Today marks the 60th anniversary of the first live performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations”, organised by John Cage.

On 9 September 1963, Vexations was performed live for the first time as its author, Erik Satie, had conceived it. This means 840 times… That is, at least, what Satie wrote in the short score (only eighteen notes, a conceptual antecedent of minimal music): “Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif, il sera bon de se préparer au préalable, et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses” [“To play this motif 840 times in succession it is advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, with great immobility”]. There is also no metronomic indication of tempo, except for the indication Trés lent [very slow], nor date of composition of the work, but Satie scholars estimate 1893 or 1894 as the most probable period of writing. Satie also did not publish the work during his lifetime, and it is not known whether he ever performed it 840 times.

The piece was first published by John Cage, in facsimile format, in Contrapoints No. 6, and it was he himself who organised the first performance session, together with Lewis Lloyd, which took place sixty years ago today at the Pocket Theatre in New York, located at 100 Third Avenue in Manhattan, with a team of pianists including David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Philip Corner, Viola Farber, Robert Wood, MacRae Cook, John Cale, David Del Tredici, James Tenney, Howard Klein and Joshua Rifkin, as well as Cage himself. That first complete performance lasted 18 hours and 40 minutes. Two years ago, on 13 August 2021, the American pianist Aaron D. Smith performed the work solo, uninterrupted, at the Sugar Space Arts Warehouse in Salt Lake City, taking the expression Trés lent to its maximum expression: it lasted 36 hours and 22 minutes.

Shorter than the two aforementioned performances is the version recorded in 2017 by Italian pianist Alessandro Deljavan for the OnClassical label –14 h 28’–, with each and every one of the 840 performances – except for one, the last one – nailed down to 1’02”.