I am vexed no longer.

Inspiration for this entry is thanks to harri3tspy, who reminded me how much I dislike Erik Satie�s music, although not usually on first hearing. While Satie did write some very nice tunes, and the Gymnopaedies are included here, they are simplistic and were meant more to illustrate how his contemporaries were going to town with their performance instructions than anything else. Satie�s fort� was in satire, and in that he was well-named.

However, I recall how in early 1999 one of our profs arranged a performance of Satie�s Vexations. This piece consists of a bass line and its subsequent harmonization played like this: theme, variation I, theme, variation II. The entire piece is four lines long and takes maybe one and-a-half minutes to play. However, the entire performance requires that this piece be played 840 times without a break. As a matter of fact, our own tcklyrpharsn was one of the performers. It was arranged thusly:

Two grand pianos were installed onstage and the first performer played Vexations 20 times at one while the third player turned pages for him and the second pianist waited patiently at the other. When No. 1 was done, he vacated his seat, which was taken over by No. 3, while No. 4 turned pages for No. 2, and so on until 42 different players had had their go at it. Even Hubby, who is not a pianist, got his chance. I am not a pianist, never was, never will be, and so I was excused from the exercise (thank the gourd). The performance was fed live to speakers in the quad so that the whole campus partook of the experience, and B. and her students had set up the chairs in the concert hall so that they resembled more an art installation than a seating arrangement.

Tom began it at 6:30 a.m. He was barely awake and apparently almost dozed off during his first reading. The tune is hypnotic anyway. The entire performance was done about 11 p.m. I think. Don�t quote me on that, Jenn would probably remember better than I. During the day various other fun activities took place in the lobby. I took part in a rendition of John Cage�s Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radios. I think we loaned a couple of transistor radios out, one of which returned in a rather unusable condition. There was also a performance of Cage�s 4'33", but instead of a pianist not playing piano, the choir did not sing. This piece works with all instrumentation, somewhat the way Bach might. (Irony intended.)

Anyway, Vexations filled the music department and the quad all day. People would wander into the hall, stay for a while, and wander out again with disturbing expressions on their faces. The music was photocopied onto 840 separate sheets of paper so that upon the completion of one time through, the page turner simply turned to the next page. It was an excellent way to keep count. After each performer was done, he/she was then requested to write on the back of his/her music a brief description of the experience. These were posted on the recital hall door and were often rather entertaining to read. Satie was some kind of musical genius. The tune and variations, after 840 playings, is totally unmemorable. You would think that we would all be humming it for years afterwards, but if you were to ask anyone who was actually involved in the project to sing it or play it for you without a score, he/she would be hard-pressed to remember how it went. I think for this reason alone we were not mobbed by the community at large demanding that we stop, since every time the piece started afresh over the speakers in the quad, it sounded like a vaguely familiar tune, but where have I heard it before?

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