This is my first post about the music of Erik Satie (I did a post about the man himself last month), and accordingly is about the earliest Satie pieces available.* I’ll be making an ongoing playlist on Spotify (I was going to anyway; this is just a convenient excuse), so you can go listen to the pieces as I cover them. I don’t know yet if I’m going to go through the entire output, but I’ll do as much as possible.
So, Allegro: the first surviving piece by Erik Satie, written at the ripe old age of eighteen, by which time he had enrolled in, been dismissed from, and re-enrolled as an auditor at the Paris Conservatoire. He was really fucking bored there. The teachers and curriculum were stuffy (as is well-documented by a slightly better-known student by the name of Claude-Achille Debussy), and the faculty disliked Satie because his piano playing wasn’t all that great (famously, according to one professor who obviously had tenure, “worthless”); and Erik, realizing this, didn’t take them very seriously.
However, this latter audit was in a harmony class, so it was just un-boring and non-judgmental enough for Satie to bother writing a full-fledged piano piece, which runs for nine bars and takes under a half a minute to play. But, trifling juvenilia though it is, it’s clearly a Satie piece through and through. It undermines the rampant maximalism of the day, focuses entirely on a single set of figures without developing any of them, and ends on an irreverently abrupt quasi-cadence, as though Satie just walked away. In fact, it resembles nothing more than a slightly shorter and more conventional version of what he would be writing in another twenty-five years or so, with his satirical miniature suites of the 1910’s.
The two waltzes that Satie wrote following this, however, are far more typical of his time and place: you can see the nausea-inducing ballrooms and gowns, with the mercifully limitless champagne in every glass in every hand. You could dance to this without a second thought, and both pieces are accordingly entirely unmemorable.
The one noteworthy aspect of the Fantasie-Valse is a dedication “to my friend, J.P. Contamine de Latour.” This seemingly innocuous gesture would transform quickly into a significant collaboration, beginning with the very next pieces Satie would publish–three little songs of great depth and maturity, all settings of poems by de Latour–and continuing for several years.
*There are some string quartet sketches from around this time (curious; it wasn’t as though Satie would ever seriously attempt writing for string quartet again…then again, maybe these sketches are the reason for that), and they apparently haven’t been published, so I can’t bloody well write about them, can I?
Sources (I know! I have sources this time! Isn’t that exciting?):
- Mary E. Davis, Erik Satie, Reaktion Books Critical Lives, ISBN 1861893213
- The scores to Valse-Ballet and Fantaisie-Valse are available on IMSLP. Allegro, not having been published until 1972, is on IMSLP but is not public domain in the United States, so be aware of the country in which you currently reside. I know, it’s difficult sometimes, but I believe in you.
Erik Satie was born more than a hundred-fifty years ago, putting him in the esteemed company of Beethoven, Bach, and Vlad the Impaler, and he had a penchant for annihilation: one of his earlier works, the four Ogives of 1886, casually erase about four-hundred years of music history, presenting a set of four un-measured Gregorian-style chants in bare octaves, each with three additional chorale-style voicings and absolutely no conventional thematic development. The popular and almost always poorly-played Gymnopédies of 1888 feature drifting 7th and 9th chords that uniformly fail to resolve, at a time when doing so was practically a cardinal sin. The brain-purée known as Vexations is atonal, formally inscrutable, impossible to memorize, and has a little hypothetical note suggesting how the performer would have to prepare in case they wanted to play it 840 times in one sitting (who wouldn’t?). And let’s not forget the later string of “humorist” piano suites and ballets, which were savagely satirical of more or less whatever Satie could get his hands on, in some cases causing riots and even a bit of jail time.
This weirdness wasn’t limited to his compositions, though. He was also a notable writer, penning several bizarre bits of prose including “Memoirs of an Amnesic,” which is full to the brim of blatant falsehoods. He sketched countless tiny self-portraits, each nearly identical, many with a bizarre caption. Also countless are the advert cards he made, which never left his apartment until its exhumation after his death. He had a wardrobe that shifted mercurially throughout his life. He had a very idiosyncratic diet. He owned dozens of umbrellas for no apparent reason, and on his daily walk to Paris he carried a hammer in case he needed to defend himself (eat your heart out, M. Boulez). Oh, and earlier on he also formed a religion of which he was the only member and with which he mostly wasted time writing polemics against heretics (i.e. other musicians who had a better reputation than he).