The Many Sides of Erik Satie

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.

Speaking of Satie, the Musée de Montmartre in Paris https://museedemontmartre.fr/ is well worth a visit.

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....

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 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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

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 (?).