Owl Pellets: July 2022

A piece submitted for a Hastings Writers Group competition, with a few changes to things that didn’t work at all.

Erik Satie, musician, composer and writer died on 1st July 1925.

Eric Alfred Leslie Satie, born 17 May 1866 in Honfleur, Normandy, was the son of a French father and a British mother. Jane Satie was an English Protestant of Scottish descent. His father, Alfred Satie was a Roman Catholic – and an anglophobe.

He had three siblings, Conrad, Olga and Diane.

Satie is today known chiefly for just one of his many pieces for solo piano, Gymnopédie No.1.

(A gymnopédie is defined in one source, - Dominique Mondo's Dictionnaire de Musique - as a "nude dance, accompanied by song, which youthful Spartan maidens danced on specific occasions"). It has been described as the “most relaxing piece of music ever written”. If it were just that it would languish in the “forgotten” pile, with a million pieces of ambient music, but decidedly does not. It is not now, nor was it ever, commonly accompanied by nude dancing.

He was described by his music teachers at the Paris Conservatoire as "... worthless. Three months just to learn the piece. Cannot sight-read properly", and as “the laziest student in the Conservatoire”. In turn, Satie hated the Conservatoire, calling it “a sort of district prison with no beauty on the inside – nor on the outside, for that matter”.

Unsurprisingly, he left the Conservatoire but foolishly instead volunteered for military service. He was invalided out after deliberately contracting acute bronchitis by standing outside, shirtless, on a winter’s night.

<< Before I compose a piece, I walk round it several times, accompanied by myself. >>

Satie signed himself “Erik” rather than “Eric” after the publication of his first piano work in 1884.

He wrote literally hundreds of pieces of music, and at the peak of his fame worked with Claude Debussy, Sergei Diaghilev, Pablo Picasso and many others in the course of his work.

All his life, the visual arts were important to Satie,. As well as Picasso, he spent time with Braque, Derain, and others. Man Ray called Satie the only musician to "have eyes”. Satie’s only love affair, as far as anyone knows, was with a painter, Suzanne Valadon, with whom he was obsessed, but the attraction seems to have been almost one-sided, and was certainly short-lived, for she left him after six months, leaving him “devastated”. He composed his “Dances Gothiques” during their relationship.

Afterwards, he said that he was left with "nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness".

He purchased seven identical, grey velvet corduroy suits which he proceeded to wear, with no variation, for 10 years.

<< I am by far your superior, but my notorious modesty prevents me from saying so. >>

He gave some of his later works absurd titles, such as Veritables Prèludes flasques (pour un chien) ("True Flabby Preludes (for a Dog)", 1912), Croquis et agaceries d'un gros bonhomme en bois ("Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Man", 1913) and Sonatine bureaucràtique ("Bureaucratic Sonata", 1917).

Satie was sued for libel in 1917 over insulting and, some would say, obscene postcards (Link, but BE WARNED!) that he had sent to the composer and critic Jean Marie Octave Géraud Poueigh, who had said of Satie that he lacked “wit, skill and inventiveness” shortly after the premiere of Jean Cocteau’s ballet "Parade", for which Satie had written the music; the resulting prison sentence and large fine were overcome by that patron of the French avant-garde Winnaretta Singer, the sewing machine heiress and Princess by marriage.

Satie’s longest piece of music was also one of his shortest: “Vexations” played once usually comes in at about 3 minutes 40 seconds, but Satie declared that for the full effect it was to be played 840 times, making the full piece well over 9 hours long. It is available in full on YouTube in a concert performance by Nicolas Horvath, complete with external sounds of rustlings and scrapings, and, quite early on, a police siren. Your obituarist held out for nearly 30 minutes. Horvath explains himself here

Satie was a heavy drinker throughout his life.

<< I eat only white foods: eggs, sugar, grated bones, the fat of dead animals; veal, salt, coconut, chicken cooked in white water; fruit mould, rice, turnips; camphorated sausage, dough, cheese (white), cotton salad, and certain fish (skinless). >>

Satie was also an author. His writings were collected in one volume many years after his death under the title “A Mammal’s Notebook” (ISBN-13: 978-1-900565-66-0). Like some of his music these are fragments, indeed they were often woven into the music, leading to his instruction that, although these written pieces were integral parts of the music, they were not to be performed. They are written in idiomatic, almost untranslatable French, yet translated into English anyway by one Anthony Melville via Satie’s posthumous editor Ornella Volta. “To whom it may concern, I forbid reading the text aloud in the course of musical performance, Any failure to observe this requirement will incur my righteous indignation against the presuming party. No special cases will be allowed”

‘The sea is wide madame.

In any case it is pretty deep.

Do not sit on the bottom. It is very damp.

Here come some nice old

waves.

They are full of water.

You are completely soaked!

“Yes I am. Sir.”’

There is a good deal more of this in A Mammal’s Notebook. We cannot recommend it highly enough:- we can hardly recommend it at all.

<< My dream is to be played everywhere, not only at the Opera.>>

Satie never married, as we have seen, and his home for most of his adult life was a single small room, first in Montmartre and, from 1898 to his death, in Arcueil, a suburb of Paris and historically, intermittently, from Roman times until the 18th Century, a place of aqueducts.

<< I took to my room and let small things evolve slowly. >>

Present-day reluctant adopters of technology will sympathise with Satie, a man who would never listen to recorded music, and made only one telephone call in his life.

He adopted various what we would call now “images” or “personae” over the years, including a period in quasi-priestly dress, the period of the velvet suits, and is well-known for his last persona, in neat bourgeois costume, with bowler hat, wing collar, and umbrella. He died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 59, and is buried in Arcueil. Despite his dapper public appearance, when friends entered his Arcueil apartment after his death they found “indescribable squalor”.

Satie is remembered today for his pieces for solo piano, the “Gymnopédies” series mentioned above, the “Gnossiennes”, and numbers of others in a similar vein. He was firmly of the avant-garde and is seen as a precursor to composers such as John Cage and Phillip Glass.

<<I came into the world very young, in an age that was very old >>

His childhood home in Honfleur is now a museum. A recent TripAdvisor review of the Satie House Museum records:

“This museum is very strange, which suits the man it's an homage to! Before you go you should read a bit about Eric Satie and his time. Besides, you might profit from a couple of audio excerpts of his works. Don't go in without an audio guide or you'll be lost in space. There are a couple of exhibits which you can touch and work, such as a merry-go-round that you can mount and which you have to power yourself like a bicycle. If you do that you'll see Satie's unplayable instruments such as the dictionary accordion. Take enough time to imbibe the atmosphere”.

<< “I liked the bit about quarter to eleven”: no-context Satie.>>

“ What I would like to see, is all Frenchmen, actually born on French soil, of parents that are French, or at least look it, have a right to a job as a postman in the Paris post-office”.

“The more musicians we have, the more madmen we have”

“ Drinking absinthe means killing yourself sip by sip ”.

“The more I know about men, the more I admire dogs”. . Finally, It is surely scarcely debatable that Satie would have chosen the original German language version of Nena’s 99 Red Balloons over the relatively insipid English version.