SATIE Gymnopédies

1000 YEARS OF CLASSICAL MUSIC SATIE Gymnopédies VOLUME 74 | THE MODERN ERA FAST FACTS • Erik Satie is famous for his deeply eccentric nature, which extended to his dress (at one point he bought seven identical velvet suits and then, for more than ten years, wore nothing else), his eating habits (he claimed to eat only white food: ‘eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt, coconuts, SATIE chicken cooked in white water, mouldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (white Gymnopédies varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish, without their skin’), and the instructions he gave to those performing his music: his scores are full of enigmatic notes such as ‘Light as an egg’, ‘Open your head’, ERIK SATIE 1866–1925 ‘Work it out yourself’ and ‘Don’t eat too much’. Trois Gymnopédies [9’44] 1 No. 1: Lent et douloureux (Slow and full of suffering) 3’37 • His sharp wit, irreverence and refusal to do as expected led him to reject the big, lush Romantic 2 No. 2: Lent et triste (Slow and sad) 3’06 tradition of composers like Wagner, and turn instead to shorter, simpler pieces in which melody was 3 No. 3: Lent et grave (Slow and solemn) 2’54 the central element. 4 Je te veux (I Want You) 5’17 • Satie broke new ground in many different musical ways. His familiarity with the world of cabaret (he [7’16] Trois Gnossiennes supported himself for several years by working as a pianist at Le Chat Noir and other Montmartre 5 No. 1: Lent (Slow) 2’58 nightclubs) enabled him to bring elements of jazz and ragtime into his own compositions – one of the first 6 No. 2: Avec étonnement (With astonishment) 1’47 composers to do so. His eagerness to embrace the absurd and the surreal, to break down the barriers 7 No. 3: Lent (Slow) 2’22 between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, would be an inspiration to later avant-garde composers like John Cage. Sonatine bureaucratique (Bureaucratic Sonatina) [4’16] 8 I. Allegro 1’09 • Decades before composers like Philip Glass or Steve Reich, Satie wrote one of the first ‘minimalist’ pieces, 9 II. Andante 1’29 Vexations: a single page of music, to be repeated 840 times. In his ballet Parade, he pioneered the musical 0 III. Vivache 1’38 use of ‘non-musical’ sounds (typewriters, sirens, pistols and a lottery wheel): an idea which would evolve ! Gnossienne No. 4 4’09 into the electronic musique concrète of the 1940s and 1950s. And his Furniture Music – a set of pieces @ Gnossienne No. 5 3’56 written specifically not to be listened to – anticipates the concept of background music which we now take £ Gnossienne No. 6 1’34 for granted. $ The Dreamy Fish, music for a tale by Lord Cheminot, alias Latour 6’24 • Despite being always immaculately groomed, Satie lived in extreme poverty: after he died, his friends were % Le Picadilly (La transatlantique) 1’45 horrified to discover that his lodgings consisted of a dingy room with a bed, a table, a chair, a half-empty Nocturnes [8’18] wardrobe, piles of old newspapers, old hats and walking sticks, and an old broken-down piano with its ^ No. 1 2’59 pedals tied up with string. & No. 2 2’11 * No. 3: Un peu mouvementé (A little faster) 3’02 ( Poudre d’or (Gold Dust) 4’47 Embryons dessechés (Dried-Up Embryos) [6’35] ) I. D’Holothurie 2’14 • Jack the Ripper murders five women in the slums of London’s East End. The killer is ¡ II. D’Edriophthalma 2’45 never caught. ™ III. De Podophthalma 1’32 • Irishman John Boyd Dunlop makes the first pneumatic bicycle tyre, to help his son, who Pièces froides (Cold Pieces) [12’09] suffered terrible headaches from the jarring while riding on Belfast’s rough pavements. Airs à faire fuir (Airs to Make You Run Away) In the US, George Eastman is granted a patent for his roll film camera, which he registers # No. 1 2’56 under the trademark Kodak. ¢ No. 2 1’42 ∞ No. 3 3’00 • During a bout of mental illness, Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh cuts off the bottom of his Danses de travers (Crooked Dances) 1888 left ear. § No. 1 1’15 • The earliest surviving wax cylinder recording of classical music is made: it’s a chorus from ¶ No. 2 1’14 Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt, sung by a choir of more than 3,000 singers in London’s • No. 3 1’56 Crystal Palace. ª Allegro 0’20 • And the eccentric French composer Erik Satie writes his three Gymnopédies. Total Playing Time 77’39 Stephanie McCallum piano — 2 — The Piano Music of Erik Satie Although his sense of irony attracted fashionable attention, Satie’s musical aesthetic stressed classical simplicity and above all the centrality of melody. In 1917 he wrote: M. Erik Satie was born in Honfleur (Calvados) on 17 May 1866. He is considered to be the strangest musican of our time. He classes himself among the ‘fantasists’ who are, in his opinion, ‘highly respectable people’… ‘Do not forget that the melody is the Idea, the outline; as much as it is the form and the subject matter of a After having essayed the loftiest genres the eminent composer now presents some of his humoristic work. The harmony is an illumination, an exhibition of the object, its reflection… If there is form and a new style works. This is what he says about his humour: ‘My humour resembles that of Cromwell. I also owe much to of writing, there is a new craft… Great Masters are brilliant through their ideas, their craft is a simple means to Christopher Columbus, because the American spirit has occasionally tapped me on the shoulder and I have an end, nothing more. It is their ideas which endure… The Idea can do without Art.’6 been delighted to feel its ironically glacial bite.’ 1 Although written nearly thirty years after his Trois Gymnopédies, such a statement could scarcely describe As the formal style of this note gradually slides into parody the reader may suspect – correctly – that the better the exploration of melodic shape which lies at the soul of those pieces. The title Gymnopédie refers description is Satie’s own. The habitual irony and characteristic strangeness are confirmed by many. Stravinsky, to a festival in ancient Sparta (Gymnopaidiai ) in which naked young boys danced and performed gymnastic who met him in 1913, wrote: exercises. Eric Frederick Jensen has pointed out that Satie’s adoption of it appears to have arisen from ‘He was certainly the oddest person I have ever known, but the most rare and consistently witty person, too. I a deliberate predilection for the arcane and the obscure among the Symbolist movement with whom he 7 had a great liking for him and he appreciated my friendliness, I think, and liked me in return. With his pince-nez, associated at the time. In 1887 Satie left his father’s house to live in Montmartre, close to Le Chat Noir, umbrella and galoshes he looked a perfect schoolmaster, but he looked just as much like one without these a bohemian cabaret run by Rodolphe Salis, who later employed Satie as a pianist and conductor to accoutrements… No-one ever saw him wash – he had a horror of soap. Instead he was forever rubbing his accompany shadow plays by Henri Rivière. According to Satie’s friend, the poet J.P. Contamine de Latour, fingers with pumice. He was always very poor, poor by conviction, I think. He lived in a poor section and his the introduction between Salis and Satie was made by another poet, Vital-Hoquet, who introduced him as neighbours seemed to appreciate his coming among them: he was greatly respected by them.’ 2 ‘Erik Satie, Gymnopédiste’, to which Salis responded: ‘Truly a fine profession!’8 The word also appears in a poem by Latour, although Jensen puts the view that it was probably Satie who first adopted it, perhaps having Actress Madeleine Milhaud, wife of Darius Milhaud, one of the group of composers in the 1920s known as found it in a music dictionary. The manuscripts of the Gymnopédies are dated 1 February, 1 March and 2 April Les Six, had similar memories. of the following year, 1888. Given Satie’s later penchant for titles displaying absurdist humour, it would be a ‘He looked like a solicitor’s clerk from the 1910s: a pince-nez, tiny mischievous little eyes, a beard that was mistake to try too hard to hear anything pictorial: the pieces are certainly far removed from anything gymnastic. always impeccably cut. He spoke slowly, breaking the syllables up. His delivery seemed artificial in contradiction Each of them is based on a floating melody in calm, even notes over an accompaniment reminiscent of a very with what he said, which was spontaneous… In fact this man, whose thoughts were the epitome of the anti- slow waltz. By subtle use of dynamics and wide spacings between the bass and the melody, Satie mixes bourgeois, was dressed just like one with his dark suit and bowler hat.’ 3 simplicity, serenity and strangeness in a way which has achieved enduring popularity, particularly since Debussy orchestrated the first and the last piece in 1898. The success of Debussy’s orchestrations at a concert which It was to fall to the Milhauds to be among those who supported Satie during his final illness. As they took him he conducted in 1911 was to be a cause of tension and jealousy between the two in what was otherwise a to hospital by ambulance for cirrhosis of the liver, Madeleine recalls that, as they passed by one of his many close musical friendship, lasting until Debussy’s death in 1918.

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