Erik Satie - composer

Erik Satie (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, he influenced Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy and Francis Poulenc, and he is regarded as an influence on more recent composers such as John Cage and John Adams. His harmony is often characterized by unresolved chords, and he sometimes dispensed with bar lines, as in his Gnossiennes. His melodies are generally simple and often reflect his interest in old church music. He gave some of his later works deliberately absurd titles, including Véritables Préludes flasques (pour un chien) (True Flabby Preludes (for a Dog), 1912), Croquis et agaceries d'un gros bonhomme en bois (Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Man, 1913), and Sonatine bureaucratique (Bureaucratic Sonatina, 1917). Most of his works are brief, and the majority are for solo piano. Exceptions include his “symphonic drama” Socrate (1919) and the two late ballets Mercure and Relâche (1924).

Satie never married, and for most of his adult life his home was a single small room, first in Montmartre and, from 1898 until his death, in Arcueil, a suburb of Paris. Over the years, he adopted various images, including a period in quasi-priestly dress and another during which he always wore velvet suits of the same color. He is known for his final persona, in neat bourgeois clothing with a bowler hat, wing collar and umbrella. A lifelong heavy drinker, he died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 59.