Eric Satie Free Sheet Music, Program Notes, Recordings and Biography

The Velvet Gentleman of Montmartre

In 1920, during the intermission of a play in a Paris art gallery, a new kind of music was premiered. The composer, Erik Satie, had created what he called musique d'ameublement—"furniture music." His intention was for the short, repetitive pieces to be actively ignored, to be part of the background ambiance, like the wallpaper or the chairs. To his immense frustration, the polite audience fell silent and began to listen attentively. Satie had to rush through the crowd, imploring them, "Go on talking! Walk about! Don't listen!" This bizarre incident perfectly captures the spirit of Satie: a deadpan provocateur, a musical ironist, and a visionary who was so far ahead of his time that he was inventing—and comically failing to implement—the concept of ambient music half a century early.

The Eccentric of Honfleur and Montmartre

Éric Alfred Leslie Satie (he would later change the "c" to a "k") was born in the Normandy port town of Honfleur. After a brief and unhappy stint at the Paris Conservatoire, which he found hopelessly stuffy and which found him hopelessly untalented, he dropped out and moved to the bohemian district of Montmartre. There, he fell in with the artistic and literary crowd, playing piano at the famous Le Chat Noir cabaret to earn a meager living.

It was in this period, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, that he developed his unique persona. He grew a beard, took to wearing a bowler hat, frock coat, and umbrella, and began referring to himself as a "gymnopedist." He had a brief, intense love affair with the artist Suzanne Valadon, after which he apparently remained celibate for the rest of his life. He also founded his own one-man church, the "Metropolitan Church of the Art of Jesus the Conductor," for which he wrote a Grande Messe (High Mass).

The Velvet Gentleman and the Gymnopédies

While working as a cabaret pianist, Satie composed the works that would eventually make him famous. His three Gymnopédies (1888) and six Gnossiennes (c. 1890) were unlike anything being written at the time. In an era of lush, dramatic Romanticism, Satie's pieces were sparse, static, and understated. With their gentle, hypnotic melodies, unresolved harmonies, and lack of traditional development, they seemed to float, free of time and emotional weight. He was the first composer to write music without using bar lines (in the Gnossiennes), and he began filling his scores with bizarre, poetic instructions for the performer, such as "light as an egg" or "open your head."

For a time, he adopted a new persona, that of "the Velvet Gentleman." After receiving a small inheritance, he bought seven identical gray velvet suits and wore nothing else for several years until they wore out. He lived in a tiny room in a grim Parisian suburb, an apartment so small he called it "The Cupboard." No one was ever allowed inside until after his death.

The Return to School and the Dada Connection

After years of being dismissed as a charming but ignorant eccentric, Satie did something remarkable. In 1905, at the age of 40, he enrolled as a student at the Schola Cantorum de Paris, a serious music school run by the composer Vincent d'Indy. For three years, he diligently studied counterpoint, earning a diploma with honors. His post-Schola music became more refined and often parodied classical forms, with absurd titles like Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear.

Satie's musical simplicity and irreverent humor made him a hero to a new generation of avant-garde artists. His friend Claude Debussy had long admired his work and helped bring him to wider attention by orchestrating two of the Gymnopédies. But it was his association with the young artist Jean Cocteau that thrust him into the center of the Parisian scene. Their collaboration, along with the artist Pablo Picasso, resulted in the scandalous ballet Parade in 1917. The ballet's score included parts for a typewriter, a siren, and a pistol, and its premiere caused a riot that rivaled the one for Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Satie became the spiritual godfather to a group of young French composers known as Les Six, which included Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc.

The Composer as Provocateur: Furniture Music and Vexations

Satie's primary goal was often to challenge the listener's perception of what music should be. He rejected the Romantic idea of music as a vehicle for profound personal emotion. His "furniture music" was one such experiment. Another was the cryptic piece Vexations, written around 1893. It consists of a single, brief musical phrase with the enigmatic instruction, "In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." This piece, which can take over 18 hours to perform, is a direct ancestor of minimalist and conceptual art. He also wrote a "dadaist" opera called Relâche, which included a surrealist film segment in the middle.

Legacy: The Grandfather of Minimalism

When Satie died in 1925 from cirrhosis of the liver, his friends were finally able to enter his apartment. They found it filled with piles of unopened letters, dozens of umbrellas, and a collection of identical velvet suits he had never worn. They also found countless unpublished musical sketches.

For many years, Satie was regarded as a curiosity, a minor eccentric footnote in the history of French music. But his true influence grew steadily throughout the 20th century. The American composer John Cage championed his work, seeing in Satie a kindred spirit who valued concept and process over traditional expression. His sparse textures, repetitive structures, and blurring of the lines between music and sound had a profound impact on the development of minimalism, ambient music, and experimental art. Erik Satie was a composer's composer, a quiet revolutionary whose strange, simple, and beautiful music sounds more modern and relevant now than ever.

Section 4: References and Further Reading

References and Further Reading

• Myers, Rollo H. Erik Satie. Dover Publications, 1968.

• Davis, Mary E. Erik Satie. Reaktion Books, 2007.

• Orledge, Robert. Satie the Composer. Cambridge University Press, 1990.

• Gillmor, Alan M. Erik Satie. Twayne Publishers, 1988.