Satie, Erik

Erik Alfred Leslie Satie, known as Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist born on May 17, 1866, in Honfleur, Normandy, France. He passed away on July 1, 1925, in Paris. Satie was a significant figure in early 20th-century music, particularly in France, known for his spare, unconventional, and often witty style that influenced many composers, including Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Francis Poulenc.

Satie’s early years were marked by his studies at the Paris Conservatoire, where he was an undistinguished student and obtained no diploma. He worked as a pianist in café-cabarets in Montmartre, Paris, and began composing works, mostly for solo piano, such as his famous Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes1. He also wrote music for a Rosicrucian sect to which he was briefly attached.

After a period of composing little, Satie entered Paris’s second music academy, the Schola Cantorum, as a mature student, where his studies were more successful than those at the Conservatoire. From about 1910, he became the focus of successive groups of young composers attracted by his unconventionality and originality, including the group known as Les Six1. A meeting with Jean Cocteau in 1915 led to the creation of the ballet Parade in 1917 for Serge Diaghilev, with music by Satie, sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine.

Satie’s music is characterized by unresolved chords, sometimes dispensing with bar-lines, as in his Gnossiennes, and his melodies are generally simple and often reflect his love of old church music. He gave some of his later works absurd titles, such as Veritables Preludes flasques (pour un chien) and Sonatine bureaucratique, and most of his works are brief, with the majority being for solo piano.

Never married, Satie lived most of his adult life in a single small room, first in Montmartre and then in Arcueil, a suburb of Paris. He adopted various images over the years, including a period in quasi-priestly dress, another in which he always wore identically colored velvet suits, and is known for his last persona, in neat bourgeois costume, with bowler hat, wing collar, and umbrella. He was a lifelong heavy drinker and died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 59.