Parade

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Walking instruction maps with magnetic tape with recorded sound of Satie’s Vexations and plastic cassette spools, 2022.

 

Walk slowly.  

Take small deliberate steps.

Note your heartbeat.

And the pace of your steps.

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"Roger Shattuck, in conversation with John Cage in 1982, put forward the interesting theory that ‘the source of Satie’s sense of musical beat - the possibility of variation within repetition, the effect of boredom on the organism - may be this endless walking back and forth across the same landscape day after day…the total observation of a very limited and narrow environment’. This becomes the more relevant when we consider that most of Satie’s pre-Arcueil music has a very slow pulse, while the faster, more mechanical regularity all belongs to the latter half of his career.  Parade, with its constant pulse of 76 beats per minute, may thus reflect his slow walking speed as much as the human heart beat.  During his walks, Satie was also observed stopping to jot down ideas by the light of the street-lamps he passed."

 

Robert Orledge, Satie Remembered.