Zappa [is] an extremely creative and highly proficient composer and performer of truly serious contemporary music, whose musical and artistic perception clearly transcends the narrowly defined limits of pop and whose breadth of musical experience outstrips the boundaries of all forms of American music, not simply pop.

By "serious," I mean a learned and studied writer of music; one who has studied the traditional techniques of theory, harmony, counterpoint, and composition; one who is aware of the history of Western Music especially and who can both appreciate and appraise contemporary music and its materials; one who has both a personal vision and aesthetic and who has the training to be, in Charles Ives' terms, "communicative," "melodious" and "expressive;" one whose work is what is done, not what has to be done; one who insists on the primacy of the creative imagination and is completely open to it both...