Bochum Symphony Orchestra Presents Zappa’s The Adventures of Greggery Peccary on the Philharmonie Essen’s NOW! AMERICA Festival

The Bochum Symphony Orchestra brings a diverse flair to their season with a performance of Frank Zappa’s absurdist work for voices and orchestra, The Adventures of Greggery Peccary, under the direction of Steven Sloane. The performance, on October 20, is part of the NOW! AMERICA festival presented by the Philharmonie Essen in Germany. The Festival runs through November and also features the music of John Cage, Steve Reich, and John Adams.

Transcribed in 2009 by Ali  N. Askin directly from the composer’s 1978 original recording featured on his album, Studio Tan, The Adventures of Greggery Peccary is an exhilarating, albeit challenging concert work. It is a wild narrative that moves in and out of a corporate desert and follows a trend-setting swine, Greggery Peccary, through discoveries of the cultural condition. This performance features vocalist David Moss and baritone Omar Ebrahim. Both are veterans of the Ensemble Modern’s Zappa Project with whom they are featured in the 2003 RCA release, Ensemble Modern Plays Frank Zappa: Greggery Peccary & Other Persuasions.

I must plummet boldly forward to my ultra-avant laminated, simulated replica-mahogany desk, with the strategically-placed, imported, very hip water pipe, and the latest edition of the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG, and rack my agile mind for a spectacular new TREND, thereby rejuvenating our limping economy, and providing for bored & miserable people everywhere some great new 'THING' to identify with!

- Greggery Peccary (reprinted by permission of the Zappa Family Trust)

Learn more on NOW! AMERICA by visiting www.philharmonie-essen.de.

More on the life and work of Frank Zappa can be found at his Composer Profile and www.zappa.com.

Frank Zappa
The Adventures of Greggery Peccary
transcribed by Ali N. Askin (2009)
for male voice, 2 actors, narrator and orchestra
text by Frank Zappa
1(afl.pic).1(ca).2(1.Ebcl.2.bcl.tsax).1-1.2(1.pictp.2.flugelhn).1.1-3perc-2kybd-mand.2gtr.bgtr.hp-str
25’