426. Interview with David Ocker (2021)

Interview with David Ocker (2021)

In 1983, Frank Zappa released the first of two volumes of his orchestral music recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra. One of them was a work called Mo 'N Herb's Vacation.

(Read more details about the genesis of the piece here.)

I scaped up $250 and ordered the full score from Barking Pumpkin as soon as I saw it was available. I've spent many years studying this piece -- always in awe of David Ocker, who plays the first clarinet part (the first movement could have been titled as some sort of clarinet concerto, David is so prominently featured) ...

Here is my interview with him, conducted via e-mail:

LS: Tell me about your musical education. At some point, I imagine you must have played some Boulez or Stockhausen which enabled you to be that proficient at reading complex nested tuplets, etc.

DO: I did play a lot of new music in college (Carleton in Minnesota) and grad school (CalArts) -- but never performed any Boulez or Stockhausen (that I can remember at the moment). It was during my two years at CalArts that I developed a real interest in tuplets (at the time still called "cross rhythms" -- the term "tuplets" didn't arrive until personal computers started offering music composition software). Upon hearing about a new program, one would always ask "does it do tuplets?" and the answer wasn't always "yes."

In any case, by the time I graduated from CalArts I was proficient in quintuplets and septuplets. I don't remember any particular piece for which I had to learn that --it was something of a personal obsession. I would practice them while walking or when sitting in the car with the windshield wipers running. Although I didn't formally study Indian music at CalArts, a lot of my fellow students did, and some of those ideas must have rubbed off on me. I don't remember being specifically taught about them.

So, when I was first exposed to the Black Page #1 by John Bergamo (see here for more details) ... I was pretty fascinated. John was also involved with Indian hand drumming and I hung out with percussionists a lot -- probably because they were into such matters while my fellow wind players weren't. My years at CalArts were 1974-76. I was hired by Frank in 1977. I think I probably went off the rails trying to learn the Black Page rhythms during this period. I don't remember confronting nested tuplets before this time. Eventually, I remember playing the solo part to Mo 'N Herb (1st mvmt.) at some informal recitals -- like guesting at a friend's art school lecture. I told Frank about it, and he insisted that I have some sort of steady rhythm to play against. I think I used a little Casio keyboard for this.

I do remember once visiting Frank during my work for him (I worked at home mostly and delivered product when I had it). I can't remember now what prompted him to tell me that he thought I really understood tuplets. Frank didn't give out compliments much, so that part of it stuck in my memory.

My learning tuplets was immeasurably aided by using a Trinome.

LS: The sessions took place in January 1983 and the album was released in June. My score says "revised 9/83." There was no Sibelius or Finale back then and I think I would have recognized Frank's notation. Who copied the score? You? Do you remember how long it took?

DO: My score has the same revision date. I don't remember anything about revisions. I believe I copied all three movements -- the other copyist who ever did full scores (Richard Emmet) had a sufficiently different hand than I did, so I'm pretty sure about that. I have no idea how long it all took. Months. All the staves were hand-drawn.

The second movement existed in quite different form before I went to work for Frank. I'm thinking he must have showed me that piece the day he hired me. He had used electrical press-on vinyl symbols on score paper to create a partially graphic score. Wavy lines and loopy coils. Higher or lower on the staff meant pitch. That sort of thing. This was WøøööĨ. He was expecting that orchestra string players would be able to play something close to what he imagined. I told him that this was the sort of thing professional string sections were not going to put up with, and I told him stories I had heard from Earle Brown (who had taught at CalArts while I was there) about giving graphically-notated music to orchestras. These were not happy stories. Frank took my advice and had me write out all the waves and coils in normal notation (e.g. m. 53-57, second violins). These days, I could probably think of less cluttered ways of doing the same thing with standard notation, but what I did apparently worked well enough.

The first movement came into being when I exchanged a pay raise for Frank writing me a solo clarinet piece. Kind of like commissioning him, huh? It was called Mo's Vacation. Then he added bass and drums -- those parts formed a separate piece, Herb's Vacation. Frank was not a chamber music kind of composer (yet), and he had a way of making small things larger and larger and larger. So once the idea for making Mo 'N Herb a first movement with WøøööĨ as the second movement and then the third movement (a synthesis of the two and probably program music in Frank's mind) became inevitable.

LS: This is the ancient plainchant Dies irae:

I always felt that -- although the intervals are different -- this quarter-note theme in Mo 'N Herb was somewhat reminiscent ...

DO: I remember having that same thought before. I don't remember this ever coming up in discussions with Frank -- who must have known the Dies Irae melody and how it had been used in classical music. I could easily imagine that such a connection would not have bothered him at all -- although while I worked for him (and forever after), I have always adhered to the mantra "never try to predict what Frank would have said/thought about anything." He was smarter than everyone around him and his reactions to things were completely unpredictable.

The theme begins the second movement right off the bat and predates the composition of the orchestral music. The Big Note says it came from his guitar soloing. I can believe that. I think the theme probably represents "Frank" (i.e., the good-guy hero) in whatever program he had in mind. (The theme first appears in Bar 38 of the second movement -- LS) ...

Frankly (no pun intended), I personally find this theme instrusive and over-used when I listen to the piece. "Oh no, not that again." Maybe there are hidden variations and uses of it that I don't remember, but mostly it seems too-often repeated and unvaried for my taste. Hey, even an inversion or two would have been nice.

LS: There are a few discrepancies between score and recorded performance. In the first movement, other than the glockenspiel that I hear in the very first measures, none of the vibraphone or marimba parts (that mostly double your part) are in evidence. Was this Nagano's decision, or Frank's? Same thing with Chad's drumset part. Sometimes it's there and played and sometimes not. At times, he is playing where nothing is indicated in the score.

DO: To the best of my recollection, every note in the score was recorded. The recordings were made to multi-track tape -- probably 24 tracks, but I don't remember exactly. In the sessions, a great deal of effort went into acoustically isolating different sections. The orchestra was somewhat spread out but, unlike the concert, seating was pretty much standard orchestra layout. And there was those plexiglass baffles on the microphones that were supposed to increase the isolation.

Afterwards, Frank wasn't completely happy with the recordings (sometimes actually disappointed). I know he spent a lot of time trying to improve them in the mix. I remember him complaining that Kent's tempos varied from take to take, making it hard for him to splice. So the most likely explanation for parts disappearing from the released recording is that for some reason Frank decided to remove them. I doubt Kent had any input at all once the recordings were finished. About mallet parts not making it into the recording -- one of Frank's orchestration tricks was to double a difficult wind or string line with some "precise" instrument (meaning one that has a sharp clear attack, like xylophone). The doubling instruments were supposed to blend into one sound, of course. The fact that he took those out of the mix implies the blend wasn't working for some reason.

Why drumset parts appeared on the recording that aren't in the score, I don't know. One thing Frank was not too worried about was leaving behind a definitive version of his orchestral music -- so if he thought he could improve the music by leaving things out or adding them to the mix, he'd do it.

LS: What were the rehearsals like? Was the LSO sight-reading, or had they gotten the parts ahead of time? Was anybody "smirking" about this long-haired rock 'n roller daring to write for such a large orchestra?

DO: The parts were sent ahead to the orchestra. I don't remember how far ahead, but not a huge amount of time. Probably, we would have been anxious for them to arrive before the Christmas holidays. The LSO was an exceptionally busy orchestra, which pretty much took any work offered to them. I remember being told that it had been months since the orchestra had any days off and would be months yet before they did again! I'm guessing that when Frank booked the orchestra, it filled a big slot of time that lots of the players had hoped would be their vacation. I was told that most of the principal players skipped this project. I was also told that the base pay scale was very low by California standards.

I'm sure some of the players worked on their parts beforehand. A few of the replacement principals were out to show off how good they were. They wouldn't have been showing off for Frank particularly, more likely for the orchestra committee -- the LSO was run by the players themselves, and by an elected controlling committee. I became friendly with the bass clarinetist, who complained to me that even though he played regularly with the LSO, they wouldn't upgrade him to full membership. (Eventually, apparently they did.)

The day before the first rehearsal when all the equipment was being moved onto the stage, I remember one percussionist quizzing me about how to play the rhythm of the first measure. I think he had to play it with me. I explained that it was easier if you thought about it as four even 16th-notes, and then just played the triplet bits as grace notes. Kent overheard me say this and seemed a bit scandalized that I wasn't trying to play the triplets exactly! That player is at least one example of someone looking at the music in advance.

The rehearsals were not terribly tense, but tension did build. Much of it came from Frank's attempts at reorganizing the orchestra seating layout. Orchestras hate sitting in unusual arrangements. At one point, Kent gave the orchestra a lecture about attitude. I remember him telling them that he too was hired to do this gig (which turned into a regular association with the LSO later on). Personally, the players were friendly to me, and I believe to Ed Mann and Chad. How they related to Frank personally, I couldn't say. For some reason, Frank had decided before the rehearsals that we didn't need a contrabass clarinet player. One of the orchestra people came to me to tell me that the guy had been hired already and had to be paid whether he played or not. They were afraid to tell Frank about this, fearing an angry response and they wanted me to tell them. I told him, he wasn't angry, and the contrabass clarinetist ended up doing the gig ... if there's any instrument in an orchestra that's harder to hear than the contrabass clarinet, I don't know what it is!

Another player -- a bassoonist -- told me that he had played the 200 Motels sessions years before, and had requested to be part of these sessions. So some members were actually excited about working with Frank.

LS: Frank complained about the whole experience; how he lost so much money, etc. Was he really that dissatisfied with the recordings (leaving  the trumpet player problems in Strictly Genteel out of the equation?)

DO: I think it was part of Frank's basic nature to complain about musicians who weren't performing up to his standards -- whether those players were members of the LSO or the MOI. He was a businessman, and was always keeping an eye on the bottom line. When I was doing Synclavier work for Frank, I was spending lots of time with him and I heard lots of bitching about all sorts of different things, often related to money. That's who he was, I guess. On the other hand, some of the music he wanted the LSO to play was damn near impossible. The doublings and the rhythms and the interlocking parts -- especially in Mo 'N Herb, strike me now as wildly over-the-top optimistic. I suppose it's possible he was a bit disappointed in what he had written. Of course, it's more likely that his ego was so big that any problems with the music or the recordings had to be someone else's fault. Which brings up (in my mind) the "Frank Zappa for President" idea. A lot of Donald Trump's behavior as president struck me as being similar to what Zappa would have been like as president.

LS: What was it like orchestraing Bogus Pomp? Did you have a piano redution to work from? Input from Frank? It's a masterful job.

DO: No piano reductions. I took previously exisiting orchestra scores (already arranged by Frank) and combined them (according to his precise instructions of what happens when) into a score that would be performable by a single orchestra. For example, if you had simply spliced together the various scores which he combined into Bogus Pomp, the percussion requirements would have been inflated many times over. There were six percussion parts and nearly every single one of them would have needed their own bass marimba, vibraphone and glockenspiel. So I had to find ways of making, say, a xylophone part playable by someone whose setup had no xylophone. Give it to a marimba? Sure. But no marimba in that setup. How about vibraphone staccato?

Another similar issue -- the Royce Hall scores had amplified solo strings and three pianos. The orchestra for the LSO project had, of course, a regular orchestra with lots of string players and only one piano. So part of my job was to apportion the pitches of the three pianos to the string section or to use the string section en masse to cover the amplified solo parts. (All this was done before we knew the LSO would be involved.)

"Piano reductions" reminds me of this story from my first year of working for Frank. He had hired someone to make lead sheets of recent tunes. Someone I never met. I suspect some of the work was takedowns, but some of it was reducing scores to single lines and chords. This would have been for the 1977 band with Adrian Belew. By mistake (whose? I know not), one of the scores sent to the lead sheet guy was the full orchestra Pedro's Dowry and yes, he sent back a lead sheet ... Frank was angry when he saw it. I remember him asking, "where's the lead sheet to The Rite of Spring?" But then, Frank figured he'd give the lead sheet to the band anyway and see what they could come up with. Alas, Mr. Lead Sheet didn't understand the score -- especially percussion parts in percussion clef for multiple drums, which became melodies with all the notes on space and no accidentals! So that particular lead sheet never got used for anything. I'd love to get a look at it now.

LS: Nagano himself has said that this was his "first real break." My experience is that most orchesras (esp. as prestigious as the LSO) give young conductors a hard time. Did you notice any of that? I have friends that have played under him recently, and gave him bad marks. But it seems to me that he pulled off a near-miracle recording all this stuff in such a short period of time.

DO: Here's a moment I remember clearly. It was the first rehearsal, maybe halfway through. I was standing behind the basses, listening. During a short break, one of the bass players turned around and asked me what the conductor's name was. I told him, and the player said "he's very clear." And he was very clear. He was a young hotshot. As I mentioned, the LSO hired him later one -- so that bass player wasn't the only one in the orchestra who was impressed. Nagano and I stayed in touch, kind of, for a while, especially while he was conducting the L.A. Opera. The last time I saw him -- years ago now -- he wasn't very friendly.

LS: Francesco. I'm really interested in the genesis of your discovery of Francesco Zappa, and how you brought it to Frank's attention. I'm also very interested in more details about your original Synclavier patches versus the bizarre final result!

DO: The Internet tells me now that there was a new edition of the Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1980 -- so this must have happened in 1980 or '81. Frank was on tour, and I had lots of free time -- probably working on some orchestra score or parts while he was gone. At that time, I was still playing clarinet, and was looking for music to play at a music store called Theodore Front -- then in or near Beverly Hills. While I was there, I saw the new Groves and I wondered whether Frank had earned an entry. Well, no -- Frank Zappa wasn't listed. But Francesco was. Of course, I immediately jumped to the obvious conclusion -- Francesco Zappa was some sort of joke. I resolved to tell Frank about this when he returned from the tour.

Meanwhile, through Judy Green of Judy Green Music, I met a man named Jim Lee -- I think was probably a prof at USC or UCLA. He found a listing of libraries which held scores by Francesco. That list is as far as I had gotten when Frank returned from the tour. While he was away, someone had already told him about Francesco and he had his secretary contact UC Berkeley and the Library of Congress for the string trio scores.

So fast forward a year or two, when I was working at UMRK inputting music into the Synclavier. One of the tasks I was given was entering these string trios. I set out to make them as realistic as possible, using Synclavier string sounds. These were FM synthesis sounds -- not samples. Imagine them played on a DX7. I added turns and other ornaments, as best as I understood them. I'm no expert on 18th century musical manuscript and notation, but I knew a lot more about it than anyone else around Frank at the time.

Frank was excited about finding another composer with his name, even if the guy had lived 200 years earlier. Also, I think he needed some easy product at the time to keep the cash flowing. For those and probably other reasons, Frank decided to record and release the Francesco cuts I had entered. Recording meant playing the files back on the Synclavier in the corner of the control room and recording them onto a tape machine on the other side of the room. I was horrified when Frank started replacing the timbres of the tracks before recording them. So, if I had programmed a little dynamic swell on a held note or pause or something sort of classical-era, playing it back on tubular bells or whatever he chose obliterated those effects. In any case -- now 36 years later -- Frank's Francesco cuts sound like some sort of weird music box to me. Far more interesting than the Stockhausen music boxes I've heard (based on the zodiac, as I recall).