The earworms of Erik Satie

New Statesman​

01-07-2025

'A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.' Ian Penman, a post-punk music critic known for his experimental and often impenetrable style, opens his book on this lyrical quote from Jean Genet, before exploding into his self-consciously ludicrous, slightly naive, post-modernist style, which matches that of its subject, the composer Erik Satie (1866-1925). A punk avant la lettre, Satie was a societal disruptor dressed in a neat suit and bowler hat.
In the light of Satie's anti-establishmentarianism, the commercial success of his music is his best joke. The king of light classics, Satie composed 'brief, evanescent piano pieces of pop-single length', the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes written between 1887 and 1895. They are hugely popular on easy-listening programmes and often used as advertising jingles. Muzak owes its being to Satie. He invented background music, calling it 'furniture music' and intended it to complete the decor for lawyers' and bankers' offices. When it was performed, he told people to walk about, eat and drink. When they sat still and listened, he waved his arms and shouted at them in frustration.
The book's title suits the subject perfectly. Three Piece Suite. Are we talking the musical form? Are we talking upholstered horror-furniture? Or social saboteurs in three-piece suits? The answer, of course, is all of them. Contradiction was Satie's stock-in-trade. 'Vexations', a little piano piece lasting less than two minutes, must be played repeatedly, 840 times. At 16 hours of music, it is understandably rarely performed. John Cage did it 1963, and Igor Levit this April at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, with Marina Abramović (predictably) in tow.
Dualism rocked Satie's cradle. His mother was an English Protestant, his father a French Roman Catholic who hated both the English and Protestantism. His mother died when he was six. Shunted off to his paternal grandparents, little Eric was swiftly re-baptised into the Catholic Church. Schooldays passed as indolently as one of his idly rocking Gymnopédies, before gently slipping into studying music at the Conservatoire. Except he didn't. 'The laziest student in the Conservatoire,' read his report, 'but gets a lovely sound.' Chucked out, he took to playing piano in bars, where he effected his first reinvention. Eric became Erik. He grew his hair long, wore a frock coat and top hat and composed the famous pieces: the Gymnopédies (a word originally meaning naked games during Ancient Greek festivals that Satie chose to redefine as a fusion of gymnase and comédie), and the Gnossiennes (gnostic spliced with madeleine, which pre-dates Proust's famous madeleine passage in Swann's Way by quite a few years).
Paris in the 1890s was shrouded in mysticism. Ectoplasm drifted up Haussmann's smart new boulevards. Tables turned, spirits rapped. Madame Blavatsky wore an amazing amount of eye make-up and Satie joined Sâr Péladan's Rosicrucian church, a hocus-pocus dress-up party obsessed with alchemy, philosophy, Wagner and the Holy Grail. Appointed Maître de Chapelle, Satie composed hymns in the manner of 'Chaldean Wagnerism' featuring flutes, harps and trumpets. His soundtrack to Péladan's play Le Fils des Étoiles would not disgrace a Cecil B DeMille movie.
But Satie was not born to play second fiddle, and in 1893 he broke from Péladan's church to found his own. L'Église Métropolitaine d'Art de Jésus Conducteur (The Metropolitan Church of Jesus the Conductor). It sounds like something out of the Midwest Bible Belt. Its purported mission was to be a place for art to grow and prosper unsullied by evil, but its real work was to launch missiles against artistic enemies and 'infidel Anglicans' who would suffer Hell's most delicious tortures unless they returned to the bosom of the Catholic Church. Penman suggests that the rather horrible, pompous and pretentious communications that Satie put out might be a leg-pull, but I wonder. Occult sects are not known for their sense of humour. And besides, while Satie sampled many varieties of religion all his life, the need for a real, sincere faith seems to have been a constant throughout.
During the brief existence of his church, Satie had his only love affair. Suzanne Valadon was a high-wire artist and painter. Whether they ever had sex is unclear. It's possible he was a celibate. He and she had next-door rooms; he composed Gothic Dances for her, and she painted a rather prim portrait of him. When she left him, he jettisoned frock coats, bought seven identical velvet suits, and transformed into 'the Velvet Gentleman'. He moved from central Paris to the suburb of Arcueil. No visitors were ever admitted to his room.
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'Satie came every morning… and sat in my room,' wrote Cocteau. 'He kept on his overcoat (always perfectly spotless), his gloves, his hat which he wore pulled down almost to his monocle, his umbrella never left his hand. With his free hand he would cover his mouth, which curled when he spoke and laughed. He came from Arcueil on foot. There he lived in a small room, in which, after his death, under a mountain of dust, were found all the letters his friends had ever written him. He had not opened one…'
Music took hold of Satie's soul during his childhood. He received lessons from the local organist who implanted a passion for early church music and Gregorian chant that never left him. His poor performance at the Conservatoire was due to him bunking off to Notre Dame to listen to the music he loved in its proper architectural setting. New, non-ecclesiastical influences only opened up when he got to the avant-garde experimental cabarets like the Le Chat Noir and met fellow composer Claude Debussy, who was also struggling to get out from under the heavy influence of Wagnerism. Out went Sturm und Drang. In came beguiling melodies conjuring lovers meandering in a shady lane, or rocking on the Seine's pretty café boats. He was composing the musical equivalent of the art of the time: sound-pictures of the untroubled arcadia created by the impressionists on canvas, and conjurations of the delicate, associative literary suggestion of Mallarmé and the symbolist poets.
The inevitable break with Debussy came when Debussy orchestrated the Gymnopédies to great acclaim. This and the flight of Valadon led to musical drought. It picked up again when he was approaching 40 and his father died. He went back to school to study early church music in greater depth, immersing himself in counterpoint and polyphony, Bach and Palestrina. The Velvet Man transformed into City Gent: bowler hat, stiff collar, furled umbrella and sober suit. He joined the Communist Party, became a pillar of the community in Arcueil and was decorated for civic services.
In 1911, Satie was suddenly 'discovered'. He was in his mid forties when he was taken up by Ravel (another composer of short earworms). Other disciples popped up, calling themselves 'Les Six', also known as 'Les nouveaux jeunes'. Intent on unhorsing impressionism, which was now old hat, their music was influenced by cubism and surrealism. Satie was also embraced by the wider circle of rising avant-garde stars: Cocteau, Picasso, René Clair, Picabia, Brâncuși and Man Ray. In 1917, he composed the music for Parade for the Ballets Russes, with sets by Picasso, scenario by Cocteau and choreography by Léonide Massine. Satie's score included parts for foghorn, typewriter, milk bottles and a pistol. It was a succès de scandale. Late blooming continued with the 1924 short dadaist film Entr'acte made in collaboration with Clair and Picabia. Written to be shown during the interval (entr'acte) of the ballet Relâche (which translates to 'show cancelled'), in the event, the show actually was cancelled, due to the unfeigned indisposition of the lead dancer. Real life aped their jape! The trio howled with laughter.
The movie they were making was slapstick at breakneck speed, surrealist before surrealism was born; Charlie Chaplin, the Goons, Monty Python, punk. A canon fires a huge shell that collapses like a soufflé. Balloon heads inflate, deflate. A runaway hearse is pulled by a camel. Matchsticks dance, boxing gloves levitate, top-hatted seducers take up attitudes. Satie wrote the music frame by frame: it is hectic and forgettable.
Cirrhosis of the liver killed him the following winter. He died peacefully, in the bosom of the Church that he had never actually left. His purported last words were suitably ambiguous: 'Ah, the cows…'
The book Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite is unsurprisingly divided into three parts. Part one, the shortest, is about Satie; it skitters selectively, mostly around his life. Part two is three times as long. Headed 'Satie A-Z', the alphabet contains such gems as 'A is for Arcueil' (where Satie lived, remember?) noting that the place name 'contains a + u + e + i, but not a single 'o''. Wow! We also marvel at the insight that Satie is satire spelled without the 'r'. Shall we just tactfully pass over this section?
The final section, headed 'Satie Diary', is again longer than the section devoted to the man himself. This is no surprise. We have already deduced that Penman is insanely self-important and deliciously un-self-aware. The diary regales us with an inconsequential daisy chain of maybe-Satie-related musings dated between January 2022 and October 2024. We wonder, among other things, why no one told him that other people's dreams ceased to interest us decades ago?
Satie was marvellous. An extremely focused revolutionary thinker and composer dedicated to quiet provocations. His earworms have burrowed their way into our brains, not only musically but culturally too. His work loosened the rigid authority of the grandiose, questioned outdated structures, rules and assumptions; reset the kaleidoscope. It is entirely right that a book should be published to commemorate and celebrate the centenary of his death. Just not this book.
Sue Prideaux's 'Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin' (Faber & Faber) won the Duff Cooper Prize
Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite
Ian Penman
Fitzcarraldo, 224pp, £12.99
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[See also: Let Kneecap and Bob Vylan speak freely]
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