Heures séculaires et instantanées (Age-Old and Instantaneous Hours) is a 1914 piano composition by Erik Satie. One of his humoristic keyboard suites of the 1910s, it features Satie's famous warning to pianists against reading aloud the fanciful texts that adorned his scores. In performance it lasts about 4 minutes. Publication of the Heures, like several of Satie's 1914 works, was delayed by the outbreak of World War I. It was finally issued by the firm E. Demets in 1916. Ricardo Viñes gave the premiere at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris on March 11, 1917. Text and music Satie wrote the Heures in June and July 1914, almost immediately after completing Sports et divertissements. In that work his need to express his literary side was restricted by the limits of one page per composition on themes not of his choosing, a challenge he conquered with haikulike precision. Here Satie was able to unleash his imagination with narratives that, on the page at least, seem to demand equal status with the music. "There are as many words as notes!" opined French composer-critic Guy Sacre. Biographer Rollo H. Myers saw in the Heures a foreshadowing of surrealism (a decade before the fact) and a new phase in the interrelationship between text and music in Satie's piano suites: "...for the first time the isolated verbal quips and sallies are replaced by a kind of recitation or monologue, which is an integral part of the composition. This is no longer a running commentary, arbitrarily superimposed and often irrelevant to the music it accompanies; it is a definite narration, of grotesque inspiration, which the music is there to illustrate". A whimsical concept of Time unifies the suite, which consists of three pieces marked Noirâtre (Blackish), Sans Grandeur (Without Grandeur), and Vivement (Strongly). It is dedicated to an imaginary Englishman, with a real French monarch tossed in for good measure: To Sir William Grant-Plumot, I pleasantly dedicate this collection. So far, two personalities have surprised me: Louis XI and Sir William: the first, by the strangeness of his good-naturedness; the second, by his continual immobility. It is an honor for me to pronounce here the names of Louis XI and Sir William Grant-Plumot. 1. Obstacles venimeux (Venomous Obstacles) A humorously plodding theme introduces us to the sole inhabitant of a vast landscape - a negro "so bored he could die of laughing". Holding his cerebellum in his