"[John Cage], whilst
discussing the effect of deliberate boredom in Satie’s music, put forward his ‘pet theory’ that [...] the
source of this in Satie, [...] is the act of walking. Satie
walked endlessly across
Paris. Someone calculated that Wordsworth in his
lifetime walked 24000 good
English miles [...] And
Rimbaud walked everywhere; Vachel Lindsey, Mayakovsky, and there are many
other instances. These are all
poets or musicians who
composed while putting one
foot in front of the
other in a fairly boring, if you want,
physical act, which nevertheless has its relationship to the
heart-beat and the universe [...] I
think that the source of Satie’s
sense of musical bear – the
possibility of variation within repetition, the effect of boredom on the
organism – may well be this endless walking
back and forth across the same
landscape day after day, and finally taking it all in, which basically what
Thoreau did: the total observation of a very
limited and narrow environment.
Robert Orledge,
Satie the Composer, Chicago: CUP 1990
