hypersongs

Erik Satie

The French composer and Montmartre cabaret pianist who wrote the three Gymnopedies in 1888, went on to Parade and Socrate, and is often named as a precursor of minimalism and ambient music.

Honfleur, Paris and Montmartre

Eric Alfred Leslie Satie was born in Honfleur, Normandy, on May 17, 1866, the son of Alfred Satie, a French shipping broker, and Jane Leslie, who was English. He lived with his paternal grandparents in Honfleur from 1872, returned to Paris in 1878, and entered the Conservatoire's preparatory piano class in 1879. He was expelled in 1882 for unsatisfactory performance and readmitted in 1885. His first known composition, a short Allegro for piano, dates from 1884, and after a spell in the army in 1886 and 1887, from which he was invalided out after feigning illness, he took lodgings in the ninth arrondissement.

In 1888 he composed the three Gymnopedies, and the first Gnossiennes followed in 1889 and 1890. In the 1890s he was a pianist and accompanist in Montmartre cafes and cabarets, at the Chat Noir and later the Auberge du Clou, where he met Debussy. In 1895 he adopted the persona of the Velvet Gentleman, buying seven identical suits. In 1898 he moved to Arcueil, where he lived for the rest of his life.

The Schola Cantorum, Parade and the last works

From 1905 to 1912 he studied at the Schola Cantorum under Vincent d'Indy and Albert Roussel. In 1911 Ravel performed some of his early works, which brought him wider attention, and in 1912 he wrote the Veritables Preludes flasques (pour un chien). Jean Cocteau heard him in 1915 and 1916, which led to the commission of Parade, premiered in 1917 by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes with sets by Picasso and choreography by Massine; its score includes a typewriter, a steamship whistle and a siren, and it caused a scandal. The same years brought the Sonatine bureaucratique and Socrate, a symphonic drama on Plato funded by the Princesse de Polignac, which the scholar Robert Orledge considers his masterpiece.

In 1918 he broke with the younger group later called Les Six, and in 1920 there was a festival of his music at the Salle Erard. Mercure and Relache, both scandalous, followed in 1924, Relache accompanied by Rene Clair's film Entr'acte. He coined the term furniture music, musique d'ameublement, for background music meant to support a mood rather than demand attention. He died in Paris on July 1, 1925, aged 59, and was buried at Arcueil. His admirers there became known as the Arcueil School, and the BBC made him Composer of the Week in 2025, the centenary, when 27 previously unpublished works were premiered.

Vexations and legacy

Vexations, usually dated about 1893 to 1894, carries a manuscript inscription suggesting that its motif be played 840 times in succession. John Cage and Lewis Lloyd organised a performance on September 9, 1963 at the Pocket Theatre, 100 Third Avenue, Manhattan, with twelve named pianists plus two reserves, among them Cage, David Tudor and John Cale, running over eighteen hours at five dollars admission with five cents refunded per twenty minutes attended. The first complete performance by a single pianist was Richard Toop's in 1967; Nicolas Horvath played for about 35 hours in Paris in 2012, Igor Levit streamed one from Berlin in 2020, and Aaron D. Smith played 36 hours 22 minutes in Salt Lake City in 2021.

Satie is credited with steering French composers away from Wagnerian impressionism toward a leaner style, and with influencing Ravel, Debussy and Poulenc, and later Cage and John Adams. Searle and Strickland linked Vexations to minimalism, and Debussy called him the precursor in 1911. Biographies include Templier's of 1932, Rollo Myers's of 1948 and Robert Orledge's Satie the Composer (1990), and Ornella Volta, who wrote Satie Seen Through His Letters (1989), founded the Fondation Erik Satie in Paris in 1981.

Songs

  • Gymnopedie No. 1 1888

    The first of three slow piano pieces completed in 1888, marked lent et douloureux, over two alternating major-seventh chords.

Sources

  1. Erik Satie, Wikipedia
  2. Gymnopedies, Wikipedia
  3. Vexations, Wikipedia
  4. Erik Satie, Larousse