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mlaux | 8 months ago

My favorite Satie piece is “Vexations” [1], a short clip that the composer ostensibly wished to be played 840 times in a row.

As a little art project, I recently made a version for MS-DOS and AdLib [2] that starts with a piano-like sound and gradually distorts the timbre every repetition by flipping a random bit in the AdLib’s registers.

I never made a recording of it because I was envisioning it as an “if you got to see it in person, cool” type of thing, but I should probably go back and do that

[1] https://youtu.be/7GoV2psW-OE

[2] http://constcast.org/vexations.html

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jancsika|8 months ago

> My favorite Satie piece is “Vexations” [1], a short clip that the composer ostensibly wished to be played 840 times in a row.

Live performances of Vexations are illuminating in their own right.

But as a reminder for those who don't know: from the score it's clear Satie was satirizing the practice of composers taking on the long, boring process of drilling inane counterpoint exercises in the hope of eventually writing "serious" music, only to teach themselves the singular lesson of how to write long, boring phrases of music.

Probably he's also satirizing the arbitrariness of the received wisdom, as evidenced by his surprising voice-leading decisions for the phrase in Vexations. (Digression-- I find the common-practice prohibition on parallel fifths funny given there are near-constant parallel fifths sounding as an accident of the harmonic series, especially prominent in step-wise basslines in the cello or bass part. Did Rameau or anyone every address that? I don't remember...)

TheOtherHobbes|8 months ago

That's why parallel fifths are considered a bad thing. They disappear into the rest of the texture and you lose one stream of independent movement.

Counterpoint is like any other musical technique. If you're a hack you can get it "right" and never say anything expressive with it. But if you have a creative musical sensibility it can add interest and complexity that wouldn't be possible otherwise.