Erik Satie was the truest bad boy of musical modernism in the hypercompetitive market of Paris before World War I, crammed with aspiring bad boys. He took up pieties and profaned them. He took up blasphemy and somehow blasphemed against that. His music is ingeniously confounding. It received no shortage of vicious criticism, and Satie responded in kind. A postcard to the critic and composer Jean Poueigh began, “Monsieur Fuckface…Famous Gourd and Composer for Nitwits.” He lost the ensuing libel suit, adding to his eternal financial woes. Among his many achievements, he’s near the top of the (long) list of self-destructive classical composers.
The most appropriate essay about Satie would itself scandalize, forcing readers to laugh while being ridiculed, all the while summoning the spirit of the age. Perhaps a series of bot tweets or AI semitruths? In that spirit I asked ChatGPT to opine on Satie and modernity, and in seconds it homed right in on my intended angle: Satie as antidote to the pretensions of classical music. I was furious. If a chatbot could predict my thesis, what was the point of retelling this Icarus story of the world-spanning ambitions of the nineteenth century and Satie, who composed quirky and haunting miniatures to try to melt its wings?
What is the point? is of course one of the main points of Satie. You don’t get the same sensation, for instance, listening to The Rite of Spring, Salome, Wozzeck, or Pierrot lunaire. As shocking or boundary-testing as those modernist masterpieces may be, they all have a point, and they work. They offer dramatic shapes, vectors, formal conceits; they expose sharp contrasts or conflicts. Mostly, Satie’s pieces don’t work in those ways, and they leave the question of a point open at best.
So how exactly does Satie take down the arrogance of late Romantic classical music? Consider the Sarabandes, Satie’s first suite of dances, from September of 1887. They begin with three lubricious seventh chords. The last, a chord that “should” lead forward, sits and lingers in the air. We hear five more chords, full of branching possibilities—but end up in the same place. This feels a bit neutralizing, if not yet frustrating. The third phrase travels more purposefully, and we soon arrive at an A major chord—a normal triad. But it’s notated on the page as arcane B-double-flat major, making it hard to read and even more irritating to write about. (A trivial distinction that also screws with your head is a perennial Satie combination.) This is the first of many arrivals sprinkled about the score, an abundance of goals that paradoxically don’t produce a sense of direction. Here we are is always followed by Where are we? Satie displays an astonishing instinct for sapping any would-be narrative. The pianist seeking momentum to guide an interpretation is out of luck. You have the feeling that all the most beautiful, most French chords have wandered out of their cages at the classical zoo and, somewhat sedated, are now roaming free across the plains of art with no apparent agenda.
If you listen to a lot of late Romantic French music (Fauré, Chausson, Franck), you may be familiar with the feeling of too much—too much richness and rapture. This language is a festival of extended chords (sevenths, ninths, elevenths), deployed through an orgy of arpeggios. It surges and throbs. Satie takes up this same vocabulary but removes all the excess. He is gently ruthless. Arpeggios are banished—an almost antipianistic gesture. It is striking (or perverse) to make something so bare from chords that are so lush.
This language is inimitable—and also retreats from authorship. The music, rotating through its enigmatic ideas, evokes AI chatbots when their algorithms have run out of primary thoughts and begin to cycle through plausible tautologies. ChatGPT confesses its lack of intentionality: “I, as an AI don’t have: Desires, Goals, Inner states, Intentional consciousness”—as it happens, a near exact list of the things that Satie was trying to purge from music. I asked ChatGPT to explore this parallel further. “Like Satie’s music,” it responded, “what I produce can: 1) Resist depth in the Romantic sense; 2) Be read as a mirror rather than a window; 3) Feel alien or emotionally ambiguous.” That was remarkably good, and I didn’t know if my prompt had “created” it, what amount of authorship I still possessed, or if I should care—yet more layers of Satie.
Ian Penman’s Erik Satie Three Piece Suite has its failings but is ultimately charming, alluring, and unique. Penman cut his teeth covering post-punk for the storied British weekly New Musical Express, and in collections of his work you find a formidable and vivid observer:
Trads embraced a louche, boho scruffiness (silly hats, sloppy jumpers, duffle coats), where Mods dressed with considered exactness. Trads were British to a fault (real ale, CND, the Goons) while the Mods had a magpie eye for European style, from the Tour de France to the Nouvelle Vague…. If the Oxbridgey Trads had a philosophical pin-up it was Bertrand Russell, with Freddie Ayer for real deep kicks; Mods backed the darker horse of existentialism.
Penman gives Satie a proper antihero’s treatment, showing him to be both impossible and essential. Penman’s manner is that of a dazzling artsy friend you can’t wait to meet at a pub—lots of openhearted enthusiasm, a mix of digression, intelligence, humor, and cultivated indolence.
The opening piece of Penman’s “suite” is a swift run through the life. The reader who craves a conventional biography might turn to two excellent and relatively recent studies: Mary E. Davis’s Erik Satie (2007) and Caroline Potter’s Erik Satie: A Parisian Composer and His World, published in 2016, the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Davis’s book is more approachable for the general reader, with lots of animating details you won’t find in Penman, like this account of Satie reinventing himself:
One day he took his clothes, rolled them into a ball, sat on them, dragged them across the floor, trod on them and drenched them with all kinds of liquid until he’d turned them into complete rags; he dented his hat, broke up his shoes, tore his tie to ribbons and replaced his fine linen with fearful flannel shirts.
Potter’s book is musicologically thorough, perhaps indispensable for hardcore Satie stans. Few people have looked at the music so deeply or comprehensively, but it’s hard to escape the catch-22 of an academic view of such an antiacademic composer. Penman wisely refers the curious reader who wants more complete information to the Satie chapter of Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years (1958)—a classic for good reason.
The composer was born in 1866 in Honfleur, a port town famous (it appears) for dry humor. His father was French, his mother Scottish. After his mother died, Davis writes, he ended up with a pianist stepmother:
One of her first priorities was to ensure that Eric* continued music lessons. Enrolling him in the preparatory class of Emile Descombes at the [Paris] Conservatoire, she initiated what would be a seven-year course of study and a source of continual frustration for her stepson.
Penman oddly avoids this Freudian web. But there is so much to chew on here—a young man, beguiled by music, forced by his stepmother to take the academic route, stewing in resentment. Satie called the conservatoire “a sort of local penitentiary, without exterior charm—or interior, either.” He left without a degree and in 1886 volunteered for military service. After four months he took off his shirt on a cold night to bring on bronchitis and a discharge, evading another regimented life. Convalescing in Paris, he read Flaubert and listened to Chabrier. The strange and revolutionary Sarabandes appeared then—he was twenty-one years old.
The next stages of Satie’s career can be divided in three: an early Chat Noir cabaret period, the source of many of his best-known pieces; a more austerely religious period, full of radical musical experiments; and then, after a decline in notoriety around the turn of the century and a rediscovery in the 1910s, what can be called (for lack of a better word) his humorous period. He came into contact with more or less everyone there was to know in the thrilling ferment of avant-garde Paris: Picasso, Cocteau, Debussy, Ravel, Auric, Man Ray, Apollinaire, Poulenc, Milhaud—the list goes on. And yet he lived in a hovel in a working-class suburb, with no visitors, as Potter depicts: “We know that dogs were the only creatures allowed to enter Satie’s filthy room in Arcueil because calcified dog excrement was found in the room after his death.”
Many of Satie’s most famous and beloved pieces lie on the dark side. The Gymnopédies (1888) offer a concentrated wistfulness—essence of rainy Parisian café, possibly right after a breakup. The Gnossiennes, from the 1890s, hover around lament, tinged with the ancient East. Penman offers this description:
They feel as old as sand, but strangely contemporary. To have even a wisp of your music eternally circling people’s minds like pollen in the air or a constellation in the night—this is not nothing. Who could have predicted that these brief, evanescent, weightless solo piano pieces would have such a prolonged afterlife?
The Ogives, an even more minimalist prequel to these hits, offer a solemn and hypnotic take on the Gregorian chant—he’s ransacking history for any model to rebuke the teleological paths of Beethoven and Wagner. They are modal and formidably monotonous, beautiful yet somehow also dour.
How, then, to explain the silliness to come? The vaudevilles and trifles, the looping inanities, the sense that Satie teases you for having or even imagining an emotion? Davis earnestly attempts to explain the first of the Embryons desséchés (Desiccated Embryos, 1913), Satie’s portrait of the sea cucumber: “Carefully using music and language in tandem, Satie offers a fresh take on the sonata, thus tweaking one of the most venerable musical forms in the repertory.” True enough, and yet in its professorial way this misses the point. Satie conjures the famous Mozart C major sonata—the one all kids play—to ask: How did Western civilization decide that this twaddle is sacrosanct? A square folk tune appears to symbolize all the symmetrical, predictable themes of the classical tradition. The development peters out in an excess of pointless repetition, which Satie tells you to play “like a nightingale with a toothache.” He concludes with grand Beethovenian fanfare, hammering away in the wrong key (if there ever was a key). The icing on the cake is Satie’s program note, an unsurpassable send-up of classical self-regard: “This work is absolutely incomprehensible, even to me. Of a singular depth, it always amazes me. I wrote it in spite of myself, driven by destiny.”
There would seem to be no common thread between the earlier, hypnotic, almost cultishly wistful Satie and this cynical satirist—except that both seem dead set against narrative. It is hard to imagine less directed music than the Gnossiennes or the Ogives. The only story they tell is their own aura. (On YouTube the great Reinbert de Leeuw can be heard playing them with a fearsome lack of haste.) And here, as Satie tells us a mockery of a story (a day in the life of a sea cucumber), the music takes up narrative devices of Western music (cadences, sequences) and scatters them about rather peevishly, like a child discarding toys from a sandbox. It is one thing to rail against narrative, but it is brave to try to build art without it, to take the radical, audience-alienating steps. Satie had to know how much people might despise some of these pieces. Listen, if you dare, to the Messe des pauvres (Mass of the Poor), with its endless astringent chords and pages upon pages of unrelieved quarter notes, which the composer Edgard Varèse admired as proto-electronic music. Satie’s Vexations feels like the natural end of this tendency—840 repetitions of the same ambiguous minute or so. It proposes effectively infinite vexation as a redemptive or transformative experience, and keeps you wondering for roughly seventeen hours if it’s the world’s longest joke at your expense.
Penman’s book is not as brave as Satie’s music, but he too seems impatient with narrative. His second section nods to Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas and assembles an informal compendium of Satie-related figures and concepts. Serious inquiries and poetry are held within its rambling humor. On the first page you find the unusual entry “Angel (1)” and the following “definition”:
I sometimes think there’s something just a bit angelic about Satie. A twinkly smile with a hint of celestial knowledge. Approaching asexual…. Umbrella wings. Soft, caressing, harp-like music with an undertow of unassuageable melancholy…. Always clothed in the one identical outfit. Angels, too, wear the same raiment all their lives…whether that life is infinite, or a single flickering spark.
Consider this entry for “In-Between”:
All those in-between emotions it’s hard to name. Old time feelings in danger of disappearing. Staring into space vs staring at a screen. Digital culture nullifies our capacity for blankness, boredom, the ability to just happily accept the passage of time; just to let something break off, drift, straggle. Non-capitalist measures of time. Gambling, according to Walter Benjamin, converts time into a narcotic. Music may likewise grant us access to certain threshold states: daydream, longing, reverie. A different form of purchase.
The dictionary roams on in this way through the alphabet, blending music criticism and personal memory with a few shots of utter nonsense. The entry for “fugue” is, sadly, incorrect. Penman asserts that a fugue has three main sections, confusing a fugue with a sonata. But fugue is more a procedure than a form; it has as many sections as it wants or needs. “Counterpoint (1)” is an unmitigated disaster:
Compositions written in free counterpoint may use non-traditional harmonies and chords, and even employ a certain dissonance. The main and establishing melody is called the cantus firmus, or fixed voice.
“Non-traditional” is meaningless without context, “a certain dissonance” worse than meaningless. It is hard to imagine how a writer so attuned to every crisp detail of trad and mod did not even bother to Google “cantus firmus,” a specific technique dating back to medieval music in which a preexisting tune is used as a foundation for new and original counterpoint. It is wonderful to have nonclassical people writing eloquently about the classical repertoire, and yet do we have to sacrifice accuracy altogether?
Other arresting entries make up for these irksome mistakes:
The name “Muzak,” a merger of music and the brand name Kodak, was trademarked in 1954. It is sometimes said that one form of muzak or another provided the soundtrack to the Cold War, a time of paranoia and prosperity, contentment and suspicion, banality and horror. The furniture here resides in a little house in the suburbs with 2.5 children, or a bachelor pad in Manhattan: cocktail cabinet, gramophone, ice box, radiogram, TV. A kind of willed tranquillity in the eye of the nuclear storm, muzak boosts the post-war American Dream and soothes Cold War nightmares…. It is used to lull workers on a production line or shoppers in a department store into a trance-like state of compliance.
Passages like these, with echoes of Roland Barthes, make you wish more of the book were written with essayish discipline and accumulated momentum. We have come to Muzak via Burt Bacharach. This cameo may seem odd, but the connection is “light music” or “easy listening”—record store bins that Bacharach and Satie both fell into despite their superior gifts. A recurring motif of Penman’s book is a complaint about tyrannies of category, the stupidity of prejudice against lightness, a plea for genres that don’t belong.
Three Piece Suite ends with a diary, which threatens to disintegrate. But here too, the way Penman keeps examining his questions from various angles manages to deepen the portrait of a musical love. He explains why Satie:
What put me off classical music when I was young: big puffed-up symphonies and self-important concertos; sweaty drama-queen conductors; the annual flag and bluster of the BBC’s Last Night of the Proms.
Against these foes Penman collects an unusual defense force of Satie-esque oddballs—David Lynch, for instance, who shares “the same counterpoint of silly/sinister. ‘O golly!’ followed by a dizzying plunge into darkness.” Penman invokes against-the-grain minds: Robert Walser, Thelonious Monk, Joseph Cornell and his shadow boxes, Harold Budd, unwilling godfather of ambient music. The net is even wider:
Popular art with arcane underpinnings. The same spirit, or something very like it, will later animate a whole circus troupe of diverse phenomena: The Goons; the Situationists; the Nouvelle Vague; Beyond The Fringe; the Yippies; Stonewall; Monty Python; Punk.
It is easy (but insightful) to see Satie in Monty Python and in the screw-everything attitude of punk. Still, can Satie’s influence be as great as all that, considering how strange and forbidding much of the music feels? It might be.
By the later years you wonder if this composer was locked into his ironies. A narrowing perspective brought on by alcoholism? A reaction to being dismissed in his earlier guises? You sense that for Penman it’s all of a piece, a necessary and canonic goofball-genius performance in the history of art. But it is distressing to read about the moment when this performance must end, the curtain drawn aside as various friends descend on his apartment after his death. Milhaud is said to have been “overwhelmed by its sadness,” the two upright pianos with broken strings stacked on top of each other, filth, all the letters from friends unopened, a tiny bed, and little space to work.
What shocks about this tableau are the absences, and yet they resonate with the music. In both the “serious” works and the zanier satires, you detect an emptiness. Music typically has a hidden agenda of filling you up, possessing you with its emotion and inspiration, but the circles of the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes feel like they’re cultivating a void, an alternative emotional zone from which feeling is merely viewed. That’s precisely what makes them so fascinating. The later caricatures, too, strut around a distinct lack of a center. They don’t want to allow you a frame of reference—just temporary genre rest stops (ragtime, music hall, fugue, chorale, nocturne), bits and bobs of the cluttered world. I’m reminded of a particular sadness that comes on while wandering around a junk shop or vintage store. It’s not quite nostalgia, a Romantic feeling; these discards don’t come with lives attached. The sensation is emptier and more modern. One of the wittiest composers in the Western tradition more or less invented this aimless, unmoored sense of loss, a shade of emotion you can’t quite find in any of his contemporaries.
I do wish Penman had spent a bit more time thinking about the classical timeline surrounding Satie. One of the reasons the Romantic era demanded such a powerful modernist backlash is the gradual disappearance of deep humor from the musical landscape. For me, this makes the first four Mahler symphonies more relatable than the last five: they have more grotesque and childish elements to round out the adult world. Strauss had wonderful, springing humor in the early days; other forces overcame it. Scriabin is never funny, for all his genius. For Beethoven and Mozart, and the classical era, the corrective of humor is folded into the recipe; the whole language is built (as Charles Rosen observed) on the grammar of comic opera. Even the most serious Beethoven works are shot through with astonishing hints of vaudeville or ironic undermining; his mature language was forged partly through code-switching between the sublime and the ridiculous. Mozart turns from tragedy to comedy on a dime, with no effort and no sense of strain.
Faced with the seriousness of late Romanticism, modern composers took diverging paths. Many prominent German-speaking composers (Berg, Webern, Schoenberg) doubled down, becoming even more desperately serious, largely neglecting their humorous heritage, while many French and Russian composers looked to irony and wit, to remind us of this neglected vitamin of music. Satie is the most extreme of the second group. His attempts to address this deficiency can be savage, or exhausting, but his best work remains essential. It allows old music to fall on fresh ears, and it forces us to reconsider big questions. What is music? That one is loud and clear in Satie, but more faintly in the background you can hear: Who is a composer?
English (US) · 