Eric Alfred Leslie Satie, who signed his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th-century Parisian avant-garde. His work was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, Surrealism, repetitive music, and the Theatre of the Absurd.
Background
Erik was born at Honfleur in Normandy on 17 May 1866. His home there is open to the public. When Satie was four years old, his family moved to Paris, his father having been offered a translator's job in the capital. After his mother's death in 1872, he was sent (at age 6), together with his younger brother, Conrad, back to Honfleur to live with his paternal grandparents. There he received his first music lessons from a local organist. In 1878, when he was 12 years old, his grandmother died, and the two brothers were reunited in Paris with their father, who remarried (a piano teacher) shortly afterwards. From the early 1880s onwards, Satie started publishing salon compositions by his step-mother and himself, among others.
Education
Satie studied at the Paris Conservatory (1883 - 1884) under Ernest Guiraud and Georges Mathias, after which he pursued his own path. Having little money of his own, he eked out a living in Montmartre by playing the piano at first in the café cafe Chat Noir and later in the Auberge du Clou.
Career
His works and his attitude toward music anticipated developments of the next generation of composers.
From the beginning Satie had a flair for novel musical ideas, and his first serious compositions reveal this originality.
His Three Sarabandes for piano (1887) include some very interesting parallel ninth chords that later became an important feature of the styles of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.
The Gymnopédies for piano (1888) avoid all the clichés of the time and strike a note of chasteness, quite different from the feverish and sentimental music of the day.
He was the first to envisage chordal progressions on consecutive superimposed fourths; this technique was first used in Les Fils des étoiles (1891; "The Son of the Stars").
From this moment all French composers followed him.
In some of his compositions of the next few years Satie used Gregorian modes as well as chords built in fourths, again anticipating musical idioms that would be extensively developed in the next 25 years.
In 1898 Satie "withdrew" to Arcueil, a suburb of Paris, where he spent the rest of his life.
He lived quietly, spending a day each week with Debussy, writing café music, and studying counterpoint.
He gave the piano pieces he wrote at this time ridiculous, almost surrealistically humorous titles, such as Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, Three Flabby Preludes for a Dog, and Desicated Embryos-perhaps parodying the elaborately evocative titles Debussy sometimes gave his compositions.
Satie also included in his scores such puzzling directions as "play like a nightingale with a toothache, " "with astonishment, " "from the top of the teeth, " and "sheepishly. "
The score, for piano, three clarinets, and a trombone, consists of fragments of well-known tunes and isolated phrases repeated over and over, like the pattern of wallpaper.
In the program he stated, "We beg you to take no notice of the music and behave as if it did not exist.
This music . .. claims to make its contribution to life in the same way as a private conversation, a picture, or the chair on which you may or may not be seated. "
This violently antiromantic attitude toward music attracted the attention of the group of young French composers who were to become known as "Les Six" and of Jean Cocteau, their poet-artist-publicity agent.
Serge Diaghilev commissioned Satie to write the music for a surrealist ballet, Parade (1917).
Cocteau wrote the libretto, and Pablo Picasso designed the cubist sets and costumes.
A surrealist movie, part of the ballet, is accompanied by music that alternates between two neutral, "wallpaper" compositions.
Indeed, Satie may be said to have anticipated everything that came to be recognized as "modern" French music.
The first complete manifestation of Satie's study at the Schola Cantorum was Socrate (1919) for four sopranos and chamber orchestra, based on a text from Plato's Dialogues; it formed the apex of his creative career. Satie's nature was one of fanciful whimsy. Socrate (1919), for four solo sopranos and chamber orchestra, is a serious work.
The words are fragments from three Platonic dialogues, one having to do with the death of Socrates.
Socrate is distinguished by its atmosphere of calm and gentle repose.
It is completely nondramatic, for one of the sopranos sings Socrates's words.
The music consists of simple melodic lines and repetitive accompaniment figures.
It is this simplicity, this avoidance of the big gesture that made Satie's music important and prophetic of an important branch of 20th-century musical developments.
Nevertheless, his influence on French composers is still apparent.
Those who cannot take his compositions seriously can perhaps recognize their harmonic and contrapuntal influences on the future.
Satie and Suzanne Valadon (an artists' model, artist, long-time friend of Miguel Utrillo's, and mother of Maurice Utrillo) began an affair early in 1893. After their first night together, he proposed marriage. The two did not marry, but Valadon moved to a room next to Satie's at the Rue Cortot. Satie became obsessed with her, calling her his Biqui and writing impassioned notes about "her whole being, lovely eyes, gentle hands, and tiny feet". During their relationship, Satie composed the Danses gothiques as a kind of prayer to restore peace of mind, and Valadon painted a portrait of Satie, which she gave to him. After six months she moved away, leaving Satie broken-hearted. Afterwards, he said that he was left with "nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness". It is believed this was the only intimate relationship Satie ever had.