‘Civilization’ a la Zappa : The Cult Composer’s Epic Final Work Is a Complex Summation of a Life

For more than a decade, Frank Zappa labored intermittentlyon “Civilization, Phaze III,” a sprawling, 113-minute epic, marked by the most complex, ambitious musical experiments the composer ever tackled.

Finishing the massive task assumed an increasing urgency after Zappa was diagnosed with cancer in 1990, and he made the last adjustments just weeks before his death at age 52 one year ago Sunday.

“I think it’s very much about finishing his life,” his widow, Gail Zappa, says of the music. “He said that after he finished this, he had nothing more to do. I asked him, ‘Is there anything else you want to tell me about?’ He said, ‘No, I’ve done everything that I can.’ ”

The weighty work--described in Zappa’s CD notes as an “opera-pantomime, with choreographed physical activity”--is being released this week, on the heels of his induction to theRock and Roll Hall of Fame. (The ceremony is in New York on Jan. 12.) There are plans for a stage presentation conceived by the composer and to be designed by choreographer Jamey Hampton (of the ISO dance troupe) and Matt Groening, the creator of “The Simpsons” and a longtime Zappa fan.

The two-CD set of the music, however, will at first be available only by mail order through Zappa’s own Barking Pumpkin company, (818) PUMPKIN. Gail Zappa allows that this may not be the best way to get the work to a general audience, but it is, she says, the way to get it to those who care most.

“I wanted to see who’s really out there, and how much attention they’re paying to the importance of having Frank’s music continue to be in their lives,” she says.

“It may seem unfair, in many ways, to treat his music this way,” she says. “But (Frank) gave this record to me. And (it is) of particular importance to me personally. I wanted to make it available to those people who are loyal fans of Frank in this country . . . without having to rely on an industry that never supported Frank in any way as a composer .”

Ironically, although Zappa was dedicated to serious composing from his mid teens, he’s probably best known for such novel pop satires as “Valley Girl” (performed with daughter Moon). Conceptually and stylistically, “Civilization, Phaze III” is a continuation of the 1967 avant-garde ballet/narrative “Lumpy Gravy,” and his 1968 album “We’re Only in It for the Money,” which has been called the cynical flip side of the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

“I think that ‘Phaze III’ is perhaps the ultimate destiny of this particular aspect (of Zappa’s work),” Gail Zappa says. “ ‘Phaze III’ probably started off to be one thing, but because he worked so hard to finish it before he died, it became something a little different than what he originally intended.”

Composed largely on a Synclavier, a sophisticated computer-driven synthesizer capable of producing virtually any imaginable sound, the piece is basically orchestral in texture, and about a third of it was performed by the European new music group Ensemble Modern. There are 19 pieces of music interspersed with a running dialogue leftover from the 1967 “Lumpy Gravy” sessions, and new dialogue recorded by daughter Moon and various Zappa associates, including his Synclavier assistant, Todd Yvega.

For “Lumpy Gravy,” Zappa prompted friends to “ramble incoherently” into microphones planted inside a piano, then edited their various speeches into an absurdist commentary that punctuated original orchestral music. “Civilization, Phaze III” continues that tradition, as Zappa’s own CD liner notes explain:

“What emerged from the (1967) texts was a vague plot regarding pigs and ponies, threatening the lives of characters who inhabit a large piano. In ‘Civilization, Phaze III,’ we get a few more clues about the lives of the piano dwellers and note that the external evils have only gotten worse since we first met them.”

Perhaps the centerpiece of the work is an 18-minute, six-movement composition titled “N-Lite.” It is likely that no piece of music in history contains so much densely packed, meticulously arranged diverse sound. The composer described the work simply as “a frightening son-of-a-bitch.”

The title of the piece was merely a bit of convenient computer-ese.

“It was put together out of two unrelated sequences,” he explained in a 1992 interview. “There’s a group of notes in front of this one sequence that just happens to sound like ‘In the Navy’ from that Village People song. You don’t realize it until it’s gone by, and then--that’s ‘In the Navy’! So that’s the ‘N,’ and the ‘Lite’ part is this sequence that was basically a bunch of very fast and short synthesizer pockets that had the computer title ‘Thousand Points of Light.’ ”

Groening describes the album as “Stravinsky-esque orchestral textures with (composer) Conlon Nancarrow’s tireless forward propulsion presented with the most cutting-edge technology.”

Laughing, he adds, “To give more of a sound bite, this music should finally get Zappa taken truly seriously as a composer. There is nothing else in contemporary music that sounds anything like it. I’ll be listening to this piece for the rest of my life--that’s for sure.”

At least one of the titles, “Beat the Reaper,” would seem to grimly attest to the circumstances under which the composer worked to complete the music.

“Listening to it,” said Groening, who befriended Zappa late in the composer’s life, “it feels like Frank was trying to cram as many musical ideas as possible, one after the other, into this piece. It’s very thick and dense and overpowering. Even if you think you know Frank Zappa’s music, I don’t think anybody could be sufficiently prepared for the powerhouse that this thing represents.”

Gail Zappa says that there’s no doubt that her husband meant this to be taken as his summary “master work.”

“It’s called mortality,” she says. “I think (this work) has a lot to do with Frank knowing that he wasn’t going to be able to realize a lot of the things that he wanted to. So then you do what you can. Part of it is an expression of that. I don’t think he was in a hurry, as much as he was pragmatic and said, ‘I can do this .’ I see it as a big-time ‘Thanks for the Memories,’ in some ways.”