32 SHORT FILMS ABOUT ERIK SATIEby Alina Stefanescu (and the others)

“El Bohemio, Poet of Montmartre (Portrait of Erik Satie)” by Ramon Casas i Carbo

1. STRONG AVERSIONS.French composer and pianist Erik Satie was born in Honfleur, France to a French father anda Scottish mother. He was expelled from the Paris Conservatory for being "incorrigiblylazy." Starting with his first composition in 1884, he signed his name as Erik Satie. Satierevolutionized the way music was heard, the way it was scored, and the sort of relationship itdesired with an audience. In many ways, these innovations emerged from his strongaversions to the dominant Romantic tradition—and to the established conservatories and artworld that rejected him.

2. BLACK CATS CROSSING PATHS: POETRY, PEDALS,AND WET WORDS.What does a music-school drop out do to survive if he wants to make music? In the 1880s,the options centered around Montmartre, a part of Paris that became a home for bohemians.Montmartre's first cabaret bar, Le Chat Noir, was a space for anti-establishment art-lovers,including Rodolphe Salis, a loud, abrasive theatrical impresario. When Salis tried to humiliateSatie by asking him what he did for a living, the unemployed Satie replied, "I am aGymnopedist."

It's doubtful that Salis caught Satie's reference to an obscure group of nude male dancerswho lived in ancient Greece, but Satie later built on the witticism by calling himself

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"phonometrician," meaning "someone who measures and writes down sounds." Speaking ofreferences, Satie made many of them—and his concern wasn't with making sure that you gotthem or understood them. He didn't think of the audience in a capitalist fashion, whereentertainment aligned with pleasing the listener and making them feel comfortable. Thatwas radical then, and it remains radical in the present.

Satie loved words, and kept trying to find a new sound, word, or form for his existence.The titles of his pieces were characterized by ribald inventiveness, seriousness and passion.Satie took notes from the demi-monde, when he worked as a pianist at Le Chat Noir from1888 to 1891. Although he found the work "degrading," it was the first time his strangemusical compositions were heard and appreciated by serious musicians such as ClaudeDebussy and Maurice Ravel. This is how his friendship with Debussy began. It's also wherehe became friends with poet Patrice Contamine.

There's a bar in Washington DC called The Black Cat and I used to hang outthere—nothing happened. Satie composed and published his first masterpieces, Les TroisGymnopédies and Les Gnossiennes, whilst working at Le Chat Noir. And I hung out with theman I would later marry at The Black Cat. The truth about black cats is people get lucky.

In the right place at the right time, Satie often collaborated with Paulette Darty, a cabaretsinger considered the Queen of the slow waltz. In fact, Satie's scoring of Je te veux (I wantyou), a slow valse chantée, or "sung waltz," became a theme song for the Parisian BelleÉpoque. Another of Satie’s popular cabaret songs, "La Diva de l’Empire," also came fromDarty’s repertoire, but this one is a syncopated melody in the ragtime style — but sexier. Thepiano's cakewalk rhythm is an early example of Black American influence on Europeanmusic.

In April 1888, the first edition of Satie's Trois Gymnopédies was published, including thepoetry of his new friend, Patrice Contamine, on the cover page.

Oblique et coupant l'ombre un torrent éclatantRuisselait en flots d'or sur la dalle polieOù les atomes d'ambre au feu se miroitantMêlaient leur sarabande à la gymnopédie

Slanting and shadow-cutting a bursting streamTrickled in gusts of gold on the shiny flagstoneWhere the amber atoms in the fire gleamingMingled their sarabande with the gymnopaedia

Using mild dissonances against the harmony, Satie's notations instructed the performer toplay each piece "painfully," "sadly" or "gravely." He also notated his pieces in French,refusing to defer to the conventional Italian notations.

Each sound mattered to Satie—and he returned the heavy Wagnerian line to a minimum,to a fastidious focus on each note. This meant looking closely at the note's shadow, or echo.To hear a sound without reverb—a stark sound not carried over—is to hear what audiologists

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call a dry sound. A wet sound is one whose echo is stuck to it. A wet sound is sticky. Itattaches to other notes and wanders around the room before settling. On a piano, the sustainpedal gives the notes this sticky sound by dragging out the reverb. Some composers hate thesustain pedal because they associate it with Romanticism. Ironically, Satie's Gymnopedies relyheavily on the sustain pedal, on this tool used by his Wagnerian foes (though Satie differs byasking the pianist to play very, very slowly, to extend the long musical lines).

The question of how to play with a sustain pedal involves how to link and flow notesinto each other, how to blur their margins and soften their edges. An insoluble problem:when you play an A and engage the pedal at the same time, the dampers are lifted off thestrings, so the other A's on the piano also sound off in sympathetic vibration. Overtonesenter. This sustain pedal wets the notes. A bursting stream. Another way of wondering aboutthe lines in the poem that serves as a paratext for Satie's piece.

3. THE DEVIL'S IN THE DISSONANCE.As for Satie's Gnossiennes, they were inspired by his time at the Paris Exposition of 1889,where Satie heard an ancient Javanese instrument called the gamelan being played. Thescales in the Gnossiennes are built on tritones, the highly dissonant "devil's music"–and, as weknow, Western music theory has a history of taking dissonance personally. What seemsexotic to us, what seems threatening and demonic, is neither: it is different.

Listening to these pieces, one notes the 19th-century crescendos, climaxes and crashingchords have been replaced by sparse textures and emotional ambivalence. In lieu of narrative,a modal melody unfolds over a backdrop of chords. Satie's commitment to iconoclasmprevented him from writing preludes, études, sonatas, impromptus or other established pianoforms. His gnossiennes, however, invented a new genre and coined a new term for solopiano pieces written in free time.

4. REJECTION IS THE SPICE OF LIFE: OPERA AGAINST SAUERKRAUT!In 1902, Satie inspired Claude Debussy to compose the first French impressionist opera,Pelleas et Melisande. When asked how the opera came about, Debussy credited the followingcomment by Satie: "There is no need for the orchestra to grimace when a character comeson the stage......Do the trees in the scenery grimace? What we have to do is create a musicalscenery, a musical atmosphere in which the characters move and talk."

Against German Romanticism, particularly the melodramatic Wagnerisms, Satie toldDebussy, "We need our own music, if possible without sauerkraut." Slowly, cautiously, andcuriously, Satie paved the way towards French impressionism in music—only to renouncehis interest in it when it grew popular and established. Once conventions formed, Satie wasready to move on. He had no school, no rule, no ideology—he flirted with many, committedto none.

When Satie and Debussy later grew apart, Satie defended himself, insisting: "I neverattack Debussy. It is only Debussyites that annoy me." In the next breath, Satie added:

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"THERE IS NO SCHOOL OF SATIE. Satieism could never exist. I would oppose it." Thecapitalization is Satie's special effect, or a notation of volume.

5. "I SHALL COME BACK TO THIS SUBJECT LATER."A great composer is often judged by his fugues. I have a theory about Satie and fugues—or,rather, the way in which he responded to the expectation of fugues. My theory is related to apamphlet, Memoirs of an Amnesiac, written by Satie. As usual, Satie uses the titling againstitself, to create suspense and challenge the meaning we read into words. Here is how hedescribes his family history and inheritance:

I don't know what the Saties did in the Hundred Years War; nor have I any information on theirattitude and the part they played in the Thirty Years War (one of our loveliest wars). Let thememory of my ancient ancestors rest in peace. Oh yes ... Let us pass on. I shall come back to thissubject later.

That is why I acquired a taste for misanthropy; why I nurtured hypochondria; why I becamethe most (leaden-like) miserable of men. It distressed people to look at me — even throughhall-marked gold eye-glasses. Oh yes. And all this happened to me because of Music. That art hasdone me more harm than good, really: it has made me quarrel with people of quality, mosthonorable, more-than-distinguished, terribly genteel people. Let us pass on. I shall come back tothis subject later.

In a fugue, the subject is presented without a countersubject, thus creating the contrapuntalmotion. Satie's taste for repetition as a hinge and an epiphanic space appears even in hisprose, where he insists that we should come back to this. Subject. Later. I think Satie wrote afugue and titled it as a memoir. And I may come back to this subject later.

6. THREE PEARS—AND A SYMBOL.Satie would try anything that let him see the world differently. He welcomed sciencealongside the circus as modes of perception. "The first time I used a photoscope I examined apear of medium size," Erik Satie said, "I assure you I have never seen anything morerepulsive." But this image of the pear close-up stayed in his mind, and he used it as materialin a 1903 composition, Trois morceaux en forme de poire, (Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pearfor piano four-hands), which disputed its own title, since the piece was a cabaret in sevenparts, not three. Again, titling was not a summary or a gesture towards convention forSatie—it was part of the art itself, the suspense created in leveraging expectation.Vladimir Golsch Mann recounts the story of what happened when, himself, asked Satie

why he titled the piece so strangely. With eyes twinkling, Satie said he visited Debussy a lot,and once day when he showed him a different piece in drafts, Debussy looked at it, and said:"‘Satie, you never had two greater admirers than Ravel and myself; many of your early works

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had an influence on our writing....You have some kind of genius, or you have genius. Fromtime to time there is in your art a certain lack of form…"

In response to Debussy's suggestion that his music lacked form, Satie wrote Morceaux enforme de poire, and brought them to Debussy, who asked the same question–why such a title?

"Simply, mon cher ami, because you cannot criticize my Pieces in the shape of a pear,"Satie replied. "If they are in the form of a pear they cannot be shapeless."

In 1913, Man Ray paid homage to Satie's wit—and to Satie, himself—with a lithographtitled "Poire d'Erik Satie (Pear from Erik Satie)." The Parisian avant-garde borrowed eachother's signs and secret symbols, and this resulted in frequent intertextual gestures, orconversations across their works.

Although Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American visual artist, he spentmost of his career in Paris dabbling amongst surrealists and dadaists with formallycommitting himself. Another homage, or dialogue with Satie's pears, can be found in RenéMagritte's La chambre d'écoute, a realistic depiction of an apple that surrealistically fills anentire room.

7. MY MONKEY NEEDS CERTAIN THINGS FROM THE PIANO.The private premiere of Satie's play, Le Piege de Meduse, took place in late 1913 or early 1914at the home of a wealthier friend. Satie accompanied his seven dances for Jonah the monkeyon the piano that he had prepared by sliding sheets of paper between the strings and thedampers to create a muted, mechanistic effect—the first "prepared" piano. Why not modifythe instrument itself in order to create the sound one wants to queer in the world?

8. LES SIX, AND FURNITURE MUSIC.What if music could serve as background, as part of ambiance furniture in a room? Satiewondered. This idea of a “musique d’emeublement” (or furniture music) played out at a 1921performance in Paris, where Satie introduced a concert featuring the works of Les Six (asFrancis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger andGermaine Tailleferre, the six young musicians that he worked with came to be called). Asthe furniture music was played during the first intermission,the audience was told, “Weurgently beg you not to attach any importance to it and to act during intermission as if themusic did not exist...it hopes to contribute to life the way a casual conversation does, or apicture in a gallery, or a chair in which one is or is not seated.”

Despite this announcement, people returned to their seats when the music started. Adismayed Satie told everyone to keep talking “Whatever you do, don’t listen!” Although theexperiment didn’t work out, Satie and his Dadaist friends had invented the concept of"background music."

Three years later, Mrs Eugene commissioned a piece of 'furniture music' for exclusive useat her Washington home on Connecticut Avenue. Satie responded with twelve bars of music

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for a small orchestra (to be repeated endlessly) entitled Tenture de cabinet prefectoral('Wall-hanging for a prefectorial office'). He loved commissions that allowed him to play.

"Satie was our mascot," Milhaud said later. "The purity of his art, his horror of allconcessions, his contempt for money, and his ruthless attitude toward the critics were amarvelous example for us all."

From Strange Mr. Satie by M. T. Anderson, illustrated by Petra Mathers

9. SATIE AND THE CRITICS: A POSTCARD PARABLE.Speaking of surrealism, the word was first used in Guillaume Apollinaire's program notes forParade, a ballet for which Satie composed the music. Parade follows a circus troupe's efforts toattract the public to its performances. Although the theme wasn't especially strange, thestrangeness came at the ballet's premiere, on May 18, 1917, where Pablo Picasso's cubiststage sets and weird costumes created a minor scandal, and Jean Cocteau's words ruffledfeathers. Picasso's fascinating “Costumes du ball et Parade” comes from this collaboration.

The artistic risk of friskiness is being misunderstood by the gatekeepers, who feelthreatened by the unfamiliar. Unsurprisingly, the critics and newspapers blasted "the threeBoches," they compared Satie's composition to immature child's play.

Refusing to let the critics have the last word, Satie sent these three postcards to critic JeanPoueigh, in response to his humiliating review of Parade. As a result, Erik Satie got taken tocourt and sentenced to a week in jail after being found guilty of "Public injury anddefamation of character."

Not to be outdone, Satie deliver a lecture titled “A Eulogy of Critics” at the Théatre duVieux Colombier on February 5, 1918, as his friends fought to lift the sentence of eight daysin prison and a 1000 francs fine imposed on Satie for having insulted a music critic.

What can writers learn from this?

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One might elect to ignore the critics completely– or, perhaps, to write the postcards butrefrain from publishing them by postal service, reserving them for an actual poetry collectionor book. Most critics wouldbe flattered to see their namesrendered relevant.

No, Satie was not a cynicaljokester! said Georges Auric,whose relationship with Satiebegan in admiration andtransformed intocollaboration. Auric blamedthe critics for creating thisidea of a ridiculous, nihilisticSatie in order to disparage orinfantilize his compositions.Critics also levied charges of"ignorance" against him fornot having degrees orcertification. To be seen as learned mattered more than to learn, or to continue learning.

But Satie knew what he was doing when he created his persona. Satie wore the samebowler hat, the "monocle set in his lively and amused eye, his beard carefully trimmed, hisumbrella in his hand"–this is the person Satie composed for public consumption. It was notaccidental. The black keys on the piano keyboard are known as “accidentals” in musictheory. O—and Satie had a collection of more than a hundred umbrellas.

10. "THE FIRST FRENCH DADA OBJECT," AS NARRATED BY MAN RAY."A strange voluble little man in his fifties came over to me and led me to one of mypaintings. Strange, because he seemed out of place in this gathering of younger men. With alittle white beard, an old-fashioned pince-nez, black bowler hat, black overcoat andumbrella, he looked like an undertaker or an employee of some conservative bank. I wastired with the preparations of the opening, the gallery had no heat, I shivered and said inEnglish that I was cold. He replied in English, took my arm, and led me out of the gallery toa corner café, where he ordered hot grogs. Introducing himself as Erik Satie, he relapsed intoFrench, which I informed him I did not understand. With a twinkle in his eye he said it didnot matter. We had a couple of additional grogs; I began to feel warm and lightheaded.Leaving the café, we passed a shop where various household utensils were spread out infront. I picked up a flatiron, the kind used on coal stoves, asked Satie to come inside withme, where, with his help, I acquired a box of tacks and a tube of glue. Back at the gallery Iglued a row of tacks to the smooth surface of the iron, titled it, The Gift, and added it to theexhibition. This was my first Dada object in France."

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11. THE COSTUME IS A CHOREOGRAPHED STRUCTURE, MAYBE.In 1922, the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi made a special dance costume forLizica Codreanu, played a vinyl recording of Gymnopedies and invited the dancer to do aone-off performance in his studio, among sculptures. Using a rack-and-pinion ThorntonPickard camera, Brancusi captured the performance in seven photographs. In 1996, thedirector Cornel Mihalache used the images taken in 1922 to recreate Lizica Codreanu’s outfitand proposed to dancer and choreographer Vava Stefanescu an apparently impossiblereenactment of that dance performance in the sculptor’s studio, on Satie’s music.

12. SPORTS, DIVERSIONS, LEISURE—AND STRAVINSKY.There is a photo taken by composer Igor Stravinsky of Debussy and Satie standing in frontof a mantle in Stravinsky's home, smoking cigarettes, looking as if they are discussing thefate of the world or just modern music. Stravinsky and Satie were friends, but they also haddifferent aesthetic values. While Stravinsky needed to be The New Yorker—the glamorous starof art—Satie was happy with small indie journals and opportunities that let him be frisky.A commission for a portfolio on Parisian sports and leisure was first offered to Igor

Stravinsky, who declined because he found the payment of 10,000 francs laughably meager.The commission was then offered to Satie, who said that 10,000 francs was too much—andagreed to accept a reduced fee of 5,000 francs.

Although Satie composed the music in 1914, publication was delayed until 1923 by theFirst World War. The twenty-one pieces illustrate the pastimes of the bourgeoisie, and areaccompanied by short humorous texts (which could be considered poems) by Satie,handwritten in red and black ink. Illustrated by Charles Martin, the twenty-one forms ofsports and leisure include:

1. Choral inappétisant (Unappetising Chorale)2. La Balançoire (The Swing)3. La Chasse (Hunting)4. La Comédie italienne (The Commedia dell’Arte)5. Le Réveil de la Mariée (The Bride’s Awakening)6. Colin-Maillard (Blind Man’s Buff)7. La Pêche (Fishing)8. Le Yachting (Yachting)9. Le Bain de mer (Sea Bathing)10. Le Carnaval (Carnival)11. Le Golf (Golf)12. La Pieuvre (The Octopus)13. Les Courses (Horse-Racing)14. Les Quatre-Coins (Hide and Seek)15. Le Pique-nique (Picnic)16. Le Water-Chute (The Water-Slide)17. Le Tango – perpétuel (The Never-ending Tango)

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18. Le Traîneau (The Bobsled)19. Le Flirt (Flirting)20. Le Feu d’artifice (Fireworks)21. Le Tennis (Tennis)

Satie's preface to Sports & Divertissements is lovely, and worth reading:“This publication embodies two arts, drawing and music. The drawing part consists of lines, witty

lines; the musical part of plain black dots. These two parts together make an album. I suggest you turnits pages with a tolerant thumb and with a smile, for this is a work of pure whimsy. Let no one look formore. For the “desiccated” and the “stultified”, I have added a chorale, sober and suitable. This makes akind of wormwood preamble, a way of beginning wholly austere and unfrivolous. I have put into iteverything I know about boredom. I dedicate this chorale to those who already dislike me. Andwithdraw. Erik Satie.”

13. WHEREIN AMERICAN COMPOSER JOHN CAGE TRANSLATES SATIE'SPREFACE.John Cage’s Choral inappétisant (Unappetising Chorale) was a “translation” of Satie’s preface toSports & Divertissements what Cage called "mesostic form," a poetic form he invented. Thehorizontal text intersects with a vertical word or text in the middle of each line, written incapitals. It is similar to an acrostic, in which the initial letters of each line spell a word or text.Each of Cage’s translations of Satie’s texts for Sports & Divertissements spellsE-R-I-K-S-A-T-I-E through the middle of every line. I shall return to this later.

14. ESOTERICA: OFFICIAL COMPOSER FOR CULTS AND CURIOUS DAIMONS.Satie’s libretto for his ‘esoteric opera’ uspud is believed to be the first work in the history oftypography printed entirely in lower case. So we can add the first lowercase libretto and firstofficial esoteric opera to Satie's list of innovations.

Occultist Jules-Bois, author of Le Satanisme et la Magie, wrote a play for which Satiecomposed music. La Porte Héroique du Ciel is an esoteric drama about the spiritual quest of apoet, with a cast of characters including courtesans and Jesus. Some say Satie’s loveliest workfrom his occult period is his Prelude to the Drama, published by a Edmond Bailly's smallbookshop, which served as the epicenter of Symbolism and was frequented by StéphaneMallarmé and Odilon Redon. Amongst the bookshop's many publications was the firstedition of Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893.)

This willingness to engage anything interesting, to immerse himself in all fascinations, ledSatie to esoteric circles. He served as the official composer to the Catholic and AestheticOrder of the Rose+Cross of the Temple and the Grail, an esoteric cult based on Rosicruciantraditions, founded in 1891 by ‘Sâr’ Joséphin Péladan.The following year Péladan initiated the first artistic Salon of the Rose-Cross at the

Durand-Ruel Gallery alongside sixty painters and sculptors. More than 20,000 Parisians

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came to see the exhibition, including the cream of literary and artistic society (Mallarmé,Zola, Verlaine, and Moreau among others.)At the grand opening, the Prelude to Wagner’s Parsifal and Erik Satie’s Fanfares of the

Rose+Cross (in a version for trumpets and harps) were performed. The Fanfares werepublished in a piano score, with a cover by the artist Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898),whose paintings Satie greatly admired. As for being used alongside Wagner, I think Satieintended the juxtaposition. Bringing the bombastic in proximity to the earnest was acompositional strategy employed often to subvert how an audience heard and responded toconventions.

14. SUZANNE VALADON: PAINTER, ACROBAT, AND WHIM.Satie's only known love affair was with French painter Suzanne Marie Valadon, who wore acorsage of carrots on her blouse and kept a pet goat in her studio. The whole dalliance lastedfor six months. Allegedly, Satie ended the affair and Valadon moved in with the banker, PaulMousis, immediately afterwards.

Most of Satie's letters to Valadon were never mailed. Conrad Satie showed them toValadon in 1926, after Satie's death, and she then chose to burn them. The one letter Satiedid send her–on 11 March 1893–reveals that he was deeply in love with her, but eventhough they both lived at 6 rue Cortot, Satie was upset that he couldn't find 'dates' to meether.

According to children’s books and various stories, the relationship ended when Satie andValadon argued and he pushed her out of the apartment window. In this story, Valadon’sexperience as an acrobat at 15 helped her land safely, unharmed, on the sidewalk.

The possibility of the storybook ending depends on believing that Valadon was stillworking at the circus when she and Satie had a relationship–which she was not. So who wasSuzanne Valdon, and what was she doing?

As a child, Valadon was the daughter of a housecleaner who spent time alone. She was adaredevil who chatted up strangers and admired confrontational, spectacular persons.Authority didn’t impress Valadon. She told Parisians that she was the daughter of poet maudit,Francois Villon—and she dressed and acted like Villon, insisting that others call herMademoiselle Villon.

“I was haunted,” Valadon said later, “As a child, I thought far too much.” Montmartre washeaven for young Valadon. There was even a circus, a space filled with the unconventional,daring sorts of humans that fascinated Valadon.

She joined the circus. For six months – at the age of 15– Valadon rode horses and becamean expert on the trapeze. One day, during rehearsal, she fell from the trapeze. The backinjury changed her life. Aware of her vulnerability, grieving the fact that she would never beon a trapeze again, Valadon began drawing. She drew and drew and drew. Among the

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nudes, the portraits, the poses, there was the circus which would remain a site in the greensof her palette as well as the ideal she measured conventional life against.

Satie had his circuses, too.

From Strange Mr. Satie by M. T. Anderson, illustrated by Petra Mathers

15. THE ROOM OF HIS DEATH.At the time of Satie's death in 1925, absolutely nobody except himself had ever entered hisroom in Arcueil since he had moved there twenty-seven years earlier. What his friendswould discover there, after Satie's burial at the Cimetière d'Arcueil, apart from the dust andthe cobwebs (which suggested that Satie never composed using his piano):- enormous quantities of umbrellas, some that had apparently never been used by Satie- the portrait of Satie by Valadon- love-letters and drawings from the Valadon period- other letters from all periods of his life- his collection of drawings of medieval buildings (only now did his friends start to see the

link between Satie and certain previously anonymous journal adverts regarding 'castles inlead' and the like)

- other drawings and texts of autobiographical value- memorabilia from all periods of his life, amongst which were the seven velvet suits from

the Velvet gentleman period, etc.- compositions nobody had ever heard of (or which were thought to have been lost)

everywhere: behind the piano, in the pockets of the velvet suits, etc. These included theVexations, Geneviève de Brabant and other unpublished or unfinished stage works, TheDreamy Fish, many Schola Cantorum exercises, an unseen set of 'canine' piano pieces,

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several other piano works, often without a title (which would be published later as moreGnossiennes, Pièces Froides, Enfantines, Furniture music, etc.).

16. THE VEXATIONS.Half a sheet of musical notation scribbled in 1893 by Erik Satie, discovered after his death,would go on to change the course of modern composition. Written above the music, Satiescored the following instructions: "In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, itwould be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence and seriousimmobility". Satie's Vexations parodied what is known in Wagnerian music as the"unendliche Melodie" (unending melody). An unnervingly skewered piano line withinstructions to be prepared for performance "in the deepest silence." The story of origins forthis tiny composition is as haunting as the piece itself.

Continual, unrelieved dissonance: this is what Erik Satie's Vexations brought to the world. Firstpublished in 1949, it is his longest composition–and the length is defined by repetition, or by thereplaying of one page 840 times, exploring a single three-part diminished chord. RobertOlredge calls it "the first piece to explore the effects of boredom, even of hallucination, both onthe performer and on the audience, as well as being the first piece to incorporate a period ofsilent meditation in its performance indication."

The first known experiment in organized total chromaticism with no sense of direction andno tonal center, "Vexations" renders the music completely homeless. There is nowhere toreturn—there is no center to conclude it. Theorists suggest that if its theme contained themissing letters AN, then this might also be taken as the first experiment in serialism.

On March 21, 1893, Satie began comprising the nine Danses gothiques in an effort toregain "the greater quiet composure and the powerful tranquility of my soul during theirtempestuous affair, which lasted from 14 January until 20 June 1893." What's unique aboutthese dances is how they open into a 10-minute sequence of chords, punctuated bysurprising harmonic juxtapositions.

A few weeks later, on April 2nd, Satie gave Valadon an Easter gift, a composition for her

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titled Bonjour Biqui, Bonjour! It bears his hallmark whimsical signature—and a sketch ofValadon on staves—but it is not a giddy gift. The undertones lie in the way it reaches forother pieces, or how it is written with the same mixture of full-strength and watered-downink as Vexations.

The only element that stays constant is the bass theme—as Robert Oldredge explains, "whenthe chord sequence is repeated, the upper parts are inverted, and even if the inner part of the firststatement remains at the same pitch the second, it now appears to the listener as an uppermelody." To quote:

Just as Vexations divides into two strains in which the upper parts are a mirrorreflection of each other, so these upper parts also divide into two exactlysymmetrical halves in which the same notes and intervals are variously re-notatedenharmonically. Mirrors—in music and poetry.

Satie must have written them in the same time, cut from the same durations, for bothpieces have the same tempo marking, and Vexations begins with the same chord with whichBonjour Biqui finishes, as if intended to be an extension of the other. These ambiguousdiminished chords represent Suzanne, for they also occur as the first six chords of the nineDanses gothiques, which Satie designated clearly as attempts to work through the relationship.

Bonjour Biqui and Vexations are the only pieces entirely constructed from these chords.This is how we know Vexations also dates from early April 1893. This is how we knowValadon was the vexation. Satie described the "icy loneliness" that descended after hissplit–one can almost hear the banal repetitions of jagged heartache, the irresolvable dullnessof grief in what Sam Sweet dubbed "the avant-garde's original break-up ballad."

17. PERFORMANCES, MARATHONS, HALLUCINATIONS.It took decades for musicians to appreciate the anti-art gestures of Satie's vexations with its

deliberate induction of boredom, and the way environmental noise became louder or moredisruptive as the drone of repetition continued. After Satie's death, one of his friends took therecovered sheet to John Cage in 1949–and so the posthumous collaboration was born. OnSeptember 9, 1963, John Cage premiered Satie's "Vexations" in New York City's PocketTheatre with a crew of 10 other pianists–including Viola Faber, John Cale, David Tudor,Christian Wolff, and David Del Tredici, each of which took turns playing in 10-minuteshifts. The first performance took 18 hours and forty minutes–the longest piece in the world,beating even Wagner's longest opera, Die Meistersinger.Cage said that Satie was responsible for the “one new idea since Beethoven” the use of

controlled duration as a structural element. Later, a gleeful Cage would exclaim: "I hadchanged the world and the world had changed."

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Performing "Vexations" soon became a rite of passage for pianists seeking to pay tribute tothe brawn and commitment of Satie's rigor. In 1967, Richard Toop became the first tocomplete it solo in a 24-hour marathon.Pianists said that Satie's brief line was impossible to memorize (many found themselves

sight-reading it). Even before repetition, the piano line is unnerving: mild but menacing,exquisite but skewed, modest but exacting. Listeners walked away unable to hum the line.Some who played it reported feeling cleansed – like a monk after chanting on a mountainand then re-entering the human hum of voices, able to hear the world more clearly. Others,like Peter Evans, abandoned the piece due to hallucinations.The length of each performance depended on the performer–or on how the performerinterpreted Satie's tempo marking, "tres lent." How slow is very slow? It depends oninterpretation.What John Cage wanted from Satie's piece shaped how we hear it. Cage's personal interest

leaned towards a transcendent, supra-temporal Zen event with enlightened edges.Eventually, this event evolved into marathons and tests of fortitude and individual heroism.But Satie didn't believe in transcendence; nor did he care for Western zen. Whatever hisoriginal intent, whatever the initial vexation, when multiplied, it has been overwritten by itsperformances. This is an example of how an old piece creates a new one. Both are real. Bothare original, in a sense.

18. THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE: A POSTHUMOUS COLLAB BETWEEN SATIE ANDCAGE.Cage shared Satie's distaste for Romanticism's emotional manipulations. The two also shareda scorn for gatekeeping critics who insisted on the primacy of their aesthetic salons. LikeSatie, Cage wanted to imagine time as part of the musical structure–not a Hegelian dialecticor a clear ideological linearity but a mysterious sort of dissonance, a displacement.

I listen to Cage to study the length of silence, to grow aware of my dynamic relation toit, how expectation generates tension, suspense, release. "The opposite and necessaryco-existent of sound is silence," wrote John Cage in his "Lecture On Nothing," where helists the four characteristics of sound as pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration. Of these four,only duration involves both sound and silence. In Cage's view, composing a piece based ondurations (rhythmic: phrase, time lengths) is a truer way of creating correspondence with thenature of the subject material. His argument against harmonic structure is based on itsinaccuracy due to the fact that it is derived from pitch "which has no being in silence."

"4'33", one of Cage's most famous compositions, was built from silence, or from thesounds inside silence; it brings various silences in dialogue with tones and chords throughchance operations. His use of the I Ching as a sort of chance oracle, a divining rod foraleatoric music, relied on acceptance of the chance results. One cannot hold the divine holyonly when it grants what we expected, or what we enjoy.

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19. NEO-CLASSICAL SYMPHONIC DRAMA WITH SOCRATES.In 1920, Satie published Socrate, a Symphonic Drama in three parts for piano and voice,composed for the performances of Princess Edmond de Polignac. The cover was designedby Constantin Brancusi. The text was taken from the French translation of the Dialogues ofPlato by Victor Cousin, a French philosopher associated with the idea of “art for art’s sake”("l’art pour l’art.") The orchestral version was scored for four sopranos and a small orchestra.The version for voice and piano was first performed at the home of the Princess de Polignacby Jane Bathori with Satie at the piano, in April 1918.

Cage’s typographic experiments evoke Satie’s innovative typography and unusualcalligraphy. On page 110 of M (1973), Cage refers to Satie’s Socrate. The quotation fromSatie on page 111 (“We must be uncompromising to the end”) might be taken as motto forCage’s life and work, as well as Satie’s. Or maybe not.

20. IMPRESSIONS ON SATIE'S ANTI-CANON, AS NARRATED BY PHILLIPCLAUSSEN."Satie was largely influenced by music not traditionally part of the canon of art music – atleast not in Satie’s lifetime. His emphasis on popular music and cabaret songs often led to adisconnect with the world of “high art,” as he simultaneously rejected this world through hissatire and parodies. In a sense, Satie was the “original” P.D.Q. Bach (the brainchild of PeterSchickele, of J.S. Bach’s 20 children, hilariously, the 21st). Indeed, much of Satie’s legacycomes from his parody works, such as Véritables préludes flasques and Embryons desséchés. Hissense of humor reflects the Dadaist spirit and the disillusionment felt by many (particularlyartists, musicians, and writers) after the Great War. In these two senses – eclectic influencesfrom outside the traditional canon of Baroque, Classical, and Romantic art music and keenirony – Satie very much connected with the Paris of 1924 and the artistic community there."

21. THE 1900 PARIS EXPOSITION GUIDEBOOK.The guidebook intended for foreign visitors to Paris contains Satie’s humorous article “Lesmusiciens de Montmartre,” (The musicians of Montmartre), accompanied by an illustrationby Charles-Lucien Léandre (1862-1934), whose posters advertising cabaret artists rivaledthose of Toulouse-Lautrec.

In Léandre’s illustration, Montmartre’s leading chansonniers sit at a table in a bar or café –their “home.” “Europe is looking at us!” it proclaims ironically; the public walks past,displaying little interest. Erik Satie is seated at front left, facing away, dressed in his thencustomary attire of top hat and cloak, with shoulder-length hair.

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22. SATIE AND FORGERY, AS NARRATED BY PETER DAYAN."Can we take seriously Satie’s praise of a forgery? The peculiar analogy between the paintingand a perhaps under ripe yet visually attractive fruit might suggest a negative answer ... butperhaps, at least before we pause to think too much about that analogy, we might havehoped that we could. After all, could it not be possible that a forger or an anonymous paintermight have produced a masterpiece? In which case, might Satie not be mocking those whothink that the signature and price-tag are what determine the value of a painting? But ourfaith in this argument fades as, going through the list of his apocryphal possessions, Satieturns to his favorite: un faux manuscrit de Beethoven–sublime symphonie apocryphe dumaître–acheté pieusement par moi, il y a dix ans, je crois."

23. SATIE "SAMPLING" OR "STEALING," AS NARRATED BY BELVA JEAN HARE."The incorporation of recordings into the act of composition is a type of quotation that Satiedid not utilize, though it does involve some of the same issues of originality and intellectualproperty. Sampling differs from Satie’s use of quotation in that it quotes actual sounds from aperformance. Here, no internal alteration takes place. Even at their most literal, Satie’squotations typically change the instrumentation and harmonization—or at the very least, arerealized in a performance unrelated to the source."

24. GREGORIAN CHANTS AND PIECES OF CATHEDRALS.One of Satie's earliest compositions was influenced by the stone cathedrals scattered in Paris. Anogive is a feature of cathedral architecture, and Satie borrowed the ogive as a form for four shortpiano pieces grounded in Gregorian chant, big octaves, and whole chords evoking a pipe organ.He published these pieces at 20. An advertisement for Ogives, probably written by Satie himselfin Le Journal du Chat Noir said: "It is a suite of melodies conceived in the mystic-liturgical genrethat the author idolizes and suggestively titled Les Ogives."

Speaking of influence again: the modal harmonies and neo-medievalism of ogives wouldenter the soundscape of Debussy's opera, Pelléas et Mélisande.

25. NOT A REAL FUGUE, NOT YOUR AVERAGE CHORUS.Choses vues à droite et à gauche (sans lunettes) from 1914 exemplifies Satie's subversiveintertextuality, a strategy that verged between dialogue and distortion. As the title suggests,the piece is seen backwards, or from the opposite direction, and so the third movement(Fantaisie musculaire, or muscular fantasy) is the beginning. The muscular fantasy brings inimpressive violin techniques that seem to rise, only to end in a quiet, ambiguous subversionof expectations. The second movement (Fugue à tâtons, or groping fugue) isn't technically afugue at all — instead, a childish theme is notated to be performed "with silly but sufficientcandor." The first movement, or the final one, (Choral hypocrite, or hypocritical choral) isbeautiful, a soft, aching chorale which includes an inscription by Satie on the score: "Mes

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Chorals égalent ceux de Bach, avec cette différence qu'ils sont plus rares et moinsprétentieux." (My chorales are equal to those of Bach with this difference: they are rarer andless pretentious.)

26. BUT SATIE DID SCORE FUGUES.Aperçus désagréables (Unpleasant Glimpses), published in 1913, included a very interestingfugue. To quote Satie's note in the first edition: "The beautiful and limpid Aperçusdésagréables… are written in the most superior style and enable us to understand why thesubtle composer is justified in declaring: 'Before writing a work I go round it several timesaccompanied by myself.'"

27. VEXATIONS—AGAIN.There is no evidence that Satie ever intended Vexations to be published, and he nevermentioned it in his surviving letters.

28. VEXATIONS SCORED AS EXCRUCIATING REPETITIONS.From Satie, I learned the power of excruciating repetition. Where classical or romanticmusic offered a trajectory – a sense of motion from beginning to end – Satie’s music circledstasis, an absence of progression or regression. Repetition was his favorite toy, enabling himto flesh out the sense of being rather than doing.

Discord can be banal—it can involve a repetition that grows excruciating over time. Thefact that nothing changes amplifies the sense of loss. Satie revealed this musically in Vexations,where we expect to get used to the repetition of the same melodic line, yet it seems to eludethe listener and the performer the more one focuses on it. Repetition changes the meaning ofa phrase—or creates a sort of incantatory motion. As John Cage said, if something seemsboring for 2 minutes, see what happens if you try it for four minutes or eight minutes or onehundred. Notice how the boring alters itself into something more interesting.

29. ODE TO IRREVERENCE, WITH ASIDE ON MARY RUEFLE & NIHILISM.When critics fail to distinguish between iconoclasm and nihilism, their expectations areviolated in ways they can't verbalize. Sometimes a personal theory is involved, and so thecritic takes art as a slap across the face of their prior articulations. Satie's iconoclasm turnedirreverence into a creative act. Like poet Mary Ruefle, Satie uses irreverence and parodicreferences without obscuring a deep, abiding hunger for marvel. This sense of wonder runslike a seam throughout his work. Engaging doubt — touching the sky and asking the cloudsto speak — is the opposite of nihilism. Varying degrees of iconoclasm are often confused byideological commitments; commercial brands (and self-branding) exist across discourses, andpower comes with the position of determining who is pious, who is appropriate, and who

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deserves to be forgotten or erased. Nihilism lives at the extreme of disbelief, in the absoluteabsence of wonder, in the death of fascination, in the hunger for power defined by stadiumsand screaming masses, in the bombast of belonging to a group that has abandoned meaningand beauty for the promise of strength.

30. SATIE'S LEGACY ON ETHEREAL SERIALISM.Ambient music and serialism were both marked by Satie. Brian Eno answered Satie’s call for“music that would be a part of the surrounding noises” in his ambient Music for Airports. One ofmy favorite composers, Arvo Pärt, discovered his compositional voice by using serial techniques.Pärt lived in Soviet Estonia, where the aesthetic ideals of the USSR did not include innovation.Tikhon Khrennikov, chair of the Union of Soviet Composers, denounced Pärt as belonging toan “exclusive small group of composers existing in the backwater of the broad stream of musicallife and engaged in formal searching and fruitless experimentation…These compositions make itquite clear that the twelve-tone experiment is untenable: ultra-expressionistic, purely naturalisticdepiction of the state of fear, terror, despair and dejection.”

Fortunately, Pärt ignored the official reprimand and continued to experiment with serialismsthroughout the 1960’s, but the piece I can't forget — the song passed to me on a mix tape by aguy named David back in the 1990's— is Für Alina, where Pärt echoes Satie in the melancholicatmospherics and modal tones. Dedicated to a family friend's eighteen-year-old daughter whosefamily had broken up, the piece was actually intended as a work of consolation for the girl'smother, whose child went to live with her father in England. It is ethereal, and, although it camedecades after Pärt's first explorations of serialism, it is marked by the sparse lines and hauntedmelodies of missed expectations.

31. THE DOG IN THE ROOM.English artist Nick Cudworth paid homage to Satie in "For aDog." The figure at the piano is Erik Satie, wearing thebowler hat that became his customary attire in later years.The title ‘For a Dog’ alludes to Satie’s “Truly flabbypreludes–for a dog.” The dog in question was a publisherwho objected to the title of Satie’s ‘Flabby preludes”, on thegrounds that he couldn’t see what was flabby about them.

32. SATIE IN HIS OWN WORDS, SMILING."As a person, I am neither good nor bad. I waver between thetwo, so to speak. So I have never really done harm toanyone—nor good, come to that. All the same, I have plentyof enemies— loyal enemies, of course. Why? For the mostpart, it is because they don't know me—or only know me secondhand, in short, through

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hearsay (lies worse than death). Man can never be perfect. I bear no grudge against them:they are the main victims of their ignorance and short-sightedness.... Poor folk! ... So I amsorry for them. Let us pass on. I shall come back to this subject later."

SourcesErik Satie, "Memoirs of an Amnesiac" [1924], in The Writings of Erik Satie, translated and edited by

Nigel Wilkins [London: Ernst Eulenburg Ltd., 1980],George Auric, "Discovery of Satie." 1952M. T. Anderson, Strange Mr. Satie, illustrated by Petra Mathers. Online at Monoskop.Man Ray, Self Portrait [Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1963], pp. 96-97.Phillip Claussen, "Satie the Satirist." Musical Geography. June 8, 2015.Robert Orledge, "Satie and the Art of the Dedication." Music & Letters, Nov., 1992, Vol. 73, No. 4 (Nov.,

1992), pp. 551-564.Robert Orledge, "Understanding Satie's 'Vexations'. Music & Letters, Aug., 1998, Vol. 79, No. 3 (Aug.,

1998), pp. 386-395.Robert Rowat, "Essential Erik Sate." CBC Music, 12 March 2019.Stephen Whittington, "Things seen of right and left: Erik Satie in words, pictures and music." From

Whittington's personal collection, Elder Conservatorium, University of Adelaide.

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