Vexations is a musical work by Erik Satie. Apparently conceived for keyboard (although the single page of manuscript does not specify an instrument), it consists of a short theme in the bass whose four presentations are heard alternatingly unaccompanied and played with chords above. The theme and its accompanying chords are written using enharmonic notation. The piece is undated, but scholars usually assign a date around 1893–1894 on the basis of musical and biographical evidence.
The piece bears the inscription "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." ("") From the 1960s onward, this text has mostly been interpreted as an instruction that the page of music should be played 840 times,"Pianoless Vexations (Erik Satie)", UbuWeb.com. Retrieved 21 June 2008. although this may not have been Satie's intention.
Publication
Satie did not publish the work in his lifetime, and is not known ever to have performed or mentioned it. The piece was first printed in 1949 (in facsimile form, by John Cage in Contrepoints No. 6). The first American publication of the piece was in Art News Annual, vol. 27 (1958), again in facsimile. The first British publication was as an engraved example in an article by Peter Dickinson in Music Review, vol. 28 (1967). In 1969 the publisher Éditions Max Eschig produced the first commercial edition of the work, placing it second in a collection of three so-called Pages mystiques. Since there is no musicological evidence linking Vexations to the other works in the volume, its appearance in that context indicates nothing more than an editor's desire to publish Satie's uncollected compositions in three-part assemblages such as the Gymnopédies, Gnossiennes, etc.
First public performance
Vexations appears to have had no performance history before the idea gained ground that the piece was required to be played 840 times. The first of the marathon performances of the work in this way was on 9 September 1963, produced by John Cage and Lewis Lloyd at the Pocket Theatre at 100 Third Avenue in Manhattan by the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, organized by Cage.
Pianists included Cage, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Philip Corner, Viola Farber, Robert Wood, MacRae Cook, John Cale, David Del Tredici, James Tenney, Howard Klein (the New York Times reviewer, who was asked to play in the course of the event) and Joshua Rifkin, with two reserves. Cage set the admission price at $5 and had a time clock installed in the lobby of the theatre. Each patron checked in with the clock and when leaving the concert, checked out again and received a refund of 5¢ for each 20 minutes attended. "In this way", he told Lloyd, "people will understand that the more art you consume, the less it should cost." But Cage had underestimated the length of time the concert would take. It lasted over 18 hours.
One person was present for the entire performance: Karl Schenzer, an actor with The Living Theatre.Schonberg, Harold. "A Long, Long Night (and Day) at the Piano; Satie's Vexations Played 840 Times by Relay Team", The New York Times, 11 September 1963: p. 45
Meaning
Satie never explained the piece's title. Conjectures regarding the meaning of Vexations (and its title) were construed long after Satie's death and in most cases, supported by little evidence.
The notation of the chords makes extensive use of enharmonic spellings, making it difficult to read immediately.Serious Immobilities: On the Centenary of Erik Satie's Vexations Vexations could be interpreted as Satie's coming to terms with Wagnerism. In this interpretation, Vexations would be Satie's ironic act of defiance. He could outdo music as lengthy and intense as Wagner's , using only the limited resources available to him; hence Gavin Bryars' description of it as 'a sort of Ring des Nibelungen des pauvres' ("poor man's ").Bryars, Gavin: Vexations and its Performers, Contact No. 26, Spring 1983 Vexations can also be seen as an attack on – or a parodic emulation of – what in Wagnerian music is known as the "unendliche Melodie" (unending melody), in which melody is supported by a continuously modulating progression of complex chords. In mood and compositional technique this brings Vexations near to the – certainly mocking – ("unsavoury Choral"), the first (introductory) piece of , which he composed more than 20 years later, after he had studied conventional counterpoint for several years. Vexations was written in a period when Satie's approach to harmony was related rather to a modal line of thought than to conventional harmony. Harmonically, Vexations appears to be an exercise in non-resolving tritones. Maybe Satie's intent was nothing more than to prove that any harmonic and rhythmic system was only a matter of habit for the hearer (and not resulting from innate or divine preconception, as his contemporaries would think): so that after listening 840 times to a chordal system that is at odds with any habitual one, and set in an odd metre, one would possibly start to experience this new system to be as natural as any other – an experiment he was likely to have taken seriously, and maybe directly or indirectly influenced Debussy and/or Ravel. Although the date of composition is uncertain, Vexations appears to have been composed shortly after a brief, but intense, affair with Suzanne Valadon, the nearest Satie ever got to a relationship with a woman, as far as is known. One of the testaments to this relationship is Satie's optimistic composition (April 1893), being a nickname for his beloved, and the composition being an echo of how Satie customarily greeted her. It can be conjectured that Satie – being "" ("angry", or even "spiteful") about being rejected by his "Biqui"—wanted to disenchant himself from what she had meant to him, by composing a piece that would help him forget all such frivolous feelings. It is also possible that Satie was spoofing the perpetuum mobile genre: many 19th-century composers had composed such separate pieces, then very popular, with an 'indefinite' number of repeats, mostly leaning on dextrous virtuosity. References like "immobilities", a definite (but disproportionately high) number of repeats, an unconventional harmony, and a "very slow" tempo, instead of the usual very rapid one of a perpetuum mobile, all might indicate that Satie was making a parody of this genre, spiting the cheap effects of content-less virtuosity in an uninspired harmonic and rhythmical scheme, that his contemporaries would use to suggest "rapture" to their public. The deeply rooted idea (from its first publication on) that Vexations might have been intended by Satie as an experiment regarding boredom appears to find little support in the ideas expressed by Satie himself, although he described boredom as 'profound and mysterious'. Other anachronistic explanations involve Dadaism (which was only invented by the end of the 2nd decade of the 20th century); (also not before the end of the 2nd decade of the 20th century, at which time Satie described it as a novelty); conceptual art (not before the 1960s); etc. Satie is often described as a precursor, or in the spirit of Oulipo, an 'anticipatory plagiarist' of subsequent developments. Why Satie chose 840 as the number of repetitions has also been subject to conjecture: there is no conclusive evidence showing why he would have preferred this number to any other. The fact that 840 is the product of the numbers from 4 to 7 does not shed much additional light on the meaning that the number 840 might have had to Satie, though the esoteric sects or cults Satie had been involved in up till the moment that he wrote Vexations could be supposed to have some interest in numerology. When Satie started his own sect, the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor, supposedly around the same time as composing Vexations, he appeared sure in his use of numbers (e.g. in the printed pamphlet listing the numbers of each type of adherent the sect was to have acquired, some of these numbers going back to biblical data). An article by Martha Curti (now Mother Felicitas) on the numerology of 840 may shed more light on the subject.Philip Corner: Prelude to a non-vexation
The composition could be seen in a tradition of "riddle music", somewhere between the riddle canons of Bach's The Musical Offering and Elgar's Enigma Variations.
Execution
There is no indication that Satie intended the Vexations for public performance – the introductory text he wrote, as quoted above, rather indicating it was intended as a one-person experience (e.g. as a restrained way to work off anger, or to get one's ears tuned to an unconventional harmonic system and metre). Satie made no effort to get either "Vexations" or "Bonjour Biqui" published during his life, scarcely, or not at all, communicating about their existence (there were more of his compositions sharing this fate).
As to the total duration of the work, and whether it is to be played aloud or silently, it is hard to ascertain what Satie's intentions were: No metronomical tempo indication: the score mentions "Très lent" (very slow), which could mean anything while the composition has not a melody that could be experienced as falling in one or another "natural" cadence – at least not at first sight: some (e.g. the pianist Armin Fuchs, who executed the work in its entirety several times) argue there is a natural cadence nonetheless (26 quarter-note beats per minute in Fuchs' case, which extends total execution to 28 hours)Kopiez, Reinhard: "Die performance von Erik Saties Vexations aus Pianistensicht". In: Musikwissenschaft zwischen Kunst, Asthetik und Experiment. Festschrift für Helge de la Motte-Haber zum 60. Geburtstag, Würzburg, 1999, pp. 303–311. It is not clear whether Satie intended the bass-line (equal to both halves of the composition) to be repeated in between of half vexation: his precise instruction is "" – "At this sign customarily the theme of the Bass will be presented" (the "sign" occurring in between of every half vexation): not really being an obligation. There is more to be said about this sign: modern executions and editions of the score usually interpret that for every Vexation the is to be played twice, while the original manuscript of Satie indicates the "sign" for playing this theme three times: once preceding (and quite above) the "motif", and once after every half of the "motif", which seems to indicate that the has to be played before the "motif" is played the first time (which is usually done), but also that it is the concluding the complete cycle (and not the 840th pass of the second half of the motif, as it is usually interpreted). This would extend the total execution time by about half a minute.