Marathon outdoor piano concert at Mountain View Cemetery marks A Vexing Time
Ida Nilsen, Leslie Dala, Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa and others pitch in on epic, 14-hour Eric Satie work as Little Chamber Music celebrates the reopening of the world
The opening of Eric Satie’s Vexations, complete with instructions to play it 840 times.
The Celebration Hall courtyard at Mountain View.
Singer-songwriter Ida Nilsen
Little Chamber Music presents A Vexing Time for free at the Celebration Hall Courtyard at Mountain View Cemetery on June 20 from 8 am to 10 am. See safety protocols here.
FRENCH COMPOSER Eric Satie’s 1893 work Vexations comprises only an untimidating-looking half sheet of notation. But true to its title, it has “vexed” pianists for generations.
That’s not only because of its strange and atonal music, but Satie’s bizarre and daunting instructions that sit at the top of the sheet, translated from French: “To play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.”
Not until 1963 did someone actually try this on a public stage, when maverick musician John Cage mounted an 18-hour concert at Manhattan’s Pocket Theatre, with “the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team”. (Lore has it that one wag yelled “Encore!” when the show finally finished.)
Now, almost 60 years later, it seems like the perfect time to revive the mammoth marathon event—a task that seems to capture just about all the strange suspended-time feeling of the past pandemic year.
On news the province would allow outdoor concerts for up to 50 audience members starting June 15, Little Chamber Music artistic director Mark Haney immediately thought of Vexations.
“I think, personally, a lot of my experience of the past year was ‘rinse and repeat’, so the idea of this marathon piece—where it was just repeated over and over by an isolated performer—seemed apropos,” he tells Stir.
Performing the piece 840 times on the longest day of the year seemed equally symbolic. Haney also loved the idea of staging the free 14-hour concert at the Celebration Hall courtyard in serene Mountain View Cemetery: it fit the theme of reflection, with its pool of water mirroring each lone piano player.
And so on Sunday, June 20, acclaimed Vancouver piano innovator Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa kicks off the performance at 8 am, one of seven pianists taking on two-hour shifts over the course of the day. The all-day show is called A Vexing Time—a phrase, if ever there was one, for the pandemic haze we’ve just started to pull through.
Haney says it’s a momentous task to mark a monumental end to an isolating and beyond-strange 16 months. “This really is an extraordinary event to mark the reopening and the light at the end of the tunnel,” says the artist and local standup-bass player.
Haney, who will be on hand for the entire haul, cops to being sick of digital programming, and so he stresses the show won’t be filmed, livestreamed, or recorded in any form.
Among the musicians taking the keyboard for the punishing task is singer-songwriter Ida Nilsen, who wondered if she could really play the piece for all 120 minutes when she first started learning it. But she reveals Vexations has worked a weird magic on her, going from perplexing to meditative as she has gotten to know it.
“The piece has been interpreted by some to be deliberately irritating,” she notes, “but after playing it more and more, it’s actually become soothing to me.”
Just what prompted Satie to write this odd yet haunting little theme is up for debate. Some attribute it to his breakup with his beloved Suzanne Valadon, a French painter and artists’ model; others say it’s a dry satire on the music of Richard Wagner. Whatever its inspiration, it’s somehow playful and agonizing at the same time. Vexing, indeed.
“The piece is built on augmented intervals and atonal melodies,” explains Nilsen, a Vancouver indie-scene mainstay who’s played in bands like Radiogram, The Violet Archers, and The Gay, as well as her own Great Aunt Ida. “I read something about it that said it was impossible to memorize—it’s very unpredictable. But the more you do it, a lot of that atonal feeling disappears and it feels more like the melodies and harmonies that I’m used to. So it’s vexing, but not as much as I originally thought.”
Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa
Leslie Dala
Nilsen takes the 2 to 4 pm slot outside Celebration Hall; elsewhere in the schedule, masked, socially distanced visitors can take in improvisational star Dr. Lisa Cay Miller (10 am to 12pm), Blue Ridge Chamber Music’s Alejandro Ochoa (12 to 2), Vancouver Bach Choir and Vancouver Opera Chorus conductor Les Dala (4 to 6), classical pianist Tina Chang (6 to 8) and Arts Club Theatre music director/Chor Leoni accompanist Ken Cormier (from 8 to 10 pm). Haney stresses he’s invited all of them to bring their individual personalities, styles, and approaches to the piece—just as Cage did with his farflung relay team in ‘63. (Their playing will be amplified out into the cemetery so visitors can spread out wide.)
Just how does a piano player prepare for this endurance test? The longest Nilsen has repeated the music so far is for 40 minutes. “I did it without being able to look at a clock, which was very difficult!” she says.
Sitting in the same position was a challenge over that period, but the music required constant focus, she relates. “It’s hard to zone out in the way you could with a lot of other compositions. It really forces you to be there with the composer. The normal way of measuring time completely disappears,” Nilsen says.
And on the day of the marathon concert? Nilsen doesn’t think it’s a good idea to practise—she needs to maintain her finger-muscle strength.
Still, it doesn’t sound like she’ll be isolating herself quite exactly in “the deepest silence, by serious immobilities" the composer recommended beforehand. We’ve suffered enough stasis over the last 16 months, after all.
“I think I’ll probably do some gardening,” Nilsen says.
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