Erik Satie

With his Gymnopédies, Erik Satie left a lasting mark on our collective memory, on the surface of a body of work that profoundly influenced twentieth-century musical language, as the father of the minimalist avant-garde. Son of a Scottish Protestant and a French Catholic shipbroker, Éric Alfred Leslie Satie was born in Honfleur on May 17, 1866, and grew up between Normandy and Paris with his father, who, after the death of his wife, remarried a piano teacher. Unmotivated during his apprenticeship, the young Satie nonetheless entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1879, from which he was expelled before being admitted again in 1885, as by then he had acquired a taste for composing small, non-academic pieces. After a spell in the infantry, he preferred the bohemian artist's life in Montmartre, and composed four Ogives (1886) for piano, reflecting his taste for the Middle Ages, with a score without barlines but annotated for performance, a principle he was to follow. He rubbed shoulders with the poets Mallarmé, Verlaine and Contamine de Latour as he created the refined Sarabandes (1887) and three Gymnopédies (1888), inspired by the dances of naked Spartan children at festivals in ancient Greece, described in Flaubert's novel Salammbô. These slow waltzes, with their melancholy temperament typical of the Mixolydian mode, were to enjoy a posterity that escaped no art, starting with the orchestration of them by his greatest admirer and supporter Claude Debussy in 1896, after their meeting at the cabaret Le Chat noir. Greek mythology also inspired Satie's six Gnossiennes, begun at the same time and completed in 1897. Tempted by mysticism, he frequented the Order of the Rosicrucian of "Sâr" Joséphin Péladan, a writer with a passion for the occult, who appointed him chapel master and welcomed his compositions for the stage(Le Fils des Étoiles, 1891) or the piano(Sonneries de la Rose-Croix, 1892). Disappointed by this experience, Satie founded his own Église métropolitaine d'art de Jésus-Conducteur, of which he was the sole member, casting opprobrium on "malefactors speculating on human corruption" and creating his only sacred work, an ascetic Messe des pauvres for organ. His only known affair was with the painter Suzanne Valadon, for whom he composed Danses gothiques (1893), while she painted his portrait. The relationship was brief, and this disappointment gave rise to the Vexations, a motif to be repeated 840 times. What resembles a musical farce preceded by a performance note, in the absence of a time indication, lays the foundations for repetitive music. In 1963, John Cage, along with ten other pianists, was the initiator, performing it for eighteen hours, followed by Meredith Monk, Gavin Bryars, Thomas Bloch, Nicolas Horvath and Igor Levit, for durations ranging from 14 to 35 hours in a row. Settled since 1898 in a tiny room in Arcueil, south of Paris, "Ésotérik" Satie, as Alphonse Allais called him, broke a period of two years without music with a book of cabaret songs, the most famous of which are Je te veux and La diva de l'empire, and a deluge of humorous pieces with ironic titles.The Pièces froides of 1897 were followed by Jack in the box (1899), Trois morceaux en forme de poire (in response to Debussy's advice to "take care of the form", 1903), Prélude en tapisserie (1906), which foreshadowed Musiques d'ameublement, Nouvelles pièces froides (1907), Aperçus désagréables (1908-1912), En habit de cheval (1911), Préludes flasques (pour un chien) and Véritables préludes flasques . .. (1912), Descriptions automatiques (1913), Embryons desséchés (1913), Chapitres tournés en tous sens (1913), Vieux sequins et vieilles cuirasses (1913), Choses vues à droite et à gauche (sans lunettes) (1914), Sports et divertissements (21 pièces, 1914), Les Trois valses distinguées du précieux dégoûté (1914), Avant-dernières pensées (1915) and Sonatine bureaucratique (1917), a parody of Clementi's Sonate n° 1. However burlesque in appearance, these works benefit from the study of counterpoint and fugue undertaken by their author at the Schola Cantorum in 1905, in Albert Roussel's class. This return to fundamentals also enabled him to tackle lyric comedy with Le piège de Méduse (1913), orchestrated by Darius Milhaud in 1921, and to turn his attention to incidental music, from Cinq grimaces pour Le Songe d'une nuit d'été (1915) to the transition to the Ballets Russes with Parade, premiered by Serge de Diaghilev at the Théâtre du Châtelet on May 18, 1917, with set design by Pablo Picasso and choreography by Léonide Massine. The show's reception was appalling, and the music criticized for its siren, pistol and typewriter sound effects. In fact, it anticipated Surrealism and inspired the musicians of the Groupe des Six. In 1917, the noisy atmosphere of a restaurant gave him the idea of composing ambient music. This was to become Musique d'ameublement, which would eventually overturn the very function of music, no longer listened to with the attention it deserved, but considered as mere background music, ready to invade public spaces from elevators to supermarkets. In 1918, he premiered the cantata for mezzo-soprano and chamber orchestra Socrate, followed by Trois petites pièces montées for orchestra (1920) and the ballet La Belle excentrique (1920), a "serious fantasy" that parodies the music hall. As for the unfinished opera Paul et Virginie (1923), it was revived by Henri Sauguet. In 1924, Satie reunited with Picasso for the ballet Mercure, commissioned for a private evening. Adopted by the Dadaists as one of their own, Satie collaborated with Francis Picabia and the Ballets suédois on Relâche, an "instantaneous ballet" premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on November 24, 1924, featuring a short film by René Clair, Entr'acte, in which the protagonists appeared. On July 1, 1925, cirrhosis of the liver took the life of the composer, a great absinthe drinker. The opening of his Arcueil apartment to his friends shows the destitution in which he lived in seclusion, in a clutter of umbrella collections, velvet jackets and faux-cols, sealed letters and so on. In contrast to romanticism, Saite's musical purity had a profound influence on the minimalist, repetitive movement of the 1960s, led by Philip Glass and Steve Reich. His Musique d'ameublement led to the ambient concept theorized by Brian Eno. An anti-conformist, he explored new forms and paved the way for the avant-garde, with a sense of derision unequalled in the history of music.