UNDERSTANDING SATIE'S 'VEXATIONS'

Abstract

SINCE ITS first reproduction in print in 1949, the single manuscript page containing the piece by Erik Satie entitled Vexations (Ex. 1) has attained something approaching celebrity status.' In many ways, this remains Satie's most revolutionary work, still causing controversy over a century after it was composed in 1893. With its 840 repetitions, it is Satie's longest composition and also the supreme example of his quest in the 1890s to make much out of a little (in this case, what is in effect a single three-part diminished chord). It is also the first known experiment in organized total chromaticism and continual, unrelieved dissonance, with no obvious sense of direction or tonal centre. Indeed, if its 'theme' contained the missing AN, it might be viewed as the first experiment in serialism. It is certainly minimalist; it is the first piece to explore the effects of boredom, even of hallucination, both on the performer and on the audience, as well as being the first piece to incorporate a period of silent meditation in its performance indications. It is no wonder, then, that Vexations was the piece that most interested John Cage in his post-war rediscovery of Satie. He mounted the first complete performance of it in the Pocket Theatre, New York, on 9 September 1963; it lasted 18 hours and 40 minutes, though the link between the timing and the 840 repetitions was not fortuitous. As Ornella Volta has discovered, Cage in fact carefully divided the performance up into 56 twenty-minute slots, each containing fifteen playings of one minute and twenty seconds.2 It would appear that Satie deliberately made Vexations hard to grasp (or memorize) for the performer (presumably a pianist or a harmonium player, although no instrument is specified, just as no dynamics are marked). Satie's apparently abstruse enharmonic notation spells chords 13 and 33 in Ex. 1 differently, even though they are the same, and the identical right-hand parts of chords 1, 10 and 12 (or 18, 27 and 29) are