Vexed

Satie's Vexations is a famous piano piece, posthumously discovered and frequently mentioned, but rarely actually performed. It's a small piece, less than two minutes long if played slowly – except that, as everyone knows, it has instructions to be played 840 times, thus making it the first example of minimalism.

I've seen the score, even played it – only two or three times perhaps – but I've never heard a performance (which should last, according to most people's calculations, from fourteen to twenty-eight hours – when it is performed it's done as a group marathon). A lovely new series of Satie recordings by LTM, a small London label, presents his work 'in context' – that is, and more than any of my other recordings, in the context of an odd prewar French avant-gardisme, rather than the usual reduction to a handful of pretty tunes. The covers are beautiful (see above), and point in the direction of the cubist/Dada/surreal/impressionist experimental milieu for which the works were intended.

Well, enough program notes. I've bought a couple of the LTM recordings, but have the one of Vexations – not complete, but a 70-minute version that you can play twenty-one times in succession to accurately reproduce the effect – on order. I already have the Musiques de la Rose + Croix CD, though, and was playing it today for the first time. Now I already knew that Satie's Rosicrucian music was, even by his standards, rather odd; long, drifting chorales and fanfares that wobble between the mysterious and the quasi-grand.

So when, while I answered e-mails, one of those chorales went on and on – and on – in the background, I didn't really notice. For a while. Then after maybe five or six minutes I started to think: hmm. Irritating. When will this one be over.

And a few more minutes... it's still going on... this can't be the same piece, still, can it?... it's kind of... annoying... and I'm kind of... vexed...

and realized, suddenly laughing, that Satie had caught me out: this was a short (very short – only 22 minutes) version of Vexations, included among the other pieces (all of which were, of course, truly short in the Satie tradition). It's wonderful to actually experience the damned thing, which really is kind of vexing: the chords are chromatic, but not extremely so; they all resolve, but not really; everything seems constantly adrift, but not in a way that is at all comfortable. It's frankly irritating, without being obviously or overwhelmingly so –

how perfect. The Velvet Gentleman has won, again.

Comments

[Agustín]

An interesting circularity, isn't it? If Vexations irritates you Satie is achieving his goal, if he doesn't he may be failing but he is being a jolly good composer if he can make a twenty-four hour-long piece feel bearable. He can't get it wrong! That is the most vexing thing of all.

By the way, Vexations was performed live at City University around 1987, by two then postgraduate students: Hugh Nankivell and Andrew Ockreja (not sure about this spelling). It lasted the best part of twenty-four hours. Although I dropped in several times during this period, it didn't then occur to me to ask what their contingency arrangements were for toilet breaks.