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Powys County Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Powys County Times
The story of how a Powys town made global news in 1983
2025 marks the centenary of the death of the eccentric French composer Erik Satie. A variety of events will be taking place across the country to celebrate his music and some will remember his impact on the Powys border town of Presteigne in 1983. Satie's mesmerically strange piano composition called 'Vexations' was played by composer and music teacher Adrian Vernon-Fish with his pupil 16 year old Dawn Pye, in the front parlour of Archie Dobson's house on the High Street in Presteigne. The composition is only 16 bars long but Satie required it to be repeated 840 times, 'tres lentement'- very slowly. Satie had in effect created a Musical Marathon requiring at least 50 repetitions an hour, which would take at least 17 hours to complete. Adrian had suggested this event as he was passionate to undertake this marathon in the hope that it would help to boost the fund-raising efforts of the recently constituted Mid Border Community Arts Association which had been created and run by volunteers who were busy fund-raising for the very first Presteigne Festival to be launched later in September. Adrian knew that he would not be able to fit a piano into the front parlour, so instead he installed his electric organ with an electric keyboard if any back up was needed. The story is taking up by Lynden Rees-Roberts who said: "I suggested maybe people could drop-in and be sponsored to see how long they could sit and listen to it. This was agreed by our MBCAA committee. "I made contact with Phil Rickman, our local Mid Wales correspondent for the Press Association, who at first, was less than enthusiastic, until I revealed that the same short piece was to be repeated very slowly 840 times. 'What's that going to be like?, he asked. ' Probably very boring' I replied. Phil then became animated and said 'Now that's interesting'. "I had no idea that this short conversation was to be so vital for what was to become an utterly bizarre experience for all of us involved in the performance of Satie's Vexations. "To our total surprise, just three days before the performance of Vexations, The Guardian ran a front page article not only discussing Satie's eccentric music but also previewing our musical event in Presteigne. "Within hours we had phone calls from the BBC in Cardiff and Harlech Television HTV who were arranging to send teams to Presteigne. At 7am Adrian started his performance of Vexations on what proved to be the hottest day of the year. Lynden added: "Very few people came in to begin with, but some did stop to see why a school bell was being rung by a man in a top hat and tails, namely my husband Gareth Rees-Roberts who approximately every 12 minutes made the announcement, 'Oh yeah, oh yeah another 10 repetitions. "As the day got hotter and hotter, more press arrived from Radio Hereford and Worcester plus camera crews from HTV and Cardiff, as well as reporters from the Telegraph, Daily Express, The Daily Mail, the Mirror, Birmingham Post, Shropshire Star and Hereford Times. "They all based themselves across the road, in Tony's Fish and Chip Bar, which happened to have a telephone on the wall from which they dictated copy for the next day's newspapers." After five hours Dawn had to take over on the back-up keyboard because the organ had started to overheat. It was so hot that Adrian's fingers were sticking to the keys. Local artist Isylwyn Watkins listened for more than four hours, collecting sponsorship for more than 200 repetitions. He declared it was very relaxing. Lynden said: "Then in the early evening someone popped by and said that our event was on the National News at Six. Suddenly the small parlour room was inundated with townsfolk curious to see what was happening and a crowd soon gathered in the street outside. At around midnight an exhausted but relieved Adrian and Dawn stood up and were greeted with applause and overwhelming admiration by those who had stayed to the end. Local policeman Charlie Edwards arrived with a bottle of champagne which was shared around the room and announced that Adrian and Dawn had performed a 17 hour Mantra which had lifted a cloud from the town. By now the world press was chasing the story and the following day organisers were contacted by South African morning television followed by another one from the Sidney Telegraph. Reports of the event were published as far afield as the New York Times, The Jamaica Daily Gleaner, the Athens News, The Boston Globe and Le Monde. Lynden said: "This completely unexpected level of publicity created a massive boost to the credibility and future success of the MBCAA and its plans for the first Presteigne Festival in September. "In effect Presteigne went viral in a pre-internet age.
New Statesman
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The earworms of Erik Satie
'A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.' Ian Penman, a post-punk music critic known for his experimental and often impenetrable style, opens his book on this lyrical quote from Jean Genet, before exploding into his self-consciously ludicrous, slightly naive, post-modernist style, which matches that of its subject, the composer Erik Satie (1866-1925). A punk avant la lettre, Satie was a societal disruptor dressed in a neat suit and bowler hat. In the light of Satie's anti-establishmentarianism, the commercial success of his music is his best joke. The king of light classics, Satie composed 'brief, evanescent piano pieces of pop-single length', the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes written between 1887 and 1895. They are hugely popular on easy-listening programmes and often used as advertising jingles. Muzak owes its being to Satie. He invented background music, calling it 'furniture music' and intended it to complete the decor for lawyers' and bankers' offices. When it was performed, he told people to walk about, eat and drink. When they sat still and listened, he waved his arms and shouted at them in frustration. The book's title suits the subject perfectly. Three Piece Suite. Are we talking the musical form? Are we talking upholstered horror-furniture? Or social saboteurs in three-piece suits? The answer, of course, is all of them. Contradiction was Satie's stock-in-trade. 'Vexations', a little piano piece lasting less than two minutes, must be played repeatedly, 840 times. At 16 hours of music, it is understandably rarely performed. John Cage did it 1963, and Igor Levit this April at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, with Marina Abramović (predictably) in tow. Dualism rocked Satie's cradle. His mother was an English Protestant, his father a French Roman Catholic who hated both the English and Protestantism. His mother died when he was six. Shunted off to his paternal grandparents, little Eric was swiftly re-baptised into the Catholic Church. Schooldays passed as indolently as one of his idly rocking Gymnopédies, before gently slipping into studying music at the Conservatoire. Except he didn't. 'The laziest student in the Conservatoire,' read his report, 'but gets a lovely sound.' Chucked out, he took to playing piano in bars, where he effected his first reinvention. Eric became Erik. He grew his hair long, wore a frock coat and top hat and composed the famous pieces: the Gymnopédies (a word originally meaning naked games during Ancient Greek festivals that Satie chose to redefine as a fusion of gymnase and comédie), and the Gnossiennes (gnostic spliced with madeleine, which pre-dates Proust's famous madeleine passage in Swann's Way by quite a few years). Paris in the 1890s was shrouded in mysticism. Ectoplasm drifted up Haussmann's smart new boulevards. Tables turned, spirits rapped. Madame Blavatsky wore an amazing amount of eye make-up and Satie joined Sâr Péladan's Rosicrucian church, a hocus-pocus dress-up party obsessed with alchemy, philosophy, Wagner and the Holy Grail. Appointed Maître de Chapelle, Satie composed hymns in the manner of 'Chaldean Wagnerism' featuring flutes, harps and trumpets. His soundtrack to Péladan's play Le Fils des Étoiles would not disgrace a Cecil B DeMille movie. But Satie was not born to play second fiddle, and in 1893 he broke from Péladan's church to found his own. L'Église Métropolitaine d'Art de Jésus Conducteur (The Metropolitan Church of Jesus the Conductor). It sounds like something out of the Midwest Bible Belt. Its purported mission was to be a place for art to grow and prosper unsullied by evil, but its real work was to launch missiles against artistic enemies and 'infidel Anglicans' who would suffer Hell's most delicious tortures unless they returned to the bosom of the Catholic Church. Penman suggests that the rather horrible, pompous and pretentious communications that Satie put out might be a leg-pull, but I wonder. Occult sects are not known for their sense of humour. And besides, while Satie sampled many varieties of religion all his life, the need for a real, sincere faith seems to have been a constant throughout. During the brief existence of his church, Satie had his only love affair. Suzanne Valadon was a high-wire artist and painter. Whether they ever had sex is unclear. It's possible he was a celibate. He and she had next-door rooms; he composed Gothic Dances for her, and she painted a rather prim portrait of him. When she left him, he jettisoned frock coats, bought seven identical velvet suits, and transformed into 'the Velvet Gentleman'. He moved from central Paris to the suburb of Arcueil. No visitors were ever admitted to his room. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 'Satie came every morning… and sat in my room,' wrote Cocteau. 'He kept on his overcoat (always perfectly spotless), his gloves, his hat which he wore pulled down almost to his monocle, his umbrella never left his hand. With his free hand he would cover his mouth, which curled when he spoke and laughed. He came from Arcueil on foot. There he lived in a small room, in which, after his death, under a mountain of dust, were found all the letters his friends had ever written him. He had not opened one…' Music took hold of Satie's soul during his childhood. He received lessons from the local organist who implanted a passion for early church music and Gregorian chant that never left him. His poor performance at the Conservatoire was due to him bunking off to Notre Dame to listen to the music he loved in its proper architectural setting. New, non-ecclesiastical influences only opened up when he got to the avant-garde experimental cabarets like the Le Chat Noir and met fellow composer Claude Debussy, who was also struggling to get out from under the heavy influence of Wagnerism. Out went Sturm und Drang. In came beguiling melodies conjuring lovers meandering in a shady lane, or rocking on the Seine's pretty café boats. He was composing the musical equivalent of the art of the time: sound-pictures of the untroubled arcadia created by the impressionists on canvas, and conjurations of the delicate, associative literary suggestion of Mallarmé and the symbolist poets. The inevitable break with Debussy came when Debussy orchestrated the Gymnopédies to great acclaim. This and the flight of Valadon led to musical drought. It picked up again when he was approaching 40 and his father died. He went back to school to study early church music in greater depth, immersing himself in counterpoint and polyphony, Bach and Palestrina. The Velvet Man transformed into City Gent: bowler hat, stiff collar, furled umbrella and sober suit. He joined the Communist Party, became a pillar of the community in Arcueil and was decorated for civic services. In 1911, Satie was suddenly 'discovered'. He was in his mid forties when he was taken up by Ravel (another composer of short earworms). Other disciples popped up, calling themselves 'Les Six', also known as 'Les nouveaux jeunes'. Intent on unhorsing impressionism, which was now old hat, their music was influenced by cubism and surrealism. Satie was also embraced by the wider circle of rising avant-garde stars: Cocteau, Picasso, René Clair, Picabia, Brâncuși and Man Ray. In 1917, he composed the music for Parade for the Ballets Russes, with sets by Picasso, scenario by Cocteau and choreography by Léonide Massine. Satie's score included parts for foghorn, typewriter, milk bottles and a pistol. It was a succès de scandale. Late blooming continued with the 1924 short dadaist film Entr'acte made in collaboration with Clair and Picabia. Written to be shown during the interval (entr'acte) of the ballet Relâche (which translates to 'show cancelled'), in the event, the show actually was cancelled, due to the unfeigned indisposition of the lead dancer. Real life aped their jape! The trio howled with laughter. The movie they were making was slapstick at breakneck speed, surrealist before surrealism was born; Charlie Chaplin, the Goons, Monty Python, punk. A canon fires a huge shell that collapses like a soufflé. Balloon heads inflate, deflate. A runaway hearse is pulled by a camel. Matchsticks dance, boxing gloves levitate, top-hatted seducers take up attitudes. Satie wrote the music frame by frame: it is hectic and forgettable. Cirrhosis of the liver killed him the following winter. He died peacefully, in the bosom of the Church that he had never actually left. His purported last words were suitably ambiguous: 'Ah, the cows…' The book Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite is unsurprisingly divided into three parts. Part one, the shortest, is about Satie; it skitters selectively, mostly around his life. Part two is three times as long. Headed 'Satie A-Z', the alphabet contains such gems as 'A is for Arcueil' (where Satie lived, remember?) noting that the place name 'contains a + u + e + i, but not a single 'o''. Wow! We also marvel at the insight that Satie is satire spelled without the 'r'. Shall we just tactfully pass over this section? The final section, headed 'Satie Diary', is again longer than the section devoted to the man himself. This is no surprise. We have already deduced that Penman is insanely self-important and deliciously un-self-aware. The diary regales us with an inconsequential daisy chain of maybe-Satie-related musings dated between January 2022 and October 2024. We wonder, among other things, why no one told him that other people's dreams ceased to interest us decades ago? Satie was marvellous. An extremely focused revolutionary thinker and composer dedicated to quiet provocations. His earworms have burrowed their way into our brains, not only musically but culturally too. His work loosened the rigid authority of the grandiose, questioned outdated structures, rules and assumptions; reset the kaleidoscope. It is entirely right that a book should be published to commemorate and celebrate the centenary of his death. Just not this book. Sue Prideaux's 'Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin' (Faber & Faber) won the Duff Cooper Prize Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite Ian Penman Fitzcarraldo, 224pp, £12.99 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Let Kneecap and Bob Vylan speak freely] Related
Spectator
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Instantly captivating: the mysterious harmonies of Erik Satie
The first time I heard a piece of music by Erik Satie it was on the B-side of a Gary Numan single. Played on a synth that sounds like a theremin sucking on a dummy, 'Gymnopédie #1' is so saccharine sweet it actually makes the music seem sorry for itself. And yet. It got me hooked on Satie's catchy yet sombre ironies. Par for the course, says Ian Penman in this dazzling study. People who know nothing about music beyond the top tens of their teens can be so 'instantly beguiled, captivated and transported' by Satie that his 'pop single length' works are 'now part of some collective audio memory'. For all that, there is no mention of Numan here. Nothing strange, you're thinking – but get a load of those who do turn up in the book. Ravel, Debussy and Poulenc are present and correct, of course. And since he studied composition under Satie's pal Darius Milhaud, I guess Burt Bacharach was a shoo-in for a look-in. But how about Stevie Wonder and Elton John? The Keiths, Jarrett and Emerson? The Evanses, Bill and Gil? It's Sunday Night at the Penman Palladium! Bring on those stars of stage and screen! Satie's double act with Francis Picabia in René Clair's comic silent Entr'acte ushers in a reverie on Morecambe and Wise, Pete and Dud and Vic and Bob. Satie came from Normandy and was rarely seen without an umbrella – give a big hand to Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. Yet none of this scattershot name-dropping is facetious, much less otiose. Even Penman's recollection of Les Dawson's version of 'Feelings' serves to point up the wit that underlies so much of Satie's music. You'll have gathered that this book, which is being published to mark the centenary of Satie's death, is no garden-variety monograph. Indeed, since it really does have three parts – a vaguely conventional essay on Satie's life and times; an A-Z of all things Satie; and a diary of the last few years in which Penman has jotted down Satie-stimulated hunches and hypotheses – we might do better to call it a triograph. But there's no way of shelf-marking a book like this. Dismissing the conventional biography for being 'too linear – as if modernity never happened', Penman is trying, like his film director hero Nicolas Roeg, to engender a whole new form. The result is something that looks more like a screenplay than a critical tract, with as much white space as black ink. Aphorisms and apophthegms – many of them so brief they occupy only a line or two – ladder the page like a John Coltrane chart. No attempt is made at logical, step-by-step argument. Penman's points rarely relate to one another and certainly don't flow in any order. Not that he's being lazy and making his readers do the work for him; he wants to get 'people… out of the habit of explaining everything'. Satie's minimalist phrases, shimmering, impressionist harmonies and cubist rhythms play havoc with convention – he wrenches time about in just the way the canvases of his chums Picasso and Braque reconfigure space. Similarly, Penman wants to undermine the commonplace that criticism must cohere to convince. Satie's aesthetic was so influential, Penman believes, that it gave us the sound of the contemporary world. He invented the ambient music that Michael Caine loves (Satie called it 'household music'); the industrial music of Lou Reed and Kraftwerk; and full-on muzak (an insulting name that is somehow outdone by Satie's original idea of 'furniture music'). Whatever the truth of these claims – and surely the bombast and braggadocio of what Penman calls 'big puffed-up symphonies', 'self-important concertos' and 'sweaty drama-queen conductors' have had some sway on rock and pop, too – they licence some stunning aperçus. Satie makes us 'attend to the forgotten realm of quiet moments'; an encyclopaedia is 'a largely successful attempt to keep chaos at bay'; Harold Budd's 'Luxa' is 'lift music for a lift that never goes up or down'. No, I haven't heard of that either. But then, if nothing else, this book leaves you with a playlist that will take weeks to work through. And be in no doubt: you'll want to hear what Penman's heard. His bibliography is brief to the point of pointlessness, and some reproductions of the images he is so fond of discussing would have been nice. But really, what more can one ask of criticism than that it turn you on to stuff you've never seen or heard?
Spectator
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Igor Levit's 12-hour performance of Satie's Vexations was far too short
So, in the end, it was long but not that long. Twelve hours, compared to the 20 hours-plus many of us had been anticipating. The fastest on record? Very possibly. Igor Levit had started Satie's Vexations at just after 10am on Thursday 24 April, and completed repeat number 840 of this niggly little bastard of a phrase around 10.30pm, preventing any kind of mass sleepover at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. No screens were required in the end either – screens that the Guardian had reported were scheduled to appear around the pianist to hide his modesty when the toilet beckoned. (The logistics of this seemed ambitious.) Instead whenever Levit decided it was time for a loo break he simply walked off stage. In the end there was also no need to get too irritated at Marina Abramovic for her conceptual interventions, as it wasn't these that spoiled the performance. What did spoil the performance was something more fundamental.
Telegraph
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
I listened to 13 hours of live avant-garde music on repeat – here's what happened
The notorious piano work Vexations by the smiling prankster of modern music Erik Satie is aptly named. What could be more vexing than to hear the same solemn procession of chords interspersed with a ghostly melody repeated 840 times, lasting up to 16 hours? More than vexed, I felt some trepidation. I was afraid Satie's ghostly, harmonically wavering piece – which usually takes between one and two minutes to play – would make me want to scream after one hour, let alone 16. I was determined to stick it out to the end, with minimum breaks, but wasn't sure why. Part of me felt I was falling for an elaborate practical joke. Pianist Igor Levit also sees the humour – he joked at one point that he might just round the performance up to a full 1,000 repetitions. Nonetheless he takes it seriously enough to do what no other pianist has ever succeeded in doing – play this piece solo (though teams of a dozen or more have played it many times). I allowed myself several quick tea and food breaks, but Levit is made of sterner stuff. He made two concessions to human frailty. He allowed himself loo-breaks (I counted four, though I may have missed some). And bowls of fruit and bottles of water were placed discreetly near the piano stool. Aside from the sheer physical challenge, there's another motive for tackling the monster. Some say that on the other side of boredom there's a state of spiritual transcendence, which Satie's thin little piece could lead us to. That's certainly the view of the well-known performance artist Marina Abramović, who conceived a theatrical action to accompany Thursday's performance. In the pre-concert chat she gave us a firm talking-to about how we should spiritually prepare ourselves. Don't cross your legs. Don't drink beer. Don't look at your phones. Breathe with me. The Southbank's Queen Elizabeth Hall stage was a dazzling spectacle. The floor area was divided into small white squares, in the middle of which was a raised platform of identically sized gun-metal-coloured cubes. On this sat the grand piano. The whole design was reflected from above in a huge tilted mirror. Levit slipped onstage, flashed us a quick smile, and launched the piece with his typical frowning, concentrated gravity and exquisite touch. Occasionally he would add a touch of pedal or a little crescendo, and later made changes of tempo which in the prevailing glacial calm seemed like high drama. However the performance took a while to settle, thanks to the audience. Free to come and go, and deprived of their phones, many became restive and started to troop out almost immediately – only to return later. I've been in calmer bus terminals. Meanwhile, around Levit a hugely slow ritual action unfolded. Two female 'celebrants' in black-and-white very slowly removed cubes from the edges of the platform and slid them to new positions to form seats. They then accompanied members of the audience to these seats to witness Levit's performance close-up, with that reverent care nurses use with convalescing patients. I was one of them. I was sat right behind Levit, and could see that he was playing repetition 329 out of 840. Discarded sheets of music (one photocopy for each repetition) lay scattered about, as well as grapes and water for the pianist. By then – around 3pm, five hours after it began – Levit's fatigue was showing. He leaned face down on the piano lid, and would occasionally stretch a leg or foot to ward off cramp. Occasionally there was a wrong note. But then he got a second wind, playing the gnomic, angular chord-sequence with an epic gravity for a few renditions, before subsiding back to meditative quiet. Eventually he slipped out for another loo-break. As time wore on, and Levit became wearier, so the tempo of the repetitions increased. Around midnight, as the last of the 13 hours approached, he seemed frankly bored, and the tempo too fast to do justice to the music's strange meandering melancholy. One's interest shifted to Abramović's beautifully realised conception of bringing the audience into the action, performed with tender yet uncanny grace by the two 'celebrants', Sara Maurizi and Jia-Yu Chang Corti. One audience member I met during a tea-break said it made her think of the Fates guiding spirits to the underworld. A very apt image, when given a twist. Instead of finding the god of the underworld, those spirits found a weary Sisyphus of the piano, condemned to repeat a strange, haunted music until the end of time. In all, it was more emotionally suggestive experience than previous performances of Vexations I've attended, though less satisfying musically – this is a piece that really needs a team of pianists. Even so, an hour would have been plenty. After all, mortification of the flesh may lead saints to heaven – but in itself it's no guarantee of a profound musical experience.
