Composer
Erik Satie
The eccentric of Montmartre whose spare, dreamy piano music was decades ahead of its time.
Erik Satie was one of the great eccentrics of music history - and one of its quiet revolutionaries. His spare, slow, strangely calm piano pieces, written in the 1880s and 1890s, turned their back on the grand emotions of Romanticism, and they sound so modern that they influenced composers from Debussy to the minimalists of the late 20th century.
Life in brief
Satie was born in 1866 in Honfleur, a port town in Normandy. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, where his teachers considered him talented but lazy, and left without distinction. In the 1880s he moved to the bohemian district of Montmartre and earned his living as a pianist in cabarets, including the famous Chat Noir. There he wrote his Gymnopédies (1888) and Gnossiennes.
His eccentricities were legendary. He founded his own church, of which he was the only member; for years he wore one of a set of identical gray velvet suits, earning the nickname "the Velvet Gentleman"; and he filled his scores with comic instructions to the performer. From 1898 he lived in a single room in the suburb of Arcueil, walking miles into Paris and back each day. At nearly forty, he went back to school to study counterpoint.
Fame came late. In 1917 his ballet Parade, created with the writer Jean Cocteau, the painter Pablo Picasso, and Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, caused a sensation - its score included a typewriter and a siren. Young composers gathered around him as a mentor, among them the group later known as "Les Six," including Francis Poulenc. He died in Paris in 1925.
Music and style
Satie's best-known music is deliberately simple: slow, gently repeating melodies over plain chords, with harmonies that drift without resolving and little sense of drama or development. Some pieces have no bar lines at all. He was suspicious of grandiosity, especially the influence of Wagner, and his humor - absurd titles, deadpan instructions - was a deliberate rebuke to musical self-importance. He even invented "furniture music," meant to be heard in the background rather than listened to: an early ancestor of ambient music.
Key works
- Gymnopédies (1888) - three slow, dreamy piano pieces; the first is one of the most recognizable piano pieces ever written. Debussy orchestrated two of them.
- Gnossiennes - mysterious, exotic-sounding piano pieces written without bar lines.
- Trois morceaux en forme de poire ("Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear," 1903) - for piano duet, with a characteristically absurd title.
- Parade (1917) - the scandalous ballet with Cocteau and Picasso.
- Vexations - a short piece with an instruction to repeat it 840 times; John Cage organized the first complete performance in 1963, which lasted more than eighteen hours.
Legacy
Satie's influence far outran his fame. His simplicity and repetition inspired John Cage and the minimalists, his "furniture music" anticipated ambient music, and his gentle piano pieces are now everywhere, from film soundtracks to study playlists. See our minimalism and Impressionism pages for the styles he touched.
Where to start listening: Gymnopédie No. 1 is the essential first listen - three minutes of perfect calm. Then try Gnossienne No. 1 for his stranger, more mysterious side.