28 hours at the piano is enough to vex anyone - but not these researchers
German and Austrian researchers analysed what happened to pianist Armin Fuchs when he spent more than a full day playing over and over again, nonstop, an oddly-named piece of music by a French composer. They also analysed what happened to the music. This was a tour de force of artistic and neurological repetition.
The research team – Christine Kohlmetz, Reinhard Kopiez and Marc Bangert of the Hanover University of Music and Drama, and Werner Goebl and Eckart Altenmuller of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in Vienna – published a pair of monographs in 2003 describing what they measured in the pianist.
The study titles, like the performance, are lengthy. One, in the journal Psychology of Music, includes the phrase "Electrocortical Activity in a Pianist Playing 'Vexations' by Erik Satie Continuously for 28 Hours".
When Satie composed the piece in 1893, he added an instruction that the performer should: "play this motif 840 times in succession".
Twenty-first-century researchers Kohlmetz, Kopiez, Bangert, Goebl and Altenmuller explicitly question whether 19th-century composer Satie "was aware of the effect his work might have on a pianist, especially with regard to his or her consciousness and motor function".
Do the maths and you'll see that Fuchs, the intrepid piano player, averaged 30 performaces an hour. That's a lot of Vexations, in two-minute-long chunks.
By affixing wires to Fuchs's head and using an electroencephalograph (EEG) to continuously monitor gross electrical activity in his brain, the researchers discovered that "the pianist experienced different states of consciousness throughout the performance, ranging from alertness to trance and drowsiness".
Fuchs's playing grew inconsistent during the periods of drowsiness. But when alert, the man was a model of consistency. "Most importantly," says the study, "whilst in deep trance, which included effects such as time-shortening, altered perception and characteristic changes in the EEG, the pianist managed not only to keep on playing but also to maintain a constant tempo, hence executing complex motor schemes at a high level of performance."
The second study, published in the Journal of New Music Research, gives a much finer-grained "tempo and loudness analysis". It boasts that "non-linear methods revealed that changes in loudness and tempo are of a highly complex nature, and both parameters unfold in an 18-dimensional space. This has never before been demonstrated in performance research".
Vexations is not one of Erik Satie's most beloved compositions – not yet anyway. Although brief (when played, contrary to instructions, just a single time), it meanders along in a way that's neither quick nor catchy.
But Satie pioneered something of value – the technique ("play this motif 840 times") that the music business would refine many years later, with significant payoff. Radio disc jockeys demonstrated in the 1950s that, by persistently, diligently repeating a song, they could ensconce it into the minds of many listeners, who would ever after believe it be one of their very most favourite tunes.
(Thanks to Jim Cowdery for bringing this to my attention.)
See a video of the performance at www.youtube.com/watch?v=km9GiejF5OQ
• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize