Frank Zappa was always a classical music fan. Sure, he fell into rock and roll in the mid-1960s, guiding his band, the Mothers of Invention, through a series of classic albums that straddled the line between complex, often psychedelic-tinged rock and scathing social commentary before releasing albums under his own name. But as a teenager, his discovery of music was split between rhythm and blues (Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Guitar Slim), doo-wop (The Channels, The Velvets), and the modern classical compositions of Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern, and Edgard Varese. While he certainly dabbled with classical motifs in the 1960s and 1970s, the 1980s were a period where he dove headfirst into classical composition and performance, with The Perfect Stranger being one of the earliest, most crucial examples of his full-on foray into that genre.
Zappa enlisted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for 200 Motels (the soundtrack to his 1971 film) as well as the 37-piece Abnuceals Emuuhka Electric Symphony Orchestra for the albums Lumpy Gravy (1968) and Orchestral Favorites (1979) and often incorporated classical concepts in his various rock band configurations. But it wasn’t until 1983, when he joined forces with the London Symphony Orchestra – under the baton of conductor Kent Nagano – that his classical inclinations were genuinely blooming. Recorded and released in 1983, London Symphony Orchestra, Vol. I included four compositions, including the side-long, three-movement “Mo’n Herb’s Vacation”, which was followed by a second volume (recorded during the same sessions) in 1987. While the album received high praise, Zappa was famously less than thrilled with the LSO’s performance, often griping in the press, and his autobiography about the number of edits required in the studio to fix “bad notes.”
For his next attempt at a classical performance and recording, Frank Zappa requested the participation of a world-renowned artist he admired greatly. Pierre Boulez, the French composer, conductor, and one of the most influential classical music figures of his generation, was initially sent scores of several of Zappa’s compositions by Zappa in 1979, but Boulez did not have a symphony orchestra to work with at the time. Boulez instead commissioned Zappa to compose a piece of music for the instrumentation of the Ensemble InterContemporain, an ensemble he formed in Paris in 1976. The commissioned piece became “The Perfect Stranger”, the impetus behind Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger, recorded and released in 1984. The Ensemble InterContemporain also recorded versions of the previously released “Naval Aviation in Art?”, as well as “Dupree’s Paradise”, which Zappa had been performing with his rock bands going back to the early 1970s.
Not content to have a modern music ensemble simply interpret some of his more challenging compositions, Zappa rounded out The Perfect Stranger with compositions executed by the Synclavier, a state-of-the-art digital keyboard sampler manufactured by New England Digital and used by artists as diverse as Stevie Wonder, Chick Corea, Laurie Anderson, and Michael Jackson. The sophisticated nature of the Synclavier allowed Zappa to sample endless sounds and build recordings of his compositions with virtually no margin of error (a necessity for a perfectionist of his nature). Frank Zappa would go on to use the Synclavier on several subsequent albums, but he introduced it in the form of the four non-orchestral tracks that appear on The Perfect Stranger.
This combination resulted in an album showing off Zappa’s compositional prowess within more traditional contexts and contemporary, wave-of-the-future configurations. As usual with Zappa’s more serious, long-form pieces, “The Perfect Stranger” incorporates 12-tone themes, a flurry of percussion, clusters of complex melodies, and lingering, romantic runs of violin, clarinet, and harp. Like his idol Edgard Varese, there is an abundance of danger and urgency within the notes. Boulez is in his element at the conductor’s podium, and Zappa – who acquired his first Boulez album, a recording of Le Marteau Sans Maitre, when he was a teenager – was certainly pleased with Boulez’s treatment of his works. “I think that he truly does want to squeeze every last ounce of excellence that he can out of the people that he works with,” Zappa enthused in a 1989 interview.
Of the remaining Ensemble InterContemporain performances on the album, “Naval Aviation in Art?” is a new version of a composition performed both on 200 Motels and Orchestral Favorites and showcases Frank Zappa’s love of deadly serious tension, even with such a relatively short composition. The long, sustained strings and woodwinds are stretched out with an evocation of mystery and suspense and are interspersed with fast bursts of notes that bring a satisfying balance to the piece. As usual, Zappa’s idiosyncratic liner notes offer up somewhat comical descriptions of the music’s meaning: “a sailor-artist, standing before his easel, squinting through a porthole for inspiration, while wiser men sleep in hammocks all around him.”
The third piece performed by the ensemble, “Dupree’s Paradise”, contains plenty of rhythms and melodies that may be more pleasing to listeners unaccustomed to modern classical music. Certainly, the song’s origins as part of Zappa’s rock band setlists give the song more of a traditional feel, but that doesn’t stop Zappa, Boulez, and the ensemble from veering into somewhat unmoored, less conventional territory. It’s constructed a bit like a jazz standard, with the melody providing the “head” (and later, the conclusion) of the piece, while plenty of atonality and experimentalism make up the bulk of the song’s center.
The Synclavier pieces on The Perfect Stranger will probably surprise those who may have been put off by the occasionally cold, robotic feel of the instrument in Frank Zappa’s hands. While this is a very modern take on contemporary classical music, there’s enough variety in the four synthesized tracks presented here to give even the most entrenched “stick to rock music” purists something to explore and enjoy. “The Girl in the Magnesium Dress” puts the warmth and clarity of the Synclavier on full display, with a sense of playfulness – aided by the heavy sampling of one of Zappa’s favorite forms of instrumentation, mallet percussion.
In a 1992 interview with Don Menn and Matt Groening, Zappa explains that the track was made “from Synclavier digital dust… there’s subterranean information which can only be viewed when you go out of the user-friendly part of the machine and into the mysterious world of XPL programming.” By plugging a guitar unit into the machine, Zappa was able to “convert this dust into something that I could then edit for pitch, and the dust indicated a rhythm”. The result is a free-form collection of lush, digital sounds that would probably live comfortably in the realm of Vaporwave or the glitchy, twitchy synth experiments of Orange Milk Records.
“Love Story” is a more manic, frenetic take on the Synclavier’s capabilities, with exclamatory, minor-key notes punching the atmosphere for just a little under one minute (described in typical Zappa outlandishness as depicting “an elderly Republican couple attempting sex while break-dancing). “Outside Now Again” is a Synclavier experiment that – like “The Girl in the Magnesium Dress” – applies Zappa’s guitar playing to the digital context. Before joining Zappa’s band as a guitarist, Steve Vai offered up his services as a transcriptionist in the late 1970s, and his transcription of the guitar solo on “Outside Now” (from the Joe’s Garage album) was fed into the Synclavier with orchestration built up around it.
The Perfect Stranger concludes with its downright eeriest moments. One can only expect a track titled “Jonestown” – named after the settlement in Guyana led by mass murdering cult leader Jim Jones – to be a despondent, sinister composition, and Frank Zappa doesn’t disappoint, as the song is filled with sustained, synthetic instrumentation and an overwhelming sense of dread. In the liner notes, Zappa explains that the song represents “a boring, ugly dance evoking the essential nature of all religions. A person pretending to be a messenger from God bangs on the side of the communal beverage tub with the skull of a former child, silently mouthing the words, Come and get it!” Not exactly a catchy pop anthem.
The Perfect Stranger requires a great deal of backstory and context because it represented a serious shift in Frank Zappa’s artistic priorities, which happened to coincide with fortuitous professional relationships and the advent of modern technology. The availability of Pierre Boulez and the Synclavier resulted in a creative perfect storm for Zappa. He released three other albums in 1984 – Them or Us (a more traditional rock album), Francesco Zappa (another Synclavier project, based on compositions of an 18th century Zappa descendant), and Thing-Fish (a musical theater piece with something to offend everyone, resulting in its ultimate failure to make it to the Broadway stage).
But The Perfect Stranger is probably the most substantial and essential of Frank Zappa’s 1984 releases as it represented the type of experimental, revelatory music that would mainly occupy his time in the last decade of his life. It may not be among his most famous albums, but it’s undoubtedly one of the most crucial ones.