Erik Satie He was born in 1866 in Honfleur, a city in northwestern France, and died in Paris in 1925. Composer and pianist, he was basically a precursor. Owner of incomparable talent, inventiveness and eccentricity, his tendency to avoid commonplaces transformed him into someone almost unfathomable. The surprising and unexpected actions and the disdain for any protocol distanced him from the academy, which did not want him, but brought him closer to artists such as Claude Debussy, René Clair, Jean Cocteau, Francis Picabia or Man Raywho admired him unmitigatedly.
Self-taught and iconoclastic, his lack of prejudice and self-confidence led him to enroll at the 40-year-old Schola Cantorum conservatory in Paris to study counterpoint. He was a very good student. Obvious.
In addition to being a musician, Satie was a very eloquent and substantial thinker and writer. He was an important influence on Maurice Ravel, on his friend Claude Debussy, and many years later on the American avant-garde. Both the one represented by John Cage, first; as by the composers of minimalism, later.
His eccentricity was so authentic that all his friends naturalized some of his most surprising customs, such as walking the 10 km. distance between his house in Arcueil and Paris, due to his phobia of trains and trams.
Lover and worshiper of popular genres such as cabaret or music-hall, some of his pieces became “standards” of the genre, such as his beautiful song “Je te veux”. Not to mention the “Gymnopédies”, one of the most universally known and listened to music, although not always referring to its author. That a phenomenon like this has occurred with someone like Satie forces us to rethink the idea that we generally have of eccentricity.
The perplexity caused by his music and his style began, without a doubt, when knowing the names of some of his pieces such as “Three pear-shaped pieces” or the “bureaucratic Sonatina”. He was lucky enough to be an inhabitant and full protagonist of the artistic expansion that occurred in Paris in the second decade of the 20th century. He worked with Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Sergei Diaghilev, for whose ballet he composed music, Man Ray, Tristan Tzara and Marcel Duchamp. Perhaps what best represents the spirit of that time is the film “Cinéma” by René Clair and the music that, in 1924, Satie composed for it.
Only after his death were his friends able to enter the room he had lived in for 26 years, to which no one except him had access. They found, among many other things, an enormous collection of umbrellas – Satie did not go out without an umbrella even if it was sunny – and the manuscript of “Vexations”. He spent the last years of his life with painters from the Parisian district of Montmartre such as Derain, Braque and Brancusi.
Surely he would have emphatically denied it, but he was, in a sense, a very lucky person. This did not prevent him from complaining saying: “God has not supported me.”
“Entr’acte”the collaboration of Erik Satie and filmmaker René Clair presented on October 11 in the main hall of the Colon Theater, premiered as an intermission for the Ballets Suédois company’s production “Relâche” [Ballets Suecos] at the Champs Elysées Theater in Paris. It is based on a libretto by Francis Picabia, produced by Rolf de Maré, with choreography by Jean Börlin. What place does it occupy in Satie’s work? Probably none, although it’s an unavoidable reference if someone wants to capture what is hazily called “period feel”. It is very difficult to define the unmistakable music of Satie. Perhaps a good way is to remember the phrase that Bertrand Russel dedicated to Ludwig Wittgenstein: “I asked him to admit that there were no rhinos in the room and he refused”.
There is nothing as unpredictable as the past, because it can erupt at any moment. That’s what I thought listening to the “furnishing music” during the confinement, in the recent quarantine experience. Quarantine is going to be a recent experience for many years. As is Satie’s music. An unexpected anticipation of what life in our homes was like for all of us in those days. The furniture surrounds us without moving us. That was for Satie the maximum aspiration for his music. The “furnishing music” inhabits the ear like furniture the space. Jean Cocteu wanted music to exist that could be inhabited as one inhabits a house. Satie did it. John Cage, once again, gave a twist to Satie’s furniture. He opened the window so that the noises of the environment were part of the music. Perhaps a way to neutralize them. Given that step, Satie’s brilliant music became endless, utterly familiar and unusually elusive. As if life were all about one enter.
Martín Bauer is a Composer, director of the “Colón Contemporáneo” program.
by Martin Bauer
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