May 17th marked the 140th anniversary of Erik Satie's birth. So, what comes to my mind when I think of his music? Wit. Humor. Precision. Squirrels climbing up my leg. Be patient, I’ll get back to that. Now, I’ve never made it a personal tradition to celebrate any remembrance of the artists and thinkers (what a dreadfully generic term) that I admire, but I’ve always had an affinity for Satie, his music and his style.
Every musician who's worth a damn is familiar with his name, and I can safely say that nearly everyone else has at least heard his music at some point another, whether they know it or not. Have you ever seen any of these films: About Schmidt, Chocolat, Being There, Another Woman, The Royal Tenenbaums? No? My Dinner with Andre, True Romance, Badlands, Henry and June, What Lies Beneath? Ok, ever been in a new age store, or, even more disappointing, in an elevator? Than you’ve heard a piece by Satie. And I say “a piece” because out of Satie’s whole repertoire, only a handful will ever be heard wafting from a public speaker. In fact, in all of the films I mentioned, the same four pieces were used.
Satie, like all artists, has his detractors. Some feel his music is trite; that there is good reason that it translates as well as it does to the world of muzak. Many point to the brevity of his pieces, many of which are short by today’s pop standards, as a sign of laziness, insinuating that his avoidance of intricate exposition and development was not so much a stylistic choice as it was a lack of skill. Well, the majority of his compositions are short, but it’s their compact nature, the tightness of the musical ideas, that gives them their (much beloved) ephemeral quality. Far from being terse musical non-sequiturs, Satie’s compositions are often quite dense, and are certainly meticulously plotted.
Some critics have expressed the opinion that Satie, whose life and music were loaded with idiosyncrasies (his tiny flat was crammed with more than 100 umbrellas when he died), was more a performer than a composer; sort of proto-performance artist, which, to a point, may bear some truth, but I never get the impression from the music he wrote that it was just a sideline. Unfortunately, I have found that reliable, engaging information on Satie and his music is sparse, especially on the web. In hardcopy, I do highly recommend Roger Shattuck's "The Banquet Years", an excellent, and very entertaining, study of the nascent avant-garde in France, circa 1885-1914.
Oh, yes, about the squirrel. I was working on a very small short film with a friend of mine, set to the tune of Satie’s Je te veux. We were shooting in Boston’s Public Gardens, when a rather well fed grey squirrel climbed up my leg. He wasn’t skittish, and it didn’t appear that he had mistaken me for a tree. He simply climbed up and stared at me for what felt like a rather long minute or so, and then jumped off and ran away. What he was trying to tell me I’ll never know.
It is quite likely that my posts will be few in the next couple of weeks, as I'll be moving literally across the country to take a new job. So, I'll leave you with some diverse links and recommendations:
Scenes from 