Choses vues à droite et à gauche (sans lunettes) (1914) They're the musical precursor to René Magritte's famous painting La chambre d'écoute, a realistic depiction of an apple that surrealistically fills an entire room. There's always some element - harmonic or rhythmic - that isn't quite right, challenging our preconceived notions of how music should go. In these compositions for piano four hands, Satie's melodic lines refuse to conform to traditional accompaniment. There are in fact seven pieces in this collection, but never mind. With typical humour, Satie responded to Debussy's criticism by publishing a set of pieces for piano duet called Trois morceaux en forme de poire (Three pieces in the form of a pear). "Now, as a true friend may I warn you that from time to time there is in your art a certain lack of form," wrote Claude Debussy to Satie.
Best of all, it invites the mind's eye to reconstruct the events on that bizarre opening night almost 100 years ago.Ĥ. It includes lots of brass, percussion and elements of ragtime. The music Satie wrote for Parade is as boisterous as his Gymnopédies are calm. Satie actually spent eight days in prison for writing an insulting letter to the music critic who gave Parade an unfavourable review. Parade depicts the attempts of a circus troupe to attract a public to its performance - not a particularly surreal scenario, but the events that unfolded at the ballet's première at Paris's Théâtre du Châtelet were pretty strange. The performance caused a minor scandal, primarily over the unconventional cubist sets and costumes designed by Pablo Picasso. In fact, the word surrealism was used for the first time in the program notes, written by Guillaume Apollinaire, for Parade, a ballet for which Satie composed the music. No composer is more closely associated with the surrealist movement than Satie. "Most recordings are much faster but to me something is lost of the spirituality of these works."įor more pieces by Satie in this vein, check out Pièces froides (1907). "I only make a point of this because very few pianists bother to play them as slowly as Satie wanted them to be," he continues. I had to listen hard in order to be able to play them with nice long lines, softly, at the tempo suggested by Satie. "A piano can't sustain long notes forever, as we all know, and sustained sound often comes at the cost of a rather loud attack, which is not the kind of thing one looks for in these fluid melodies. But don't be deceived, cautions David Jalbert, who has recorded Satie's Trois Gymnopédies on ATMA Classique: In fact, many pianists are drawn to these pieces because they're so easy to play. They're also decidedly anti-virtuosic: You don't need to be Franz Liszt to make music on the piano, he seems to be saying. With their winding, quarter-note melodies and slowly waltzing left-hand accompaniments, they're often found on relaxation compilations.
The obvious place to start is Trois Gymnopédies for solo piano, Satie's best-known compositions. Here are 10 essential pieces to complete the Satie picture. Because of his famous down-tempo piano music from the 1880s and '90s, with no emotional highs or lows, he has been dubbed the father of ambient music, which is apt, but only tells part of his story.
He even wrote silly articles for Vanity Fair, including this one about his admiration for animals, which includes the line, "I like chickens, sheep, ducks, smoked salmon, beef and turkey stuffed with chestnuts." He gave his compositions absurd titles, made up words and filled his scores with instructions like "wonder about yourself" or "open your mind." When he quoted other composers' music, it wasn't to be respectful.
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And yet, his music is full of gags, some at the listener's expense. Debussy, Ravel and Stravinsky all cite Satie as an important influence, and his currency with the leading artists and poets of his day was high.
Erik Satie's music is better described by what it isn't than what it is.Ī contrarian, he wrote anti-emotional, anti-virtuosic and anti-Wagnerian music, basically rejecting all the major trends of 19th-century classical music and blazing a new trail - maybe unwittingly - for modernism.īut was he serious? Yes and no.