Erik Satie

Originally presented at the T.W. Wood gallery and Arts Center Montpelier, VT

Only decades after his death in 1925 was French composer Erik Satie hailed as a genius of contemporary classical music. His work was extremely simple in structure, yet innovative and marked by a characteristic wit. His reliance on unusual harmonic configurations was a reaction against the heavy, symbol-rich music of his era, a time when the works of Romantic European composers like Richard Wagner were still very much in vogue, and the highly decorated Impressionism of his friend, Claude Debussy, was ascendant. Satie left a relatively scarce body of work behind, most of it written for the piano. But his groundbreaking use of bitonal or polytonal elements would become a hallmark of twentieth-century modernist music.

Mentor and collaborator of the likes of Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Serge Diaghilev, Satie’s music transcended the accepted norms of Romanticism and Impressionism of the time and influenced generations of French composers that followed.

A prolific writer and cartoonist, Satie wrote fantastic diaries he titled Memoirs of an Amnesiac and was a regular contributor to such magazines as the Dadaist 351 and the publication that was, and continues to be, the arbiter of contemporary style and taste, Vanity Fair. It is from these sources the text of this WordStage presentation is derived.