Erik Satie  

By Shannon Cullen

Erik Satie was born in Hofleur, a small town in Normandy, France on May 17^th, 1866.  When he was four years old, his family moved to Paris where his father had acquired a translator’s job.  Upon his mother’s death in 1872, he was sent back, along with his brother, to Hofleur to live with his grandparents.  He received his first music lessons from the local organist. Upon his grandmother’s death in 1878, the two brothers were reunited with their father who had now married a piano teacher.

    In 1879, Satie enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire where his teachers labelled him untalented.  Having been sent home for two and a half years, he re-entered the Conservatoire in 1885 but again made little impression on his teachers and he decided to take up military service.  After a few weeks he left and took up lodgings in Montmartre, the artistic hub of Paris.  Here, his father published his first compositions.  The next year, he started to publish his famous Gymnopedies for piano.

    Satie’s Gymnopedies were gentle but somewhat irregular pieces of music that deliberately flouted many music forms and conventions.  Written in ¾ time with a similar theme, they are ethereal, atmospheric pieces regarded as precursors to today’s ambient music.  Satie himself used the term “furniture music” to describe some, suggesting they should be background music.  However by the end of 1896, Satie popularity and financial position were at an all time low.  Claude Debussy, now the most popular French composer, decided to help his friend by orchestrating the Gymnopedies.  Their rebirth made people finally take Satie seriously.

       In 1917, the first performance of his ballet Parade (the orchestration of which consisted of parts for typewriter, foghorn and baby’s rattle) caused a scandal but established him at the forefront of the avant-garde.  It was co-written by Picasso. Another piece, Vexations, has 840 repetitions of the same musical motif.

    Satie gave his piano pieces names like Unpleasant Glimpses, Gentle Flabby Preludes (for a dog) or Old Sequins and Old Breastplates.  He accompanied the scores of these pieces with all kinds of written remarks which he insisted are not to be read out during performance.  These seemingly frivolous titles were actually taken quite seriously by Satie.

Around this time, Satie was sentenced to a week of imprisonment for an insulting postcard sent to a critic.

    It was only on the intercession of people like Debussy, Saint Saens and Stravinsky that he was released.

    Upon his death in 1925, absolutely nobody else had entered his room since he had moved there 27 years earlier.  It resembled Tutankhamen’s tomb with dust and cobwebs even covering the piano, which friends deduced that he never used for composing.  In the wardrobe were seven velvet suits containing love letters to an unknown woman while around the apartment sat hundreds of umbrellas that had never been opened.

Last modified: April 13, 2009