10/10/2026 – 11/10/2026,

30hrs piano concert, Eric Satie: Vexations

, KLANGZEIT_ _#13 Festival, Dominikanerkirche

As part of the KLANGZEIT_ _#13 Festival (October 8–11, 2026), a 30-hour performance of Eric Satie’s Vexations will take place at the Dominikanerkirche in Münster in cooperation with the Kunsthalle Münster. The performance will feature more than 30 pianists from Münster and throughout North Rhine-Westphalia. It begins on Saturday, October 10, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. and ends on Sunday, October 11, 2026, at 5:00 p.m.; admission is free.

KLANGZEIT is the biennial festival for new music in Münster. At a time when borders are more prominent than ever, KLANGZEIT_ _#13 aims to forge connections under the theme “BRIDGES”: connections between musical and artistic disciplines and traditions, between continents, between audiences and performers, and between the concert hall and urban space.

Erik Satie’s Vexations from 1893 is not a pleasing composition: it is a monumental miniature, a puzzle, a psychological experiment. According to the composer’s instructions, an atonal motif consisting of just a few measures is to be played 840 times very slowly, thereby shattering every boundary of the conventional concert setting. The piece was never performed during Satie’s lifetime; it was not until 1963 that John Cage brought it to the stage with eleven pianists in a performance lasting more than 18 hours. Happening, meditation, installation – a play on time and perception, about which Satie wrote: “To play this motif 840 times in a row, it would be good to prepare beforehand, in the utmost silence, through serious stillness.”

Through this collaboration with the Kunsthalle Münster, this extraordinary work enters into a dialogue with the installation Two Gray Double Mirrors for a Pendulum by Gerhard Richter in the Dominican Church. Within their respective media, both artworks explore the dimension of time in the form of two movements toward infinity; both artists seek to transcend the temporal boundaries of their respective media. The spatial coexistence and juxtaposition of Gerhard Richter’s installation and the performance of Satie’s Vexations challenge the audience to engage in a multifaceted perception of connections, parallels, and differences.

At the work’s centre is a Foucault pendulum designed by Richter and constructed in collaboration with the Physikalisches Institut of the University of Münster. It consists of a metal sphere (ø 22 cm, 48 kg); the sphere’s uninterrupted swinging motion is generated by an electromagnetic motor installed below the circular floor plate made of greywacke—a sedimentary rock some 380 million years old. The pendulum’s relationship to the earth’s surface as it rotates cannot be directly perceived: for this reason, the outer rim of the greywacke plate is engraved with a 360° goniometer scale from which the earth’s rotation can be ascertained. In the course of an hour one can observe a rotation of some 12 degrees. In Münster it takes about 30 hours to complete a full rotation of the floor plate; by contrast at the North or South Pole it would require just 24 hours. The rotation of the plate serves as the starting point for the performance of Vexations.