The musical experience will begin on Friday, November 14 at 8:30 p.m Kowloon Theater Rehearsal Center (CTC) That It challenges all traditional party concepts: continuous interpretation Insults (Vexations) by Erik Satie, which will last for 24 hours straight.
In a room open to the public, Pianists from different generations and backgrounds will gather at the keyboard to bring this short and mysterious piece of music to life, accompanied by a video presentation that dialogues with the sound.. The audience will be able to enter and exit freely throughout the event, turning listening into an expansive, shared and, above all, reflective act.
The experience is being held as part of the 100th anniversary of the composer’s death.
It’s hard to talk about Insults Without resorting to words like Mystery, sarcasm, or extremism. The work, written around 1893, consists of a simple melody for piano repeated between two different harmonies. In normal execution, it lasts less than two minutes; However, Satie left instructions that upend all temporal calculations: “To play this piece 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare in advance in profound silence, through grave inertia.” The annotation, almost an act of poetry, turns the miniature into a physical and mental challenge.
For decades, Insults It remained a subject of curiosity among the composer’s manuscripts. Only in 1963 did American John Cage – a central figure in 20th-century experimentalism – play it in public for the first time, along with a team of pianists who devised the sequencing system to complete the 840 repetitions.
This concert at New York University lasted more than 18 hours and constituted a milestone in the history of contemporary music.This opens the way for the long-lasting works and repetitive structures that characterize minimalism and later performance art.
but Sati’s gesture was not only an introduction, but also extremely destructive. In fin-de-siècle Paris, composer Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes He was an eccentric figure, far removed from the romantic brilliance and excesses of Impressionism. He inhabited a world of his own, made of dry humour, wry spirituality, and an almost ascetic relationship with sound.
Deliberately anti-rhetorical, his music sought to strip art of rhetoric and bring it closer to everyday life, from silence, to the absurd. in Insults, Satie took this idea to its extremes: repetition as a form of deprivation, listening as resistance to modern-day saturation..
In 2001, the work was shown for a continuous week at the Old National Conservatory, A protest in defense of public education in the face of budget cuts.
Today, one hundred years after his death, his personality resonates with renewed force. Satie anticipated the gestures that would later be central in conceptual art, in Cage O’s music No Monte YoungEven in contemporary performance and sound artistic practices. His legacy lies not so much in inventing style as in redefining the act of listening itself.
Marathon interpretation Insults Which will be held on November 14, will not be just a tribute, but a live reinterpretation of that radical gesture, with the participation of more than 80 pianists. In each repetition – and in each silence between repetitions – the question that runs through all of Satie’s works will be reactivated: How long can an idea last? What happens when music becomes pure time, a sustained presence, a space in which performer and listener share the experience of perseverance?
More than just a concert, it will be a healthy vigil, a collective meditation on patience, boundaries, and listening.. In the vibrant inertia that Satie proposed more than a century ago, time – that elusive substance – would become music again.
Construction site: Insults, 24 hours a day with different pianists It starts: November 14 at 8:30 pm place:CETC (Cowloon Theater) entrance: Free and ongoing throughout the event.
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