The Reception of Erik Satie's Gymnopédies
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The Reception of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies: Audience, Identity, and Commercialization Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Master of Arts in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Billie Eaves, M. M. Graduate Program in Music The Ohio State University 2011 Thesis Committee: Danielle Fosler‐Lussier, Advisor Arved Ashby Robert Sorton Copyright by Billie Eaves 2011 Abstract Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies (1888) embody the aesthetic synthesis of high and low musical culture, which was the premise of artistic ventures at the Chat Noir, the cabaret frequented by Satie in the 1880s. The Gymnopédies maintained but softened distinct aesthetic boundaries by combining modernist and popular musical elements, making the pieces accessible to both artistic and bourgeois audiences. In subsequent performances, the popular musical elements more dominantly informed the identity of the works, and even though Claude Debussy’s 1896 orchestration of the Gymnopédies succeeded in elevating the status of the pieces, this prevailing perception led to aesthetic debates regarding the justification for including the works on concert programs. With the advent of recordings, the Gymnopédies attained a broader, less musically literate audience, and by the 1950s, commoditization and marketing campaigns targeting amateur audiences assigned new functions and meanings to the Gymnopédies that were wholly separate from intensive listening to the pieces as abstract, modernist music. For example, the pieces were marketed for such purposes as sleep, exercise, weddings, or light accompaniment to everyday activities. With experimental transcriptions, especially the arrangement by Blood, Sweat and Tears, Satie’s aesthetic identity was completely supplanted by influential performers. While the modernist identity of the Gymnopédies as absolute music endured through concert‐hall performances and recorded collections, the accessible and popular elements of the pieces encouraged a multitude of transcriptions and allowed for their successful commercialization. ii Acknowledgements I am indebted to my advisor, Dr. Danielle Fosler‐Lussier, for her perceptive suggestions and positive encouragement, from the earliest ruminations of my topic through the finalized project. Her meticulous reading and detailed comments enabled me to make efficient and profitable progress from draft to draft, challenging my ability to achieve conceptual clarity, and encouraging my growth as a writer and scholar. I would also like to thank Dr. Arved Ashby and Professor Robert Sorton for their careful reading and insightful contributions to this project. Finally, a special thanks is owed to my husband, Adam, for his unshakable confidence in me, and to my parents, for providing me with the resources and support to follow any and all of my musical interests for the past twenty‐five years. iii Vita November 27, 1985 ..................................................... Born – Binghamton, New York May 2008 .......................................................................... B.M.. Musical Studies and Oboe Performance, Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam 2008‐2009 ....................................................................... University Fellow, The Ohio State University June 2010 ......................................................................... M.M Music, The Ohio State University 2009‐present .................................................................. Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Music iv Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments .................................................................................................................................................. iii Vita ................................................................................................................................................................................. iv List of Examples ....................................................................................................................................................... vi Chapter 1: The Impact of the Chat Noir’s Audience and Aesthetic on the Composition and Identity Formation of Satie’s Gymnopédies .................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Transmission and Reception of the Gymnopédies through 1950 ................................ 14 Chapter 3: The Commercialization of the Gymnopédies (1950‐2010) ............................................. 39 Selected Bibliography .......................................................................................................................................... 67 Appendix: Selected List of Gymnopédies Recordings, 1985‐2010……….……………………………..70 v List of Examples Example Page 1. Gymnopédie no. 1, mm. 21‐24 ...................................................................................................................... 10 2. Gymnopédie no. 1, mm. 1‐4 ............................................................................................................................ 11 3. Gymnopédie no. 3 (orchestration by Debussy of Satie’s Gymnopédie no. 1), mm. 1‐8 .......... 17 4. Gymnopédie no. 1 (orchestration by Debussy of Satie’s Gymnopédie no. 3), mm. 28‐40 ..... 18 vi Chapter One: The Impact of the Chat Noir’s Audience and Aesthetic on the Composition and Identity Formation of Satie’s Gymnopédies Following his famous introduction by Vital Hocquet as “Erik Satie, gymnopédiste!” the Parisian cabaret Le Chat Noir welcomed the young composer gladly.1 Satie’s made‐up profession, likely chosen for the novelty, obscurity, and musicality of the word gymnopédie, unusually struck Rodolphe Salis: he responded, “That’s quite a profession!”2 Satie wrote the Trois Gymnopédies between February and April of 1888, and the first was published in August by his father, Alfred Satie, in La Musique des familles. While the third Gymnopédie was advertised in La Lanterne Japonaise on December 1, 1888 (in an entry where Satie described the piece as “One of the most beautiful”)3 it had been published privately by his father’s publisher, Dupré, possibly a full month earlier.4 Because the interaction with Salis took place before Satie began composing his Gymnopédies, one can assume that these pieces were developed to justify his claim to the title and gain the approval of Salis and the inner 1 Eric Frederick Jensen, “Satie and the ‘Gymnopédie,’ Music & Letters 75, no. 2 (May, 1994): 239‐240. Dominique Mondo’s Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1839) describes gymnopédie as “a nude dance, accompanied by song, which youthful Spartan maidens danced on specific occasions.” Gymnopaidia is additionally defined by Liddell and Scott in A GreekEnglish Lexicon as the “festival at Sparta, at which naked boys danced and went through gymnastic exercises.” Therefore, Satie may have learned the word from these French or German dictionaries, or possibly Jean‐Jacques Rousseau’s music dictionary (dating all the way back to 1768) whose definition was simply: “Gymnopédie – air or nomos to which young Spartan maidens danced naked.” Satie would surely have had ample access to this volume, whether through home collections or those at the conservatory. Steven Moore Whiting also speculates regarding what Satie meant by his profession, whether referring to the Sparta festival, himself as a future composer of the Gymnopédies or simply “just to cut an audacious figure.” Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 69. 2 Patrice Contamine de Latour, “Erik Satie Intime: Souvenirs de Jeunesse,” Comoedia (August 3, 1925): 2, quoted in Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 69. 3 Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 337. 4 Orledge, Satie the Composer, xxi. 1 circle of artists, poets and musicians of the Chat Noir. Nevertheless, they were also composed for the bourgeois public present at the performances. This aesthetic synthesis of high and low musical culture—the premise of artistic ventures at the Chat Noir—was embodied in Satie’s Gymnopédies: these works maintained but softened distinct aesthetic boundaries, allowing for simultaneous reception by modernist and bourgeois audiences. Émile Goudeau and Rodolphe Salis opened the Chat Noir in 1881 in Montmartre. The cabaret originated in “a group of young Latin Quarter poets, chansonniers, and painters calling themselves the Hydropathes, who had begun meeting regularly in the seventies to recite, sing, and issue a magazine.”5 Thanks to new theatrical interaction and entertainment at the Chat Noir, the cabaret’s clientele broadened to include not only artists with shared values and identity, but also amateurs.6 Jerrold Seigel offers a particularly vivid picture of the constructed behavior of performers and a typical profile of the clientele at the Chat Noir in the 1870s and 80s: At the Chat Noir, the traditional blague [joke, deception, good‐natured jesting] of students and artists took on new forms: the staff of the cabaret was dressed in the green robes of the French Academy; as patrons arrived, they were greeted with exaggerated politeness, addressed with noble titles, and treated with extreme, caricatured respect. Bohemia was literally turned into theater,