The Black Page
The Black Page is a piece of music by Frank Zappa . It first appeared on the album Zappa in New York (1978). Its name (German: black side ) refers to a tight set of notes with many notes to be played.
The piece was originally written for drums and percussion and was later rearranged in different versions , including a disco version and a so-called new age version.
Drummer Terry Bozzio reported in an interview that Zappa wrote the piece after always talking to studio musicians of the Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra & Chorus about the fear of coming to a recording session in the morning and being confronted with a black page full of notes to become. After Bozzio mastered the piece after two weeks of practice, Zappa wrote the melody and chord progressions.
On the live album Zappa in New York (1978), Zappa mentioned the "statistical density" of the piece. It is written in 4/4 time with excessive use of triplets, quintuplets, septoles, etc. , including nested triplets. The original composition culminates in the last bars in unodecimoles, i.e. eleven notes played on one beat. In the later versions, Zappa takes up the notes of the melody and regroups them rhythmically. The piece appeared on eight different albums by Zappa.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Ben Watson: “Frank Zappa. The negative dialectics of poodle play, "London, 1994, p. 334
- ^ "The Black Page # 2", album Zappa in New York (1978), text on globalia.net
- ↑ Interview by Andrew Greenaway, September 17, 1992, T'Mershi Duween, Volume 28, Web presence of Andrew Greenaway ( Memento of the original from October 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
literature
Brett Clement: Little dots: A study of the melodies of the guitarrist / composer Frank Zappa , Master Thesis, The Florida State University, School of Musik, 2004, online version (PDF; 6.5 MB), pages 25-48