Erik Satie (1866-1925)

At St Catherine's, the wooden church at Honfleur, a blind organist given to inexplicable fits of melisma taught a little of her craft to young Erik Satie, then a boy of eight, motherless, his father already departed for Paris at her death. Intuititive and alert to the beauty of music which had not yet discovered polyphony, Satie was caught around the slowpaced aethereal chant to which these early lessons brought him. Can you imagine? Eight, and his uncle, the 'sea-bird', started taking him to the most dingy cosies of the dockland, this and the weekly lessons in medieval musicianship. Nor was it in the interest of rescuing the boy from this squalid happy life that his father brought him to Paris in 1879.By 14, and knowing at least enough to absolve himself of all tedious duties towards any school, Satie began at the Paris Conservatoire with high hopes and no reserve, under the tutelage of Mathias and Tadou. What he encountered there in the matter of disapproval and signal incomprehension goes only a little way towards explaing his singular lack of progress - the vigour of the infestations of Wagnerianism then afflicting French music could not in itself have accounted for his desultory labours and unerringly mediocre accomplishments (mediocre at least in the eyes of those at the Conservatoire who judged his performance; Jean-Aubry is more enthusiastic). A singular ability to avoid steadfast application, indicated in his scrupulous evasion of earlier schooling, may help us to reason through his lack of interest in formal achievement in his first attempt at academic training.

Yet Satie left still determined to live as a writer of music, rather than turning to navvying or plumbing as he might have done under the aegis of his uncle. Even at this time, his music was limpid with Gregorian melodies and anti-rigorous clumps of notes which struck ears halfway between lassitude and revolution, certainly shocking to any sensibility finely tuned to well-stringed strophes of Silesian sublimity. Some familiar sounding works (then deemed barbaric, or peculiar in their predilaetion for haunt)ing the tender listener) emerged from this time: the Sarabandes, Gymnopedies (these named for the festival dancing boys at Thyrea described by Herodotus,) and Gnossiennes (named in the lough of Satie's current interest in Cretan history). A habit which seems arch, that of unusual naming and instructions, was employed by Satie to remind performers that they were not to play as if humming grandly along to the Meistersingers). An odd elipsis in standard biographical notation is the absence of reference to Satie's piano playing, which seems to have descended upon him like a dense but invisible fog; could he not play as well as Debussy, whom he followed as accompanist at the Auberge du Clou, or possibly even at the Chat Noir (here history beckons us, diaphanous but elusive, towards An Adventure)? At least in the earlier part of his life, Satie was a pianist first (at least by night) and a composer second. The latter seems to have grown from his immersion in and skill at the former. His musical originality rests partly in his murderous transformation of the cafe song style of writers such as Hyspa and of Desboutin, which finds oblique expression in such works as Le Piccadilly and La Diva de L'Empire.

(From Satie homepage).