In September 1963, John Cage charged five dollars to enter a Manhattan theater and refunded five cents for every 20 minutes an audience member stayed. The music was Vexations, a single page written by Erik Satie in Paris around 1893 with a note suggesting it be played 840 times in a row. This episode unpacks the trap Satie set on that page: enharmonic spellings that stall the reader's brain, missing accidentals, no instrument, no dynamics, an unresolved final chord, and the sole instruction to play very slowly.

We weigh the competing theories about why Satie wrote it, from heartbreak over Suzanne Valadon to a parody of Wagner's endless melody, his one-member Metropolitan Church of Art and its mystical numbers, and an early experiment in habituation. Then we follow the piece's transformation into an extreme sport: Cage's 18-hour relay with J ...