Satie is fascinating, and I don't know of any composer who had so much variety in what he attempted. The Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes are by far his best known pieces, but once you get away from that it gets strange and wonderful. He threw off ideas which seem to have led to different musical movements years later. Minimalism, for instance, was a term first coined in 1968, but some people point to Satie's Vexations of 1893 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKKxt4KacRo&list=RDsKKxt4Kac...) - to be played 840 times. One puzzle (at least for me) is to work out whether he had the piano or organ in mind for some pieces. While the instruments look similar, some of the held notes will fade away on the piano, losing harmonies which would otherwise be present.
Actually, the idea of background music goes back at least another couple hundred years before that, as opera in the early days of Mozart was often treated as background music while everyone partied and chatted in the concert hall.
In addition to writing the music and drama mentioned in the article, Satie also wrote about his own (rather eccentric) life. An excerpt about optimizing that stood out to me:
> An artist must regulate his life. Here is a time-table of my daily acts. I rise at 7.18; am inspired from 10.23 to 11.47. I lunch at 12.11 and leave the table at 12.14. A healthy ride on horse-back round my domain follows from 1.19 pm to 2.53 pm. Another bout of inspiration from 3.12 to 4.7 pm. ... My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coco-nuts, chicken cooked in white water, mouldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). [1]
Thanks for sharing; I didn't expect to see Erik Satie on HN :-)
It's a lovely little vignette of Satie's work and life. If you haven't already, give a listen to his Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies. Beautiful melodies with a lot of harmonic variation.
In the spirit of recommending favourite pieces, one of his that I love is Je Te Veux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1J_lxbaQxQ It's perhaps more obvious in terms of its tunefulness than some of his pieces, but I think it's like a perfectly-cut jewel and somehow quintessentially French.
Satie's my favourite composer so I was pleased to read this article. If I had to compare him with another composer (and if it was possible), I'd say Basil Kirchin (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Kirchin): I can imagine Satie listening to Kirchin and nodding in that knowing fashion...
Hate to nit, but there is actually a seventh gnossienne. Satie didn't publish 4-6, or even label them "gnossiennes", whereas the seventh was explicitly referred to as a gnossienne by Satie.
I had arranged variations on a theme by Erik Satie when I was in music school so my experience is indeed a wormhole through pop to Satie - very old pop, but pop nonetheless. The involvement of John Cage just makes it more unique and special to me since we had played him too at the time.
Thanks again. Love the writing here. The author met his subject's match!
His music appears in the soundtrack for the beautiful comedy movie Being There, with Peter Sellers, along with some lovely matching pieces by Stephen Edwards.
It’s funny because apparently he expected his work to be listened to passively in the background but I’ve listened to it actively pretty much exclusively.
I having trouble activity listening to music, but I remember as a teen listening to it with a freind and laughing together at its musical wit. Both of us were deep into punk at the time (the Clash), and we had stumbled across this by accident. Rarely have I felt such empathy with a composer…. At once sad, funny and erudite.
Not just exact copies, he wore copies of velvet clothes every day. It was kind of his brand, "The Velvet Gentleman", walking around Paris daily, being seen always in velvet. I have no doubt it had some kind of an effect. Apparently he knew what he was doing because people still know him for it today.
I think Zappa was mostly influenced by Varese. I can't see much Satie in his work. However, Satie's music and ideas had a big impact on John Cage, who in turn was obviously a very influential figure in experimental music.
Aphex Twin's Avril 14th [1] reminds me a bit of Satie. A bunch of songs in the same album, Drukqs, use John Cage's prepared piano technique [2]. A lot of Aphex Twin's music is ambient like Satie's, but I prefer his more in-your-face stuff.
There is so much that I love about this article that it makes me shy.
This image: “Gnossienne #1” radiates a mood of … what, exactly? Lightly anxious contemplation? Oddly contented melancholy? An icy but heartwarming breeze? ...Slightly bruised, but not down and out.
This sentence: In some ways, Satie feels like a long-ago ornament; at the same time, more playfully modern than our own increasingly doctrinaire era.
These recommendations: Dip a toe into the Satie rock pool and you soon discover a cove, a coastline, an entire horizon. As well as his solo-piano works, he wrote a riotous avant-pop ballet (Parade); a comical Christian allegory (Uspud); an intimate drama with samplings of Greek philosophy (Socrate); and his final work was a groundbreaking movie soundtrack (Cinema).
This reference: There is copious testimony as to the utter shambles of his living space — yet the moment he steps outside this tiny cell he is a smiling dandy, spick and span, his own ambulant branch of Yohji Yamamoto.
Satie is fascinating, and I don't know of any composer who had so much variety in what he attempted. The Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes are by far his best known pieces, but once you get away from that it gets strange and wonderful. He threw off ideas which seem to have led to different musical movements years later. Minimalism, for instance, was a term first coined in 1968, but some people point to Satie's Vexations of 1893 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKKxt4KacRo&list=RDsKKxt4Kac...) - to be played 840 times. One puzzle (at least for me) is to work out whether he had the piano or organ in mind for some pieces. While the instruments look similar, some of the held notes will fade away on the piano, losing harmonies which would otherwise be present.
I am surprised the article didn’t touch upon ‘furniture music’ - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furniture_music
https://aeon.co/videos/background-music-was-the-radical-inve...
Indeed. He came up with the concept of "background music" 100 years ago, it's impressive!
Actually, the idea of background music goes back at least another couple hundred years before that, as opera in the early days of Mozart was often treated as background music while everyone partied and chatted in the concert hall.
In addition to writing the music and drama mentioned in the article, Satie also wrote about his own (rather eccentric) life. An excerpt about optimizing that stood out to me:
> An artist must regulate his life. Here is a time-table of my daily acts. I rise at 7.18; am inspired from 10.23 to 11.47. I lunch at 12.11 and leave the table at 12.14. A healthy ride on horse-back round my domain follows from 1.19 pm to 2.53 pm. Another bout of inspiration from 3.12 to 4.7 pm. ... My only nourishment consists of food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coco-nuts, chicken cooked in white water, mouldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (without their skin). [1]
[1] Mémoires d'un amnésique (1912). An english translation of the excerpt: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Day_in_the_Life_of_a_Musici....
This is obviously a piece of satire, very typical of Satie.
Thanks for sharing; I didn't expect to see Erik Satie on HN :-)
It's a lovely little vignette of Satie's work and life. If you haven't already, give a listen to his Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies. Beautiful melodies with a lot of harmonic variation.
I think his most underrated and unknown piece is _Danses de travers_.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x6nuiNN3JI&list=RD9x6nuiNN3...
What a beautiful piece. For me it evokes a river: not knowing where it's going, but sounding exactly right in the moment
I was going to ask what (a) Gnossienne is, but "a completely new and made up word, in this case, "gnossienne."
In the spirit of recommending favourite pieces, one of his that I love is Je Te Veux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1J_lxbaQxQ It's perhaps more obvious in terms of its tunefulness than some of his pieces, but I think it's like a perfectly-cut jewel and somehow quintessentially French.
Satie's my favourite composer so I was pleased to read this article. If I had to compare him with another composer (and if it was possible), I'd say Basil Kirchin (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Kirchin): I can imagine Satie listening to Kirchin and nodding in that knowing fashion...
Speaking of Satie, the Musée de Montmartre in Paris https://museedemontmartre.fr/ is well worth a visit.
Hate to nit, but there is actually a seventh gnossienne. Satie didn't publish 4-6, or even label them "gnossiennes", whereas the seventh was explicitly referred to as a gnossienne by Satie.
Thanks so much for this splendid writing about Satie!
For me, it's as if the hauntological presence of David Foster Wallace showed up to match the known and yet unknowable genius that is Satie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnopédies#Legacy
I had arranged variations on a theme by Erik Satie when I was in music school so my experience is indeed a wormhole through pop to Satie - very old pop, but pop nonetheless. The involvement of John Cage just makes it more unique and special to me since we had played him too at the time.
Thanks again. Love the writing here. The author met his subject's match!
My introduction to Erik Satie was through the Piano theme played in Beat Takeshi's [1] directorial debut Violent Cop[2].
I was hooked.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takeshi_Kitano 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Cop
His music appears in the soundtrack for the beautiful comedy movie Being There, with Peter Sellers, along with some lovely matching pieces by Stephen Edwards.
One of the Gnossiennes was in Spider Forest as well -- great Korean psychological horror.
It’s funny because apparently he expected his work to be listened to passively in the background but I’ve listened to it actively pretty much exclusively.
I having trouble activity listening to music, but I remember as a teen listening to it with a freind and laughing together at its musical wit. Both of us were deep into punk at the time (the Clash), and we had stumbled across this by accident. Rarely have I felt such empathy with a composer…. At once sad, funny and erudite.
> It’s funny because apparently he expected his work to be listened to passively in the background
I think this mostly applies to his "furniture music".) Works like "Socrate" or "Sports et Divertissements" are certainly not background music.
) In these concerts, he actually told the audience members not to listen :)
Satie was a really weird dude. I really like his style of music (also Poulenc). But he was very strange.
At one point he would like wear exact copies of the same clothes every day, and only eat white food (?).
Not just exact copies, he wore copies of velvet clothes every day. It was kind of his brand, "The Velvet Gentleman", walking around Paris daily, being seen always in velvet. I have no doubt it had some kind of an effect. Apparently he knew what he was doing because people still know him for it today.
The white food stuff is referred by another commenter, but it was purely parodic.
Satie heard music where others didn't and found a way to write it down. So fresh still too.
I'm so glad I discovered Satie. His music gives me a dopamine rush every time.
He was an influence on Zappa, no?
I think Zappa was mostly influenced by Varese. I can't see much Satie in his work. However, Satie's music and ideas had a big impact on John Cage, who in turn was obviously a very influential figure in experimental music.
Aphex Twin's Avril 14th [1] reminds me a bit of Satie. A bunch of songs in the same album, Drukqs, use John Cage's prepared piano technique [2]. A lot of Aphex Twin's music is ambient like Satie's, but I prefer his more in-your-face stuff.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxTdTaNIUxo
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bc2HCxUQ12s
There is so much that I love about this article that it makes me shy.
This image: “Gnossienne #1” radiates a mood of … what, exactly? Lightly anxious contemplation? Oddly contented melancholy? An icy but heartwarming breeze? ...Slightly bruised, but not down and out.
This sentence: In some ways, Satie feels like a long-ago ornament; at the same time, more playfully modern than our own increasingly doctrinaire era.
These recommendations: Dip a toe into the Satie rock pool and you soon discover a cove, a coastline, an entire horizon. As well as his solo-piano works, he wrote a riotous avant-pop ballet (Parade); a comical Christian allegory (Uspud); an intimate drama with samplings of Greek philosophy (Socrate); and his final work was a groundbreaking movie soundtrack (Cinema).
This reference: There is copious testimony as to the utter shambles of his living space — yet the moment he steps outside this tiny cell he is a smiling dandy, spick and span, his own ambulant branch of Yohji Yamamoto.
Just, great.
Classical is king