Sound and Music

Erik Satie emerged every morning from his tiny rented room in Arceuil, on the outskirts of Paris, dressed exquisitely in a velvet suit of which he owned an identical dozen, bought in the early 1890s with an inheritance. His dapper appearance was matched in his correspondence – even the most trivial note written in flawless copperplate, and in his painstaking music notation.

When, after his death, Satie’s room was entered by his brother and small group of friends, including the composer Darius Milhaud, no-one but Satie had entered the room for more than twenty years – not even the ‘large and splendid concierge’. Milhaud recalled ‘what a shock we had on opening the door!’ The room inside was horrific: ‘an unbelievable slum’, ‘an unforgettable rubbish heap’. There was hoarded newspaper, unopened parcels, dust, grease and – according to Robert Caby ‘numerous lumps of excrement, hardened and blackened with age, which I hastily stuffed into newspapers so that Satie’s brother shouldn’t see them.'

This is where biographical information becomes troublesome. The velvet suit, the exquisite handwriting - these seem to fit with the music. The filthy room, unopened piano, dust and excrement - does not. But that is the room, whether we like it or not, in which Satie wrote Parade, Relâche, Socrate, and from which he emerged every day looking ‘rather like a model civil servant’.

Satie's gift was more modest than he was, particularly when compared with contemporaries like Fauré and Debussy. Jane Austen described her talent as ‘the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour’, and could apply equally to Satie. He had a restricted range, but one uniquely his. And amongst the ivory-polishers are many important composers: Chopin, Webern, Reich, Nancarrow. Even Stravinsky, the towering genius of twentieth century music, overcame his deficiencies as melodist by stealing tunes and bringing rhythm to the forefront.

Satie's music has the same aloof exterior and unknown interior as Satie the man. Who can say what led him into the lifestyle he adopted, or what his state of mind was. But I see Satie as a heroic, not a tragic, figure. Like Oscar Wilde, his genius was in his life as much as his art. He would don character of the boastful, irascible composer as he donned his velvet suit in the morning, before spending his days touring the bars of Paris. The poverty of his bedroom was irrelevant to his public life as the view of the unpainted back of a stage set from the wings is to the theatre-goer.

Those who entered Satie's room after his death felt as if they had ‘penetrated his brain’, but if you dissect a dead brain it does not give many clues to the character of the person when alive. Did Satie's lifestyle shape his music, or the other way round? Who knows. Certainly both are obsessive, eccentric, perplexing, but looking for meaning is probably the surest way not to find it.

Satie died at the age of 59 in a nursing home, of cirrhosis of the liver, having spent his last few days drinking champaqne and rejecting visitors as his strength gradually diminished. His last words were 'Ah! The cows…'