Erik Satie

Erik Satie (* May 17, 1866, Honfleur; † July 1, 1925, Paris) is considered one of the forefathers of the musical avant-garde. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, initially worked as a cabaret pianist, and wrote music for the Rosicrucian Order. From 1898, he lived in the Parisian suburb of Arcueil, resumed composition studies with Vincent D’Indy and Albert Roussel in 1905, and refined his own sound system, which he sometimes concealed behind whimsical humor. He responded to Wagnerism and the opulent Neo-Gothic style of his era, to Impressionism and Expressionism, with humor, sometimes sarcasm, but above all with the purification of inflated forms of expression. Erik Satie liked children, and therefore he not only worked as a piano and music teacher but also instructed school classes in understanding culture. He even wrote piano miniatures such as “L’Enfance de Ko-Quo” (1913) to prepare young people “for the sound world of modern music.” By this time, Satie was already the center of an unofficial circle of convention-defying avant-gardists. His acquaintances included Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Sergei Diaghilev, and Leonid Fyodorovich Myasin. Five years later, he joined forces with friends and students to form the pre-Dadaist “Groupe des Six” (Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, George Auric, Francis Poulenc, Louis Durey, Germaine Tailleferre), who elected him as their leader. In his radical rejection of contemporary mannerisms, Satie went further than many of his peers, even if he did not need a demonstrative break with tradition to do so. The seriousness of his mockery permeates his compositional work, from the Debussy-influenced “Gymnopédies” (1888) and “Gnossiennes” (1890) to Ragtime references like in the ballet (“Jack in the Box,” 1899), and up to sarcastic late compositions such as the “Sonatine bureaucratique” (1917) or “Musique d’ameublement” (1920). Erik Satie’s conscious simplicity and non-functional harmony, his harsh stylistic breaks and unusual sonic explorations thus became a model for numerous avant-gardists, from jazz to John Cage and the Minimalists.