The Umbrella Room: About Erik Satie

“I have never written a note I didn't mean.”
(Erik Satie)

 

Erik Satie

Sometimes it's unsettling to read the biographies of the artists we love.

Let's take Erik Satie.

Absolutely bizarre character. Born on 17 May 1866 in the town of Honfleur in France to a Scottish mother and a Norman father, Satie moved with his family to Paris at the age of four. Then his mother died and he and his younger brother returned to his hometown in 1872.

He returned to Paris six years later, to live with his father who had remarried to a piano teacher – she was the one who gave him the first lessons when he was twelve.

He tried to enter the conservatory but was rejected after two years because he was lacking in talent according to the professors. In 1885 he was readmitted but still considered a poor value student.

So he tries the army at 19, but that doesn't seem to be the right direction either. He will deliberately be reformed.

What else can I say? He lived in an apartment he called “the Wardrobe” with only two rooms, one of which was always locked and contained his collection of umbrellas, loved to the point of never being used.

He founded a personal religion of which he was the only adept.

He was a friend of the great poets of the time, such as Mallarmè, Verlaine, and Cocteau.

He was the first to use the “prepared piano” technique, placing objects in the soundboard of the piano: a technique that will become commonplace in “contemporary concrete music”.

His scores were illegible and without indications.

Sitting in the clubs drinking with his friends, he loved to repeat that the ideal of his music was that of “furniture music”. It was he who created this term that we still use today, to describe a certain type of soft, backbone music.

It seems that one day Satie, sitting at a cafe, said to his friend Fernand Léger:

“You know, we should create furniture music, that is music that is part of the noises of the environment in which it is broadcast, that takes it into account. It should be melodious, so as to cover the metallic sound of knives and forks without completely canceling it, without imposing itself too much. It would fill the sometimes embarrassing silences of the diners. It would spare the usual exchange of platitudes. Furthermore, it would neutralize the street noises that indiscreetly penetrate from the outside.”

Reading “en passant” (as the French say) the life of this little man, who died of cirrhosis of the liver in Paris in July 1925, makes us think who knows what funny music he could create.

I don't know how many of you who are reading have ever heard his three Gymnopédies and the six Gnossiennes.

The Gymnopédies, composed in 1888, are among his most famous works, but I prefer the first three Gnossiennes.

He was the one who coined this term, to call this music composed between 1889 and 1897. It seems that Gnossienne derives from the word gnosis, which is not too surprising given Satie's involvement in Gnostic sects and movements in the period in which he began to compose these songs. Some sources, however, assert that the title derives from the famous Cretan palace of Knossos, or “Gnossus”, and that the compositions are therefore to be connected to the myth of Theseus, Arianne, and the Minotaur.

That is the myth of the Labyrinth.

I already wrote about Glenn Gould's music and how much the piano has always fascinated me. I'm not the only one who thinks this is the King of musical instruments. Perfect and complete.

It has something very mysterious about the sound it makes as if the chords are playing directly into the synapses of the brain.

Listening to the first Gnossienne for the first time, I think is one of the strongest emotional experiences in music.

It is like a trap – a labyrinth in fact – from which it is impossible to escape.

It's incredible how the one who aspired to make furniture music and lived in a “Wardrobe” collecting umbrellas never used, could conceive something so profoundly touching and sublime.

A piece of music that is still played with every instrument and in a thousand interpretations, which remains so mysterious.

To think that Satie, at the time, was called the “tapeur à gages”, a salaried strummer, because he had no academic education, essentially self-taught.

But when these notes start everything stops, it seems to be catapulted into a desert land, whose high chords leave a strange melancholy, a sense of loneliness, a force of gravity that makes us sit on the ground, embrace our knees and suffer its charm to tears.

I write about what I love, and I think it is a splendid gift to make this music known to those who have never listened to it.

It is also a way to reflect on our lives, on the bizarre people we meet on the street, perhaps smiling mockingly at the oddities and tics of men and women, as if they were production errors of the great factory of our lives.

Then maybe it's enough to get to know them better to be overwhelmed by the wonder, of how much beauty each of us hides in our intimate, without anyone ever taking care of it.

 

Just like the umbrella room in Satie's house.

Each of us, I'm sure, hides one.

 

I recommend listening to one of the most famous performances by the Italian pianist Aldo Ciccolini:

Erik Satie Gnossienne n° 1:

Gnossienne n° 2:

Gnossienne n° 3:

• Wishlist 
• The Whispers of Glenn Gould 

Italian version