This music is metrically complex and chromatically wide-ranging to a degree that the question whether it is rock music or classical music is meaningless as far as the music's essence is concerned—mostly, it depends on the attitude of the performers, the context of the performance, and whether it is a rock band or some classical formation that is playing.

It began as a solo that Zappa composed for his frequent drummer, Terry Bozio. Zappa evidently taught it to Bozio as a head arrangement, then added some written parts for two more percussions to go along with Bozio's improvisations on it. (On the Zappa in New York album Zappa had some more percussion added by overdubbing.)

As of this stage the music was a rapid flurry of rhythmic patterns, with broken, discontinuous rhythms that have the rhythmic stutters that are peculiar to many of Zappa's pieces. In this form Zappa called it The Black Page Drum Solo. (To a musician, by the way, a "black page" of music is one that is densely covered with a lot of notes, especially fast ones with tails and beams, that blacken the page with ink marks.)

Zappa said in his recorded Zappa in New York concerts that he then wrote a melody derived from the drum solo. As he described it in the liner notes, "The exact same rhythm patterns...are now the metric spacings of a melody that sounds like the missing link between 'Uncle Meat' and 'The Be-Bop Tango.'" The melodic line is as disjunct and chromatically complex as its drum solo-derived rhythms. This version is called The Black Page # 1.

There is a creative arrangement of it for percussionist and piano, using the Drum Solo for half its length of four minutes or so, the piano then entering to take the melody and harmonies of Black Page # 1. A quarter century after its composition it still sounded like a complex modernist classical composition.

But there is more to the story. In the concert, Zappa said it occurred to him that while quite a few listeners liked The Black Page, "what about the other people in the world who might enjoy the melody of The Black Page but couldn't really approach its statistical density in its original form?"

For them he regularized the underlying rhythms to a more standard steady rock beat and smoothed out the rhythms, producing a "cheesy New York teen-aged version," which he called Black Page # 2. In reality, this is still a complex composition as the focus is merely changed to the dizzying chromaticism of the melodic line.

This, too, exists in classical versions; one of the most striking by Finland's Olli Virtapekko, who wrote an arrangement for his original instruments Baroque Ensemble Ambrosius, for Baroque oboe, glockenspiel, melodica, harpsichord, and Baroque cello. This arch-classical group manages to rock the piece about as well as Zappa himself did in New York.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide