In 1973, a 70-year-old former child prodigy named Ervin Nyiregyházi emerged from obscurity to give a concert in San Francisco. After a promising early career, Nyiregyházi had gradually vanished from the public eye. His return, primarily as an interpreter of Liszt, led to a brief season of celebrity, a recording contract, and a fleeting period of notoriety before his death in 1987.

Nyiregyházi’s playing was distinctive due to his extremism regarding tempo and sonority. A performance of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 3 by Balint Vazsonyi takes 4′20″; by Alfred Brendel, 5′27″. The Nyiregyházi performance clocks in at 8′47″. What appear in Liszt’s score to be melodic gestures (and are realized as such by interpreters like Vazsonyi and Brendel) become, under Nyiregyházi’s fingers, intense islands of sound. What appear in the score as bars of $\raster="rg2"$ become, for Nyiregyházi, spans of time that are at once more indeterminate and more individuated. John Rockwell noted the ‘glacial tempos and total dissociation from contemporary performance styles’ that this involved.Footnote ¹ The result is an odd mix of localized energy and overall stasis. Nyiregyházi was welcomed not as a radical innovator, but rather as a kind of time traveller, someone who provided, in the 1970s, a window on unabashedly subjective performance practice that was (to his supporters) all the truer to the spirit of Liszt and the 1840s.

One might consider Nyiregyházi’s Liszt from many perspectives. A postmodern gloss on music that is too well known not to require a degree of deconstruction; hence, a political statement about art. A postcard from a vanished past when pianists took the music of the masters as a springboard for their own creativity, rather than as holy writ; hence, a statement about individualism and subjectivity. A piece of outsider art, or a portrait of madness, one that (absent an Oliver Sacks to explain things to us) turns the audience into voyeurs. A radical mode of analysis.

I was thinking about Nyiregyházi while listening to Philip Corner’s Satie Slowly, a double compact disc released with a 40-page booklet (plus an 11-page insert of graphic materials) of the pianist’s thoughts and analytical insights into the music of Satie, 17 of whose works are presented here. Philip Corner is described on one website as a ‘veteran fluxus composer’. Now in his eighties, he studied with Cowell, Luening and Messiaen, collaborated with Malcolm Goldstein, James Tenney and others, and co-founded several contemporary music ensembles. Corner was one of the tag team of pianists who, at John Cage’s instigation, premiered Satie’s Vexations in 1963, a premiere that took 18 hours.

The ‘serious immobilities’ that Satie calls for in the score to Vexations seem to have remained an integral part of Corner’s aesthetic. Corner writes in a style that recalls Cage’s textual performance pieces (e.g. his 1949 Lecture on Nothing), using free-flowing syntax and a typography that might best be called Fluxus Sans. His brief introductory essay, followed by descriptive notes (which he labels a ‘Verbose Adjunct to the Graphic Analyses’) for the works on the disc, recalls the prose style of Cage, who wrote, ‘As we go along, (who knows?) an idea may occur in this talk. I have no idea whether one will or not. If one does, let it’. Almost inevitably, this mode of discourse – part impromptu shoptalk, part free association, part polemic, part ideas-for-an-essay-I-may-write-someday – provides more insight into the mind of the performer/analyst than it does into the music being performed and analysed. If the performer/analyst is as well informed as Corner, with his length and breadth of involvement with the music of Satie, one does not mind this. The intention of the booklet of graphic analyses is clearly more along the lines of conventional structural analysis. Here Corner combines conventional harmonic analysis with the insights of Cage, for whom Satie’s brilliance lay primarily in his reimagining of musical form as a series of durational frames within which anything could happen, including both the tediously mundane and the miraculous. The handwritten analytical graphs and excerpts convey a sense of Corner’s discovery of patterns of cadence, contour and iteration, but seem documentary, not prescriptive; another pianist would no more use Corner’s analytical graphs to create a good performance than a mountaineer would slavishly follow Sir Edmund Hillary’s diary to successfully scale Everest.

Corner’s Satie is not, despite the title of the release, all about slowness. A recording such as this one should estrange us a bit from the overly familiar, just as it familiarizes us with what has hitherto been strange. Corner succeeds in removing Satie’s best-known works, the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, from the roseate glow of late-afternoon sentiment to which they are usually consigned. (One thinks of the use of Satie at the end of the Louis Malle film My Dinner with André, where the Gymnopédie no. 1 tells the audience, ‘I don’t know what all that was about, but it was probably profound’.) It is true that Philippe Entremont performs the Gymnopédie no. 1 in three minutes and seven seconds, but the somewhat infamous Reinbert de Leeuw version takes up just under six minutes, and Corner’s version, at 4′23″, mediates between them with respect to tempo. What is unusual about his recording is the way he refuses to skate along the sonic surface in the customary manner. In the ninth bar, Satie places a forte indication (ignored by most other performers) that comes out of nowhere and seems to go nowhere, until the dissonant chords and dynamic swells towards the end of the first half of the piece redeem what Corner takes to be a promissory note of sorts, resolved when the corresponding crisis recurs in the second half of the piece. Other interpreters acknowledge no crisis; for Corner, it lies in the pile-up of dissonant harmonies and densities that the customary reading doesn’t even notice.

In de Leeuw’s Gymnopédie recording, whether or not the next downbeat will be reached often seems like a matter of great anxiety. Corner’s performances, even when they are quite slow indeed, do not have this anxiety-producing quality. This is because anxiety is a product of expectation. Corner sculpts his performances so that they are not about expectation; in his rendition of the Petits chorals, for example, we are invited to savour each individual chord but also to take note of what the chord progressions suggest. Take the first choral’s unexpected glints of Beethoven (almost inevitable in a piece in E-flat major), or the fourth’s Parsifal-like mediant substitutions. About a third of the way through Satie’s cycle of wordless chorales, we begin to silently mouth the words to a non-existent hymnody; then we notice that organ sonority seems to be more on his mind than liturgy. We wish these tiny rites would continue, broaden out into complete services; then we notice that what we are feeling is not anxiety at the postponement of each downbeat (Corner’s Chorals take just over 12 minutes, another commercially available recording only nine and a half), but rather a kind of excitement.

This is not like the violent liberties that Nyiregyházi took with Liszt, although the sonic product seems, at first, quite similar; Corner has stretched the temporal fabric here just about the right amount. Thoughts of Morton Feldman also intrude; Corner’s sensitivity to the issues of the aural plane (Feldman’s term for the cohesion that timbral, registral and dynamic saturation can provide, by analogy to the ‘picture plane’ of Rothko and Matisse), particularly in his Ogives and Danses gothiques, in which we listen to Corner listening to the decay of each chord, a quite Feldmanesque activity.

One disappointment lingers, namely that Corner doesn’t include the Cinq grimaces, short bits of incidental music written for a Cocteau production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1915. Cage was so taken with the fourth Grimace, a 16-bar trifle, that he claimed it as the inspiration for his entire square-root method of creating rhythmic structure, and thus as the forebear of works like First Construction (In Metal), Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, the Imaginary Landscapes, the Concerto for Prepared Piano and Orchestra, Music of Changes and so on. It would be nice to hear someone as well attuned to such matters as Philip Corner give his diagnosis of this, the focus of Cage’s madness on the subject of Satie. (In his programme notes, Corner opines, ‘Satie is not as great as John Cage would have us believe. Who could be?’)

An obvious question looms over Corner’s entire project: given that Satie has been forced to stand, and stand in, for so much, doesn’t he deserve to performed, heard and appreciated for what he was, namely a composer of the ‘banquet years’ of the late nineteenth century? Must he become a surrogate for John Cage, or a Rorschach upon which Cage or Corner (or we) can project our teleologies? One answer brings us back to Nyiregyházi, who created not a postmodern Liszt, but rather an alt-history Liszt. Perhaps our view of Satie (or Liszt) could do with a Great Leap Sideways, into not a proto-Cagean Satie but rather a Satie resistant to our expectations of both the Long Nineteenth Century and the Long Twentieth. After all, Satie himself felt estranged enough from his time and place to found his own religion, and – trusting no one else to do so properly –to criticize and interpret (after his own fashion) his music as it unfolds on the page. Corner’s Satie succeeds not because his is the correct Satie, but because we need multiple Saties.