November 6, 2006 -- How many pianists does it take to perform French composer Erik Satie’s Vexations? Given that Satie’s instructions call for the aptly named work to be played 840 times, a lot.

A team of some 20 to 30 faculty and student pianists from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music will give the piece a go on Friday, Nov. 17, at Fairchild Chapel on the campus of Oberlin College. The concert begins in the morning at 6 a.m. and ends at roughly 10 p.m. that evening.

The concert is free and open to the public, and audience members are invited to enter and exit, silently, at any point during the proceedings. Fairchild Chapel is located in Bosworth Hall at 50 W. Lorain St., across from Tappan Square. Free parking is available throughout the campus. Updated concert information is available by calling the Conservatory’s 24-hour Concert Hotline at 440-775-6933.

Professor of Composition and Music Theory Randolph Coleman has organized the performance as part of his “Seminar on John Cage and American Experimental Music.”

“Satie was a strange, seminal figure, among the first to challenge the traditional notions of music and performance,” says Coleman. “He predated such movements as Dada, Les Six, Fluxus, muzak, indeterminacy, minimalism, the musical counterculture of the 1960s, and much music by composers such as Virgil Thomson and Morton Feldman.”

Satie’s Vexations, written for piano in 1893, is actually quite short; it consists of four phrases, is about half-a-page long, and, performed once, clocks in at just under a minute. Satie, however, directed it to be played 840 times, which, understandably, increases the running time somewhat. Performers are required to prepare themselves in advance, “in the greatest silence,” with complete immobility.

At Oberlin, Vexations was performed in April 1971, and again in 1993, also in April. But according to Coleman, Satie himself never heard a public performance of the work. The premiere was given in New York City in 1963, 70 years after it was written, in a performance led by composer John Cage.