The Many Sides of Erik Satie

“The Satie life contains so much murk; his music sparkles with riverine clarity.”

Contemplating this book, I asked a selection of young people: “Have you ever heard of Erik Satie?” Across the board, his name registered nothing. The moment I played the Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies however — “Oh, I LOVE those!” Everyone seems to know one or two, as if they’re now part of some collective audio memory. There are three Gymnopédies and six Gnossiennes, all composed between 1887 and 1895. Most people seem to know either “Gymnopédie #1” or “Gnossienne #1.” They are familiar props in TV adverts, film soundtracks, chill-out compilations. They are both just over three minutes — i.e., pop single length, not grand classical excursion.

In the Gymnopédies, Roger Shattuck writes, Satie “takes one musical idea and … regards it briefly from three different directions.” “Gymnopédie #1” is probably Satie’s best-known piece. You reach for words like stately, unhurried, spacious, melancholy, poignant … but the music’s ineluctable strangeness remains. It is like a painting by Velázquez, where everything looks correct but the perspective seems somehow subtly awry. You’re pulled in without quite knowing why. Technically, there is no better description than this, from Constant Lambert: “Melodically speaking we find the juxtaposition of short lyrical phrases of great tenderness with ostinatos of extreme and deliberate bareness …. The strangeness of Satie’s harmonic colouring is due not to the chords themselves, but to the unexpected relationships he discovers between chords.”

“Gnossienne #1” radiates a mood of … what, exactly? Lightly anxious contemplation? Oddly contented melancholy? An icy but heartwarming breeze? For the three Gymnopédies, Satie specifies sad and grave in his instructions for pianists; but the mood is softer, gentler, more wistful. Slightly bruised, but not down and out. The Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes do not sound like 19th-century concert hall music; they sound like pieces composed by someone who knew there would one day be recording studios, CDs, downloads. They feel as old as sand, but strangely contemporary. To have even a wisp of your music eternally circling people’s minds like pollen in the air or a constellation in the night — this is not nothing. Who could have predicted that these brief, evanescent, weightless solo piano pieces would have such a prolonged afterlife? Satie is a crossover artiste, his catalogue ever reviving and never out of print.

If you only know these few exquisite morsels, you only know a tiny fraction of Satie. Until relatively recently, I didn’t know too much more myself. Dip a toe into the Satie rock pool and you soon discover a cove, a coastline, an entire horizon. As well as his solo-piano works, he wrote a riotous avant-pop ballet (Parade); a comical Christian allegory (Uspud); an intimate drama with samplings of Greek philosophy (Socrate); and his final work was a groundbreaking movie soundtrack (Cinema). A creature of his time, he anticipates a host of things we now take for granted — a world of adverts, headphones, leisure time, music as personal soundtrack.

In some ways, Satie feels like a long-ago ornament; at the same time, more playfully modern than our own increasingly doctrinaire era. This contradictory pulse — on the one hand, on the other — can be found in all aspects of his life. He is a one-man synthesis of Catholicism and Protestantism. He reconciles counterpoints of high culture and popular song. Founder of a church, habitué of low dives. His day job — or night apprenticeship — was in small clubs, memorizing the melodies of popular songs: things that made people dance and smile and sing. He is knowledgeable about ancient forms, but never wedded to how things have always been done. He loves both raucous cabaret songs and the sacred music of Palestrina. His work rings with marches, waltzes and hymns. He makes angular ballet from popular melodies; infuses classical forms with the ribald life of popular art.

He may have been an elective celibate or madly passionate — or both. There is his five-month-long amour with the artist Suzanne Valadon, shining like a sun over stony fields. Maybe he carries her memory deep inside for the rest of his life — a personal alchemical emblem, the lush rose on his barren cross. Such things do happen.

He could snub people for apparently trivial reasons — status and worth, we should always remember, are two completely different things — but he was generous with his time, especially when it came to young people. He could be prickly if he thought he was being patronized: some of his most barbed wit is reserved for those who have power and don’t deserve it. (In today’s parlance: he always punched up, not down.) He lived most of his life in a state of near-indigence, but when money did arrive he’d spend it on a brace of velvet suits. There is copious testimony as to the utter shambles of his living space — yet the moment he steps outside this tiny cell he is a smiling dandy, spick and span, his own ambulant branch of Yohji Yamamoto.

The Satie life contains so much murk; his music sparkles with riverine clarity.

Like Magritte’s painting of a bowler-hatted gentleman standing between two creatures, one of sea and one of air: neither fish nor fowl.

Maybe what we rush to define as opposites should not always be seen that way.

Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist, and critic. His first original book, “Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors” (Semiotext(e), 2023), won the RSL Ondaatje Prize for Literature and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography in 2024. This article is adapted from his book “Erik Satie Three Piece Suite” (Semiotext(e)).