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Erik Satie, born Éric Alfred Leslie Satie, was a French pianist and composer born on 17 May 1866 in Honfleur, Normandy. Very soon after he was born, Erik and his family began to alternate between living in Normandy and Paris. His Norman father found a job as a translator in the French capital which meant moving the family there while Erik was just 4 years old. Two years later, in 1872, Erik’s mother, of Scottish origins, passed away, and the young boy and his brother went to live with their grandparents in Normandy until the passing of their grandmother in 1878 when they uprooted again to go and live with their sister and father in Paris. His father was married again, to Eugénie Barnetche, a pianist and piano teacher who taught Erik the basics on the instrument. He soon demonstrated a familiarity with the keyboard, but also a certain hostility towards institutions, his mother-in-law’s teaching, and towards music in general.
At 13 years old, the young pianist started studying piano, as well as some theoretical music studies like composition, at the Conservatoire de Paris, but was expelled after two years. Several years later, he was enrolled again in 1885 but did not finish his course and abandoned his studies to join the army, from which he managed to be dismissed a few weeks later.
At around 20 years old, Erik settled alone in Montmartre. He frequented artistic and intellectual circles, rubbing shoulders and becoming friends with people such as Mallarmé, Verlaine, Ravel, and Debussy, the latter of whom he met at the Le Chat Noir cabaret and whose wedding he witnessed. This intellectual and creative environment motivated him to write his first compositions, which reflected his presumed anti-conformism: his first collection of four piano pieces, Ogives (1886), does not feature classical notations such as bar lines, but rather the composer's personal comments. Two years later, he followed up with his second collection for piano, the three Gymnopédies. His father edited the two cycles as an intermediary. He maintained a scandalous relationship with the painter Suzanne Valadon, a relationship that was artistically fruitful both in its passion (a collection of nine piano pieces named Danses Gothiques, 1889) and in the separation that destroyed it (Vexations, 1893).
In addition to his anticonformist tendencies toward academies and institutions, Satie’s character was decidedly atypical: he would buy several of the same suit and he founded his own Church of which he was the leader and sole follower. Some exchanges and testimonials refer to his aggressive tendencies. In 1898, he left Montmartre for financial reasons, moving to Arcueil, where he occupied a modestly comfortable room. He remained very discreet about his finances. At the time, he was a self-proclaimed socialist and was involved in a number of the town's civic initiatives.
In 1905, nearing his forties, Satie reconciled somewhat with academia and attended classes on classical-style counterpoint with composers Albert Roussel and Vincent d’Indy at the La Schola Cantorum music school in Paris, which had been founded by Vincent d’Indy a few years earlier. He finished the course and received a diploma.
He met playwright Jean Cocteau ten years later. In 1917, they worked together on the creation of the one-act ballet, Parade, for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at the Châtelet theater. The libretto was written by the playwright and the music composed by Satie. The set was designed by Picasso and the choreography was the work of dancer Léonide Massine. To reflect Picasso’s cubist inspirations, Satie and Cocteau integrated new sounds into their work using objects such as bottles and typewriters. The ballet music was poorly received by audiences who described it as “noise.”
The collaboration between the two artists was nevertheless a source of inspiration for other artists, namely “Les Six,” a group of six composers who worked together in the same period and named themselves officially in 1920. Three years later, under the guidance of Satie and Henri Milhaud, the Arcueil school was formed by four young composers Henri Cliquet-Pleyel, Roger Désormière, Henri Sauguet and Maxime Jacob. During these same years, the musician met other distinguished artists such as painters Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray—with whom he learned how to make ready-mades—poets Tristan Tzara and André Breton, and later writer Pierre de Massot, philosopher Jacques Maritain and composer Gabriel Pierné.
At the beginning of 1925, Satie's health began to decline and he was hospitalized. The previous year, he had composed the music for choreographer Jean Börlin's ballet, Relâche, for the Swedish Ballet, which was an abject failure and left him in financial ruin. He was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, due in part to alcohol consumption at his Parisian parties. He died in Paris on 1 July 1925, aged 59.
Les Six
Les Six refers to a group of six French composers officially created in 1920 by musicians Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre. The six musicians met at the Conservatoire de Paris and developed a habit of weekly musical encounters, evolving around artists with established reputations, such as Cocteau, Satie, Swiss painter Émile Lejeune, Georges Braque, and Picasso. In 1916, Satie and Cocteau had formed the group Les Nouveaux Jeunes on the basis of these encounters; the result was Les Six, officially christened four years later, in response to The Five in Russia. Satie and Cocteau would remain inspirational models for this new generation of French composers.
His main works
Over the course of his life, Erik Satie composed around fifty works, more than half of which were written for piano, others for voice and orchestral ensembles.
His most famous pieces are the Gymnopédies (1888), three piano pieces inspired by the waltz for which the name was inspired by ancient Greek dances. The slow tempo and seemingly suspended nature of the notes gives the work an impressionist feel. In 1896, Debussy arranged the third and first of these dances in reverse. Les Gnossiennes, composed in 1890, is a seven-part piano work that takes its name from the Greek “gnosis” meaning knowledge.
Satie also composed vocal pieces including Messe des pauvres (1895) for organ and choir, and Socrate (1918), a symphonic drama in three movements based on extracts of Plato’s books Symposium, Phaedrus, and Phaedo. The piece is written for mezzo-soprano accompanied by piano and orchestra. Satie also composed around fifteen “mélodie” songs, some stand-alone and some part of cycles, which reflect his literary and philosophical background, but also his impressionist and cubist inspiration, and a touch of humor and sarcasm. For example, his five-song cycle Ludions (1923) sets to music the poems of Léon-Paul Fargue, giving rise to titles such as “the song of the rat” or “the french frog.” His first cycle, Trois Mélodies: Les Anges, Élégie, Sylvie (1886), is often sung and has a more romantic style, closer to the codes of French mélodie than other of his compositions.
Satie composed five pieces for the stage, mainly for ballets with the exception of Piège de Méduse, a single-act lyrical comedy based on a libretto he wrote himself in 1921. Finally, three chamber music compositions are listed, including the fanfare composed in 1921 for two trumpets, entitled Sonnerie pour réveiller le bon gros roi des singes (lequel ne dort toujours que d’un œil) (“Fanfare for Waking Up the Big Fat King of the Monkeys [Who only Ever Sleeps with One Eye]”).
Satie’s work cannot be easily attributed to one style or movement. While he rejected musical academism, he did not shy away from it. His creations seem to draw on a wide range of influences and inspiration from the arts. He is sometimes associated with impressionism and musical symbolism, in its effervescent crossbreeding of the arts. He is considered a forerunner of later movements such as Minimalism and Neo-Classicism.