If you’ve ever looked up a playlist to help you relax, focus or fall asleep, you’ve probably come across the music of Erik Satie.
Most likely, you will have heard his “Gymnopédie No. 1”: a swaying foundation of chords that seem to step forward yet stay in place, somehow both independent of and supporting an instantly alluring melody.
This piece’s popularity transcends genre, exemplifying the composer Virgil Thomson’s idea that Satie is the only composer “whose works can be enjoyed and appreciated without any knowledge of the history of music.”
But Satie, while one of the most popular composers, is also one of the most enigmatic. He was a mystery to many during his lifetime and, a century after his death, remains elusive: a house of mirrors full of tricks, distortions and dead ends.
The more you try to understand Satie, the more difficult it becomes. His “Gymnopédies” are just a taste of a much bigger, stranger collection of works that are rarely heard. They were composed outside any fashion, and beyond traditional forms like the symphony and concerto, with scores idiosyncratic to the point of absurdity. To some they are a joke; to others they are disarming, a way to clear your mind and allow it to question the nature of music and performance.
Discussions about Satie usually include as much speculation as fact. He was always one step ahead of his supporters and critics alike, and is too slippery to make sense of even today. His sound changed constantly, and he masked details of his life, as well as the meaning of his music, in irrational nonsense. We may never really understand him.
Born in 1866, in northern France, Satie was practically destined to have a bizarre career: His father published Erik’s first work as “Opus 19,” probably to make him seem more established, but also prefiguring his art of misdirection. After being called “the laziest student” by a teacher at the Paris Conservatory and failing to earn a diploma, Satie became a pianist at the Chat Noir, the Parisian nightclub that embodied Montmartre’s freewheeling spirit during the belle époque.
Satie dressed like a bohemian caricature, with his signature pince-nez, and changed the spelling of his name from Eric to Erik, all efforts to cultivate a reputation as an eccentric artist. One description of him read, “He is considered to be the strangest musician of our time.” He wrote that himself.
With near obsession, he composed music in sets of three, including the early “Gymnopédies” and the similarly famous “Gnossiennes.” The “Gymnopédies,” with a title that suggested nude dances from Ancient Greece, were like a sculpture in sound: three miniatures that regarded the same idea from different angles.
The “Gnossiennes,” dancerly and a bit exotic, were even more daring. They included the first instance of Satie composing without a key or time signature, signifiers of a piece’s tonal center and the number of beats per measure. This music was free, a stream of consciousness that, rather than prompt interpreters with directions like “slowly” or “with passion,” called on them to play “on the tongue” and to “equip yourself with clairvoyance.”
Was it a joke, or was Satie just being weird? The title “Gnossiennes” reflects a gnostic interest; Satie was getting involved with the esoteric mysticism of Rosicrucianism, a centuries-old movement guided by a belief in ancient wisdom. At the end of the 1800s, Rosicrucianism resurfaced in gaudy Pre-Raphaelite art and the writings of W.B. Yeats. In Paris, it was led by the flamboyant cult leader Joséphin Péladan, who had named himself the high priest of the Order of the Rose+Croix.
Satie became entwined with the Rosicrucians to the point where his music was directly inspired by them, including the suite “Sonneries de la Rose+Croix.” One of its movements, “Air du Grand Maître,” which begins with the sacred sound of plainchant, refers directly to Péladan.
Yet Satie’s relationship with this group is confusing. The Rosicrucians worshiped Richard Wagner’s mystical operas, but Satie detested them. He felt they had too much influence on French composers, and once told Claude Debussy, a close friend, that they needed their “own music — without sauerkraut if possible.”
It wasn’t long before Satie broke with the Rosicrucians. He also retreated from music. Then, in 1905, he went back to school, this time at the new Schola Cantorum instead of the Paris Conservatory. He wanted to refine his technique, even if, as Debussy told him, “At your age one doesn’t change skin anymore.”
But Satie did change, repeatedly, for the rest of his career. In the next decade, he became more famous, befriending artists like Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso, and found fresh ways to baffle the public.
Satie’s scores were as much works of visual art and literature as music. They included meticulous calligraphy and illustrations, as well as poetry and lines of text meant only for the performer, never to be read aloud. Some of the instructions, such as in “Little Prelude to the Day,” read like a conceptual art score from the mid-20th century:
Get up nicely.
Stand up nicely.
Brush your hair nicely.
Look at yourself nicely.
Behave yourself nicely.
Go for a walk nicely.
Look after yourself nicely.
Other directions in his music are morsels of comic absurdity. He would write for performers to play “from the top of yourself” and “full of subtlety, if you believe me.” He seemed fixated on body parts, with instructions like “with tears in your fingers,” “on the tips of your back teeth” or “out of the corner of your hand.”
Satie urged musicians not to take some of his music too seriously. “Sports et Divertissements,” a work of pure entertainment, was prefaced with the advice to flip through its pages “with a kindly and smiling finger.” It was, however, a groundbreaking experiment in multimedia: miniatures accompanied by poems and drawings, meant to be taken in together. “Le Golf,” for example, combines a tune like “Tea for Two” with a caricature by Charles Martin and a short tale of a colonel’s outing that leaves the holes “a-tremble” and the clouds “amazed.”
We can only guess at the psychology behind Satie’s funny but ambiguous directions, or the changes in his style. Even in his memoirs, he offers nothing helpful about his real thoughts. “I sleep with only one eye closed, very profoundly,” he writes, before either making a joke or speaking metaphorically about a mental reset: “My bed is round with a hole in it for my head to go through. Every hour a servant takes my temperature and gives me another.”
Cocteau wondered whether Satie used prankster eccentricity as a form of protection. If Satie couldn’t be pinned down, then critics couldn’t write anything definitive about him. And if he presented himself as a joke, he wouldn’t have to be taken as seriously as, say, Debussy. But perhaps Satie’s frivolous affect is also an act of liberation, an invitation to players to ignore expectations and open their minds.
Then again, the moment you start to think about Satie sincerely, you come across a work like “Parade,” a collaboration with Cocteau, Picasso and the choreographer Léonide Massine for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The music is as contradictory as Satie the man. Guillaume Apollinaire’s program notes for the premiere described it as “surrealism” (before Surrealism existed as a movement), and it was especially modern for its found percussion, like a lottery wheel and a siren. But it was also the stuff of popular entertainment from music halls and the streets of Paris.
In Satiean fashion, he followed that with a work of startling sobriety, “Socrate,” which despite its subtitle as a “symphonic drama” is neither of those things. A kind of anti-music, it couldn’t be farther from “Parade,” seeming to lack any form and unfolding with a slow, continuous pulse that hardly ever changes, like a faucet left trickling. The result, though, is hypnotically beautiful, with musicalized speech that recounts the death of Socrates taking on the ritualistic feeling of a sacred chant.
“Socrate” both denies and insists upon itself as music. Satie’s later “Musique d’Ameublement,” or “Furniture Music,” would take that paradox to an extreme, with a series of pieces designed to be so inane they could blend into a room as well as an armchair, or, as one title suggests, “Wrought Iron Tapestry.” This was music not for listening, but for ambience.
Satie’s experiment in a proto-Muzak was a failure. It was first performed in a gallery, with people invited to walk around, look at the art, eat and drink as musicians played. Instead, the composer Darius Milhaud later recalled, they paused and quietly listened. Satie shouted at them: “Talk, for heaven’s sake! Move around! Don’t listen!”
Had Satie lived longer, he might have seen this vision blossom as film music, which he was able to write for the 1924 ballet “Relâche,” created with the Dada artist Francis Picabia. The piece included a cinematic break called “Entr’acte,” a short film whose madcap soundtrack was Satie’s final completed work. After that, he couldn’t experiment further: His health quickly declined, and he died on July 1, 1925. Reportedly, his last words were “Ah, the cows!”
Satie continued to mystify people from beyond the grave. “Vexations,” possibly written for piano in the 1890s, was unpublished and unperformed until it was printed, decades after his death, by the composer John Cage. The piece consists of just a few lines of music, with the instructions to repeat them 840 times. No one could tell whether it was a joke, a thought experiment or a key to enlightenment. But it was performed nevertheless, with a running time of about 19 hours. Strangely, it resists memorization. Pianists have played it for long stretches, stood up from their instruments and realized they already forgot it.
Satie’s influence reached far beyond Cage. Never part of any movement, Satie would be claimed by the Minimalists, Fluxus artists and ambient musicians. His sculptural treatment of sound echoed in the works of Morton Feldman. John Adams tipped his belle époque bowler hat to the “Gymnopédies” in the second movement of his piano concerto “Century Rolls.”
Relaxation mixes and playlists have made Satie something of a pop star, but his music has also crossed over. The rock group Blood, Sweat and Tears led its self-titled, Grammy Award-winning album with “Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie,” an instrumental adaptation of the “Gymnopédies.” Janet Jackson sampled the first “Gymnopédie” in her hit song “Someone to Call My Lover.”
What would Satie have made of all that? As always with him, we can only guess.
Audio credits: Jean-Yves Thibaudet, “Gymnopédie” No. 1 (Decca); Jean-Yves Thibaudet, “Danses Gothiques” No. 4 (Decca); Jean-Yves Thibaudet, “Gnossienne” No. 1 (Decca); Jean-Yves Thibaudet, “Sonnerie de la Rose+Croix: Air du Grand Maître” (Decca); Jean-Yves Thibaudet, “Petit Prélude à la Journée” (Decca); Pascal Rogé, “Sports et Divertissements: Le Golf” (Decca); Michel Plasson and Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, “Parade” (Erato); Barbara Hannigan and Reinbert de Leeuw, “Socrate” (Winter and Winter); Marius constant and Ensemble Ars Nova, “Tapisserie en Fer Forgé” (Apex); Marius constant and Ensemble Ars Nova, “Cinéma” (Apex); John Snijders, “Triadic Memories” (Hat Hut); Cleveland Orchestra, Christoph von Dohnányi and Emanuel Ax, “Century Rolls” (Nonesuch); Blood, Sweat & Tears, “Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie” (Sony); Janet Jackson, “Someone to Call My Lover” (Virgin Records America)
Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.
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