Erik Satie

Erik Satie was a French composer, born in Honfleur in 1866, who wrote the three Gymnopédies and the score for Parade, the 1917 ballet made with Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso that put the Paris avant-garde on a popular stage. He earned his living for years as a cabaret pianist in Montmartre, founded a church with a membership of one, owned seven identical suits, and spent his last twenty-seven years in a room in the suburb of Arcueil that no visitor ever entered. After Parade, the young composers of postwar Paris claimed him as their model.

His importance runs past the eccentricities. At a time when prestigious European music aspired to Wagnerian scale and intensity, Satie repeatedly moved the other way — toward brevity, repetition, understatement, popular tunes, dry humor, and finally music the listener was not supposed to listen to. What looked like simplicity or incompetence was usually a deliberate refusal of the musical values around him, and later generations kept discovering that he had arrived somewhere first: composers from Les Six to John Cage treated him as an ancestor, and he is now routinely discussed as a precursor of minimalism and ambient music.

Honfleur

Satie was born Éric Alfred Leslie Satie on 17 May 1866 in Honfleur, on the Normandy coast, to a French father and a British mother of Scottish background, and was baptized in the Anglican church. The childhood was marked by loss. His mother died in 1872, when he was six, and Erik and his younger brother Conrad were sent back to Honfleur to be raised Catholic by their paternal grandparents. Music arrived there through the local organist Gustave Vinot, who had been trained in early sacred music; the Gregorian chant and church modes Satie absorbed as a boy stayed in his harmony for good, and the archaic, suspended atmosphere of the Ogives, Gymnopédies, and Gnossiennes did not come from nowhere.

His grandmother died in 1878 and the twelve-year-old returned to Paris to live with his father, who the next year married a piano teacher, Eugénie Barnetche. She arranged for her stepson to enter the Paris Conservatoire. It went badly. His teachers found some ability and no diligence, dismissed him for poor progress, readmitted him, and were unimpressed a second time; he left without a diploma. In 1886 he escaped in the most drastic direction available and volunteered for the 33rd Infantry Regiment, discovered he disliked military discipline as much as the academic kind, and — by the standard biographical account — stood bare-chested in winter weather until bronchitis got him discharged. Around this time Éric began signing himself Erik.

Montmartre

By 1887 he was living in Montmartre and working as second pianist at the Chat Noir cabaret. The three Gymnopédies, slow and spare piano pieces, followed in 1888; they are now his most familiar music, and Claude Debussy orchestrated two of them in 1897. The Gnossiennes, begun around the turn of the 1890s, pushed further — some dispense with bar lines and time signatures entirely, their harmonies circling rather than progressing. The materials were simple; the organization was radical. Long before anyone had the words for it, Satie was writing music that established an atmosphere and let the listener stay inside it, rather than driving toward a climax.

The cabarets were his income for years — he accompanied singers and wrote for the commercial stage, including the songs Je te veux, La Diva de l'Empire, and Le Piccadilly. He was later dismissive of the material, but the music hall taught him economy, timing, parody, and a durable disrespect for the wall between serious art and popular entertainment. All of it resurfaced in Parade.

The Montmartre years produced the eccentricities he is still known for. In the early 1890s he wrote ceremonial music for the mystic Joséphin Péladan's Rosicrucian circle, then broke away and, in the mid-1890s, founded his own church, the Église Métropolitaine d'Art de Jésus Conducteur, served as its only member, and issued attacks on his critics from its headquarters, which was his room on the rue Cortot. In 1895 he spent a small legacy on seven identical chestnut-coloured corduroy suits with matching hats, and wore little else for years. Montmartre called him the Velvet Gentleman.

Suzanne Valadon

In January 1893 Satie began an affair with the painter Suzanne Valadon, a former artists' model who had taught herself to paint between sittings. She took the room next to his on the rue Cortot and painted his portrait that year; in April he wrote her a four-bar song, Bonjour Biqui, Bonjour!, on the pet name he had given her.

After about six months she left, and he was devastated. It is the only love affair of his that is documented; as far as the record shows, he never had another. One object survives in the Bibliothèque nationale de France: a lock of Valadon's hair that Satie kept, mounted on card, with the beginning and end of the relationship recorded in his own hand.

Vexations

Around the same period Satie wrote one of the strangest pieces in the history of music. Vexations is a short, harmonically unmoored motif for piano, and above it Satie left an instruction suggesting that anyone wishing to play it 840 times in succession should prepare beforehand, in profound silence and serious immobility. Played literally, it lasts many hours. He never mounted a performance, and the piece stayed unknown in his lifetime.

It became famous through John Cage, who organized the first complete public performance in New York in 1963 with a relay of pianists; it ran more than eighteen hours. For the experimental composers of that generation, the obscure manuscript posed exactly their questions — what repetition does to perception, where a concert ends and a ritual begins — and its recovery turned Satie from a charming miniaturist into an ancestor of the avant-garde.

Arcueil

In 1898 Satie moved to a single room in Arcueil, a suburb south of Paris, and kept it until his death. Most days he walked the ten kilometres into the city, umbrella under his arm, stopping at cafés along the way, and often walked back late at night. In the twenty-seven years he lived there, no visitor entered the room.

The jokes moved into the titles. Trois morceaux en forme de poire — Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, 1903, containing more than three pieces — is the most famous; the often-repeated story that it answered Debussy's advice to pay more attention to form is questioned by scholars, which is itself a warning about Satie, who was very good at turning himself into a story. The humorous piano collections of the 1910s — Desiccated Embryos, True Flabby Preludes (for a Dog), Sports et divertissements with its drawings and prose — read like absurdist literature and are controlled with complete precision. Some of the instructions written between the staves were never meant to be read aloud: a private channel between composer and performer.

In 1905, at thirty-nine, he enrolled at the Schola Cantorum to study counterpoint and composition under Vincent d'Indy and Albert Roussel — the lifelong enemy of academies going conscientiously back to school, because if he was going to refuse the rules he wanted to know exactly what they were. His mature simplicity was a choice, not a limitation. Recognition came slowly and from other composers first. In January 1911 Maurice Ravel played Satie's early piano pieces at a concert of the Société musicale indépendante in Paris, presenting the forgotten cabaret pianist as a pioneer who had written the music of tomorrow a quarter-century early.

What Satie's music sounds like

There is no single Satie style — the music kept changing — but several qualities recur across forty years:

• Simplicity: a melody, a repeating accompaniment, a small set of chords — the sparseness that later drew the minimalists
• Repetition that simply remains, instead of building toward a climax; the music does not always seem to be going anywhere, on purpose
• Unresolved harmony: chords moving in parallel or arriving unprepared, beautiful precisely because nothing forces them to explain themselves
• Modes and archaic sound, from the Gregorian chant of his Honfleur childhood — the ancient atmosphere of the Ogives and early piano pieces
• Flat emotional delivery: a tragic melody that declines to erupt, a beautiful chord not driven to release — the composer refuses to tell the listener how intensely to react
• Humor, in the titles, in the performance directions, and in the notes

Traditional tonal music creates tension by making listeners expect resolution. Satie weakened that expectation deliberately, and the weakening is why the Gymnopédies can sound more recent than their date. It is also why the pretty piano pieces can mislead: someone who meets them as background music imagines a dreamy miniaturist, and is then surprised by the insults, the typewriter, the 840 repetitions, and the cannon. The peaceful music and the provocations are the same artist — both refuse the demand that music behave conventionally.

The score as an object

A traditional score is a set of instructions for making sounds. Satie made the page itself part of the work. He wrote music in a striking calligraphic hand — the Centre Pompidou describes him writing 'like a calligrapher poet,' drawing his staves by hand and swapping standard terminology for deliberately impish expressions. He dropped bar lines from some pieces, inserted prose between the staves, and addressed performers in instructions the audience would never hear — a private channel between composer and player. Some directions were expressly not to be read aloud.

A Satie score can therefore exist three ways at once: as sound, as writing, and as a visual object. His prose ran on the same voice — polite, bureaucratic, mystical, deadpan, and absurd by turns, delivering jokes without signaling them. Later experimental composers explored graphic notation far more systematically; Satie was there extraordinarily early.

Parade

Jean Cocteau brought Satie the scenario for a ballet during the war, and over the next two years the two built Parade with Pablo Picasso for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Satie's score called for a typewriter and a siren alongside the orchestra; Picasso supplied a Cubist drop curtain, sets, and costumes; Léonide Massine choreographed. The premiere at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 18 May 1917 scandalized the house. In the program note, Guillaume Apollinaire called the result 'a kind of surrealism', the word's first prominent appearance in print.

Satie's temper survives in the court record. When the critic Jean Poueigh published a hostile review, Satie answered with insulting postcards; Poueigh sued for libel, and Satie was convicted and sentenced to a week in jail, a punishment ultimately headed off through his friends' intervention. The gentle eccentric with the umbrella could hold a grudge and turn a disagreement into a crisis.

Parade made Satie the presiding figure of postwar French music. Cocteau's 1918 pamphlet Le Coq et l'Arlequin held him up as the model for a plain, French music stripped of prewar orchestral fog, an argument later collected in Le rappel à l'ordre and attached to the Return to Order. The six young composers soon grouped as Les Six — Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre — proclaimed themselves his heirs.

Cocteau also drew him. The line portrait Erik Satie was published as a plate in his 1923 album Dessins.

Socrate

The most surprising work of his later career contains no jokes at all. Socrate (1917–18) sets passages of Plato in French translation with unusual restraint and purity — even the death of Socrates passes without an operatic climax. Scholars connect it to what Satie called his style dépouillé, the stripped-down manner: he had come to trust emotional restraint over emotional display.

The immaculate bourgeois costume concealed left politics. After the assassination of the socialist leader Jean Jaurès in 1914 Satie joined the Socialist Party, and after the split of Tours he was associated with the young French Communist Party — the avant-garde provocateur dressed like a civil servant, voting with the Arcueil working class he lived among. He resisted being reduced to a single identity from every direction at once.

The larger battle of his generation was with Richard Wagner, whose scale, chromatic intensity, and mythic ambition dominated European music. Satie became almost the exact inverse — short instead of enormous, dry instead of intoxicated, everyday instead of mythic, static instead of relentlessly developmental, funny instead of reverential — and that inversion is why younger French musicians eventually found him so useful: he was an escape route. His years in commercial entertainment made the escape possible. Satie knew popular songs from the piano bench, not the folklorist's notebook, and he never accepted a permanent wall between fine art and popular culture — the refusal that reaches full scale in Parade.

Furniture music, Relâche, and the end

In March 1920, during the intermissions of a comedy by Max Jacob at the Galerie Barbazanges, Satie presented what he called musique d'ameublement — furniture music, written to be ignored. The audience was invited to walk about and look at an exhibition of children's drawings while it played. When people sat down and listened instead, Satie was annoyed. The experiment failed in the room and succeeded everywhere since: music designed as an environment rather than an event is now an entire genre, and its later practitioners, John Cage first among them, named Satie as the source.

His last stage work was Relâche (1924), commissioned by Rolf de Maré for the Ballets Suédois, the company's final production, with a scenario by Francis Picabia — the title is the word a French theater posts when it is closed. For its cinema interlude, René Clair's short film Entr'acte, Satie wrote a bar-by-bar score and appeared on screen with Picabia in the cannon prologue. It premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on 4 December 1924.

Satie had been a heavy drinker for most of his adult life, and his health failed that winter. He was admitted to the Hôpital Saint-Joseph in February 1925 and died there of cirrhosis of the liver on 1 July 1925, at fifty-nine. He was buried in the cemetery at Arcueil on 6 July. His friends then entered the Arcueil room for the first time. Clearing it took two cartloads, and what they found included:

• Manuscripts believed lost, among them Vexations, Geneviève de Brabant, and Jack in the Box, recovered from behind the piano and from the pockets of his suits
• Two pianos, one stacked on the other
• A wardrobe of near-identical corduroy suits, some of them scarcely worn
• Umbrellas, walking sticks, old hats, and piles of old newspapers

Several of the recovered scores were published and performed after his death. The secrecy of the room had, without anyone intending it, created an archive.