ABSTRACT
Sooner or later, any scholar or critic who is seriously interested in the music of Frank Zappa will have to come to grips with more than a few favorite songs, with more than any single category of his compositions under such misleading labels as “rock” or “classical.” Zappa will never be properly understood short of an attempt to encompass the shape of the oeuvre as a whole and its remarkable stylistic diversity. What, aft er all, is one to make of a composer whose live-band concerts featured songs with such outré titles and lurid subject matter as “The Illinois Enema Bandit” and “Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?”—and who also off ered his listeners recordings of orchestral compositions like the half-hour long “Mo ’n Herb’s Vacation,” densely scored in an uncompromisingly dissonant, “advanced” twentieth-century style?
