The first Australian performance, organised by David Ahern, took place in Watters Gallery, Darlinghurst, Sydney, on 21-2 February 1970. The performance lasted 22hours; The pianist was Peter Evans, who attempted the performance solo. After 16hours, having reached repetition 595, he stopped abruptly, and left the room. He wrote: “I would not play the piece again. I felt each repetition slowly wearing my mind away. I had to stop….People who play it do so at their own great peril.” Apparently his mind became full of “evil thoughts, [and] animals and “things” started peering out of the score at him.” However all was not lost; another pianist, Linda Wilson, came forward and completed the performance, reporting no ill effects.

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The act of performing or listening to a complete performance of Vexations cannot be compared to any other musical experience. As Cage observed, “the experience over the 18 hours and 40 minutes of those repetitions was very different from the thought of them or the realisation that they were going to happen. For them to actually happen, to actually live through it, was a different thing. What happened was that we were very tired, naturally, after that length of time and I drove back to the country… I slept an unusually long period of time, and when I woke up, I felt different than I had ever felt before. And furthermore the environment that I looked out upon looked unfamiliar even though I had been living there. In other words, I had changed and the world had changed… It wasn’t an experience I alone had, but other people who had been in it wrote to me or called me up and said that they had had the same experience.”

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Dick Higgins observed, “the music first becomes so familiar that it seems extremely offensive and objectionable. But after that the mind slowly becomes incapable of taking further offence, and a very strange euphoric acceptance and enjoyment begin to set in… Is it boring? Only at first. After a while the euphoria… begins to intensify. By the time the piece is over, the silence is absolutely numbing, so much of an environment has the piece become.”

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In Cage’s famous aphorism, “In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.”

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In a poetic sense, Vexations never finishes – the 840 repetitions are themselves but an instant in the eternal present in which the music exists like some platonic form, obliterating memory, eluding analysis. In the words of an ancient Indian saying, “The music continues; it is we who walk away.”