Erik Satie – composer (b. 17 May 1866 – d. 1 July 1925)
was a French composer and pianist. The son of a French father and a British mother, he studied at the Paris Conservatoire but was undistinguished there and did not obtain a diploma. During the 1880s, he worked as a pianist in the café-cabarets of Montmartre, Paris, while beginning to compose works, mostly for solo piano, including his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes. He also composed music for a Rosicrucian sect to which he was briefly attached.
After a period of limited compositional activity, Satie entered Paris's second music academy, the Schola Cantorum, as a mature student. His studies there were more successful than those at the Conservatoire. From around 1910, he became the focus of successive groups of young composers drawn to his unconventionality and originality. Among them was the group known as Les Six. A meeting with Jean Cocteau in 1915 led to the creation of the ballet Parade (1917) for Sergei Diaghilev, with music by Satie, sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine.
Satie's example helped guide a new generation of French composers away from post-Wagnerian Impressionism towards a sparer and more concise style. During his lifetime,...
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