World Premiere of "Petit" With Judith Gordon— April 10, 2004

A veteran of America's leading chamber music festivals, Judith Gordon is equally at home giving her dynamic interpretations of new music. She performed Arthur Jarvinen's Serious Immobilities, a work for piano solo consisting of 840 variations on Erik Satie's enigmatic Vexations.

In its complete form, Serious Immobilities lasts twenty-four hours; Ms. Gordon performed a recital-length version entitled Petit, the WORLD PREMIERE of Jarvinen's ambitious work. Concert proceeds benefited Santa Fe New Music's Youth and Education Programs.

Program Notes

It has been argued that Erik Satie's Vexations is not a long piece, but a short piece made to last a very long time solely by means of repetition. In my opinion, it is in fact a long piece because the extreme repetition is specified by the composer—840 playings of the motif, to be exact... and repetition is a standard composition technique used not only to fill time but to clarify structure, create desired proportional relationships, and, sometimes, manipulate or alter perception.

When I saw a call for piano works lasting a maximum of 60 seconds it immediately occurred to me to do a variation on the longest piano piece I know of. As soon as I had written that first Vexations variation, I realized I must write 839 more.

Serious Immobilities in its complete form lasts twenty-four hours with no literal repetition. Though some variations are so subtle as to be nearly subliminal, each is unique in some way. The work was premiered at The Kitchen in New York City in January, 1998, by pianists too numerous to name here, working in shifts.

The Petit version was meant to fit on one compact disc. It is culled from Part One (the first quadrant of the complete work). The published score of Petit contains 84 variations. (The CD version only includes 81 of them, due to lack of space.) Hence, the version Judith Gordon will play today is the world premiere of the definitive Petit.