# Historical context of Erik Satie's piano works



## pianolearnerstride (Dec 17, 2014)

I really enjoy Erik Satie's work. But I'm wondering if his work falls within some kind of historical context (romanticism->impressionism->modernism). The other impressionist composers wrote in traditional forms. But Satie's work seems like its own thing...


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Satie (1866 - 1925) His first music lessons, age six, were with an organist. His mother died that year, and his father later remarried piano teacher when Satie was 12 years old. With his stepmother, he continued with music. She wrote salon music, the lighter more popular fare, and some of what Satie composed then was in collaboration with her, some of these published in the early 1880's. As a young adult, he moved to the Montmartre quartier (Paris) and continued to compose 'in his own way.' Later in his life, he played in dance halls, and improvised dance numbers, waltzes, etc.

He did not get a more formal 'classical' training until he attended the Paris Conservatory in 1879, in his mid to late teens (an unusually late start for performing and composing, where many have an earlier preliminary training in prep for the later higher level conservatory studies) where he was quickly pronounced by his teachers as an inept and untalented musician and a very lazy pupil 

He was a Dada-ist, aligned with those artists who were the precursor to surrealism, a 'convert' to the Rosicrucians, a Catholic mystic cult, (the Rosicrucian Order "Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique, du Temple et du Graal") for whom he was their official composer and chapel-master.

In 1888, in a private edition made available to a few friends, he published his Gymnopedies Nos. 1 and 3.

Those Gymnopedies were composed and published but five years after the death of Wagner, when almost all of Europe and Eastern Europe were in complete thrall and slaves to the musical fashion of the Germanic style a la Wagner.

It is the combination then of 'light' salon music, music hall, popular music, the Dadaism, the Rosicrucians, an innate eccentricity and it seems a complete lack of interest in, or ignoring, the more standard classical repertoire and standard classical theory, which are all together a very different set of spheres of influence than most going into classical had, and are all part of 'where he came from.'

Without knowing some of that background, at the height of the wave of post-Wagnerism raging across Europe, it is no wonder that Satie would appear to have 'come out of nowhere' with a completely different approach to music compared to much of the mainstream classical music at the time.

_*'Placement.'* Tricky_ He is somewhat in this relative position to earliest modernism / impressionism as the painter Camille Pizarro is considered the precursor / granddaddy to the later French Impressionist painters.

With Satie, there is a bit of a similar relation from him to then Debussy, while Debussy was actually born a few years earlier. They knew each other, and each others' work, and each admired the other. *Satie is also generally known and thought of as a "Dadaist" composer,* a pretty singular category nearly his own

But it was Debussy who had cemented his reputation in place as the first truly modern composer with the premiere of his _Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune_ in 1894, that scandal earlier than the debut of Satie's strange and new Gymnopedies of 1888.

P.s. I had to remind myself of much here, especially the dates, and some of the above is pretty much paraphrased from the Wiki Article, which has the goods but does not draw much of any conclusion or mention 'what else so other was going on all about Satie.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Satie


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## pianolearnerstride (Dec 17, 2014)

Wow, great post! Thanks PetrB.

Just curious... what other composers seemingly came out of nowhere like Satie... ie: ignoring past musical developments and doing his/her own thing... perhaps due to lack of adequate musical education.


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