How I Was Discovered by Erik Satie

Birthday Salute to The Velvet Gentleman

Erik Satie GNOSSEINNES #1: The Tears of a Velvet Clown

"All this happened to me because of music."--Erik Satie

Odd, funny, and romantic things happen when you tune into the world of The Velvet Gentleman, Erik Satie (1866-1925). Rather than mull the debate over whether he was a prophet or leg-puller, it’s better to just lay back and enjoy the pragmatic surrealism in the Satie sonique, where lovely and mysterious messages rise from the mundane "readymades" of your life. Don't be surprised if people start to read your thoughts, if only the good ones.

It has happened to me around the world, where people I barely knew would hand me presents of music, and the music happened to be Satie, like they already knew it was for me.

In 1970, in Williamsport (Pennsylvania), I was left to my own devices at a cousin's house. On his eight-track tape player was the new (1969) BLOOD SWEAT & TEARS album with Spinning Wheel and their fine rendition of Satie's best-known work,Gymnopedies #1,  from Trios Gymnopedies. Gymnopedies #1 has been interpreted by Steve Hackett, Janet Jackson, Gary Numan, not to mention numerous jazz groups and film scorers. My cousin, who'd gone off partying, did me a favor.

"Satie indicates a new, untouched road in which each is free to step and leave his footprints as he pleases."--Jean Cocteau

Trios Gymnopedies flowed with the fountainhead of the late Sixties and early Seventies, when young artists were mining past obscurities to create future treasures. I joined a league of sprites dressed in multi-generational cast-offs as we studied Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin films on college campuses, then the art of Bosch, Dali, and Escher on new album covers. The songs of David Bowie and Genesis songs segued with the Camarati Ensemble "electronic chamber Satie" records on "hip FM radio." Art and time were in a blender, producing wondrous frappes.

The Velvet Enigma of Satie spoke through artists such as The Doors, Brian Eno, and Frank Zappa. Satie's eccentric song title-ing habits and performance suggestions foretold Eno's "Oblique Strategies" and Zappa's freewheeling orchestrations. Where some composers would leave performance instructions like allegro con moto, Satie would suggest playing "like a nightingale with a toothache."

Satie was a brilliant musician who made elaborate jokes about not being a musician. He never wrote for large orchestras (at a time when most “serious composers” were expected to), and he was an academy misfit; a gadfly to critics and traditionalists, and his notoriety wavered. Yet he was always respected by esteemed composers: Ravel, Stravinsky, Milhaud, Poulenc, and Debussy (a close friend of Satie). He wrote in multiple genres (cabaret, chamber, ragtime, tango) and is a key figure of Twentieth Century Avant-Garde--a precursor of ambient music, atonalism, conceptual art, Dada-ism, impressionism, minimalism, and neo-classicism. Darius Milhaud said that Satie, within his body of work, prophesied every major movement in music for the next 50 years beyond his life.

"He was a knowing old card…intelligently mischievous. I liked him from the start."--Igor Stravinsky

Of Satie's prophecies, he was one of a few (with Percy Grainger) who said that the ability to mechanically reproduce music would change the craft of songwriting—this, as Thomas Edison's phonograph, invented in 1887, was still a babe of science. Satie believed that the emotional and the mechanical were equally important to creativity. He practiced reductionism as a countermand to bloated, overdressed composition. Years passed, and the "three-minute pop song" accommodated the three-minute long 78 r.p.m record. Music today is rarely made without some bridge with technology or computers (Satie was also one of the first to write sound effects into his scores).

"Have you ever tried to clean sounds? It is a dirty process."--Satie

In the 1924 surrealist film ENTR'ACTE, Satie was one of the first musicians to cross a line and "play himself" onscreen (sixty years before The Beatles and The Monkees did the same) As a working partner with Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso, and a contemporary of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Satie was a pioneer of taking music into multi-media formats.

Sate was an ardent defender and promoter of artists scorned by the old guard. He was an "encouragement engine" to young composers and an elder mascot to "Les Six," an important group of fledgling, Twentieth Century French composers. In July 1925, Yves Dautun, a twenty-something musician who barely knew Satie, wrote a newspaper eulogy:

"Was he touched by the grace of God?...He was a very unassuming man, very bizarre, very sensitive, very amusing, very kind, who lay dying for four months under our grieved eyes, without ever quite ceasing to smile."

For twenty-seven years, Satie kept an apartment in the drab Parisian suburb of Arcueil. Though he was an outgoing person with many friends, Satie never invited anyone inside his apartment. After his death, friends entered the place, opening a door to strange revelation.

Satie’s friends walked into a dark dustbowl with ragged curtains. They could not reconcile this with the immaculately groomed and clean Satie they knew. His piano was covered in cobwebs; broken pedals held with rope. Did this explain why he did most of his composing in public cafes with nice pianos?

Also found were:

1. Dozens of unheard compositions stuffed in clothes pockets, furniture and behind the piano.

2. Rows of unused handkerchiefs and umbrellas. Did this explain the unswerving answer given to friends who asked Satie what he'd like for his birthday? "I always wanted a handkerchief and an umbrella," he’d say.

3. All seven of Satie's velvet suits, one for each day of the week, worn during the Velvet Gentleman phase of his youth.

4. His walking stick, which Satie, capable of tantrums and not shy of fighting, used as a club.

5. Hammers, which Satie carried around as a defense against muggers around Arcuiel.

6. Countless drawings of medieval buildings. Did this explain the odd, anonymous newspaper ads promoting "castles of iron?"

Most telling, they found the portrait of Satie by actress/artist Suzanne Valadon, along with every letter and drawing she gave him. She was the only woman Satie proposed to, and the only intimate relationship of his life. Their love story lasted just six months in 1893, becoming a theme of plays and modern myth.

The Valadon Affair was an interlude during Satie's first "spiritual phase," when he was taken with "The Rosy Cross" (Rosicrucianism). He believed that an "ignorance of God" lowers human comprehension of aesthetics; to not appreciate Creation is to be immoral. He published his music in threes to reflect the Holy Trinity.

From this phase came Gnosseinnes #1 (1890), a short, haunting and beautiful piece that is comical, simple, soaring and melancholy all at once. In 2006, in the film, THE PAINTED VEIL, it was motif for Naomi Watts, playing the character Kitty Garston. The song is truly hers if you know the story of Kitty’s transformation from a self-absorbed party girl into an enriched woman.

During the 1890s, Greek art was fashionable with the French. Like Trios Gymnopedies, Gnosseinnes #1 is an abstraction on Greek history. The Knossos in Crete was the scene of Ariadne and the Minotaur. The song could have been inspired by a Grecian vase depicting young girls dancing; others say it is drawn from the word "Gnostic" (Satie never said). Written in the Lydian scale, it has a Mediterranean flavor with an oriental overtone. It is not hard to imagine a hologram of Greek girls spinning in the air.

The melody aches with laughter and tears. It is immediately gripping; lyrical with no words, piercing time, reaching back to the sights, smells and even the tactile senses of what was going on in life. Was it that really that much different from now?

The playing instructions for Gnosseinnes #1 are "open your head" and "with astonishment." It was written without bar lines or time signature. There is no "one way" to play it. Pianist Aldo Ciccolini recorded it fast, steady and muscular, while Pascal Roge and Angela Brownridge (my favorite) recorded it softly with a lithe, floating rhythm. In 2011, I adapted the melody and chords to a new song (In Your Hands) with a rock-tango beat.

Said to be Satie's most popular piano work, Gnosseinnes #1 is easy to play, making it that much easier to read the mind of a Velvet Gentleman.

"In art there must be no form of slavery. I have always tried to throw off my followers and keep them guessing…This is the only way for an artist to avoid becoming a chef d'ecole…a pundit."--Satie

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