Early in RAMH‘s history, a post here covered what I always think of as “thought music”: music to listen to while doing things other than music — specifically, things which require mental activity: writing, programming, art… — music, ideally, to stimulate thought.
One of my favorite classical composers of thought music is Erik Satie. (He was something of an oddball character, I gather; Wikipedia calls him “an eccentric,” which says pretty much the same thing.) Like many (most?) Baby Boomers, I first encountered him by way of the band called Blood, Sweat, & Tears. Although the group’s music sprang from a sort of raucous, literally brassy jazz-rock-blues core, their self-titled second album opened with a quiet flute/guitar/triangle piece, “Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie.” (The first section of that cut morphed into a second, all horns, which provided a springboard to the more characteristic “sound” of the rest of the album.) Here’s that take on Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies:
[Below, click Play button to begin Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:29 long.]
But Satie was a pianist, and composed almost exclusively for piano (including his original arrangement of the Gymnopédies). Among his other dream-state, not-quite-trance pieces are the ones he called the Gnossiennes.
No one, apparently, knows exactly what the word Gnossiennes means; Satie made it up, and never explained it. For some time Satie was involved in various sects ascribing to the tenets of gnosticism, and an association between the words seems obvious. But nobody knows. At any rate, like the Gymnopédies, these pieces share (almost? entirely?) no features in common with the works of, say, Bach, Beethoven, Wagner… Not only does the music not overpower; it doesn’t even assert itself — it makes no point and has no real discernible narrative arc. Yet it’s also strangely beautiful: moody, contemplative, and (yes) haunting.
The Gnossienne known collectively as #5 actually consists of six separate pieces, or sections. Here, Hungarian pianist Klara Kormendi gives Gnossienne #5 a thoughtful — thought-y — presentation.
[Below, click Play button to begin Satie: Gnossienne #5. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. Taken together, the six pieces in this clip are 14:31 long.]
I love working to this. And because of the unconventional structure, I find I can listen to it over and over for hours, with the individual tracks shuffled, without getting any sense of, like, I need to hear something else. It always sounds like “something else.”
Froog says
You know he wrote a piece called Vexation. It’s only two-and-a-bit minutes long, I think. But he added a headnote implying it should be played 840 times in succession. He probably intended this as a joke, but…. 70 years later, John Cage decided to take it seriously. It took 18 hours. I don’t know that anyone else has ever done it since.
John says
Cage is one of those composers whose ideas and intellect and cleverness are all worth paying attention to… but whose work I can’t listen to without setting my teeth a-jangle.
Of that Cage performance of the piece, Wikipedia says:
So let’s see, 18 hours = 54 20-minute intervals, at $0.05 apiece… Mr. Schenzer earned himself a refund of $2.70. I wonder if he believed the experience to be worth every penny of the $2.30 net.
Froog says
By the by, I think this is the kind of minor annoyance that will speak to your techie obsessions…. I tend to leave single page views open for long periods, because I can’t be bothered to set up comment notifications. And I have noticed that while hitting ‘Refresh’ updates the comments (which is what I’m mainly interested in), it doesn’t update ‘Hats Recently Chased’ in the sidebar. There have been a few times when I’ve just been checking back in to the last published post, wondering when, if a ‘Midweek Music Break’, or whatever it may be, is going to appear… and waiting, and waiting, and waiting.
It just seems odd. As you know, I use Blogspot. It is dreadful in so many ways; but when you refresh a pageview, it updates everything.
John says
Thanks for alerting me to that. I’d noticed a lag myself, but kept putting off doing anything about it until I forgot it was an issue. :)
I think the problem involves a WordPress plugin I’m using, called WP Supercache. This is a plugin which speeds up page loading, by caching a copy of each post or page and serving that cached copy rather than (as is the norm) assembling it out of whole cloth, so to speak, when a visitor loads the URL. The cache schedule is every one or two hours, but there’s an option to force a refresh if a page or post is posted or updated. I hadn’t checked that option before, but I just did now. I hope that fixes it, but let me know if the trouble persists. (Tomorrow’s whiskey river post should be the first test.)