An avant-garde marathon astonished the press by sustaining absurdity for nineteen hours

Evidence

The event made headlines. A relay team of pianists (including newly arrived Welsh musician John Cale) played 840 renditions of Erik Satie’s eighty-second, 180-note “Vexations.” The performance began at 6:00 p.m. on Monday, with seven people in the audience. “Note succeeded note: implacably, doggedly, swinging back and forth like the windshield wiper of an automobile,” according to Harold Schonberg, the first (and last) of eight critics whom the New York Times dispatched to cover the event—one of whom pinch-hit for a no-show pianist early Tuesday morning. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 485

Categorization

• CANDY: A critic pinch-hitting as a pianist at 5 a.m. at a Satie marathon is a great bar-story fact.
• SHARE: For someone into Cage/anarchic performance history — the detail that a Times critic had to substitute-play piano is a gem.