Erik Satie’s Vexations from 1893, first published by John Cage in 1949, is presumably one of the longest pieces in music history even though its score is only one page. This is due to an instruction reading “In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities” (Vexations, epigraph).

derek beaulieu uses this repetitive approach as a constraint for his publishing project Vexations. Corresponding to an eighteen-hour marathon performance organized by Cage with ten performers taking turns in 1963, beaulieu began a ten-volume series in 2016 that translates Satie’s Vexations into the visual in ten iterations: It “decomposes the score of Erik Satie’s masterpiece through repeated photocopy degeneration” (blurb on Lulu).

For each iteration, he uses a different photocopy machine to reproduce Satie’s sheet of music: first copying the sheet music, then copying the copy, and so on, eighty-four times. These physical copies are then scanned and transferred into book form. This will result in 840 visual variations in ten clusters. The different machines produce astonishingly different results in this recursive practice.

So far, 4 of 10 planned volumes have been published. We have purchased volume 1 for our collection, titled Book 1: Lexmark XM9155. Although available via Lulu’s bookstore, the books are limited to twenty-six copies, presumably taken down when this number is reached. The other volumes have as subtitles: Book 2: Xerox Workcentre 5755, Book 3: Lexmark XM5163, and Book 4: Xerox Workcentre 7845i.