# TC Listening Club Part 11: Relache (Satie)



## crmoorhead (Apr 6, 2011)

PURCHASE OPTIONS

Here are two available purchasing options. Any additions to this list welcome:

Satie: Orchestral Works (Nancy Symphony Orch., Kaltenbach) (Naxos)
Satie: Ballets, Piano Works and Rarities (Orch. Du Societe du Conservatoire, Auriacombe) (EMI)

YouTube LINKS

YouTube links for those who require them:





 (Nancy Symphony Orch., Kaltenbach)




 (Part 1) (Orch. du Capitolede Toulouse, Plasson)




 (Part 2) (Orch. du Capitolede Toulouse, Plasson)

You can watch the accompanying Dadaist film for the Entr'Acte here, if you are so inclined:





 (Sauget)

There is also a performance of the Entr'Acte on piano here:






OTHER INFORMATION

The following taken from the All Music Guide via classicalarchives.com:

Erik Satie is often attributed with anticipating many, if not most of the major movements in French art in during the early decades of the twentieth century, including Cubism, Surrealism, and Dadaism. Relache, a ballet, is thought by some musicologists, Satie scholar Alan Gillmor among them, to be an early Dadaist work, predating Dadaism by a good ten years. The work was conceived and created in collaboration with the poet and painter Francis Picabia, and theatre and ballet impresario Rolf de Mare. Picabia and Satie were well-met as collaborators; both were unconventional and iconoclastic, with a flair for the irreverent and a taste for controversy. The ballet was intended to rail against convention, and to provoke. The title alone, a term which may mean "No Performance," or "Theatre Closed," already hinted at the ballet's connections with Dadaism, and its nontraditional (anti-traditional) nature.

Relache was Satie's last work. It is a ballet in two acts, with a film, Entr'acte, intended to be shown after the overture and then again between acts. Satie also provided the music for Entr'acte. Shot by film critic Rene Clair, the experimental film is full of humorous, surrealistic images, and outrageous scenes. Filmed in Paris, Entr'acte includes scenes in which a ballerina with a beard and moustache dances, a hunter shoots a large egg with a shotgun, only to be shot in turn by Picabia, and a mock funeral procession with a camel-drawn hearse causes havoc in the streets. The music for the film, which Robert Orledge describes as "revolutionary," consists of yet another example of Satie's forward-looking style. The score for Entr'acte includes ad lib. repetitions of discrete, "self-contained segments," perhaps an early manifestation of indeterminant music. It is also an excellent early example of film music, as the different segments of the music reflect and support, as Gillmor notes, "the rhythm of the action," serving as "a kind of neutral rhythmic counterpoint to the visual action." The film score consists largely of juxtaposed units of ostinati, and is scored for small orchestra.

Satie referred to Relache, as a pornographic or obscene ballet, and indeed, some of the staging, which included large silver breasts with light bulb nipples along with a coterie of half-naked dancers, certainly supports this designation. The work is essentially plotless, with a central female character dancing with changing numbers of male characters-including a paraplegic in a wheelchair-all of whom wander in and out of the audience while images are projected onto a screen, balloons are released, and clothes are removed. Throughout the ballet, a man dressed as a fireman wanders about on the stage, passing water from on bucket to another. Musically, the ballet proved shocking to audiences and critics, perhaps even more so than the provocative staging and choreography, but, this kind of music was nothing new to Satie. Most of the music for Relache was adapted from popular, generally bawdy tunes, including a number of very raunchy army songs. While the ballet seems by all accounts to have been a nonsensical, fragmented spectacle, the music is much more unified and symmetrical, using reoccurring motives which are overlapped, transformed, and recontextualixed to connect the twenty-two numbers of the work. As expected, the work provoked scandal, and was only performed about a dozen times. It was despised by critics, who attacked the stupidity of the staging, and the paucity of the score.


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## crmoorhead (Apr 6, 2011)

UPCOMING

The schedule for the next four Listening Club sessions will be:

PART 12: Symphony No. 4 (Bax) chosen by maestro267 and starting 28/08/12
PART 13: Symphony No. 5 (Sibelius) chosen by Sonata and starting 04/09/12
PART 14: Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings (Britten) chosen by Petwhac and starting 11/09/12
PART 15: Das Lied von der Erde (Mahler) chosen by Stlukesguildohio and starting 18/09/12

OTHER THREADS

You can still participate in past Listening Club threads here:

http://www.talkclassical.com/19793-tc-listening-club-week.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/19883-tc-listening-club-week.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/19986-tc-listening-club-part.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/20078-tc-listening-club-part.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/20189-tc-listening-club-part.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/20318-tc-listening-club-part.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/20413-tc-listening-club-part.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/20541-tc-listening-club-part.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/20697-tc-listening-club-part.html
http://www.talkclassical.com/20858-tc-listening-club-part.html

NOMINATIONS

To sign up and nominate pieces for listening, use the following thread or PM crmoorhead.

http://www.talkclassical.com/19752-listening-club.html

If a member does not nominate a piece before the deadline in the schedule, you will lose your turn and a piece will be selected at random from the list of pieces nominated by other members. Nominations must be available on YouTube.


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## cwarchc (Apr 28, 2012)

Hmm no takers upto now?
Not his "normal" fair. If anything could be classed as normal for Satie:
It was one of his last pieces, performed in the year before his death
If you search out the film Entra'cte you can see him performing.
It's not what he became known for
However was it ahead of it's time, or just a waste of time?
I know my thoughts on it
It's true Dadism, perhaps in it's last gasps, but certainly different


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## crmoorhead (Apr 6, 2011)

I have had an interest in the Dadaist movement for some time now (I especially like the works of Max Ernst), so I was immediately intrigued by this suggestion for the listening club. To be quite honest, however, I really didn't know that Satie composed anything but piano music. Oh well. 

I have listened to the piece only once through so far, but will listen again and watch the video in full later (what a bizarre collection of images!). This piece should obviously be taken as tongue in cheek - the choice of title, "Relache/Show Cancelled", says it all - so it is not really useful to analyse the music too much. The musical phrases are catchy, but repetitive, although I suspect that is the point. It fits the Dada program to a tee. This is a little slice of Paris in the 1920s, a bit of post-War radicalism. One can understand why the critics slated it, but who wants to listen to the critics? Thanks for the introduction!


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## cwarchc (Apr 28, 2012)

Oh well 
Nobody likes my selection 
You have to be open to different things
Satie himself walked through the audience asking people what they thought of the music?
In my opinion, I think he was taking the pxxx out of the music industry at the time


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## Cnote11 (Jul 17, 2010)

Seeing as Satie is my favorite... and I happen to have this and I would listen to it soon anyway, I find this to be a extraordinary pick  Probably the best one yet.


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## SimonNZ (Jul 12, 2012)

cwarchc said:


> Oh well
> Nobody likes my selection
> You have to be open to different things
> Satie himself walked through the audience asking people what they thought of the music?
> In my opinion, I think he was taking the pxxx out of the music industry at the time


I'm very grateful to be made aware of (and made able to watch) an early and brilliant Rene Clair film I haven't seen or heard of before - doubly so considering the context and the other art forms it connects to.

I know very little about Satie, he's someone I'm fascinated by from a distance but have never taken the time to get to know. The ballet music sounded somewhat less eccentric than the few scattered works I know slightly (Socrate, for example). How typical is this work of his general style? Would someone very familiar with Satie, but hearing this for the first time pick it as him immediately? I'm genuinely interested to learn what it is about this work that you love.

Also: is there footage of the ballet being danced in any production?


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## Sonata (Aug 7, 2010)

Honestly can't say I have an interest in the visual aspect of this production but it certainly sounds fascinating. I have not heard any Satie. I plan to get to listening to this within a week or so. Definitely will be good to expand my listening horizons.


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