Erik Satie
French eccentric and proto-minimalist who defied every convention
1866
1925
French
Modern
Gymnopédies, Gnossiennes, Vexations
Early life
Erik Satie was born on 17 May 1866 in Honfleur, Normandy. After his mother's death in 1872, he was raised partly by his grandparents. He entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1879 but was an indifferent student, described by his teachers as lazy and untalented — judgements that spectacularly missed the mark. He left without distinction and spent the late 1880s and 1890s earning a meagre living as a cabaret pianist in Montmartre, notably at the Chat Noir, while composing in near-obscurity.
Career and major works
It was during this bohemian period that Satie produced his most iconic early works: the three Gymnopédies (1888), three Gnossiennes (1890–1893), and Vexations (c. 1893), a short passage marked to be repeated 840 times. The Gymnopédies — slow, modal, and stripped of conventional harmonic progression — were utterly unlike anything else being composed at the time and anticipate the ambient and minimalist movements of the late twentieth century by decades. In 1905, dissatisfied with his technical equipment, Satie enrolled as a mature student at the Schola Cantorum, studying counterpoint with Vincent d'Indy and Albert Roussel for three years. The discipline sharpened his craft without dulling his iconoclasm.
Musical style and legacy
Satie's later works include the 'humoristic' piano suites Embryons desséchés (1913) and Sports et divertissements (1914), the ballet Parade (1917) — a collaboration with Cocteau, Picasso, and Diaghilev that scandalised Paris — and the 'symphonic drama' Socrate (1918), a work of austere beauty. His concept of 'musique d'ameublement' (furniture music) — background music not meant to be actively listened to — prefigured ambient music by half a century. Satie's influence on Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, and the group of composers known as Les Six was considerable. His music is characterised by modal harmony, deliberate simplicity, deadpan wit, and a refusal to conform to expected emotional rhetoric. He died in Paris on 1 July 1925; after his death, friends discovered his tiny room in Arcueil contained stacks of unpublished manuscripts and little else.