Essential Satie

Satie was born in Normandie and supported himself financially early on by hiring out his services as a pianist in bars, cabarets and other entertainment establishments. He came of age in a France whose musical life was defined by conflict and contradiction – between love and hate for Wagner and his all-embracing romanticism, between the the catholic organ tradition and the new approaches of Debussy and Ravel – but Satie, his perspective arguably coloured by a harmful drinking habit, sought his own musical way: musical anarchy.

Satie’s best known works – mostly written for solo piano – come across as belonging to the French romantic tradition, touchingly simple, ironically inconsequential or curious. His first ‘Gymnopédie’ (1888) is still used today as background music in many commercials and romantic films. Yet every one of Satie’s works has a sting in its tail, manifesting itself in intentionally ‘wrong' notes, surprising musical events or even in the form of abstruse – sometimes pseudo literary – performance directions in the musical text. Satie was also something of an early representative of Dadaist conceptual composition: the few (and wonderfully austere) notes of his piano piece ‘Vexations’ (1893), for example, are repeated 840 times, meaning that some performances can run to 24 hours.