Saturday 9th March
Within performance art, time-based works draw upon the artist’s endurance and stamina as one factor that makes up the experience. In music, one thinks of Charlemagne Palestine’s four-hour-and-more piano ruminations, and perhaps the progenitor of all such pieces, Eric Satie’s Vexations, which lasted a finger-numbing 18 hours when performed in 1963 by a team of pianists that included John Cage, John Cale, and many other notables.
Robert Fripp’s third day of the QEH residency notched up seven hours and 26 minutes worth of music between 1.00 pm - 10.00 pm. In that time, as with the previous day and the one that would follow, there were periods in which, as Fripp puts it, “Any interest in playing Soundscapes had long since flown away. Ideas. What ideas are those? A blankness of thought and imagination.” The solution facing the performer might be to quit or, as the guitarist would later note, “Get to the end of what you know, then take the jump into the unknown.”
10 April 2025
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