Z
Zappa, Frank
(21 December 1940–4 December 1993; b. Francis Vincent Z., Jr.)
Familiar from his youth with avant-garde composers such as EDGARD VARÈSE, and thus musically more sophisticated than others involved with 1960s rock, Zappa tried at various times and in various ways to introduce avant-garde elements into the formally expansive popular music of the late 1960s. Because successful pop musicians were allowed to transcend the short time limits of the 45 rpm disk to create long-playing 33 rpm records, Zappa’s group, the Mothers of Invention (1964–69; 1970–71; 1973–75), produced music in twenty-five-minute stretches; the result were “concept albums” that he released on a label appropriately named Bizarre. Some of the stronger works mocked California fads and popular music itself. Freak Out (1966) includes “Return of the Son of Monster Magnet,” subtitled “An Unfinished Ballet in Two Tableaux,” which appropriates the techniques of MUSIQUE CONCR È TE.
Figure 21
Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention with The Joshua Light Show at Fillmore East (1968).
I once saw Zappa in a performance when he instructed various sections of the Fillmore East audience to perform preassigned sounds in response to his hand signals from the front of the stage. Once we got going, he said to himself, audibly and with proud irony, “wouldn’t PIERRE B OULEZ like that?” Here and elsewhere, Zappa’s conceited sense of humor is refreshing to some and disaffecting to others. He produced, with less success, not only orchestral scores but eccentric motion pictures, such as 200 Motels (1971) and Baby Snakes (1980). He was to his death perhaps the only alumnus of 1960s rock still capable of generating an esthetic surprise. Innately irrepressible, Zappa also released synthesizer arrangements of an 18th-century composer authentically named Francesco Zappa.
Zaum
(1912)
Coined by a RUSSIAN F UTURIST, probably ALEKSEI K RUCHONYKH, to indicate language that was indefinite or indeterminate in meaning (and phonetically translated as “zaum,” to indicate the palatalized “m”), this term literally means something “beyond or outside of reason or intelligibility”; common English translations are “transrational,” “trans-sense,” or “beyond-sense” language. The idea of writing poetry in invented words was suggested to Kruchonykh by DAVID BURLIUK in December 1912. By March 1913, the former published his notorious poem “Dyr bul shchyl,” which is generally considered to be the first work of Zaum, though VELIMIR K HLEBNIKOV had for several years before this been producing poetry with obscure coinages. The principal difference is that Khlebnikov apparently intended that his experiments be eventually understood, and thus that they be conceptual demonstrations of language’s creative potential to renew itself with ancient Slavic linguistic resources, whereas Kruchonykh intended, at least in the initial stages, that his Zaum be indeterminate in meaning, though not meaningless. Such indeterminate meaning was based on the suggestiveness of sound articulations and roots.
By dislocating language units ranging from phonemes to syntactic structures, Kruchonykh created a whole range of types of Zaum, often combined within a single work. One measure of true Zaum is that it should not be able to be motivated or decoded by such factors as onomatopoeia or psychopathological states. In 1917–19, he created a series of “autographic” works in which the verbal elements were sometimes reduced to a minimum of letters and lines. Thereafter, however, as Kruchonykh moved closer to the mainstream, Zaum appeared only as spice in otherwise non-Zaum works, sometimes arguing for the psychological motivation of such effects. By 1923, Kruchonykh had ceased experimenting with the use of Zaum, though he continued to theorize about its importance.
Other major Zaumniks were I LIAZD, Igor Terentyev (1892–1937), and Aleksandr Tufanov (1887–1942). Some avant-garde painters, such as KAZIMIR M ALEVICH, Olga Rozanova (1886–1918), and Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958), also experimented with Zaum as an analog to abstraction.
Because Zaum is usually considered the most radical product of RUSSIAN F UTURISM, its value is still, decades later, the subject of fierce dispute.
—Gerald Janecek
Zelevansky, Paul
(10 September 1946)
Trained in painting, Zelevansky developed in his twenties a unique and precociously mature style of VISUAL POETRY that mixes texts of his own authorship, set with various typefaces (including rubber-stamped), with graphic drawings. Zelevansky makes each medium of communication as important as the others, so that his works take their rightful place in a tradition that includes both WILLIAM B LAKE and Hebrew illuminated manuscripts. This style informs not only the modest Sweep (1979), but a highly ambitious epic about a historical culture, The Hegemonians, filled with both literary and visual references. Issued as a trilogy, The Case for the Burial of Ancestors (1981, 1986, 1991), for depth and scope, ranks among the strongest book-art. Zelevansky has exhibited pages from it along with sculptures and other artifacts relating to the project.
After working briefly with theater music, he authored one of the first narratives exclusively for computer interaction, Swallows (1986), only to encounter the principal difficulty in distributing literature on computer disk – the systems that could read Swallows (Apple lie, II+) were neither universally popular nor long-lived. Later, Zelevansky created computer-assisted response displays for the Queens Museum in New York. As a sometime educator, he wrote about visual literacy. His wife Lynn Z. (1947) had a distinguished career as a museum administrator.
Zukofsky, Louis
(23 January 1904–12 May 1978)
There is no doubt that Zukofsky did something unprecedented in literature, particularly in poetry, but exactly what is hard to say, even four decades after his death. To point out that he was obscure or that much of his work remains incomprehensible is merely to avoid the issue of whether greater understanding is possible. Zukofsky worked with unusual forms, including a numerical counterpoint in his early classic “Poem Beginning ‘The’”; he produced a highly unusual musical Autobiography in collaboration with his wife, Celia (1913–80). He began in 1927 a “poem of a life,” A, that for its ambition conceptually echoes the Cantos of EZRA P OUND, whose closest Jewish friend Zukofsky probably was.
A differs significantly from other extended contemporary poems in revealing little about its author. HUGH KENNER called it “the most hermetic poem in English, which they will still be elucidating in the 22nd century.” Those appreciative of intricacies indigenous to poetry regard Zukofsky’s translation of the Latin poet Catullus (1969) as awesomely complex. His son Paul Z. (1943–2017) was for many years a distinguished interpreter of avant-garde American music, initially as a violinist, later as a conductor. Celia Z.’s self-published American Friends (1979) is a widow’s remarkable tribute to her late husband, a classic of its rare kind, that prints passages by him beneath relevant fragments written by historic Americans.