Erik Satie: Prepare yourself …
This article is more than 7 years oldAlthough scorned by the French music establishment, Erik Satie’s innovations can still be heard in minimalism, muzak and even Aphex Twin. Nick Shave on the maverick composer at 150
On 9 September 1963, 70 years after it was written, Erik Satie’s Vexations was given its world premiere before a gathering of off-Broadway actors and artists at the Pocket theatre in Manhattan. The work is no more than half a page long, and yet the composer indicates that its curiously angular motif – melancholic yet deadpan, ecclesiastical yet demonic, strangely lacking direction – should be repeated 840 times: “One would have to prepare oneself in advance,” he warns. It took John Cage and his relay team of pianists, including John Cale who would later co-found the Velvet Underground, 18 hours and 40 minutes to perform the musical marathon from start to finish, playing continuously from 6pm until lunchtime the following day. Patience was rewarded: those who attended were refunded five cents of their $5 dollar ticket for every 20 minutes they stayed, with a bonus for anyone who crossed the finish line. Only one man did; another, as it finished, called out “encore”.
It is typical of Satie, one of music’s great ironists, that a work that would become so significant was probably never intended for performance, and characteristic, too, of the Zen Buddhist Cage that he should immerse himself in Satie’s mystical sounds and silence over such an expansive stretch of time. (Pianists who have attempted too many repetitions have complained of hallucinations, evil thoughts and an alarming inability to remember the melody.) But Vexations is more than just a joke that was never designed to be told: its revival marked a growing appreciation of Satie’s music, as a new generation of composers in the US woke up to the bold invention with which so much of his music sparks.
Pianists who attempted too many repetitions have complained of hallucinations and an inability to remember the melodySatie is the maverick who invented “furniture music”, sounds that were designed to be heard but not listened to, long before Muzak was branded and sold. He created one of the earliest examples of “prepared piano”, fixing sheets of paper between the strings so as to alter the way it sounds. The unperformable directions on his scores – “open your head”, “be invisible for a moment” – mark them out as a precursor to conceptual art. Vexations, too, offers the earliest use of extended repetition in a piano piece, pre-empting the phase loops of Steve Reich, the arpeggios of Philip Glass and dancing melodic fragments of Terry Riley. “It’s not a question of Satie’s relevance,” Cage famously declared. “He’s indispensable.”
As concerts take place across the UK to celebrate his 150th anniversary, it is possible to more fully appreciate the visionary qualities of Satie’s work. There will be a Satie cabaret presented by Alistair McGowan at this year’s Proms and, alongside a recital of Vexations, given by a relay of 35 pianists over an anticipated 22 hours, visitors to Cheltenham festival next month will be able to hear Pascal Rogé, one of the leading interpreters of his piano music, explore the impact Satie had on the composers around him. His programme, with his partner Ami Rogé, includes pieces by Debussy and Ravel – who both helped to promote his work – as well as atmospheric miniatures of a younger generation of composers, such as Auric, Tailleferre and Poulenc, who admired his music’s cool, ironic detachment. Meanwhile, Christina McMaster’s multimedia piano recital celebrates the way in which Satie worked closely with visual artists, from Man Ray to Braque to Picasso. Her use of film is a reminder that he was in the first wave of composers who matched music to image, tailoring a score for René Clair’s 1925 surrealist film Entr’Acte, which featured Duchamp playing chess with Man Ray.
One can only imagine that Satie would have been delighted – and, in the case of Vexations, amused – by the attention now devoted to his works. Born into a poor and difficult childhood in the Normandy harbour town of Honfleur, he would always be an outsider. The Paris Conservatoire to which he was enrolled by his stepmother, herself a pianist, became for him “a sort of local penitentiary” during his teens; he left with no qualifications and a reputation for being lazy. He signed up for military service in 1886 and dropped out within the same year. Immersing himself in the bohemian life of Montmartre, he became linked with the popular music scene and eked out a living as an accompanist, playing at the Chat Noir cabaret. Always on the periphery, and forever out of money, he later downgraded from the cramped room in which he lived to the less fashionable Parisian suburb of Arcueil, where he holed up in isolation and squalor – no visitors set foot in the room during the near-30 years he lived there.
Much has been made of the eccentricities of this flâneur, who was always seen in a grey velvet suit, and yet underlying Satie’s music is his serious desire to create something new. You can hear it in his popular piano pieces: the haunting scales and rhythms of the Trois Gnossiennes written under the spell of Romanian folk music, and the meditative world of Gymnopédies, where, as in a cubist painting, motifs are “seen” from all sides. At a time when French composers were looking to escape the shadows of Wagner’s epic Romanticism, the French composer’s stripped-back mechanical sound, inspired by the humble barrel organ, offered a radically simple approach. “Satie showed imagination, he was more daring than Debussy and he pushed him,” explains Rogé. “If Debussy had stayed with the pattern of music he was writing [before the 1890s], he would not be considered ‘the great Debussy’.”
Debussy helped to draw public attention to Satie, orchestrating two of his Gymnopédies, yet Satie had to wait until much later in life to attain celebrity status. While still earning a living writing salon dances and popular cabaret songs, and after suffering a creative crisis, he enrolled himself at the Schola Cantorum in Paris at the age of 39. Rather than finding him validation, his studies seem to have fuelled his hatred of convention – it’s with more than a hint of bitterness that he claims to put “everything I know about Boredom” into the Bach chorale of his masterful Sports et Divertissements piano pieces. But notoriety led to a succès de scandale and when it came it came with a bang in Parade, his surreal, one-act circus ballet for Diaghilev. Into the orchestral score, which featured jazz and cabaret tunes, were thrown typewriters, sirens and a pistol – just the kind of noises a wartime audience would normally pay not to hear. With its rigid cubist costumes by Picasso – which restricted Massine’s choreography – and a promotional push from Cocteau, it was provocative enough to secure Satie’s position at the vanguard of modernism.
Yet Satie was continually frustrated in his attempts to be accepted as an artist in high society France – his failure to establish himself at the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts, to which Debussy had won a scholarship, only compounded his resentment. Was this treatment by the cultural elite fair? Certainly his determination to antagonise his audience in his late ballets did little to endear him to the critics, but the fierce criticism he received in Paris was also a sign of things to come. Pierre Boulez would later poke fun at Satie’s lack of craft, while composer Jean Barraqué – another proponent of 12-tone music – would deride Satie as “an accomplished musical illiterate … who found that his friendship with Debussy was an unhoped-for opportunity to loiter in the corridors of history”. According to Pascal Rogé, the snobbery shows no sign of abating. “Satie has always been treated unfairly – especially in France where he is considered a clown,” he says. “It’s funny how the French have much more respect for Berg and Schoenberg than Satie. People still look down on him as if to say, ‘This is not music, it’s not serious.’”
Underlying this criticism is the great battle that gathered momentum after the second world war: on the one side, those avant-garde composers, such as Messiaen and Boulez, who embraced the complexity of serialism; and on the other, Cage and his minimalist followers, who harked after music of simpler means. As minimalism crossed the Atlantic, so interest in Satie’s music grew in Britain. Gavin Bryars, who performed Vexations with Christopher Hobbs in 1971, studied the French composer’s harmonies in detail and drew on them in his work; Howard Skempton, too, started sculpting hypnotic Satiesque miniatures. Brian Eno directly answered Satie’s call for “music that would be a part of the surrounding noises” in his ambient Music for Airports. And even after minimalism outgrew its origins, the composers associated with repetitive means continued to pay tribute – you’ll find Satie echoing in the melancholic atmospheres of Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina, in John Adams’s Gymnopédies-inspired piano concerto Century Rolls and the folkish piano miniatures of Ludovico Einaudi, not to mention the electronic music of Aphex Twin. At 150 years old, the French composer is both everywhere and absent.
Cheltenham music festival takes place from 1 to 17 July. cheltenhamfestivals.com/music. A Satie cabaret is on 1 August at Cadogan Hall, London SW1. bbc.co.uk/proms.
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