1866–1925 · France · 20th century
French composer and pianist Erik Satie (1866-1925) is remembered for short piano pieces such as the Gymnopédies and the Gnossiennes. He coined the genre of "furniture music", meant to be heard without being actively listened to, and is regarded as a forerunner of several musical movements. Today he is among the most performed piano composers of the 20th century; the site's collection features his pieces at intermediate and upper-intermediate level.
Erik Satie came into the world on 17 May 1866, in the Normandy town of Honfleur; his father, Alfred, worked in maritime shipping, and his mother, Jane Leslie Anton, was of Scottish origin. The family moved to Paris in 1870, when Erik was four years old. His mother died two years later, in 1872, and the boy and his younger brother Conrad were sent to their paternal grandparents back in Honfleur, who had them baptised as Catholics; their sister stayed behind in Paris with their father. Once the grandmother died in 1878, the brothers moved back to Paris, where their father took charge of their upbringing himself.
Back in Paris, Alfred soon remarried: his new wife, Eugénie Barnetche, a piano teacher and salon composer ten years his senior, was not liked by young Satie, then just twelve. It was Eugénie who first showed her stepson the keyboard and who pushed him toward a musician's career: by November 1879 he had entered the Conservatoire's preparatory piano class in Paris. His teachers thought little of him, and in 1882, after two and a half lacklustre years, he was let go. His earliest surviving piece, a brief Allegro for piano, dates from a holiday spent in Honfleur in 1884 — around the time he began signing himself "Erik" rather than "Eric". Readmitted in 1885, he once again failed to finish the course; wanting out, he volunteered for an infantry regiment in 1886, liked barracks life no better than the classroom, and talked his way out of service by deliberately catching a chill on a cold winter night.
Around 1887, at the age of twenty-one, Satie left his father's house and settled in Montmartre. For a while he earned his keep as a pianist at the Chat Noir cabaret, then moved on to the nearby Auberge du Clou. In 1888 he wrote the Trois Gymnopédies for solo piano, and from 1889 the first of his Gnossiennes; in some of them he dispensed with bar-lines altogether.
In Montmartre, Satie grew close to Claude Debussy, a friendship that lasted more than twenty years. In 1893 came what appears to have been the only love affair of his life: he met the painter Suzanne Valadon, proposed marriage after their first night together and, though the wedding never happened, she moved into the room next to his. He called her his "Biqui", filled notes with feeling about her eyes, her hands, her tiny feet, wrote the Danses gothiques for her, and sat for a portrait she painted of him. Five months on, Valadon left, and by his own account it left him in an icy solitude.
In 1898 Satie left the bustle of Montmartre for the quiet southern suburb of Arcueil, where he lived for the rest of his life and never once let a visitor through the door. Cabaret work still paid the bills: he arranged more than a hundred popular songs for voice and piano, folding in a few of his own, among them "Je te veux" to words by Henry Pacory and "La Diva de l'Empire" to words by Dominique Bonnaud and Numa Blès. Between 1898 and 1908 he wrote and arranged music for around thirty texts by Vincent Hyspa. In later years Satie spoke of this cabaret output with distaste, regarding it as foreign to his real voice.
The turning point for Satie came in 1902, when Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande received its premiere and Satie, on hearing it, took a fresh look at his own writing. Keen to sharpen his technique, he enrolled in October 1905, by then a mature man, at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, studying counterpoint under Albert Roussel and composition under Vincent d'Indy, who valued strict technique over originality. This time his studies went far better than at the Conservatoire: three years of hard work earned him a diploma in counterpoint, and his classes at the Schola continued until 1912.
For a long time Satie remained little known to the wider public — sardonic and withdrawn, he kept his distance from Parisian musical circles. The change came in early 1911: at a concert of the Société musicale indépendante, a body Ravel and like-minded colleagues had set up as a rival to the more conservative Société nationale de musique, Ravel performed some of Satie's early works, and Satie was suddenly hailed as a herald of the coming musical revolution. Debussy, around this time, orchestrated and conducted the First and Third Gymnopédies, the publisher Demets began commissioning new pieces from him, and Satie could finally give up cabaret work for composition; among the results was the cycle Sports et divertissements (1914), brought out in a deluxe edition.
In 1915 Satie met Jean Cocteau, and from 1916 the two began working together on the ballet Parade, commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev, with choreography by Léonide Massine and sets by Pablo Picasso. The premiere, on 18 May 1917 at the Théâtre du Châtelet, ended in uproar; the score included jazz rhythms and called for a typewriter, a steamship whistle and a siren among its instruments. Stung by hostile press notices, Satie sent the critic Jean Poueigh an insulting message, and the matter went to court with the threat of prison hanging over him. The scandal nonetheless made Satie's name, and from then on his work centred on the theatre, almost always to commission.
In October 1916, commissioned by the Princesse de Polignac — born Winnaretta Singer — Satie began Socrate, a chamber oratorio setting excerpts from Plato's dialogues in Victor Cousin's French translation; he completed the score in 1918. Work on it was interrupted for a time by the libel suit brought by the critic Poueigh. At its premiere Satie described the piece as a return to classical simplicity coloured by a modern sensibility, and Igor Stravinsky, a composer Satie greatly admired, praised it highly too.
One group of young composers after another gathered around Satie, and he would encourage them at first, only to break away sharply, often bitterly, later on. First came a circle drawn to Ravel; it gave way to a set nicknamed “Les Six”: Georges Auric, Louis Durey and Arthur Honegger, together with Germaine Tailleferre, later joined by Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud — a company Satie broke with in turn in 1918. A different set of young musicians gathered around him in the 1920s — among them Henri Cliquet-Pleyel, Roger Désormière, Maxime Jacob, together with Henri Sauguet — later remembered as the “Arcueil School”. Even his oldest friendship was not spared: in 1917 Satie quarrelled with Debussy, stung by his indifference to his recent work, and when Debussy died a year later, Satie pointedly stayed away from the funeral.
In 1924 came the premieres, one after the other, of two of his ballets — Mercure, with choreography by Massine and designs by Picasso, and Relâche, made with Francis Picabia and René Clair — both of which caused an uproar on their opening night. Besides composing, Satie wrote a good deal for the press, from the Revue musicale and Paris newspapers to English-language outlets such as Vanity Fair; he also filled his scores generously with written remarks for performers, to the point that he once had to ask specifically that they not be read aloud during a performance.
In early 1925 Satie's health broke down badly; Count Étienne de Beaumont arranged and paid in advance for a private room for him at the Saint-Joseph hospital in Paris. Satie died there on 1 July 1925, aged fifty-nine, of cirrhosis of the liver, the result of years of heavy drinking. He was laid to rest in the Arcueil cemetery, the suburb that had been his home for more than a quarter of a century. Few came to see him off — among the handful of artists at the funeral was the painter Jean Pierné, son of the composer and conductor Gabriel Pierné — and the first to respond to his death were mainly Jean Cocteau and the composers of Les Six and the Arcueil School. Real interest in Satie's music came back only around the middle of the 20th century, and today he is among that century's most performed piano composers.
Most of what Satie wrote was for solo piano, and most of it is brief: he left behind hardly any large-scale orchestral scores. His harmony often rests on unresolved chords; some pieces, the Gnossiennes among them, dispense with bar-lines altogether, and his melodies are pointedly simple, often echoing old church music. He gave his later instrumental sets deliberately absurd titles, such as "Véritébles Préludes flasques (pour un chien)" or the "Sonatine bureaucratique". In "Le fils des étoiles" (1891) he was among the first to base a harmony on chains of chords built in fourths, a device other French composers of his day later took up as well. Then, in 1892, Satie devised a compositional method of his own: for each piece he would write several — usually no more than five or six — short musical fragments and simply join them together. A separate strand in his output is the "furniture music" he invented, background sound meant to blend into a room rather than demand attention; one example of this writing is "Cinéma", composed for René Clair's film "Entr'acte".
The site holds 13 sheet-music editions of Satie's works, all of them for solo piano. They include all three Gymnopédies and all three Gnossiennes (Nos. 1–3) on the site, plus seven further pieces: "Españaña", "Le porteur de grosses pierres", "Celle qui parle trop", "Regrets des Enfermés (Janas et Latude)", "Sa Taille", "Ses Jambes" and "Tyrolienne turque". By level, six editions are marked intermediate and seven upper intermediate; there are no elementary- or advanced-level editions on the site.
A first look at Satie's sheet music on the site can start with the intermediate-level "Le porteur de grosses pierres", continue with "Gnossienne No. 2", "Gnossienne No. 3" and "Gymnopédie No. 1" at the same level, and then move on to the upper-intermediate "Celle qui parle trop".