[mlaux]

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

[jancsika]

> 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]

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.

[jancsika]

> 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.

An instrument sounding at the partial a compound perfect fifth (fifth plus octave) above another voice's fundamental can certainly disappear into the timbral texture. But that's quite different from an instrument sounding a simple perfect fifth above another instrument.

Check out the famous parallel fifths at the beginning of Rondes printanières from Rite of Spring. That's strings and winds articulating pitches which are a perfect fifth apart. Simple perfect fifths moving in parallel like that in the bass of the orchestra (or, really, in any range of the piano) are conspicuous and stand out.

It's unlikely that parallel fifths were prohibited during common practice period both because compound ones would accidentally blend into the sounding harmonic series of the other voice, and because simple ones stick out when compared to thirds or sixths.

Moreover, parallel fifths don't stick out any more than, say, parallel fourths. But parallel fourths had long been standardized in practice and theory as part of fauxbourdon.

I can just imagine Satie playing fauxbourdon with fifths-- because, why not?-- and a teacher telling him it's wrong and therefore not to do it. And then we get Vexations, and Debussy, Mahler, Ravel, Polenc, Stravinsky and many others thumbing their noses at the prohibition, creating a new allowance for them that persists into modern film scores even without the initial irony of those composers.

[MarcelOlsz]

Kinda reminds me of Industry [0] by Michael Gordon.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gujb-wyTy5s

[justinc8687]

Please make that recording!