Satie Erik: French Composer
The French composer Erik Satie was born on May 17, 1866, and died on July 1, 1925, was
the son of an English mother and a Parisian music publisher.
He entered the Paris Conservatory in 1879 but failed to benefit from academic education,
which he embarked on again only in his 40th year, when he enrolled as a pupil of Vincent
d'Indy and Albert Roussel at the Schola Cantorum. Long before that, however, he had
composed a number of short piano pieces, whose eccentric titles and unfashionable and yet
convincing simplicity of melody were matched by an individual sense of harmony. It is
still a moot point whether Satie got his harmonic ideas from his fellow student and
friend Claude Debussy, or whether the debt was on Debussy's side. It is quite clear,
however, that Satie's tasteful principles influenced Debussy in the composition of his
opera Pelleas et Melisande and that Satie was the main influence in helping Debussy to
free himself from the musical domination of Richard Wagner. Satie became interested in
plainsong through his association with a so-called Rosicrucian group, while he earned his
living as a cafe pianist in Montmartre.
Satie was a conscious eccentric and a determined enemy of all establishments, including
the musical. The comical titles that he attached to his small piano pieces are
characteristic of the Bohemian wit in the Paris of his day. Irony and a deceptively
childlike attitude, a dislike for pomposity of all kinds, and an instinctive
secretiveness were hallmarks of both the man and his music. In 1916, Satie was
befriended by Jean Cocteau and wrote the music for a ballet, Parade, on which Pablo
Picasso and Leonid Massine also collaborated. By far the most important of Satie's works
is Socrate , an harsh setting for four sopranos and chamber orchestra of Plato's account
of the death of Socrates. The young composers who formed the essentially Parisian group
known as Les Six regarded Satie as a kind of tutelary genius, and in 1923 one of them,
Darius Milhaud, tried to found an "Ecole d'Arcueil," named for the obscure Paris suburb
where Satie lived in extreme poverty.
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