"The harmony that's used is all derived from this book called The Chord Bible. Every composer has notes, chords and rhythms that he likes to hear. Some people keep it all in their head and some people will jot down little sketches. Several years ago I made a classification of all of my favorite chords plus the order in which I preferred to hear the pitches in the chords arpeggiated. It's all broken down from three-note, four-note, five-note, six-note, eight-note chords. The chords are in different classifications, starting with those chords that have a minor second as the uppermost interval, major second, minor third, blah blah blah blah blah, all the way down to the fewest chords that have the minor ninth as the upper interval of the chord. There are real dense voice chords and chords that cover four or five octaves. There's a whole variety in the book." (FZ in Music & Sound Output, March 1987)
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"MUSICIAN: Is that where you came up with different dissonances?
ZAPPA: Well, I've always been in favor of dissonance. I like food with a lot of cayenne pepper on it, and I like music with a lot of dissonance in it. And I can't stand that shaging V-I!! In fact, the stuff that I'm working with now is seven-part harmony – with no notes doubled. And most of the orchestra stuff is based on that. In other words, if you take any kind of a diatonic scale, it contains seven notes, and there are ways of spacing those seven notes so that at all times you're playing the entire scale. But you can make it sound like chords instead of blurs. Want to hear an example? I'll play you a beautiful seven-note chord [goes to the piano]. If you take a C major scale, it sounds like this. You have a certain number of mathematical possibilities of how you space those things out to get a chord. This chord is made up of all the notes in that scale: [plays chord]. That's spread out over an octave and a fifth. See, it's spelled E-F-A-C-D-G-B.
MUSICIAN: That doesn't sound that 'off' to me.
ZAPPA: That's the trick. It's how you take a whole scale and play it and make it sound like something you want to hear. Anybody can go: [smashes dissonant chords randomly up and down the keyboard]. The other thing I worked out is chords built in fifths. You build chords in fifths plus one third, and that will also give you seven notes. Here's an example of that [plays scale]. That's C-E-B-F#-G-D-A. That's a third on the bottom, and all the other intervals are fifths except one half-step. It's a third, then a triad in fifths, then another triad in fifths up a half-step." (FZ in Musician, August 1979)
