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New Statesman
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The earworms of Erik Satie
'A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.' Ian Penman, a post-punk music critic known for his experimental and often impenetrable style, opens his book on this lyrical quote from Jean Genet, before exploding into his self-consciously ludicrous, slightly naive, post-modernist style, which matches that of its subject, the composer Erik Satie (1866-1925). A punk avant la lettre, Satie was a societal disruptor dressed in a neat suit and bowler hat. In the light of Satie's anti-establishmentarianism, the commercial success of his music is his best joke. The king of light classics, Satie composed 'brief, evanescent piano pieces of pop-single length', the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes written between 1887 and 1895. They are hugely popular on easy-listening programmes and often used as advertising jingles. Muzak owes its being to Satie. He invented background music, calling it 'furniture music' and intended it to complete the decor for lawyers' and bankers' offices. When it was performed, he told people to walk about, eat and drink. When they sat still and listened, he waved his arms and shouted at them in frustration. The book's title suits the subject perfectly. Three Piece Suite. Are we talking the musical form? Are we talking upholstered horror-furniture? Or social saboteurs in three-piece suits? The answer, of course, is all of them. Contradiction was Satie's stock-in-trade. 'Vexations', a little piano piece lasting less than two minutes, must be played repeatedly, 840 times. At 16 hours of music, it is understandably rarely performed. John Cage did it 1963, and Igor Levit this April at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, with Marina Abramović (predictably) in tow. Dualism rocked Satie's cradle. His mother was an English Protestant, his father a French Roman Catholic who hated both the English and Protestantism. His mother died when he was six. Shunted off to his paternal grandparents, little Eric was swiftly re-baptised into the Catholic Church. Schooldays passed as indolently as one of his idly rocking Gymnopédies, before gently slipping into studying music at the Conservatoire. Except he didn't. 'The laziest student in the Conservatoire,' read his report, 'but gets a lovely sound.' Chucked out, he took to playing piano in bars, where he effected his first reinvention. Eric became Erik. He grew his hair long, wore a frock coat and top hat and composed the famous pieces: the Gymnopédies (a word originally meaning naked games during Ancient Greek festivals that Satie chose to redefine as a fusion of gymnase and comédie), and the Gnossiennes (gnostic spliced with madeleine, which pre-dates Proust's famous madeleine passage in Swann's Way by quite a few years). Paris in the 1890s was shrouded in mysticism. Ectoplasm drifted up Haussmann's smart new boulevards. Tables turned, spirits rapped. Madame Blavatsky wore an amazing amount of eye make-up and Satie joined Sâr Péladan's Rosicrucian church, a hocus-pocus dress-up party obsessed with alchemy, philosophy, Wagner and the Holy Grail. Appointed Maître de Chapelle, Satie composed hymns in the manner of 'Chaldean Wagnerism' featuring flutes, harps and trumpets. His soundtrack to Péladan's play Le Fils des Étoiles would not disgrace a Cecil B DeMille movie. But Satie was not born to play second fiddle, and in 1893 he broke from Péladan's church to found his own. L'Église Métropolitaine d'Art de Jésus Conducteur (The Metropolitan Church of Jesus the Conductor). It sounds like something out of the Midwest Bible Belt. Its purported mission was to be a place for art to grow and prosper unsullied by evil, but its real work was to launch missiles against artistic enemies and 'infidel Anglicans' who would suffer Hell's most delicious tortures unless they returned to the bosom of the Catholic Church. Penman suggests that the rather horrible, pompous and pretentious communications that Satie put out might be a leg-pull, but I wonder. Occult sects are not known for their sense of humour. And besides, while Satie sampled many varieties of religion all his life, the need for a real, sincere faith seems to have been a constant throughout. During the brief existence of his church, Satie had his only love affair. Suzanne Valadon was a high-wire artist and painter. Whether they ever had sex is unclear. It's possible he was a celibate. He and she had next-door rooms; he composed Gothic Dances for her, and she painted a rather prim portrait of him. When she left him, he jettisoned frock coats, bought seven identical velvet suits, and transformed into 'the Velvet Gentleman'. He moved from central Paris to the suburb of Arcueil. No visitors were ever admitted to his room. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 'Satie came every morning… and sat in my room,' wrote Cocteau. 'He kept on his overcoat (always perfectly spotless), his gloves, his hat which he wore pulled down almost to his monocle, his umbrella never left his hand. With his free hand he would cover his mouth, which curled when he spoke and laughed. He came from Arcueil on foot. There he lived in a small room, in which, after his death, under a mountain of dust, were found all the letters his friends had ever written him. He had not opened one…' Music took hold of Satie's soul during his childhood. He received lessons from the local organist who implanted a passion for early church music and Gregorian chant that never left him. His poor performance at the Conservatoire was due to him bunking off to Notre Dame to listen to the music he loved in its proper architectural setting. New, non-ecclesiastical influences only opened up when he got to the avant-garde experimental cabarets like the Le Chat Noir and met fellow composer Claude Debussy, who was also struggling to get out from under the heavy influence of Wagnerism. Out went Sturm und Drang. In came beguiling melodies conjuring lovers meandering in a shady lane, or rocking on the Seine's pretty café boats. He was composing the musical equivalent of the art of the time: sound-pictures of the untroubled arcadia created by the impressionists on canvas, and conjurations of the delicate, associative literary suggestion of Mallarmé and the symbolist poets. The inevitable break with Debussy came when Debussy orchestrated the Gymnopédies to great acclaim. This and the flight of Valadon led to musical drought. It picked up again when he was approaching 40 and his father died. He went back to school to study early church music in greater depth, immersing himself in counterpoint and polyphony, Bach and Palestrina. The Velvet Man transformed into City Gent: bowler hat, stiff collar, furled umbrella and sober suit. He joined the Communist Party, became a pillar of the community in Arcueil and was decorated for civic services. In 1911, Satie was suddenly 'discovered'. He was in his mid forties when he was taken up by Ravel (another composer of short earworms). Other disciples popped up, calling themselves 'Les Six', also known as 'Les nouveaux jeunes'. Intent on unhorsing impressionism, which was now old hat, their music was influenced by cubism and surrealism. Satie was also embraced by the wider circle of rising avant-garde stars: Cocteau, Picasso, René Clair, Picabia, Brâncuși and Man Ray. In 1917, he composed the music for Parade for the Ballets Russes, with sets by Picasso, scenario by Cocteau and choreography by Léonide Massine. Satie's score included parts for foghorn, typewriter, milk bottles and a pistol. It was a succès de scandale. Late blooming continued with the 1924 short dadaist film Entr'acte made in collaboration with Clair and Picabia. Written to be shown during the interval (entr'acte) of the ballet Relâche (which translates to 'show cancelled'), in the event, the show actually was cancelled, due to the unfeigned indisposition of the lead dancer. Real life aped their jape! The trio howled with laughter. The movie they were making was slapstick at breakneck speed, surrealist before surrealism was born; Charlie Chaplin, the Goons, Monty Python, punk. A canon fires a huge shell that collapses like a soufflé. Balloon heads inflate, deflate. A runaway hearse is pulled by a camel. Matchsticks dance, boxing gloves levitate, top-hatted seducers take up attitudes. Satie wrote the music frame by frame: it is hectic and forgettable. Cirrhosis of the liver killed him the following winter. He died peacefully, in the bosom of the Church that he had never actually left. His purported last words were suitably ambiguous: 'Ah, the cows…' The book Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite is unsurprisingly divided into three parts. Part one, the shortest, is about Satie; it skitters selectively, mostly around his life. Part two is three times as long. Headed 'Satie A-Z', the alphabet contains such gems as 'A is for Arcueil' (where Satie lived, remember?) noting that the place name 'contains a + u + e + i, but not a single 'o''. Wow! We also marvel at the insight that Satie is satire spelled without the 'r'. Shall we just tactfully pass over this section? The final section, headed 'Satie Diary', is again longer than the section devoted to the man himself. This is no surprise. We have already deduced that Penman is insanely self-important and deliciously un-self-aware. The diary regales us with an inconsequential daisy chain of maybe-Satie-related musings dated between January 2022 and October 2024. We wonder, among other things, why no one told him that other people's dreams ceased to interest us decades ago? Satie was marvellous. An extremely focused revolutionary thinker and composer dedicated to quiet provocations. His earworms have burrowed their way into our brains, not only musically but culturally too. His work loosened the rigid authority of the grandiose, questioned outdated structures, rules and assumptions; reset the kaleidoscope. It is entirely right that a book should be published to commemorate and celebrate the centenary of his death. Just not this book. Sue Prideaux's 'Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin' (Faber & Faber) won the Duff Cooper Prize Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite Ian Penman Fitzcarraldo, 224pp, £12.99 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Let Kneecap and Bob Vylan speak freely] Related
New York Times
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Satie's Music Will Always Be Popular. But Will We Ever Understand It?
If you've ever looked up a playlist to help you relax, focus or fall asleep, you've probably come across the music of Erik Satie. Most likely, you will have heard his 'Gymnopédie No. 1': a swaying foundation of chords that seem to step forward yet stay in place, somehow both independent of and supporting an instantly alluring melody. This piece's popularity transcends genre, exemplifying the composer Virgil Thomson's idea that Satie is the only composer 'whose works can be enjoyed and appreciated without any knowledge of the history of music.' But Satie, while one of the most popular composers, is also one of the most enigmatic. He was a mystery to many during his lifetime and, a century after his death, remains elusive: a house of mirrors full of tricks, distortions and dead ends. The more you try to understand Satie, the more difficult it becomes. His 'Gymnopédies' are just a taste of a much bigger, stranger collection of works that are rarely heard. They were composed outside any fashion, and beyond traditional forms like the symphony and concerto, with scores idiosyncratic to the point of absurdity. To some they are a joke; to others they are disarming, a way to clear your mind and allow it to question the nature of music and performance. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman review – the radical lord of light entertainent
Music is extremely difficult to write about. First, because it has no plot, no figures, no images, and second, because it is, as the critic Walter Pater pointed out, the one artform to which all the others aspire. Remember those earnest mini-essays on the backs of album covers, which told us everything and nothing about the piece or pieces we were about to listen to? Ian Penman writes: 'As with sex, we inherit a certain language to talk about music which only glancingly reflects how much of it really makes us feel.' Penman, a journalist, critic and biographer, has written not only for the London Review of Books but also the New Musical Express. To say that he is eclectic in his tastes is an understatement; he gives the same level of consideration to Burt Bacharach as he does to Bach, and along the way puts in a word for the genius of the likes of Les Dawson – that's right, Les Dawson. If Penman's cheery chappiness can at times seem studied, he is for the most part admirably accommodating and affirmative, and always enthusiastic. He has little time for the grand Germanic musical statements of the 19th century, which Erik Satie and Debussy gigglingly referred to as Sauerkraut. Satie is an ideal subject for him, and Three Piece Suite is, as you would expect, a glorious celebration of this most elusive and ambiguous of early 20th-century composers. Satie was born in 1866 to a French father and a British mother. He studied first at the Paris Conservatoire but left without a diploma; later, he enrolled at the Schola Cantorum and was more successful. For a time he played the piano in a Montmartre cabaret. He had a five-month liaison with the trapeze artist and painter Suzanne Valadon, but lived for the latter part of his life alone in a small and extremely cluttered room in the Paris suburb of Arcueil, making frequent forays into the city, where he became a well-known figure in cultural circles that included Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Darius Milhaud and Jean Cocteau. He was a true eccentric, instantly recognisable for his neat grey suits, bowler hat and inveterate umbrella. One Paris wag nicknamed him Esotérik Satie. He drank a great deal, and died of cirrhosis when he was 59. His last words were, so Penman reports, 'Ah! The cows …' He composed mostly miniatures, especially for the piano, his best-known pieces being the Gymnopédies and the Gnossiennes – 'They feel as old as sand,' Penman beautifully writes, 'but strangely contemporary' – but also wrote what he called a symphonic drama, Socrate, commissioned by Princess Edmond de Polignac, and two late ballets. Penman loves him for his light and humorous touch – 'What's the big problem with happiness?' – and for the depths he managed to plumb by way of seeming superficiality. Penman situates Satie among the proto-surrealists, along with René Clair and Francis Picabia – 'the three amigos' – but distances him from the likes of André Breton, he of the 'pursed lips and castigating impulse'. The amigos 'proved that it was possible to be radical and lighthearted at the same time'. However, Satie was at heart solitary – solitary, that is, in the midst of the social whirl. At Arcueil he organised public concerts, took groups of schoolchildren on Thursday afternoon outings, and was, Penman notes, 'made a superintendent of the Patronage laïque of Arceuil-Cachan and honoured with a decoration called the Palmes Académiques for services to the community'. Yet the music, despite its apparent simplicity and sunny surfaces, turns upon inwardness. All true art is enigmatic, but the art of Satie is an enigma hiding in plain sight. His 'furniture music', musique d'ameublement, the composer himself wrote, 'will be part of the noises of the environment… I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks at dinner, not dominating them, not imposing itself'. Not to impose: it could be Satie's musical motto. Disconcertingly, the audiences refused to ignore the furniture. Milhaud reported after one performance: 'It was no use Satie shouting: 'Talk, for heaven's sake! Move around! Don't listen!' They kept quiet. They listened.' But was Satie displeased, really? Was there not here a joke within a joke, a blague within a blague? Penman associates Satie not only with later composers upon whom he could be said to have had an influence, such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, even Morton Feldman, but also with artists in other forms, the novelist Raymond Queneau, for instance, the choreographer Merce Cunningham and, of course, the painter René Magritte – in the 'Satie A-Z' section of the book there is a telling cross reference: 'See also: BOWLER HAT; MAGRITTE; UMBRELLA.' One remarkable aspect of Three Piece Suite is that in its more than 200 pages there is not a single word of adverse criticism of its subject. Ian Penman is of an unfailingly cheerful disposition, which makes his book a delight to read, but you cannot but wonder if he never finds himself even a teeny bit exasperated by Satie's relentless whimsy, by titles such as Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Dummy or Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, and references in the scores to the likes of 'Turkish Yodelling (To be played with the tips of the eyes)'. All the same, who could resist a work of musical criticism that closes with the diary entry '10.8.24. Such a lovely blue sky today'? Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from Delivery charges may apply
