If you tuned into WMFO last Friday night, you were treated to a historic event - whether you knew it or not. For the first time ever, a performance of Erik Satie's Vexations was simulcast live on the radio, and was broadcast live over the Internet on the WMFO. The piece lasted approximately 14 hours, performed by a relay team of 28 pianists who each played for half-hour intervals. Some played more than once. The concert began at noon on Friday and ended in the wee hours of Saturday morning.
Vexations has been labeled an irritant, a transcendent Zen-like koan, a meditation on the role of boredom in art, and an elaborate practical joke. John McDonald, chair of Tufts' music department, and one of the organizers of the performance, called the event, "clean and unusual." The sheet music for the piece consists only of one page of music for solo piano, enough for about 60 seconds of play. The actual length, however, depends on the tempo at which it is played. And how many times you play it. At the bottom of the page is a note from the composer that states, "To play this motif 840 times in succession it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand in deepest silence, by serious immobilities."
"Why would anyone do this?" one might ask. "That's the big question," said Tim Leanse of WMFO, who was responsible for putting Vexations on the air.
Several years ago, Leanse was introduced to Vexations by a fellow DJ who believed that broadcasting a 14-hour piece was a great way to showcase radio's ability to do anything. When Leanse recently became more involved with radio as an art form (he teaches a course in radio art in the Ex College), the idea of putting broadcasting Vexations resurfaced. He teamed up with McDonald, another staunch advocate of musical experimentation.
McDonald found the pianists and arranged the performance space, complete with enough sandwiches, vegetables, and Doritos to nourish the performers and audience. Leanse arranged a computer hook-up between the parlor at 20 Professors Row, home of the music department, and the WMFO station, and the entire performance was broadcast live.
The radio broadcast provided an entirely new dimension to the performance of the piece. Due to Vexations' repetitive and meditative nature, the listener's thought processes become part of the performance itself. Radio took this one step farther. The multitude of listening environments made possible by the radio - home, car, on the street with a Walkman - create a multitude of performance experiences, unique to each listener based on which background noises weave in and out and merge with the notes from the piano.
In addition, the radio broadcast made it possible to enjoy Friday's concert without having to sit in one room for 14 hours. The performance hit the streets, so to speak. According to Leanse, a WMFO employee went to Radio Shack to get some necessary parts during Friday's broadcast and was listening to Vexations on the car radio as he went. After parking and shutting off his radio, he still heard the music as though it were haunting him. In reality, what he heard was the same broadcast, this time from a nearby car radio where someone had been sitting for ten minutes, mesmerized, wondering what on earth the repeating melody could be.
Despite the fact that Vexations consists of one motif over and over, performers say playing it requires enormous concentration, mostly due to its complicated notation.
"If you zoned out for a second, you messed up," said Todd Nocera, a Tufts graduate student, calling the piece "artist's torture." Nocera was forced to play the same thing over and over again, while his mind constantly wandered. "The mind goes first," a pianist from a previous performance commented.
But McDonald, who also performed part of the piece, found it healthy to play, despite the fact that he played the melody for over three hours. "I like playing the piano, I guess," he said.
Performers used numerous tricks to keep themselves from going batty. Although many played each repetition uniformly, others experimented with different articulations, changing volume levels, speeds, and their usage of the pedals. McDonald spent about three minutes trying to remove his shoes without missing a note. Every time the music freed his right hand, he was able to get another lace loosened. At one point, he tried playing the right hand part with his left hand and vice versa.
Some people played standing up, while others reclines, yawned, and grinned at the brave few who were in attendance. Some bore looks of concentration, and others, amusement.
When the time came for a player to be relieved, his or her replacement would take over one hand at a time, first the left hand, then the right, never missing a beat. One of the pianists' relievers didn't show up on time and he was forced to play longer than expected. When his relief did show up, she was so flustered from her rush to the show that she was unable to muster the concentration to play, and couldn't find the correct notes. But by then, another player arrived ready to jump in and keep the performance going.
Erik Satie composed Vexations in 1893, but its first performance wasn't until 1963, when John Cage uncovered it and organized its debut. The first performance lasted 16 hours and was performed by ten pianists playing in series, much like Friday's performance. The 1963 performance also involved a relay of eight New York Times reporters, one of whom fell asleep. According to the Times story, only one audience member stayed for the entire event. Another member described the performance as "wonderful."
"I don't know why, but it was wonderful," he said.
At that event, a music theoretician was overheard saying, "This kind of music leads toward the elimination of conscious control." The music was likened to an ever-moving windshield wiper.
Several years later, in Australia, Peter Evans attempted the piece solo. He lasted through 595 repetitions, which took nearly 16 hours, until he couldn't stand it any longer, and another pianist had to finish the performance. "I would not play the piece again," he said. "I felt each repetition wearing my mind away."
One can only wonder what went through the minds of WMFO's regular listeners who tuned in expecting their Friday programming and instead heard a solo piano playing addictively that solitary page of music. As one attendee of the 1963 performance mused, "Is this what the ice cream vendors go through who cruise the streets in wagons playing the same thing over and over again?"
For more information on Erik Satie and Vexations visit the WMFO Web site: www.wmfo.org/vexations
