Shoot the Piano Players

Erik Satie was the court musician of Dadaism. He swooped around Paris in the belle epoque of the 1900s with a lighted pipe in his pocket and could be seen most afternoons in the cafes with his pocket gently smoldering. He pronounced himself Pope of the "Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor," issued blizzards of encyclicals and excommunicated unfriendly music critics. He cheerfully orchestrated his music for airplane propellers, lottery wheels and typewriters--and occasion ally delivered it to his friends in the form of paper gliders. He also wrote a little work for piano called Vexations--an 80-second chordal theme of only 180 notes in 52 beats. Then, in high humor, he added to the score an instruction that Vexations was to be played by a pianist with "interior immobility"--840 times in unbroken succession.

No Control. Last week, 43 years after it was written, Vexations was finally performed as directed. The recital began at dusk in a dim little hall on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and with chicken soup and peaches to keep them going, a dozen pianists kept the ritual alive for 18 hours and 40 minutes until the final E was struck for the 840th time the next afternoon. The pianists, who were led by Composer John Cage, presented uniform poker faces to their audience, and everyone who bought one of the $5 tickets got a nickel refund for each 20 minutes he stayed in his seat.

Cage, who has by some means determined that "people today are no longer afraid of time," played Vexations 75 times himself, then retired to sleep soundly on a foam-rubber pad down in the basement. But those who sat through the whole thing found themselves deeply enriched by the experience. The pianists were all transfixed by the music's windshield-wiper logic, and while each played his 20-minute turn (15 Vexations), the relief pianist stood by the piano, cultivating his interior immobility. "This kind of music," said one communicant, "leads toward the elimination of conscious control!"

Solemn Bows. Vexations' premiere proved it to be in many ways Satie's finest joke. After even a dozen hearings, the music became more a hex than a vex, its funereal tune permanently etched in everyone's ear. The august New York Times dispatched eight critics in two-hour relays to cover the performance and gave 101 column inches to an account the next day. One critic, who signed in as "Anon," confessed he had slept through his stint, but another, who took over the keyboard himself when one of Cage's men failed to show up, found his mind tuned to an "inner state of balance"--whatever that is. "The experience," he wrote after he recovered, "is dreamlike, and the pianist tries to resist waking up."

Cage was on his feet with his mesmerized colleagues to take his solemn bows when the historic moment arrived. The audience--including an actor who was the only one to sit through the whole concert, and a neo-Dadaist who honored the occasion by wearing a bell around his neck--jumped to its feet for a spirited round of applause. "Bravo!" shouted the inwardly immobile. "Encore!" shouted a desperate wit.

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