25 July 2022
I have a favour to ask. Please listen to Gymnopedie No. 1, composed by Erik Satie. You already know it. Probably as a track from "Calming Classical Classics" or "20 Smoothing Piano Masterpieces". I'm asking you to listen to it again. Assuming nothing. Forgetting everything. Eyes shut. Ears open. Attentively.
Erik Satie - Gymnopedie No. 1 - Aldo Ciccolini
The smallest work by Satie is small the way a keyhole is small. Everything changes when you put your eye to it.
Jean Cocteau
In the space of three minutes, nine seconds (approximately) during August 1888, Erik Satie defines modernism, and reaches out into our post-modernist age.
We've grown accustomed to its strange, sublime simplicity, subsumed it into popular culture. An easy listening melancholic great, troped out (like a prostitute is tricked out) by TV and film whenever instant reflective atmosphere is required. But it's as radical as its composer was eccentric. Let's raise a glass of absinthe to Erik Satie, as we promenade through his legacy.
Born in 1866, which just about covers it for standard biography. He was entered into the Paris Conservatoire by his stepmother. He hated it and they hated him. Expelled in 1882 as "the laziest student" ever known.
Four years later he published Gymnopedie No. 1. At a time when Wagner held sway with German Romanticism, Satie gave us pop music. Gave us minimalism. Gave us repetition. Gave us ambient music. Gave us hammers and umbrellas. And typewriters and sirens. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Pop music. Satie's signature musical form is ABABCB. Yes, the same Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Chorus ABABCB beloved of pop music. See “High and Dry” by Radiohead. 3'09" and ABABCB . Most people could rest on having invented pop music. 1
Repetition and loops. Satie only had one love affair. Perhaps his life-long job as pianist in a brothel had something to do with it? He fell madly in love with Suzanne Valdon, proposing to her after their first night together. She painted his portrait, she moved next door, then moved away five months later. Leaving him bereft.
It's thought his composition "Vexations" was a reaction to his heartbreak. Published posthumously by John Cage in 1949. Not hard to see why it took so long, it's a few bars directed to be played very slowly. Eight hundred and forty times in a row.
John Cage also performed it. With the help of nine other pianists, and the New York Times journalist Howard Klein who was originally there just to review it. It takes eighteen hours to complete. By the end, the audience was down to six, one of whom shouted "Encore!" when it finished.
Satie really needed a "Too radical for 1880s" t-shirt. Instead he wore a dun coloured velvet suit. Albert Einstein's genius is often referenced by his wearing the same suit every day, so as to not squander thought on picking an outfit. 1895 sees Satie ordering several identical velvet suits, which he wore every day for ten years, insisting he be referred to as "the Velvet Gentleman". He was christened Eric. The spelling with a k was another affectation.
He lived in a rented room on the outskirts of Paris, never allowed anyone to visit, and was a hoarder. I'm trying to keep this brief, but honestly, his eccentricities are endless. Even during the few years he was popular he walked everywhere. With a hammer in his hand. You know. Just in case. He also carried an umbrella inside his jacket. His room, upon being cleared out by friends after his death, contained a hundred umbrellas. Along with two grand pianos stacked on top of each other. The bottom one for playing, the other to keep his unopened letters and parcels in. Really.
He was a Dada-ist, and wrote an autobiography called "Memoirs of an Amnesiac".
“I rise at 7:18; am inspired from 10:23 to 11:47. I lunch at 12:11 and leave the table at 12:14. A healthy ride on horse-back round my domain follows from 1:19 pm to 2:53 pm. Another bout of inspiration from 3:12 to 4:07 pm. From 4:27 to 6:47 pm various occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, dexterity, natation, etc.)”
He claimed to only eat white food. He washed only with pumice stone, never soap.
I was faced with a choice at a difficult age
Would I write a book? Or should I take to the stage?
But in the back of my head I heard distant feet
Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat
Left to my own devices, Pet Shop Boys, 2009
Satie's music was not popular. Hardly surprising really. His most accessible work Gymnopedie No. 1 is ambiguous as to which key it's in, and is full of discordance. A few of his contemporaries did recognise his genius. Debussy. Picasso. Cocteau.
I'm sorry, but that roll call is quite extraordinary isn't it? Claude Debussy, considered to be one of modernity's most influential composers, thought Satie was it. Satie had told a young Debussy to avoid all popular Wagnerian influences, who in return orchestrated Gymnopedie No. 1 to show the public how wrong they were. Ravel also championed him.
Erik Satie - Gymnopedie No.3 (Orchestrated by Debussy)
Pablo Picasso (who was never called an arsehole), the Twentieth Century's most influential artist, collaborated, doing the costumes for his ballet "Parade" in 1917. Commissioned by Jean Cocteau, who wrote the libretto. Everyone hated it. There was a riot when it premiered. The music featured typewriter, steamship whistle and siren.
After shaking Satie's hand backstage, the critic Jean Poueigh then went on to call it “an outrage on French taste.” Satie, in turn, was outraged. Sending Poueigh a series of insulting hand-written postcards.
Satie to Monsieur Fuckface Poueigh
Famous Gourd and Composer for Nitwits
Lousy arsehole, this is from where I shit on you with all my force.
Never again offer me your dirty hand.
Due to shouting "Arse" repeatedly during the ensuing libel court case, he was beaten by the police and sentenced to, but never served, a week in prison.
Honestly, I'm trying to keep this brief, so I'll wrap up with Furniture Music. The 80s pop band Furniture (check their excellent single Brilliant Minds from 1986, which sounds very Pulp-esque), I suspect, are named in reference to Satie.
My pattern seeking mind-map is in overdrive (Satie->Debussy->Pet Shop Boys) but it doesn't take much of a stretch to see his influence. My second favourite film (Casablanca, taking top spot) is Jean-Jacques Beineix's "Diva". It's scored by Vladimir Cosma, whose "Promenade Sentimentale" I have always found extremely Satiesque. Today I read it's a Gymnopedie's pastiche.
Vladimir Cosma - Promenade Sentimentale
Richard D. James, better known as Aphex Twin, titled his first two albums "Ambient works I" and "Ambient works II". If you Google "aphex twin erik satie" page after page of links to "Avril 14th" are returned.
Aphex Twin - Avril 14th
There's absolutely nothing to be said, is there?
Perhaps less obvious is my suspicion that "Ambient works" are a sleight of hand reference to Satie's Musique d'ameublement. I would ask him, as back in 1990 we were emailing, he'd agreed to contribute some samples to my SoundBox CD-ROM. Except Dean Garcia, the other half of the music label I had at the time, for reasons unknown, emailed him a 140MB claymation movie his wife had made, killing his email server, and leading him to never speak to us again. I do have a message somewhere asking what format I want the samples in, as he has Apple, Windows and a Kray supercomputer. I wonder too, if Aphex's gibberish song titles are a sly homage to Satie's absurdist ones.
Avril 14th is played on a Disklavier, a player piano created by Yamaha, where a MIDI feed can play the keyboard, rather than a pair of hands. You can hear the clanks of the mechanism in the background of the recording. 2
Satie played his ambient, or background music only once. He was vexed that the audience didn't ignore him, instead stopping their conversation to listen. Even here Satie preempts postmodernism, and rather than play a unified score, he scattered musicians through the event, each playing distinct pieces. He meant the music to be played in the background, to cover up the noise of knives and forks, or pauses in conversation. 1917 and Satie invents ambient music.
He never called himself a musician. He referred to himself as a "phonometrographer", a phrase he devised as someone who measures sound. He wrote an absurdist play "Medusa’s Snare". Having fallen out with (he fell out with everybody) Joséphin Péladan, cult leader of the Mystical Order of the Rose and Cross of the Temple and Grail, Satie formed his own religion, Église Métropolitaine d’Art de Jésus Conducteur. With himself as the only member.
Gary Numan, and Blood, Sweat and Tears have covered Gymnopedie No.1, an act akin to painting your own version of the Mona Lisa perhaps? There's only one musician who's deserving of a mention, when it comes to covers. No surprise perhaps that he also formed a group in 1977 with the postmodern moniker "The Pop Group", and call me out if I'm wrong, but is the only person to release a single named after a Friedrich Nietzsche work, "She's beyond Good and Evil". Which still sounds as extraordinary today as it did in 1979. Yes, none other than Mark Stewart.
Mark Stewart + Maffia – This Is Stranger Than Love
Here is his 2014 single "Stranger Than Love". Where, over a trip-hop reggae fusion featuring amongst others, Skip McDonald and Doug Wimbish, both of whom played on GrandMaster Flash's The Message, Mark Stewart intones a mutated version of Westside Story's "Somewhere", amending the lines 3
There's a place for us,
Somewhere a place for us.
Peace and quiet and open air
Wait for us, somewhere.There's a time for us,
Some day a time for us,
Time together with time to spare,
Time to learn, time to care.
...to something that fills my heart with compassion and sorrow every time I hear it...
Somewhere...
There is a place for us
Somewhere...
Over the borderlineThey say that somewhere
There is a place for us
Take me that somewhere
Over the borderline
... as I can not help but think it perfectly encapsulates the refugee experience. 4
It seems only fitting to recommend Mohsin Hamid's "Exit West", a slim, beautifully told sci-fi, magical realism parable of migration.
"Exit West" by Mohsin Hamid
Buy here | www.penguin.co.uk/books/300265/exit-west-by-hamid-mohsin/9780241979068
This week I'm buying a house. On an island surrounded by sea. No, I'm not recommending everyone buy a house. Compassion is pointless without action. I am extremely fortunate to have been born in a country that has allowed me to migrate to a small volcanic paradise off the coast of Africa. Voluntary exile and warmly welcomed, and through the power of remortgaging, able to own a home. An experience as disparate as can be to the thousands who leave the coast of Africa, seeking a home in the country where I now live, or remortgaged from.
That same sea I swim in daily, calling paradise, is a route of terror and hope, with drowning a distinct possibility. Reading a book, and feeling sad, or angry, is meaningless to those embarking on this journey. This Friday I will be signing the deeds, as others simply hope to reach shore safely in their rubber dinghies.
I've donated to two NGOs, Sea Watch and Open Arms, who've joined forces to patrol the Mediterranean's international waters, rescuing those at peril, who are only looking for somewhere, a place over the borderline. 5
If you email me a receipt of any donation you make, Consume and Enjoy will also match your donation.
I'm aware of the arguments against charity, the percentage that reaches the needy, etc. It's not something I'm concerned about but if you are, try impactful.ninja/best-charities-for-refugees/
Further viewing
“Diva” directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix
Further listening
Tom Waits - "Somewhere" (From 'West Side Story')
The Pop Group - “She Is Beyond Good & Evil”
Radiohead - “High and Dry”
Modern Lovers - “Pablo Picasso”
Furniture - “Brilliant Mind”
I chose Aldo Ciccolini's version of Gymnopedie No. 1 as the album was omnipresent when I was growing up, and introduced me the song of the 20th Century. Portrait by Pablo Picasso, cos, you know, who else.
All the music mentioned in a Spotify playlist…
A small ask
I’m currently interviewing a few more authors , who have kindly relented agreed to humour my inquisitiveness. I feel rather sheepish in the number of subscribers, and would love their words and work to reach a wider audience.
If there’s anyone you know who you think would enjoy these posts, please forward this edition on to them, or a different one you think better suited to wooing. Better still, ring them up, harangue, shout, threaten and coerce them into subscribing. Nicely, of course.
Illustration by Timothy Hunt
©2016 Timothy Hunt
A shoutout to Timothy Hunt, my favourite illustrator, who very kindly allowed use of his work to enliven this post. Please do him a solid by following him on Instagram and liking all his posts. Even better would be visiting his shop and purchasing a print, gold star goes to commissioning him to design or illustrate your next project.
www.instagram.com/timothyjphunt
Further reading
Rather than add footnotes, here's the articles I stole from to cobble this together. I've only skimmed the highlights. There's a lot more in these links.
https://www.yourclassical.org/story/2017/02/24/satie-gymnopedies
https://flypaper.soundfly.com/diversions/composer-erik-satie-was-weirder-than-you-realize/
https://blogs.loc.gov/nls-music-notes/2021/05/erik-satie-and-the-art-of-simplicity/
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/the-essential-erik-satie
https://kids.kiddle.co/Erik_Satie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Satie
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Erik-Satie
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/25/erik-satie-vexations-furniture-music
https://www.mfiles.co.uk/composers/Erik-Satie.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexations
https://www.therestisnoise.com/2007/05/more_on_vexatio.html
https://interlude.hk/composers-in-the-court-room-erik-satie-versus-jean-poueigh/
https://erenow.net/ww/paris-at-the-end-of-the-world-1914-1918/32.php
https://worldfoodbooks.com/item/a-mammal-s-notebook-the-collected-writings-of-erik-satie
http://music.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/0003_satie/satie.shtml
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Erik_Satie
There's even PhDs and academic papers drawing parallels between Satie, Cage, and postmodernism. If you want to dig deep. See, I'm not making this shit up.
https://www.oocities.org/hk/sylvianavsky/mywork/satie.pdf
https://www.academia.edu/29428614/Music_and_Postmodernity_by_Jean_Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269823164_Postmodern_Interpretations_of_Satie's_Parade
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41814072_Erik_Satie's_sententious_writings
Jean-François Lyotard's Adaptation of John Cage's Aesthetics
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25164530
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269823164_Postmodern_Interpretations_of_Satie's_Parade
References
https://www.catalannews.com/society-science/item/open-arms-mediterranea-and-sea-watch-join-forces-as-single-humanitarian-fleet
Legally I have to tell you I might get five pence or something from Bookshop dot org should you purchase something, but really I just want to stick it to Amazon and keep independent bookshops alive. Yeah, rebel me, bringing the man down from the inside etc etc.