Erik Satie

French composer

• Born: May 17, 1866
• Birthplace: Honfleur, France
• Died: July 1, 1925
• Place of death: Paris, France

Satie was a unique figure in French music at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1890’s he played an important role in turning French music away from the influence of nineteenth century German Romanticism. During and after World War I, he was the major composer of the French avant-garde; he turned away from Impressionism, in which he never really took part, and prefigured the neoclassicism of the 1940’s and 1950’s.

Early Life

Erik Satie (sah-tee) was born in a coastal town in the Normandy region of France to Jules Alfred Satie, a marine broker, and Jane Leslie Anton, a Scotswoman. In 1870, at the close of the Franco-Prussian War, the family moved to Paris. When Satie’s mother died two years later, he and his brother and sister returned to Honfleur to live with their grandparents, who reared them in a strict Roman Catholic tradition. Satie attended school in Honfleur with little distinction.

In 1874, Satie’s grandfather started him in piano lessons with a church organist, who introduced the boy to liturgical music, particularly Gregorian chant; this exposure influenced the full range of Satie’s later work. Another notable influence at this time was an eccentric uncle, nicknamed the Sea Bird because he spent much of his time sitting in a beautifully outfitted boat that never left the dock. The Sea Bird also took young Satie to see traveling circuses and acting troupes, and the boy got a glimpse backstage while the uncle pursued various female performers.

Satie’s music teacher left Honfleur in 1878, the same year his grandmother died, and shortly thereafter he returned to live with his father in Paris. At this point all aspects of his formal education languished except for music. In 1879, he entered a preparatory class at the Paris Conservatoire and began auditioning for the regular piano class. For the next seven years, he continued to take the biannual examinations with no success. In November of 1885 he finally passed the entrance exam for the intermediate class, where he spent a year working under an intolerant teacher. Throughout his conservatory experience, Satie’s teachers took note of his natural talent but chastised him for laziness.

Part way through his second year of the intermediate class, Satie dropped out and volunteered for military service. This allowed him to shorten the customary five years’ compulsory service to one year, but he ended his military career even earlier with a self-inflicted case of bronchitis. While convalescing he began to sketch out the Trois Gymnopédies and Trois Sarabandes, his earliest significant compositions. Later that year, 1887, Satie left his father’s home and settled at the foot of Montmartre, the Bohemian section of Paris. The following year he began playing piano at the Chat Noir, a Montmartre café, and he assumed the full costume and role of a bohemian eccentric.

Life’s Work

While earning a living as a café pianist, Satie also began his career as a serious composer. With the Trois Gymnopédies , which he finished in 1888, and the Trois Gnossiennes of 1890, he prefigured many of the harmonic innovations of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel at a time when the German Romanticism of Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner still dominated European music. These early works for piano combine exoticism and awkwardness into a simple but purely original style, and they set a pattern for Satie’s career by anticipating popular taste by at least ten years. In fact the Gymnopédies did not achieve their full initial popularity until 1911.

Satie’s early fascination with the mysticism and ritual of the Catholic Church drew him to a brief affiliation with the Rosicrucian sect in 1890, and over the next two years he composed incidental music and fanfares for their elaborate ceremonies. He then disassociated himself from the group, but his affinity for religious pomp reasserted itself in the next few years in the form of the “Metropolitan Church of the Art of Jesus the Conductor,” an imaginary institution under the auspices of which Satie published attacks on his perceived enemies and rivals in the Paris music scene. A small inheritance in 1892 allowed him to indulge such fantasies with increased vigor. He proposed himself three times for the Institut de France, an impossible honor for an obscure bohemian in his twenties, and he maintained a pose of complete seriousness throughout, all the while mocking the prosperous bourgeois self-importance of such established institutions. Thus Satie carried the bohemian ethos to fulfillment.

While performing in the cafés of Montmartre, Satie met many of the painters and poets of the artistic avant-garde that flourished in Paris from the 1890’s through the 1920’s. In later years, he acknowledged having spent more time with and learned more from painters than musicians. In 1891, however, while playing at the Auberge du Clou, Satie met Debussy and began a close friendship that would last thirty years. The two composers influenced each other, particularly at the beginning of their friendship, as they attempted to find a new direction for a more uniquely French music than was then being composed. Debussy had already achieved some renown as a composer, but his wider experience had exposed him to more of the Wagnerian influence then prevalent. Satie played an important role in Debussy’s career by liberating his more famous friend from that tendency. Satie also met the young Ravel in the 1890’s and exercised a similar influence on his development. These two composers went on to create Impressionism in music, drawing in part from Satie’s earliest work.

Satie’s stylistic development moved in a different direction. His music reached the height of its liturgical phase with the Messe des pauvres (1895) and then returned to the simplicity and playfulness of his earlier work with Pièces froides (1897). A year later, he moved across Paris from Montmartre to the obscure suburb of Arcueil-Cachan, where he lived in a second-floor flat over a bistro called The Four Chimneys. Although he still composed and performed popular songs in Montmartre to make his living and in fact he made the six-mile walk twice a day he essentially shut himself off from the frenzy of artistic activity in his former neighborhood and retreated into solitude. Over the next twelve years, Satie composed very little work of importance, and his grandiose public gestures ceased. The most notable composition of these years is Trois Morceaux en forme de poire (three pieces in the shape of a pear), his most ambitious work for piano. Debussy is said to have advised Satie to pay more attention to form in his composition; Satie supposedly responded to his friend’s advice with Trois Morceaux en forme de poire, a formless piece having no relation to pears or to the number three. In fact the work is a twenty-minute conglomeration of short pieces spanning the previous fifteen years of Satie’s career. In it he combined the style of his popular songs with the modal and harmonic characteristics of his more serious liturgical work.

Satie laid the foundation for the second half of his career when, nearing the age of forty and against Debussy’s advice, he returned to school. In 1905, he entered the Schola Cantorum, a music school founded ten years earlier by Vincent d’Indy, and he studied counterpoint under Albert Roussel for the next three years. Satie was a diligent student; he worked with seriousness and deep conviction, and this time he earned the admiration of his teachers. On graduating in 1908, he received a diploma entitling him to pursue a life of composition, but at first Satie composed nothing at all. Rather, he devoted his energies in the winter of 1908-1909 to local affairs in his neighborhood of Arcueil. He joined the local Radical-Socialist Party, gave music lessons to his neighbors, and wrote a column in the local newspaper.

Satie put aside his civic activities in 1910 and returned to composition. Following his intense study of counterpoint, he now wrote in a spare, linear, contrapuntal style. His titles grew increasingly grotesque, as in Embryons desséchés (dried embryos), and his directions on interpretation began to mock those of Debussy: “Like a nightingale with a toothache,” for example. He grew increasingly playful and humorous with the running commentary of text in his piano works: A musical quote from Chopin’s funeral march appears in Embryons desséchés deliberately mislabeled as “a well-known mazurka by Schubert.”

At the same time, Satie began to receive recognition for the compositions of his youth. Ravel and Debussy both presented such early works as Trois Gymnopédies in performance in 1911, praising Satie for anticipating Impressionism. The critics began to mention him favorably, and publishers began requesting new compositions. Satie’s style had changed, however, and the work he submitted in response was rejected. He found it bewildering that twenty-year-old works previously considered simplistic were now considered charming, while the works he now composed were considered too complex, too academic. Ultimately Satie ignored the fashion and continued to write what have become known as his humoristic works. This period culminated in Sports et divertissements , a collection of twenty fragments that combines poetry, painting, and Satie’s exquisite calligraphy with his music.

In 1915, the young poet Jean Cocteau heard Satie perform Trois Morceaux and was moved to propose a collaboration on a ballet with Sergei Diaghilev, the producer of the Ballets Russes. Pablo Picasso designed the sets and costumes, and Satie wrote a score that included parts for typewriters, sirens, and similar effects. The result was Parade , a rendering of cubism in music and choreography, premiered in 1917. The first performance caused a minor uproar in the audience, and Satie is said to have joined in the whistling from his seat in the balcony. The critics responded with such hostility that Satie sent one critic an insulting postcard and wound up with a damage suit that led to a stiff fine and a week’s prison sentence; he avoided prison only with the urgent intercession of his friends.

Parade established Satie’s reputation as an opponent of Impressionism and a friend to the newer schools. When Debussy, now disabled and nearing the end of his life, neglected to send Satie any congratulations over Parade, Satie took offense. As far back as the 1890’s, Satie had been known for quarreling with his friends over imagined slights, and this was no exception. He wrote Debussy a reproachful letter in 1918, the year Debussy died. The two friends were never reconciled, and Satie later regretted this last falling out.

At this point Satie began to collect a following of his own; a group of young French musicians, later dubbed “Les Six,” including Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud, were attracted as much by Satie’s personality as by his music. Satie was amazed by this; he asked their advice, quarreled with them, but refused to assume the role of master of a school.

As the critics began to recognize the importance of Parade, Satie turned to a new form. His next major composition, Socrate (1919), was a musical setting of the Dialogues of Plato for chamber orchestra. Often called Satie’s masterpiece, Socrate is the culmination of his spare, linear conception of music. Satie anticipated its reception with a note in the program for its premiere: “Those who are unable to understand are requested to adopt an attitude of complete submission and inferiority.” In fact, part of the audience giggled at its apparent monotony, and the critics responded with both praise and scorn.

A few months later, in March of 1920, Satie engaged in an experiment with “furniture music,” an idea that originated with the artist Henri Matisse, who envisioned an art without subject matter, an art similar in function to a comfortable easy-chair. At the intermission of a play by Max Jacob being performed in an art gallery, Satie and Milhaud had musicians dispersed about the gallery start playing rhythmic but purposefully inconsequential music. The audience was instructed to ignore the music, to treat it as merely a background. Thus Satie was disappointed when the audience ignored his instructions and kept silent; he rushed about the gallery, urging them to talk, move around, make noise, but not listen.

Satie further developed this approach to music several years later with background music for a Surrealist film by Renè Clair, which formed the entr’acte of his ballet Relâche (1924). Here the function of the music was to underline the action of the film indirectly, without drawing attention to itself. Relâche, subtitled Ballet instantanéiste (instantaneous ballet), was Satie’s last work. The performance included dancers smoking cigarettes, a firefighter wandering through the set, and costume changes on stage. Satie’s music elicited heckling and laughter: His prelude was based on an indecent student song, and the rest was considered dull. At the end of the premiere, Satie drove on stage in a tiny automobile to take his bow. Like Parade, the performance was considered scandalous, and, true to form, Satie ignored the response.

Shortly thereafter Satie grew ill with cirrhosis of the liver. The illness lasted for six months, during which time he refused to see most of the old friends with whom he had quarreled, and he died in St. Joseph Hospital on July 1, 1925.

Significance

Satie has never been considered more than a minor composer. His collected works would make a slim volume, and most of his individual compositions are very short. Even now only a handful of his early piano works are regularly performed. However, his contributions to the development of Western music in the early twentieth century are considerable. Tonal music over the preceding centuries had used chords to create motion, as one chord implies motion to another related chord. Satie ignored that tradition; he was one of the first to use chords as isolated sonorities, with no need to move in any given direction. Starting from this harmonic conception, Debussy developed a style of great complexity, while Satie’s music always retained an apparent simplicity, ever avoiding grand, transcendent sentiment. Often his work took the form of parody, not only of Romanticism but also of Impressionism; in his more serious work he stripped his music of all pretension, revealing austere essence. Thus, while Debussy’s music has been compared to the works of the Impressionist painters, the sonorities of his chords resembling their brushtrokes, critics have compared Satie’s Trois Gymnopèdies, for example, to the cubist still-life paintings of Picasso and Georges Braque, not only for the motionlessness of his harmonies but also because the three movements seem to take three different perspectives on the same theme, just as the painters view their subjects from different angles and superimpose the images.

These qualities in his music combined with his eccentric social behavior, his ability to ignore current fashion and anticipate future styles, and his emphasis on graphics and textual elements to put him at the center of the Parisian avant-garde after 1910. Ultimately he outpaced the avant-garde as well: A play he wrote in 1913, La Piège de Meduse, anticipated the Dada movement by eight years, and it was unearthed and celebrated by the Dadaists in 1921. His later music, with its clarity, simplicity, and wit, influenced Poulenc, Milhaud, and beyond them the American neoclassical composer Virgil Thomson. The same attributes in Satie’s personality set an example for the entire artistic avant-garde.

Bibliography

Gillmor, Alan M. Erik Satie. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Gillmor’s biography of Satie derives mostly from that of Rollo Myers, but his musical analysis is excellent, providing a clear, concise, and readable discussion of technical issues. Includes a bibliography, a chronology of Satie’s life, a list of works, and an excellent discography.

Harding, James. Erik Satie. New York: Praeger, 1975. In this biography Harding vividly portrays the spirit of Satie’s times, focusing particularly on the years leading up to his collaboration with Cocteau and Diaghilev. Smoothly written and very readable, the book includes a bibliography and a catalog of Satie’s published works and writings.

Myers, Rollo H. Erik Satie. London: Dennis Dobson, 1948. This monograph was the first biography of Satie available in the English language. Short but comprehensive, it provides a balanced portrait of his life and a general introduction to his music.

Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years: The Origin of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I. Rev. ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. This social history provides a detailed analysis of the French avant-garde, focusing on four of its members: painter Henri Rousseau, poets Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire, and Satie. Shattuck’s approach is scholarly and incisive. Includes illustrations and a bibliography with a list of principal works and published writings.

Simon, John. “The Composer as Clown.” New Leader 86, no. 6 (November/December, 2003): 50-52. Discusses Satie’s music, family background, peculiarities, and other aspects of his life.

Templier, Pierre Daniel. Erik Satie. Translated by Elena L. French and David S. French. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969. This translation of the first biography of Satie, originally published in France in 1932, provides an excellent starting point. Templier gives a sympathetic analysis of Satie’s character and a general description of his music. Written mostly from primary sources, the book contains excellent documentation as well as an extensive selection of Satie’s illustrations and drawings, a discography, and a few pages from his original scores in sixty pages of plates.

Whiting, Steven Moore. Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Describes Satie’s experiences as a musician in the bohemian Montmartre area of Paris and how he transferred elements of this popular music into his more serious compositions.