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Buffalo Evening News

November 7, 1974
Musical Marathon With a Flock of Pianists Leaves Some Sated With Satie Composition
By John Dwyer

The internationally known inventor, Robert Moog was asleep under the piano.
He'd already taken his half hour turn at the keyboard. But the hypnotic spell of the music had gotten to him, and he didn't want to go home.
Students, professors and plain lover of musical curiosa were draped on chairs and settees, sprawled on the floor, hunched against the walls.
Young couples drifted over to the coffee urn and dipped into baskets of oranges and bananas. Others wandered in and out, and a few intended to hear it through, first to last.
At the keyboard now was Leila Melandinidis, youthful recitalist.
SHE AND the sleeping creator of the Moog Synthesizer were seventh and eighth in a procession of 20 or more pianists playing a brief, slow, dreamy piece by Parisian composer Eric Satie in a most unusual way.
That is, 840 times in a row, as suggested by the composer on the original manuscript of 1896. The title of the work is "Vexation", but it is the least vexing piece in the world.
This was an hour or so before midnight in darkened, barn-like Room 100 of Baird Hall, the UB Music Department emporium on the Main St. campus.
It has started at 6 PM and originally was figured to go until about 8 AM today.
But the performers were lingering so lovingly over the few bars of oddly harmonized chant figurations, mesmerized by the work and their own playing, that a revised estimate gave it another four hours. That would make it a 20-hour musical marathon.
THERE WAS an electronic board and engineer with headphones near the piano. It was being broadcast over WBFO, the campus station, and by this time the studio switchboard was loaded with callers, some of whom suggested changing the needle.
Of those phoning in, said UB Creative Associates Director Renee Levine, "about one out of six are for it." That's the nicest way I know of saying that five out of six were against it.
But the listeners in Room 100 were wrapped in the spell. And me, too, for a while.
The piece has an unearthly, suspended quality and a feeling of endless cycle, so that it doesn't seem to repeat itself so much as merely to exist. The one impact, I think, would be when it stops.
THERE HAD been an arrangement with the telephone company to hook in Buffalo-based touring pianist 'Leo Smith from Cleveland, where he is appearing as a guest artist.
But his late-hour commitments wouldn't allow it. Speaker would have carried a half-hour of Mr. Smith into the room by telephone wire.
Joseph Kubera, Buffalo-born pianist who went on to honors and high-level erformances around the country and now is back as a UB Creative Associate, opened the marathon and was due to close it. He was mostly in charge.

Other performers included noted composers, pianists who have appeared with major orchestras, graduate students, Creative Associates and faculty members.
Among them:
Lejaren Hiller, James McKinnon, Claudia Hoca, Stephen Manes, Norma Sapp, Steve Radecke, Neal Hatch, David Cohen, James Calabrese, Tom Constanten, Martin
Kalve, Mark Brooks, Richard Schulman And perhaps several more, with the extended hours.
AND SATIE himself? He was a medievalist, Cultural anarchist, Rosicrucian, incomparable self-satirist, in-and-out friend of Debussy, Verlaine,
Mallarme and impressionist painters.
He was heavy on the absinthe, stayed up all night and slept through as much daylight as possible, before rising to hang out in the Left Bank cafes.
He wrote beautiful, mysterious, roistering, disembodied and cryptic music according to mood.
He was a great influence on many later composers, especially in purity of form, and he left a bunch of memorable thoughts. They usually mask a very sensitive soul with flagrant cynicism.
One of them:
"When I was young, people told me: You'll see, when you're 50. "I'm 50. I've seen nothing."