“Play Like Satie”

“Do you know the Gymnopédies?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. I was twenty, and just falling in love with classical music—because I was falling in love with him. He could hear the first few bars of any symphony and tell me in what year (he was sometimes off by two) it was composed. At Powell Hall, his long, slender pianist’s fingers drummed on his leg, and his face was rapt. I wanted to live in the music the way he did.

And when he played Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies, I stepped through that door.

“Haunting” is the first word that comes to mind. The melody’s ghost lingered, changing the very air. The Gymnopédies, a word I now know means “Three Nude Dances,” were indeed bare: simple, vulnerable, tender, wistful, melancholy. I played them often over the next three decades, yet never knew much about their composer until I read Ian Penman’s new book. At once a slender biography, a diary, an étude, and an impish experiment, Three Piece Suite turns a bit self-indulgent, stitching Penman’s own likes and stray thoughts into a glossary in the middle and using his own writing diary as Part Three. Penman’s prose is as artful and elegantly light as Satie’s music—and he wants us to know it.

That said, the biographical Part I alone is worth the book’s price. Penman begins with an account of Entr’acte, a jokey, rapidfire collage of a film created by Satie, Rene Clair, and Francis Picabia. Satie pokes the audience, popping echoes of popular music into the classical score, and the overall approach is what Penman calls “seat-of-the-pants surrealism,” years before Surrealism’s official birth. “Things zoom and stutter and levitate and vanish at the drop of a hat.” Balloon heads inflate and deflate; a female ballet dancer turns out to be Satie in drag; Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp play chess in the rain; a runaway hearse is led by a camel….

What? All these years, I have thought of Satie as so serious. A sensitive man, I assumed, and a moody one, exquisitely attuned to beauty, no doubt trailing a string of disastrous love affairs. He would have been an ascetic and an atheist, unable to find comfort in either physical pleasure or divine, and a gentle friend, always ready to console. I pictured him hatless, wearing a flowing white poet’s shirt….

I got only the sensitivity and moods right. Satie dressed in dark suits of velvet or corduroy and topped them with a bowler hat à la Magritte, pince-nez glasses, and an umbrella. The epitome of an eccentric bachelor, he had only one intense, passionate love affair: with painter and former high-wire artist Suzanne Valadon, who broke it off five months later. Atheist? He was so susceptible to religious mystery that he joined a Rosicrucian sect—a friend nicknamed him Esoterik Satie—then founded his own church. Satie’s Eglise Metropolitaine d’Art de Jesus Conducteur was meant to be “a refuge where the Catholic faith and the Arts, the which are indissolubly bound to it, shall grow and prosper,” sheltered from profanity and the workings of evil.

Yet he would have experienced plenty of both at his favorite hangout, Le Chat Noir in Montmartre. Far from ascetic, he drank hard and died young, of cirrhosis of the liver. As for gentle friendship, he seems to have pissed off quite a few people, including his more worldly friend Claude Debussy. When Satie died, his friends entered an apartment crammed with hoarded objects and layered with dust. Stuffed inside a piano, they found a bundle of unsent letters addressed to Suzanne Valadon. They also found their own letters to Satie, unopened; he had consulted the return address and answered without ever reading them.

The more I read, the more intrigued I am by this funny, irritable, idiosyncratic little man whose mien bears such little relationship to his Gymnopédies. Or to his jazz, or his Gnossiennes. Early on, he left the bright animation of Paris for the suburb of Arcueil, where life was calmer, plainer, and cheaper. He once refused a payment he thought too extravagant. On Thursdays, he took schoolchildren on musical outings. At the age of thirty-nine, he returned to school himself and studied the antique forms of counterpoint and polyphony. When he composed Sports & Divertissements, stealing the title from an advertising slogan, he wrote in his introduction: “I have put into it everything I know about Boredom. I dedicate this Chorale to those who do not like me.”

Audacious and playful, he had no time for elaborate, heavy, fussily self-important symphonic works. “Keep it short,” he urged young composers. He was never scared of doing what others might dis as small, slight, or insignificant. “The smallest work by Satie is small in the way a keyhole is small,” Jean Cocteau remarked. And when Satie wrote tongue-in-cheek instructions for any musician eager to “play like Satie,” they included: “Be an hour late…. Be unaware of your own presence…. Bury the sound…. Dance inwardly/Detached but not dry/Even duller if you can/Have a drink/Laugh without anyone knowing.” As Penman notes, “his humor isn’t diversion, sauce or skin; there from the very beginning, it’s who he is. An antic spirit.”

In 1918, long before there were ways to inject such music into the home, Satie began to write “furniture music,” household compositions he explained as practical, mundane, nothing to do with art. “‘Furniture music’ creates vibrations; it has no other purpose,” he explained. “It fills the same role as light, warmth, and comfort in all its forms…. It is not tiring; It is French; It is unusable; It is not boring…. Listen without feeling awkward.”

Again and again, he proved, in both life and work, “that it was possible to be radical and light-hearted at the same time,” a combination I have always wanted to believe possible. How did he pull it off? With a politics of sympathy, not moral superiority. With delight in his work itself, not the cachet or the money. And with a fresh, restless imagination that scattered itself across many forms. Daily, he wrote little jokes and theories on scraps of paper and tossed them into an upside-down hat for safekeeping.

Yet there is none of this brio in the Gymnopédies. Reviewer Constant Lambert describes their “juxtaposition of short lyrical phrases of great tenderness with ostinatos of extreme and deliberate bareness,” the eerie harmonies coming not from the chords themselves but from “the unexpected relationships he discovers between chords.” Ignoring the trends and institutions of his time, Satie composed far ahead of himself. Penman points out that “the Gymnopédies and Gnosssiennes do not sound like nineteenth-century concert hall music; they sound like pieces composed by someone who knew there would one day be recording studios,” their technology capable of capturing ethereal, delicate subtlety without fighting to be heard.

Would Satie be startled to know how profoundly his music would touch us? Or did he see that coming, too?

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.