Adding Spoken Words to Satie’s “Vexations”

Cover of the album being discussed

The latest release by pianist Nicolas Horvath on his Nicolas Horvath Discoveries label is entitled Échecs Opératiques. As the hyperlink indicates,  this is available for purchase as a digital album, which is the preferred medium, since the duration of the entire composition is about three hours and 50 minutes. Like most of Horvath’s recordings, it is distributed through Bandcamp, which is the site for the above hyperlink. The French title translates as “operatic chess,” which may be a better description of the listening experience than the phrase “musical journey,” which concludes Horvath’s introductory description, included on the Bandcamp Web page.

The composition itself is the result of a project that Horvath shared with David Christoffel. Horvath’s introduction describes him as follows:

David Christoffel allowed me to discover the potential of the radio medium. He is also one of the very first french composer[s] to understand the immense possibilities offered by the Internet.

On the Échecs Opératiques album, Christoffel performs as a narrator, speaking in simultaneity with Horvath’s piano playing. That instrumental part is based on Erik Satie’s “Vexations.”

This past December I introduced Satie’s composition to readers as follows:

This piece is based on a theme of thirteen beats alternating between quarter notes and eighth-note pairs,” which is then performed in parallel tritones. That, in itself, would do much to vex both performer and listener; but the kicker comes in a note by the composer, which, when translated into English, instructs the performer as follows: “In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.”

The manuscript page lacks a date, but the general consensus is that it was composed between 1893 and 1894.

“Vexations” was not given a serious performance until 1963, when it was presented by a “tag team” of eleven pianists, including John Cage, who made most of the arrangements for having the music played for an audience. It was not performed by a single pianist until 1967, when the performer was Richard Troop. Horvath gave his first solo account on December 12, 2012 in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

The Wikipedia page also cites a performance by a robot that “was performed for the public for the first time at a 2010 New York City Maker Faire.” Just to set the record straight, both my Bachelors and Doctoral theses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology involved creating and then working with EUTERPE, a parallel processing assembly language, whose instruction set included the pitches of an equal tempered scale of 72 notes to the octave. (For those unwilling to “do the math,” this involved dividing the semitone into six equal parts. This allowed a composer that was working me to program both half-tones and third-tones.) I cannot remember when I wrote the code for “Vexations,” but it was probably around 1968. Given the size of the PDP-6, the Maker Faire robot was much easier to move from one place to another!

Since 2012, Horvath has given a series of solo performances of “Vexations.” In Échecs Opératiques his performance accompanies Christoffel’s narration. This involves not only the three-part parallel voices of the music itself but also monodic accounts of the contributions of individual voices. The booklet notes by Bertrand Ferrier describe the result as a “dense dance of directionless meaning.” I do not take that as a pejorative dismissal. Rather, in the context of the overall setting of Échecs Opératiques, it is through a departure from direction that the performance emerges as a boldly unique account of almost four hours of clock time, which liberates the listener from approaching time as a constraint.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no printed account of the text that Christoffel narrates. It would not surprise me if it were improvised. As is the case with “Vexations,” listening is not about discovering any “underlying meaning.” Just as one establishes familiarity with the spectral qualities yielded by the piano, Christoffel’s voice is defined more through the contours of phrasing that shape sequences of phonemes. In both cases the sonorous qualities have less to do with a “journey” from beginning to end and more to do with the way in which the movement of chess pieces gradually reveal an underlying strategy.