His more radical approach to tonality is partially responsible for his difficulties in the Prix de Rome. The competition judges viewed music more conservatively. When Ravel wrote compositions that were more traditional, he had greater success. While Ravel never wrote atonal or twelve-tone music, he did admire the work of Arnold Schoenberg. During the First World War, several French writers and musicians formed a League for Defense of French Music. Ravel was not happy about some of the limitations of the League and wrote a letter addressing his concerns.
An enforced at last enables me to reply to the enclosure by you of your bylaws. I fully approve the wish for action which inspired the founding of the League. This wish was so active in me that it led me to give up civilian life without having been forced to do so. But I do not believe that ‘the defense of our national artistic inheritance’ makes I necessary to ‘prohibit the performance of contemporary German and Austrian works.’ It would actually be damaging to French composers to ignore the output of their foreign colleagues and thus to create a kind of nationalistic clan. Our art of music, being so rich, would soon degenerate and restrict itself to obsolete formulas. To me it signifies little that, for example, Mr. Schönberg is an Austrian national. He is none the less a musician of great value, whose highly interesting explorations have a valuable influence on certain allied musicians, and have had on us. In Germany, outside of Richard Strauss, we find only second-class composers, of whom we can find many without having to step over our own boundaries. But it is possible that young artists may soon emerge there, whom it would be interesting for us to know. On the other hand, I do not consider it necessary that all French Music, regardless of its worth, must be made to prevail and be propagandized abroad. So you see gentleman, that my opinion differs from yours on many points, so I must deny myself the honor of joining with you. Nevertheless, I hope to continue to act like a Frenchman.
Dissonance plays a larger part of Zappa’s music, as does the Second Viennese School. The dissonance can be attributed to the influence on Charles Ives on Zappa’s music, particularly Zappa’s fondness for the Ives collision. As a composer Zappa shows a strong pull towards the Second Viennese School for due to Zappa’s flirtation with atonality as well as several twelve-tone compositions. Like Ives, Zappa’s music has a distinctly American focus, repurposed popular music of the day to evoke specific ideas and images, and had a fondness for contrasting voices. Zappa discusses the influence of Ives in his autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book.
…[O]n Absolutely Free, our second album. There’s a twisted reference to Charles Ives a the end of “Call Any Vegetable.” One of the things that Ives is noted for is his use of multiple colliding themes – the musical illusion of several marching bands marching through each other. In our low-rent version, the band splits into three parts, playing “The Star Spangled Banner,” “God Bless America,” and “America the Beautiful” all at the same time, yielding an amateur version of an Ives collision. Unless listeners pay attention in that one spot – there are only a few bars of it – the might think it was a “mistake.”
Zappa would later collaborate with composer Pierre Boulez for an album, in which Boulez conducted Zappa’s music. Boulez was interested in serialism in the early part of his career. Boulez did several recordings where he conducted Ravel pieces.
Nationalism is another important influence on the music of Maurice Ravel and Frank Zappa. Both composers were interested in exploring the music and culture of their respective nations. Ravel’s music is very French, both in terms of sound and in terms of his vocal and programmatic music, the text. The music of Maurice Ravel is sometimes classified under Impressionism due to Ravel being a contemporary of Debussy, but it’s not an entirely accurate assessment. Debussy chafed at the label, though his music arguably fits into that category more than Ravel. Ravel is better described as a Neo-Classical composer, though that particular term did not really come into use until the early 20th century. Ravel embraced elements of classical music and romantic music.Impressionism and Neo-Classicism were a reaction strong tradition of German music, which had dominated music for the last hundred years. This flowering of French music occurred simultaneously with a flowering of other elements of French literature, painting and poetry. Neo-Classicism, in particular, stood in strong contrast to the music being created by the Second Viennese School. Though Ravel did not feel animosity towards German composers, even during WWI, and admired the work of Arnold Schoenberg. Ravel wrote several compositions inspired by the writing of French Symbolist poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine. As a composer, Ravel was very much influenced by the French composers who came before him, his composition, Le Tombeau de Couperin is dedicated to the 18th century composer François Couperin. Menuet antique reflects the influence of Emmanuel Chabrier. Jeux d’eau is most certainly influenced by Debussy’s compositions meant to evoke water.
Zappa’s nationalism manifests itself differently from Ravel. While American composers, such as Charles Ives, influenced him, Zappa drew more from American popular music than American classical music. As was previously discussed, doo-wop, blues, and R&B are Zappa’s major American sources. Much of Zappa’s lyrical focus was on contemporary American culture. As previously mentioned Zappa’s time in jail really put him off on the American way of life. On his first several albums, Zappa goes after mainstream culture and the counter-culture. Zappa was able to do so, as he did not fit in with the mainstream or the counter-culture, so he was able to criticize both social groups. Throughout his career, anyone could be the target of satire. During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and the Christian Right were the subject of Zappa’s lyrical scorn. While it might appear that Zappa hated the United States of America, that couldn’t be further from the truth. While he was certainly cynical about politics, he was actively engaged with the world, followed the news, and got involved in politics. During intermission of his performances in the 1980s, Zappa would encourage audience members to register to vote. A favorite target of Zappa during the 1980s was disgraced evangelical minister, Jimmy Swaggart. Swaggart had been found with a hooker in Louisiana and broadcast a tearful confession of his sins. Zappa found this a fertile source of comedy and in concert he performed parody versions of his songs and the songs of others.
Self-borrowing is another compositional technique that crops up in the music of Maurice Ravel and Frank Zappa. Ravel reused pieces of his music in some of his other compositions. Ravel incorporated Habanera into his Rapsodie Espagnole.Ravel also incorporated aspects of The Sunken Bell, a work he abandoned, into L’Enfant et les Sortilèges. The latter included the music from The Sunken Bell with a libretto by Collette.The theme of the tree and the chorus of frogs comes from The Sunken Bell.
Self-borrowing is an important aspect of Zappa’s music. It’s part of what Zappa called his conceptual continuity. Zappa believed that all of his work was connected.
It’s all one album. All the material in the album is organically related and if I had all the master tapes and I could take a razor blade and cut them apart and put it together again in a different order it still would make one piece of music you can listen to. Then I could take that razor blade and cut it apart and reassemble it a different way, and it still would make sense. I could this twenty ways. The material is definitely related.
This way or working became Zappa’s “project/object” concept: the idea that each project is part of a larger object, an overall body of work in which every individual piece is changed, if only slightly, by the addition of each new part. This new part could be a film, a record or even as he once claimed, an interview. He reinforced this ‘conceptual continuity’ by the re-use of identifiable themes from one album to next, by snatches of monologue which refer back to a previous albums, by repeating themes on his album sleeves (the poodle is one: ‘Po Po’ the poodle being mentioned in one his very first interviews; Suzy Creamcheese was another), and most of all reworking earlier melodies or subject matter.
The character of Suzy Creamcheese was first mentioned on Freak Out! on the back cover, which features a letter penned by her.
These Mothers is crazy. You can tell by their clothes. One guy wears beads and they all smell bad. We were gonna get them for a dance after the basketball game but my best pal warned me you can never tell how many will show up...sometimes the guy in the fur coat doesn't show up and sometimes he does show up only he brings a big bunch of crazy people with him and they dance all over the place. None of the kids at my school like these Mothers...specially since my teacher told us what the words to their songs meant.
Suzy Creamcheese pops up again on the second album by The Mothers of Invention: Absolutely Free, in a song titled “Son Of Suzy Creamcheese.” The song is a watershed moment in Zappa’s body of work because it contains his first use of “Louie, Louie.” Zappa used the song as a way of representing banal pop music.
Jazz was another style that influenced the output of both composers. It wasn’t a major component of their work, but they did leave several pieces behind with a jazz inflection. One thing one must keep in mind when considering the approach to jazz that Ravel and Zappa took, was that the type of jazz Ravel was familiar with was very different from the jazz Zappa knew.
Ravel’s jazz influenced compositions predate big band, bebop, and modal jazz, while Zappa approached jazz in an era where rock bands like Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago, in their early albums, incorporated elements of jazz into their music. Jazz exerts a noticeable influence on Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, particularly during the dance of the tea pot and the Chinese cup. Ravel incorporates jazz into the first and third movements of his Piano Concerto in G, a piece that, as has been previously noted, Zappa frequently played in concert.
Jazz played an important role in Zappa’s career, particularly during the mid 70s. Zappa made what some consider to be the first jazz-rock album in 1969, Hot Rats, though his more famous jazz-rock work is probably the two albums he released in 1972: The Grand Wazoo and Waka/Jawaka. All three albums were not entirely jazz-rock, typical for Zappa as his music fits into multiple genres, frequently on the same album, and sometimes his music switches genres in the middle of a song.
Orchestration
Zappa and Ravel were similar as composers in that they frequently created different versions of a composition. Ravel’s pieces often started as compositions for piano and then later he orchestrated them. One example is Daphnis et Chloé, which exists in four forms: a ballet, two orchestral suites, and a piano suite. Pavane pour une infante défuntewas originally written for piano and Ravel later orchestrated it. “Ravel’s predilection for remodeling his music was a significant aspect of his artistic creed. It appears that once a composition was perfected, the attempt was made to draw out every ounce of its inherent possibilities.” Almost half of Ravel’s works were presented in new forms, whether that be as an orchestrated pieces or as a ballet.
Zappa’s approach to orchestration was very much influenced by his conceptual continuity. A song he did with rock band could easily be performed by a classical ensemble and vice versa. Zappa never treated his compositions as finished once they were on an album. When played live, the songs could be shorter or longer as he deemed fit, new elements might be added to them, their run time might be stretched out to showcase the virtuosic playing of Zappa’s band, or the lyrics might be changed to reflect a new interest Zappa had. One example of the latter is “Lonesome Cowboy Burt,” a song originally on 200 Motels, a soundtrack album for Zappa’s film of the same name. Following the scandal of TV preacher, Jimmy Swaggart, Zappa wrote new lyrics for the song and called it “Lonesome Cowboy Jim.” These new lyrics poked fun at Swaggart’s tearful confession about sleeping with a prostitute as well his hypocrisy.
Reception By the Public, Critics, and Contemporaries
Zappa and Ravel are known to the public through only a few pieces, with Zappa, he’s best known for his so-called novelty songs, such as “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow,” “Dancin’ Fool,” and, “Valley Girl.” Ravel’s best-known work is probably Boléro. Both composers were sometimes misunderstood by critics of the day. In 1900, during Ravel’s first attempt at the Prix de Rome, his fugue was trashed by Théodore Dubois, who gave the composition a zero and wrote this about the piece, “Impossible, owing to terrible inaccuracies in writing.” Music critic, Pierre Lalo was probably Ravel’s biggest enemy in the press. He trashed many of Ravel’s pieces, including Shéhérazade. Lalo criticized the pieces structure and the program for the piece.
…In reality, Shéhérazade. Is composed of a series of very brief fragments, without natural connections between them, and attached to each other with extremely weak bonds. You have ten measures, or fifteen or thirty, which seem to present an idea; then brusquely, something else happens, and then something else again. You don’t know where you’re coming from, or where you’re going. If this is what M. Ravel believes to be an overture “composed according to the classical plan,” one must admit that M. Ravel has a great deal of imagination. With regard to structure, or the lack thereof, his style recalls that of M. Grieg, even more, M. Rimsky-Korsakov or M. Balakirev. One sees that same incoherence in the overall structure and in the tonal relations: but these qualities, already striking in the models, are carried to excess by the student…
Zappa also got his fair share of nasty reviews by critics who didn’t quite get Zappa, at least in the early days of his career. Like Ravel, the years have been kind to his work and he is generally held in high esteem.
Mothers and Dads, you thought the Beatles were bad. You got up in arms about the Rolling Stones. Sonny & Cher made you cringe. Well, as the man said, you ain't seen nothing yet. The Mothers of Invention are here with an album called Freak Out! (someone suggested it should have been called Flake Out!) They come from Hollywood. Their clothes are dreadful -- and I dig mod clothes. Their hair and beards are filthy. They smell bad. You just can't believe it -- So, Mothers and Dads, next time the Beatles, the Stones, or Sonny & Cher come to town, welcome them with open arms. Next to the Mothers Of Invention the other groups come on like the Bobbsey Twins. – Lorraine Alterman, Detroit Free Press, July 15, 1966
Ravel’s relationship with Claude Debussy was times contentious. Though initially the composers got along well, Debussy was highly critical of Ravel’s later works, though Ravel continued to hold Debussy’s music in high regard, though he was sometimes critical of it. Though Ravel’s relationship with Debussy deteriorated and was, at times unfriendly, it pales in comparison to Frank Zappa’s relationship with Lou Reed. Like Ravel and Debussy, Zappa and Reed were contemporaries of each other and shared similar artistic temperament. Both were signed to the Verve label, had Tom Wilson as a producer, and were very controlling of their bands. Like Debussy and Ravel, their music was heard in the same circles, and in May 1966, the two bands played the same venue. Reed had this to say after sharing a bill with The Mothers for a second time, “They can’t play and they can’s write…Frank Zappa is the most untalented bore who ever lived. You know, people like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, all those people are the most untalented bores that ever came up.” Zappa wasn’t exactly nice about Reed either, during the second performance, while on stage, Zappa said, “[The Velvet Underground] suck!”
Zappa biographer, Barry Miles speculates that Reed and Zappa despised each other because they had too much in common and viewed each other as rivals. According to Miles, Reed was convinced that Zappa had persuaded producer Tom Wilson to delay releasing the first Velvet Underground album, so that Freak Out! would come out first.
The rivalry really got nasty in the 70s. During the 1971 tour, Frank Zappa was attacked on stage at the Rainbow Theater by a fan. The fan pushed Zappa into the orchestra pit and Zappa suffered head trauma, a broken rib, a fractured leg and a crushed larynx. The injury to his larynx dropped his voice by a third.
When Reed played London in 1973, he changed the concert venue from the Hammersmith Odeon to the Rainbow Theater so that he could look down on the spot where Frank Zappa fell. When Zappa was inducted in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 1995, the Hall wanted Lou Reed to give the induction speech. Speculation is they wanted to butter up Reed so that he’d attend the induction of The Velvet Underground. The Zappa family was not happy about the situation and only agreed after Reed called Frank’s widow, Gail Zappa, and apologized.
Conclusion
As was shown in the course of this paper, Frank Zappa and Maurice Ravel were composers who shared many of the same artistic sensibilities and approaches. While they were very different people, it’s interesting to note that their careers and lives played out in a similar fashion. Both died due to medical ineptitude. Ravel died during brain surgery to fix a degenerative condition and Zappa died of prostate cancer due to negligence by his doctor who didn’t diagnose early enough, though Zappa had been complaining about symptoms that point to prostate cancer. When noting the similarities in the careers of Zappa and Ravel, one can’t help but be reminded of convergent evolution, where the same feature arises in unrelated species or perhaps the fact that calculus was invented independently. Comparing composers from different eras can give us greater insight into their musical approach and a better understanding of what made them unique in their era.
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