Erik Satie

Erik Satie was born at Honfleur in Normandy on 17 May 1866. His father, Alfred, was a shipping broker; his mother, Jane Leslie Anton, of Scottish origin, died in 1872. The boy was then entrusted to his grandparents in Honfleur, where the organist of the church of Saint-Léonard gave him his first music lessons and introduced him to Gregorian chant. In 1878, after his grandmother’s death, he joined his father in Paris, who had remarried a piano teacher.

In 1879 he entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he was profoundly bored. His teachers thought him lazy and untalented: one called him “the laziest student in the Conservatoire”. He was expelled, readmitted, then gave up. In 1886 he enlisted in the army but, to get himself discharged, deliberately exposed himself to the cold and caught bronchitis. He published his first piano pieces, including the Ogives, inspired by Gothic architecture.

In 1887 he left the family home and moved to Montmartre, the district of artists and cabarets. He became pianist at the famous Chat Noir cabaret, then at the Auberge du Clou, where he met Claude Debussy, who became his friend. It was then that he composed his most famous works: the three Gymnopédies (1888), slow, simple and melancholy, then the Gnossiennes (1890), written without bar lines and with strange instructions such as “on the tongue” or “so as to obtain a hollow”.

For a time Satie was passionate about esotericism and became the official composer of Sâr Péladan’s Rosicrucian order. He even founded his own “Metropolitan Art Church of Jesus the Conductor”, of which he was the only member. He composed Vexations (around 1893), a short piece with a note asking for it to be played 840 times in a row, which takes about eighteen hours. He had a brief and only love affair with the painter Suzanne Valadon, which left him very unhappy. In 1900 he also wrote cabaret songs such as the waltz Je te veux.

In 1898, penniless, he moved into a small room at Arcueil in the southern suburbs of Paris. Every day he walked across Paris to Montmartre and back at night. No one ever entered his room in his lifetime. In 1905, aged thirty-nine and aware of his gaps, he went back to school and studied counterpoint at the Schola Cantorum with Albert Roussel and Vincent d’Indy, graduating in 1908. He then composed many humorous pieces with absurd titles: Véritables Préludes flasques (pour un chien), Embryons desséchés and Sports et divertissements.

From 1911 Ravel and Debussy promoted his early works, and a new generation discovered him. In 1917, with Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, he created the ballet Parade, whose music uses typewriters, sirens and pistol shots. The shocked audience hissed and shouted. Satie became the godfather of “Les Six” — Poulenc, Milhaud, Honegger, Auric, Durey and Tailleferre — who admired his simplicity and humour. In 1918 he composed Socrate, a symphonic drama of great sobriety.

In 1920 he invented “furniture music”, music meant to be heard but not listened to, like furniture — the ancestor of ambient music. In 1924 he composed the ballet Relâche, with a film by René Clair, Entr’acte. Ill, he died in Paris on 1 July 1925. In his room at Arcueil his friends found incredible clutter: two pianos stacked on top of each other, more than eighty umbrellas and a dozen identical velvet suits. Long regarded as an eccentric, he is now recognised as a forerunner of minimalist and ambient music.