ABSTRACT
Composer, guitarist, film maker, satirist and political activist, of all the prominent rock musicians to emerge during the mid 1960s, Frank Zappa is arguably the most complex and prolific. Regarding Zappa's personal conceptual positioning of music, he was clear that all of his creative output was unified by a philosophy he entitled The Big Note. Zappa employed his self-titled Xenochrony, a studio technique he incorporated to horizontally fuse often unrelated tracks recorded in incongruous times and places. As Zappa's music is constructed in such a way to at times ignore conventional notions of linear time, it is suggested that any analysis of his musical output should place a particular emphasis on the synchronic nature of his texts. Barthes precedence of the intergrational over what he describes as the more linear distributional has a particular resonance with Zappa's creative practices, in addition to the potential meaning of his texts.
