The Longing for Less by Kyle Chayka

Author:Kyle Chayka
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

3 - III

Before everything got so noisy, daily silences could be overbearing. There was so much silence that one late nineteenth-century composer took it upon himself to fill it singlehandedly. In order to hear the results, I took the subway to the Upper East Side on a chilly spring evening and walked to the Guggenheim Museum. There, a series of classical pianists were performing an eerie, roughly three-minute-long piece of music for solo piano on loop for seventeen hours straight.

The piece was the French composer Erik Satie’s 1893 “Vexations,” which Satie had suggested repeating 840 times in a row: “In order to play this motif 840 times,11 one would have to prepare oneself in advance, and in the utmost silence, through serious immobilities,” he noted on the score. There was no time signature, but it was meant to be played “very slowly.”

Avant-garde joke or not, the full 840 repetitions weren’t performed until 1963 when the American composer John Cage rediscovered “Vexations” and the piece became known as an early predecessor to Minimalist music.12 But it’s also an endurance performance, like a cultural ultramarathon. I walked into the museum’s seashell-spiral rotunda and headed downstairs into a hushed basement theater that felt removed from the world, like the deck of a sunken ship. Everything inside was plush and gray, warm monochrome, from the cushioned chair I sat down in to the thick carpet and the white rounded walls. The room had an air of elevated anticipation, but for what? The radical act we had come here to witness seemed to be boredom itself.

The first pianist took the stage. He settled onto the bench and began to play with a particular warmth and softness, brushing the opening notes of “Vexations.” Satie’s famous trio of “Gymnopédies” might be sweetly meditative, but “Vexations” is discordant and plunking. It sounds like the contents of a junk drawer spilling slowly out onto a xylophone. It has passages of nostalgic melody interspersed with stabs of pain or discomfort—the soundtrack to going for a walk in the rain with a hangover. But the pianist blurred it together into something mostly pleasing to the ears. When he finished the initial loop of the piece and paused for a moment before beginning again, an attendant behind him drew a single tally mark on an easel pad onstage. There were many, many more to go. The marathon had begun around seven P.M. I wasn’t sure how long I would survive.

Satie was more than comfortable with discomfort. He described himself not as a composer but as a “phonometrographer,” a scientific measurer of sounds, like a tin can robot, with a lifestyle to match. Too poor to afford Parisian rent, he eventually abandoned the Montmartre of artist studios—Picasso, Matisse, Degas—and the cabarets where he played for a living. He moved to an unfashionable suburb and walked the five kilometers into town every day, dressed in a bowler hat like a staid member of the bourgeoisie.

The normcore outfit was deceptive. The composer joined the extravagantly aestheticized Catholic cult of the Rosicrucians but left it to start his own religion of one.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.