Musicians - Erik Satie

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	Musicians - Erik Satie

Eric Alfred Leslie Satie (Honfleur, 17 May 1866 – Paris, 1 July 1925) was a French composer and pianist.

Satie also introduced himself as a "gymnopedist" (in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopédies). He was a writer of articles for several periodicals, and referred to himself as a "phonometrograph" or "phonometrician". Satie can be seen as a serial precursor, streets ahead of many 20th century avant-garde artistic ideas, see below.

He is best known as Erik Satie (he exchanged, from his first composition in 1884, the 'c' at the end of his first name for a 'k'). Although in later life he prided himself on always publishing his work under his own name, there appears to have been a brief period in the late 1880s in which he published articles under the pseudonym ‘Virginie Lebeau’.

Life and work

From Normandy to Montmartre

Erik Satie's youth was spent alternating between living in Honfleur, Basse-Normandie, and Paris. When he was four years old, his family moved to Paris, his father (Alfred), having been offered a translator's job in the capital. After his mother (born Jane Leslie Anton) died in 1872, he was sent, together with his younger brother Conrad, back to Honfleur, to live with his paternal grandparents. There he received his first music lessons from a local organist. When his grandmother died in 1878, the two brothers were reunited in Paris with their father, who remarried (a piano teacher) shortly afterwards. From the early 1880s onwards, Alfred Satie started publishing salon compositions (by his new wife and himself, among others).

In 1879 Satie entered the Paris Conservatoire, where he was soon labelled untalented by his teachers. After being sent home for two and a half years, he was re-accepted in the Conservatoire at the end of 1885 — but was unable to make a much more favourable impression on his teachers than he had before, so he finally resolved to take up military service a year later. This didn't last very long; within a few weeks he tried to leave the army through a trick, which eventually succeeded.

In 1887 he left home to take lodgings in Montmartre. By this time he had started what was to be a long-lived friendship with the romantic poet Patrice Contamine, and had had his first compositions published by his father. He soon integrated with the artistic clientèle of the Le Chat Noir Café-cabaret, and started publishing his Gymnopédies. Publication of compositions in the same vein (Ogives, Gnossiennes, etc.) followed. In the same period he got to know Claude Debussy. He moved to a smaller room, still in Montmartre (rue Cortot N° 6), in 1890. By 1891 he was the official composer and chapel-master of the Rosicrucian "Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique, du Temple et du Graal", led by Sâr Joséphin Péladan, which led to compositions such as Salut Drapeau!, Le Fils des étoiles, and the Sonneries de la Rose+Croix.

By mid-1892 he had composed the first pieces in a compositional system of his own making (Fête donnée par des Chevaliers Normands en l'Honneur d'une jeune Demoiselle), had provided incidental music to a chivalric esoteric play (two Préludes du Nazaréen), had had his first hoax published (announcing the premiere of Le Bâtard de Tristan, an anti-Wagnerian opera he probably never composed), and had broken with Péladan, starting that autumn with the Uspud project, a "Christian Ballet", in collaboration with Contamine de Latour. While the comrades from both the Chat Noir and Miguel Utrillo's Auberge du Clou sympathised, a promotional brochure was produced for the project, which reads as a pamphlet for a new esoteric sect.

Satie and Suzanne Valadon, an artist, and long-time friend of Miguel Utrillo, started an affair early in 1893. Soon Valadon moved to a room next to Satie's at the Rue Cortot. Satie became obsessed with her, calling her his Biqui, and writing impassioned notes about "her whole being, lovely eyes, gentle hands, and tiny feet". Valadon painted Satie's portrait and gave it to him, but after six months she moved on, leaving Satie broken-hearted. During their relationship Satie had composed the Danses Gothiques as a kind of prayer to restore peace of mind. Apparently, this would remain the only relationship Satie ever had.

In the same year he met the young Maurice Ravel for the first time, Satie's style emerging in the first compositions of the youngster. One of Satie's own compositions of that period, the Vexations, was to remain undisclosed until after his death. By the end of the year he had founded the Eglise Métropolitaine d'Art de Jésus Conducteur (the Metropolitan Church of Art of the Leading Christ). As its only member, in the role of "Parcier et Maître de Chapelle" he started to compose a Grande Messe (later to become known as the Messe des Pauvres), and wrote a flood of letters, articles and pamphlets showing off his self-assuredness in religious and artistic matters. To give an example: he applied for membership of the Académie Française twice, leaving no doubt in the application letter that the board of that organisation (presided by Camille Saint-Saëns) as much as owed him such membership. Such proceedings without doubt rather helped to wreck his popularity in the cultural establishment. In 1895 he inherited some money, allowing him to have some more of his writings printed, and to change from wearing a priest-like habit to being the "Velvet Gentleman".

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