Francis Vincent Zappa, composer and guitarist: born Baltimore, Maryland 21 December 1940; twice married (two sons, two daughters); died Los Angeles 4 December 1993.

A RENEGADE spirit even by the nonconformist standards of the late Sixties counter-culture, Frank Zappa was a largely self-taught musician and composer whose prolific output ranged from highly complex modern orchestral pieces to doowop vocal group arrangements. Staunchly libertarian in both economic and social matters, he also became one of the most articulate anti-censorship campaigners in the United States throughout the Seventies and Eighties. (read more)

Source: independent archive

The posthumous reputation of Frank Vincent Zappa has taken an interesting turn. Now safely dead (he died 17 days short of his 53rd birthday, in 1993, from cancer of the prostate), Zappa has become a composer whom classical promoters love to programme. His tricky, late-modernist scores (with their wisecracking and/or scatological titles, such as Orchestral Favorites or Alien Orifice) have become genuine orchestral favourites. Or at least that is how it would appear from the sheaves of promotional literature pouring out about "Frank Zappa and the Fathers of Invention", a three-concert series of music by eight "American" composers – Zappa, Stravinsky, Nancarrow, Reich, Varese, Copland, Ives and Cage – being launched by the Britten Sinfonia, under Stefan Asbury, at the Corn Exchange, Cambridge, this Thursday. (read more)

Source: slime.oofytv.set