Go Zappa!

Elsewhere in the program, before the interval, we had to sit through three commissions, all of which were pretty benign stuff. Nothing to set the heart racing, nothing to object to. The harshness of most contemporary music in the 70s and 80s is now being replaced, I fear, with blandness. One of our new composers, Dan Coleman, is arranging music for Lisa Loeb. Another, Hsueh-Yung Shen, wrote a piece called Autumn Fall about which he writes that “the work follows a large unbroken arch”. (It’s something of an in-joke among readers of contemporary-music program notes that at least 50% of all new music is “in the form of an arch”.) Zappa would skewer them all without a second thought. There was more life and imagination in any 30 seconds of his music than in the entire first half of the concert. Here’s hoping we get more of him at Carnegie Hall, and that he continues to mix it up with young and old.