Erik Satie, the Individual
Erik Satie kept a meticulous
schedule.
"I am inspired from 10:23 to
11:47. I have lunch at 12:11 and leave the
table at 12:14....Another bout of inspiration
from 3:12 to 4:07...Dinner is served at 7:16
and over at 7:20. Then come symphonic readings
(aloud) from 8:09 until 9:59. My bedtime is
regularly at 10:37. I awaken with a start at
3:19 A.M. (Tuesdays)."
It is not always easy to
tell just how to take his writings, but you
can be assured that they come with a healthy
dose of the absurd. To assume, however, that
he is merely a prankster is to make a
serious misjudgment of his character. He had
larger things on his mind.
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| "What have I
come to do on this earth...? Do I have duties
to perform here? Have I come to carry out a
mission...? Have I been sent here to amuse
myself? ...to forget the miseries of a beyond
which I no longer remember? ...What should I
say to all these questions? Thinking, almost
from the moment of my arrival, that I was
doing some good down here, I began to play a
few musical airs which I myself had
invented... All my troubles stemmed from
there." |
They did indeed. Young Erik (it
was his idea to spell his name with a 'k') made his
way through the Paris Conservatory, where he did not
light up the sky with his brilliance. His professors
described him as lazy, indolent, a malingerer--any
adjective they could think of to show they did not
approve of his pianism. Considering he was
frequently absent, they were probably right. A young
man with talent who just wouldn't apply
himself...but it was more than that.
Satie began to write. And his
earliest pieces show that he was not interested in
following in the footsteps of his great French
forbears. His early efforts are for the cabaret, not
the concert stage. Soon he would spend his life
working (if you could call it that) in a cabaret,
following in the dilatory steps of his father. But
he didn't feel quite comfortable there, either.
| He began to
experiment. And soon he created some
remarkable little pieces which defied all
convention. Pieces that seemed to have no
ancestry and to just spring out of nowhere.
Just the sort of revolution that might bring
fame...but not yet.
For now, he remained in
obscurity, living in a tiny apartment twenty
miles outside of Paris, walking to Paris
every day to work in the cabaret, wearing
seven identical velvet suits which earned
him the nickname "the velvet gentleman," and
becoming more and more eccentric.
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| "I take
greater pleasure in measuring a sound than in
hearing it....The first time I used a
phonoscope, I examined a B- flat of medium
size. I assure you I have never seen anything
more revolting. I called in my servant so he
might see it too. On the phonoscales an
ordinary F sharp, very common, reached
214-and-a-half pounds. It came from a very fat
tenor whom I also weighed." |
Satie's writings, Memoirs of
an Amnesiac, and other diatribes of various
kinds, are at least as important as the music he
wrote. The collision of ideas, the theater of the
bizarre...this was Satie's workspace.
But the music did not come
easily. He rejected earlier models, standard ways of
developing ideas, and so his pieces tend to be very
short, and he was not prolific. Eventually, he
rethought his earlier rejection of the educated
establishment and went back to school to study
counterpoint.
After this, his works become more
conservative. More traditionally acceptable, yes,
but perhaps... less inventive?
| His young
idols certainly thought so. A new generation
of French composers had inconveniently chosen
this time to proclaim Satie's early flights of
fancy to be great landmarks in the history of
art and were now booing loudly his more recent
endeavors. Satie wrote to his brother Conrad
of the irony of having his earlier work
appreciated only now that his current efforts
could be dismissed. "That's life, my
friend...It's utter nonsense." |
Satie
kept on finding new ways to pull the rug out from
under his listeners. He created furnituremusic,
music which functioned as a kind of sonic wallpaper.
At the gallery where it was first "performed" he had
to keep shouting to the people who were respectfully
listening to the music to keep on talking through it
(imagine!) as it was meant only to perfume the air
around them. He wrote a short, enigmatic piano piece
to be continually repeated for upwards of 24 hours.
He kept having fun with what he must have thought
stuffy old conventions, and when he was berated for
it, dedicated one of his pieces to "the puffed up
ones. May they swallow their beards! May they dance
on their own stomachs!"
| He loved
getting into fights in the newspapers. He
would scornfully denounce the leader of a
movement in overblown language for all manner
of artistic crimes. In his early years he
became attracted to a strange religious sect
and soon left it to form his own church of
one, not without an extensive parody of such
movements in general, as when he described the
colossal proportions he expected his movement
to assume in a few short years. His penchant
for creating a sensation was perfect for the
Parisians of the time. |
And so it was that in 1917 he
collaborated with Jean Cocteau on a surrealist
ballet called "Parade" and caused an instant scandal
which brought him overnight fame. It also ruptured
his friendship with his friend Claude Debussy, who
probably regarded his friend as a harmless jokester
who never would, or should, amount to anything.
Most of the conservatory no doubt
felt this way. In spite of the fact, or more
probably exactly because it would be viewed as
absurd, Satie applied for the vacated position of
Director of the Conservatory itself, twice. He was
certainly never seriously considered, not only
because of his outsider status, but because he would
have been thought of as not really conservatory
material. Throughout his career, Satie continued to
irritate his colleagues at the school with his
strange printed outbursts and scandalous artistic
expressions. They were certain that his success
wouldn't last, and a well-deserved obscurity would
be his fate before long. Many of them are now
footnotes in musical history.
But nearly a century after his
death we are still talking about him, aren't we?
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