My favorite Satie piece is “Vexations” [1], a short clip that the composer ostensibly wished to be played 840 times in a row.
As a little art project, I recently made a version for MS-DOS and AdLib [2] that starts with a piano-like sound and gradually distorts the timbre every repetition by flipping a random bit in the AdLib’s registers.
I never made a recording of it because I was envisioning it as an “if you got to see it in person, cool” type of thing, but I should probably go back and do that
Ian Penman wrote a fantastic biography of Satie, published earlier this year. Worth a read! He was a profoundly strange and fascinating person: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781635902532/erik-satie-three-piec...
Is he remembered for his personality or his music? I'm asking because I find it fascinating how some music from 100 years ago still holds value today.
Certainly both, but in your question, I'm suspecting your unaware of how much of this music you're familiar with it since it lives rent-free in the general zeitgeist. For example, I suspect you'd recognize Satie's work Gymnopedie no. 1[1] and perhaps putting a name to it will give you some appreciation for why his work is valued
Talk about living rent free…the number of modern songs which are (generally obliviously) derivative of Pachelbel's Canon in D is mind boggling, which itself was surely built upon even earlier, similar chord progressions.
Obligatory comedy sketch: https://youtu.be/JdxkVQy7QLM
> I find it fascinating how some music from 100 years ago still holds value today.
Some of the world's most cherished music is much older than that. Is it your general expectation that musical compositions, regardless of merit, will inevitably lose their appeal over time?
Right, and that's kind of the point. A small group still finds immense value in it, but for the majority, the appeal has faded or been replaced by other forms of music. It doesn't mean the compositions aren't brilliant, it just shows how cultural relevance shifts over time (regardless of quality).
Music has an interesting relationship with time and human appreciation. At any particular time, there's a lot of music being produced. It's filtered at the source by things like the Billboard 100 and DJ preference, but a lot of music survives the immediate filter.
Older music is filtered by the brains of the people who experienced it when it was new. A consensus forms on what music was good and should be remembered. There's a nostalgia bump in popularity that lags about 20-30 years behind as middle-aged folk (the people with money and influence) replay the songs from their younger days. That's where "classic rock" and the like come from.
After that, the music is filtered again by people who encounter the previously filtered music for the first time. Music that survives this filter becomes essentially a permanent part of the culture. Here you find pieces like Scott Joplin's The Entertainer and Benny Goodman's version of Sing, Sing, Sing.
So if you're encountering century-plus old music, it's generally the stuff the stuff that our culture has flagged as being the best of its time (by one of several measures, not necessarily the most enjoyable) and still worthy of appreciation. Or it's music nerds doing their thing.
>Is he remembered for his personality or his music?
Both, but mostly for his music. Listen to Gymnopédie No. 1 and Gnossienne No. 1 for good beginner pieces.
He is primarily remembered for his music. Most people know some of his compositions but don't even know who wrote it. Gymnopédie is still used all over the place today in ads, remixes, and everywhere else - but few know who composed it, and even fewer know about his eccentric personality.
But apparently hackernews loves to point out how "weird" he was.
Various musicien like to play his music. Here's Gnossienne N°1 in a Gipsy Jazz style, by the Beltuner group in 2005 https://beltuner.bandcamp.com/track/gnossienne-n-1
I see. Thanks for the info.
I think if you explore the “classical” genre of music you’ll quickly find many works of merit by composers which date back over 100 years
A Strangeloop talk by Mouse Reeve, years ago, looked at the Markovian structure of "Gnossiennes" then made an endless version. A beautiful talk and really cool music website.
Music website: https://gnossiennes.mousereeve.com/ (slightly better on Desktop).
Talk: https://youtu.be/ANYMii3Sypg
Abstract: https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2019/minimalist-piano-forever...
If you like procedurally based music - you should definitely check out CPU Bach, a program written by Sid Meier (the Civ series designer) for the 3DO console back in the 90s.
It doesn't use markov chains (to my knowledge) but can generate some pretty impressive sounding Bach-like preludes / fugues using a weighted rule based approach across notes and melodic phrases.
I love this. Thank you.
Satie's Gymnopedies have been on our household's "calming & focused" playlists for years now. Highly recommend, and I look forward to hearing these new works, too.
Did you perchance find these originally on youtube? They're very popular on their autosuggestions.
They’re hugely famous, I don’t think most people’s first encounter with them would be as YouTube suggestions
Indeed, they feature in a number of media. I think I first heard them in the Mother 3 game!
I think you’re overestimating how much people listen to music from 100 years ago. Youtube is probably hugely responsible for Erik’s modern popularity.
I actually discovered Satie's music by listening to a track that used Gnossienne n°1 as a sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-sS_Ts2Bjc
From there went deep in research on whosampled.com.
That’s not my argument. Even if his music was “absorbed”, it doesn’t mean people know who he is. I’d argue that most people under 30 who know Erik found him through youtube.
If you’re older I can understand why it seems perplexing but it’s true in my experience.
Nope, I listen to a lot of classical music. And a lot I listen through youtube, Satie is just one of the few that I "met" through youtube, the others I know from elsewhere and I purposefully search them like Beethoven, Mozart Bach, Ravel, Xenakis, Bernstein
I think that bubble is called the real world. Most people don’t care for classic music.
They’ve been a bit everywhere for decades I think. Like I think in movies such as The Royal Tenenbaums of Wes Anderson.
I think I heard it more or less since childhood.
There are a lot of interpretations of Satie's work and a random playlist on YouTube may not necessarily get you the best performers, also because not everybody has the same tastes in music.
My favourite interpretation of Satie's is played by Reinbert de Leeuw. He plays very slow, playing just a bit behind the beat, with astonishing precision and expressiveness.
I have three different recordings of Satie's Gymnopedies on CD from many years ago: de Leeuw's, coming in at almost 16 minutes total; a version from 1968 by William Masselos totaling about 9 minutes; and on the extreme end, Klára Körmendi's version totaling less than 7 minutes.
When I used to play piano, I once timed myself playing them to my own preference. As I recall, it was around 11 minutes at the speed that makes sense to me.
Chacun a son gout. (Satie himself claimed to only eat foods that are white, after all.)
He also claimed to eat only fat of dead animals, so yes nothing too peculiar I must say
Yes, I agree. I also like Aki Takahashi.
Actually, my wife discovered them via Calm or Headspace because they were used in something there. We then added them to YT Music playlists.
It got very popular with the raise of lofi. The Gymnopedie samples are everywhere.
I listened to this recording yesterday and thought the pieces were unfamiliar but didn't realize they were newly rediscovered.
The pieces were more conventional than I was expecting. I like the album and the music, it's a different side to Satie more reflective of the era, provides some context and perspective on his works.
I assume these are well-vetted as real discoveries, but can't help but think of "Albinoni's" Adagio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adagio_in_G_minor
Still looking forward to listening!
I always thought furniture music was such a pragmatic description of his work. Every few years I make a half-hearted attempt to learn Gymnopedie 1 on guitar but can never seem to follow through.
Have you tried the Danses de travers? I bet those could sound terrific on guitar.
my go to chill out music for the past 10 years
I highly recommend
Eric Satie's complete piano works on 2 x CD
has all the music from this wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Erik_S...
I tried to play some of these on classical guitar and failed dismally.
Are the new scores available anywhere?
tharaud rules the piano, i like what he did with the goldberg stuff
music leaks from the 20th century, neat
It’s AI
This may come as a shock, but there was no AI in 19th century France.
19th century France is AI generated
Major Hari Seldon vibes
I'm still waiting to hear 4'33" by John Cage and it's allegedly very popular
It's permanently performed everywhere all the time.
You simply have to decide to hear it.
> My favorite Satie piece is “Vexations” [1], a short clip that the composer ostensibly wished to be played 840 times in a row.
Live performances of Vexations are illuminating in their own right.
But as a reminder for those who don't know: from the score it's clear Satie was satirizing the practice of composers taking on the long, boring process of drilling inane counterpoint exercises in the hope of eventually writing "serious" music, only to teach themselves the singular lesson of how to write long, boring phrases of music.
Probably he's also satirizing the arbitrariness of the received wisdom, as evidenced by his surprising voice-leading decisions for the phrase in Vexations. (Digression-- I find the common-practice prohibition on parallel fifths funny given there are near-constant parallel fifths sounding as an accident of the harmonic series, especially prominent in step-wise basslines in the cello or bass part. Did Rameau or anyone every address that? I don't remember...)
That's why parallel fifths are considered a bad thing. They disappear into the rest of the texture and you lose one stream of independent movement.
Counterpoint is like any other musical technique. If you're a hack you can get it "right" and never say anything expressive with it. But if you have a creative musical sensibility it can add interest and complexity that wouldn't be possible otherwise.
> That's why parallel fifths are considered a bad thing. They disappear into the rest of the texture and you lose one stream of independent movement.
An instrument sounding at the partial a compound perfect fifth (fifth plus octave) above another voice's fundamental can certainly disappear into the timbral texture. But that's quite different from an instrument sounding a simple perfect fifth above another instrument.
Check out the famous parallel fifths at the beginning of Rondes printanières from Rite of Spring. That's strings and winds articulating pitches which are a perfect fifth apart. Simple perfect fifths moving in parallel like that in the bass of the orchestra (or, really, in any range of the piano) are conspicuous and stand out.
It's unlikely that parallel fifths were prohibited during common practice period both because compound ones would accidentally blend into the sounding harmonic series of the other voice, and because simple ones stick out when compared to thirds or sixths.
Moreover, parallel fifths don't stick out any more than, say, parallel fourths. But parallel fourths had long been standardized in practice and theory as part of fauxbourdon.
I can just imagine Satie playing fauxbourdon with fifths-- because, why not?-- and a teacher telling him it's wrong and therefore not to do it. And then we get Vexations, and Debussy, Mahler, Ravel, Polenc, Stravinsky and many others thumbing their noses at the prohibition, creating a new allowance for them that persists into modern film scores even without the initial irony of those composers.
Kinda reminds me of Industry [0] by Michael Gordon.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gujb-wyTy5s
Please make that recording!