Erik Satie PDF

Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature
Je me dédie cette œuvre. E.S.

[I dedicate this work to myself. E.S.]
Erik Satie: dedication of Prélude de la Porte héroïque du ciel (1894)
Erik Satie: Music, Art
and Literature
Edited by
Caroline Potter
Kingston University, UK
© Caroline Potter 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Caroline Potter has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the editor of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Erik Satie : music, art and literature. – (Music and literature)
1. Satie, Erik, 1866–1925 – Criticism and interpretation.
2. Satie, Erik, 1866–1925 – Knowledge – Art. 3. Satie,
Erik, 1866–1925 – Knowledge – Literature. 4. Satie, Erik,
1866–1925 – Friends and associates. 5. Music and
literature – France – History – 19th century. 6. Art and
music – France – History – 19th century. 7. Music and
literature – France – History – 20th century. 8. Art and
music – France – History – 20th century.
I. Series II. Potter, Caroline.
780.9'2-dc23
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Erik Satie : music, art and literature / edited by Caroline Potter.
pages cm. – (Music and literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-3421-4 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-4094-3422-1 (ebook) –
ISBN 978-1-4724-0277-6 (epub) 1. Satie, Erik, 1866–1925 – Criticism and interpretation.
I. Potter, Caroline, editor.
ML410.S196E72 2013
780.92–dc23
2012049940
ISBN 9781409434214 (hbk)
ISBN 9781409434221 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN 9781472402776 (ebk – ePUB)
V
Contents
List of Figures vii

List of Musical Examples ix
Notes on Contributors xi
Preface and Acknowledgements xiii
1 Satie’s Personal and Musical Logic 1

Robert Orledge
2 Satie and the Meaning of the Comic 19

Ann-Marie Hanlon
3 Satie’s Rose-Croix Piano Works 49

Grace Wai Kwan Gates
4 Satie as Poet, Playwright and Composer 67

Caroline Potter
5 ‘The Only Musician with Eyes’: Erik Satie and Visual Art 85
Simon Shaw-Miller
6 Exploring Interart Dialogue in Erik Satie’s Sports et

divertissements (1914/1922) 115
Helen Julia Minors
7 Parade: ballet réaliste137

Christine Reynolds
8 Collaborative Works in Satie’s Last Years 161

Pietro Dossena
9 History, Homeopathy and the Spiritual Impulse in the Post-war

Reception of Satie: Cage, Higgins, Beuys 183
Matthew Mendez
vi Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature
10 After Satie: Howard Skempton in Conversation

with Caroline Potter 229
Appendix: Chronological Catalogue of Satie’s Compositions and

Research Guide to the Manuscripts 243
Robert Orledge
Select Bibliography 325

Index of Names 341
Index of Works 345
List of Figures
5.1 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, ‘The Hangover’ (portrait of Suzanne

Valadon) (1889, Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA) 86
5.2 Ramón Casas, El Bohemio, Poet of Montmartre, (1891, courtesy of
Northwestern University Library) 87
5.3 Santiago Rusiñol, portrait of Erik Satie at the harmonium (private
collection, 1891) 89
5.4 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, ‘Le Bois sacré cher aux arts et aux
muses’ (1880, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon) 91
5.5 Suzanne Valadon, Portrait of Erik Satie (1893, National Museum
of Modern Art, Pompidou Center, Paris) Oil on canvas; 41 × 22 cm 94
5.6 ‘Choral inappétissant’, Satie’s score. Typ 915.14.7700, Houghton
Library, Harvard University 101
5.7 Camel cortège, still from René Clair, Cinéma 111
6.1 Le Bain de mer, Satie’s score. Typ 915.14.7700, Houghton

Library, Harvard University 128
6.2 Le Bain de mer, Martin’s 1914 etching. Typ 915.14.7700,
Houghton Library, Harvard University 129
6.3 Le Bain de mer, Martin’s 1922 pochoir print. Typ 915.14.7700,
Houghton Library, Harvard University 130
8.1 Gounod, vocal score of Le Médecin malgré lui, from Act III 165
8.2 Satie, Le Médecin malgré lui: BNF 9595(1), pp. 11–12: from
Act III, Scene 7 166
This page has been left blank intentionally
List of Musical Examples
1.1 Satie, ‘Adieu’: first version 14

1.2 Satie, ‘Adieu’: second version 15
1.3 Satie, ‘Adieu’: final version 16
2.1 Satie, Heures séculaires et instantanées, I (‘Obstacles venimeux’):

opening 42
3.1 The 23 horizontal notes in Ogives no. 1 52

3.2 The 23 vertical notes in the first of the Ogives, taken from the first
chord of each system 52
3.3 Perfect cube symbolism and the deviations from this in Ogives 53
3.4 Accidentals on block chords to avoid tritones in Ogives no. 4 54
3.5 Different harmonisation for the second and third systems of
Ogives no. 1 55
3.6 Example of a punctuation phrase in Prélude de la Porte héroïque
du ciel 59
3.7 Punctuation phrases and a self-contained motif in Prélude de la
Porte héroïque du ciel 62
3.8 The first system of Gnossienne no. 3 63
3.9 The third, fourth and fifth systems of Le fils des étoiles, third act
prelude 64
4.1 Erik Satie, Trois poèmes d’amour, 1 (‘Ne suis que grain de sable’):
bars 5–8 75
4.2a Erik Satie, Le piège de Méduse, first dance (‘Quadrille’): opening 82
4.2b Erik Satie, Le piège de Méduse, seventh dance (‘Quadrille’):
opening 82
5.1 Satie, Vexations 95

5.2 Satie, Cinéma: opening rhythmic figure 109
5.3 Satie, Cinéma: Chopin ‘Marche funèbre’ figure 109
6.1 Satie, Le Water-chute: descending scale passage 131

6.2 Satie, Le Water-chute: opening 132
6.3 Satie, La Pêche: water motif 133
x Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature
7.1 A sketch for Parade from the end of August 1916 (BNF 9603(5),
p. 1) 143
7.2 The original opening of Part 2 of Parade, showing semiquavers
instead of sextuplets (BNF 9603(5), p. 19) 146
7.3 Parade, tritones used as a scale (piano duet, Ed. Salabert, 1917,
p. 9) 149
7.4 Parade, original introductory music: the fourth and final statement
of the theme (piano duet, Ed. Salabert, 1917, p. 3) 151
8.1 Satie, Le Médecin malgré lui: BNF 9595(5), pp. 16–17; ink 170
Notes on Contributors
Pietro Dossena is a musicologist, composer and pianist. He is the author of an

article on Satie’s Socrate published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association
in 2008 and completed his PhD, focusing on sketch studies of the music of Erik
Satie, at the University of Padua in 2010. As a composer, he studied at the Milan
Conservatory and has been awarded prizes in various national and international
competitions. He has also studied at the University of Paris III and the University
of California, Santa Barbara. A passionate film lover, he has written and performed
the soundtracks of various short movies and documentaries, and also makes short
films of his own.
Grace Wai Kwan Gates is a PhD candidate at Kingston University, focusing on

piano performance issues in the music of Erik Satie. A pianist and former part-time
lecturer on the joint Kingston/SPACE degree in Hong Kong, she is a graduate of
Kingston and Surrey Universities.
Ann-Marie Hanlon has completed a PhD thesis on ‘Erik Satie and The New
Canon: Criticism, Reception and Analysis’. She graduated with an MA in Music
in 2006 (Newcastle University) and a BMus (First Class Honours) in 2004
(University College Cork). She has lectured undergraduate classes on music
history at Trinity College Dublin and Newcastle University. In 2009 two of her
works on Satie were published: an article on humour and cubist aesthetics in
the music of Erik Satie in The Musicology Review (Dublin) and a foreword to a
study score edition of Trois petites pièces montées (Munich: Musikproduktion).
She is a recipient of a three-year Travelling Studentship from the National
University of Ireland.
Matthew Mendez is an independent scholar specialising in the study of

contemporary music. A graduate of Harvard University, where he earned a
Bachelor’s degree in music, he also holds Master’s degrees from the University
of Edinburgh and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He is active as a
composer, having studied with Julian Anderson and Brian Ferneyhough.
Helen Julia Minors is Senior Lecturer in Music at Kingston University. She

completed her PhD on Paul Dukas at Lancaster University and is a musicologist
with interests in music at the turn of the twentieth century, especially music
theatre, music and the other arts, music and dance, and criticism in France. She
has published book chapters in Bewegungen zwischen Hören und Sehen, edited
xii Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature
by Stephanie Schroedter (2012) and La musique française: esthétique et identité

dans le processus de transformation 1892–1992, edited by Pascal Terrien (2012).
Robert Orledge is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool

and is one of the world’s leading experts on Satie. Author of Satie the Composer
(1990) and of numerous articles on Satie, and editor of Satie Remembered (1995),
he has also completed and published several unfinished works by the composer.
Caroline Potter is Reader in Music at Kingston University, London. An established

specialist in French music since Debussy, she has published books on Henri
Dutilleux and the Boulanger sisters and is co-editor, with Richard Langham Smith,
of French Music since Berlioz (2006). In April 2010 she convened a conference
‘Erik Satie: His Music, the Visual Arts, His Legacy’ hosted by Gresham College.
Christine Reynolds studied French and Spanish at King’s College, University

of London, then taught for many years. As a mature student she took a degree in
music at the University of Liverpool, also studying History of Art for two years.
She subsequently ran the north-west branch of a national music charity while
working with Professor Robert Orledge on a PhD thesis about the ballet Parade
which brought together her love of the French language, art and music.
Simon Shaw-Miller is currently Professor of History of Art at Bristol University.

He studied at the Universities of Brighton and Essex and previously held positions at
the Universities of St Andrews and Manchester. In 2005 he was made an Honorary
Research Fellow and in 2007 an Honorary Associate of the Royal Academy of
Music, London. He is the author of many works on the relationships between
music and art, including the books The Last Post: Music after Modernism (1993)
and Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (2002). His co-
edited collection of essays Samuel Palmer Revisited was published in 2010 and
his new book Eye hEar: The Visual in Music is due to be published in 2013 by
Ashgate.
Howard Skempton is a composer, teacher, performer and adjudicator. He

studied in London with Cornelius Cardew, who helped him to discover a musical
language of great simplicity. Since then he has continued to write undeflected by
compositional trends, producing a corpus of more than 300 works – many pieces
being miniatures for solo piano or accordion. He calls these pieces ‘the central
nervous system’ of his work.
Preface and Acknowledgements
Erik Satie (1866–1925) was a quirky, innovative and enigmatic composer whose
impact has spread far beyond the musical world. As an artist active in several
spheres – from cabaret to religion, from calligraphy to poetry and playwriting –
and collaborator with some of the leading avant-garde figures of the day, including
Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Serge Diaghilev and René Clair, he is one of the few
genuinely cross-disciplinary composers. His artistic activity, during a tumultuous
time in the Parisian art world, situates him in an especially exciting period. His
friendships with Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky and others place him at the centre
of French musical life; more importantly, so does his music. His manuscripts and
correspondence testify to his talent for calligraphy, and his drawings, usually in
black or red and usually created for himself, show that he was an artist gifted in
several media.
This book originated in a Study Day, ‘Erik Satie: His Music, the Visual Arts, His
Legacy’, convened by the editor and hosted by Gresham College on 16 April 2010.
This event was greatly over-subscribed and Gresham’s philosophy – to make their
talks accessible to a wide audience – means that the papers are available online and as
podcasts on iTunes. Four of the speakers at this event are contributing chapters to the
book. The chapter authors are a mixture of well-established and emerging scholars
of French music and culture. Orledge, perhaps the world’s leading Satie expert, is an
éminence grise for many younger researchers, having supervised their PhD research
(Reynolds) or provided essential advice and materials for their projects.
Much material on Satie has been published by Ornella Volta in French (e.g.
Satie’s complete correspondence and writings, Satie et la Danse, L’Ymagier
d’Erik Satie), though the primary aim of these works is to document his output
rather than interpret it, and little of this work has appeared in English. In 1985
selected correspondence was published in an English translation (Satie Seen
Through His Letters, trans. Michael Bullock) and selected writings by Satie were
translated by Antony Melville and published as A Mammal’s Notebook (1997).
The most important scholarly work has focused on music analysis and Satie’s
working methods (Robert Orledge’s Satie the Composer, 1990; Alan Gillmor’s
Erik Satie, 1988); the connections between his work and the Paris cabaret scene
(Steven Moore Whiting’s Satie the Bohemian, 1993); or a brief biographical
overview (Mary E. Davis’ Satie, Reaktion Critical Lives series, 2007). A recent
French book, Jean-Pierre Armengaud’s Erik Satie (2009) discusses Satie’s work
and psychological make-up.
This book explores many aspects of Satie’s creativity to give a full picture of
this most multi-faceted of composers. It can be roughly divided into four parts:
xiv Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature
Satie’s philosophy and psychology revealed through his music (Chapters 1–3);
Satie’s interest in and participation in artistic media other than music (Chapters
4–5); Satie’s collaborations with other artists (Chapters 6–8); and Satie’s impact
on later composers and artists (Chapters 9–10). Inevitably, some of Satie’s works
are discussed by more than one author, though each contributor offers his or her
own distinct perspective and contextualisation.
One message recurs throughout: Satie was a unique figure whose art is
immediately recognisable, whatever the medium he employed. His music can
draw equally on an unremembered past and present reality (medieval cathedrals
and cabaret songs), sometimes within the same work. Satie’s drawings, hundreds
of which were discovered in his filthy Arcueil room after his death, include
meticulous pen-and-ink images of imaginary castles and their floor plans (as if
he were a twelfth-century estate agent), and far more contemporary phenomena
such as airships. Parody, often in the form of what Raymond Queneau would term
‘exercices de style’, is another recurring Satie theme. Ann-Marie Hanlon’s chapter
shows that musical parody was a rich source of humour, and in Chapter 4 I show
that Satie wrote poetry modelled on courtly love verse.
In one of his most intriguing works, Sports et divertissements (1914), we see
Satie playing with the frontiers of media: is this a piano work, poetry collection or
set of illustrations (by Charles Martin), or some novel combination of the three?
Both Helen Julia Minors and Simon Shaw-Miller investigate this most multi-
faceted work. His collaboration with Martin appears to have been unproblematic,
perhaps because the two artists do not seem to have contacted each other. After
working with Cocteau, Picasso, Massine and Diaghilev on Parade, Satie wrote
to his friend Valentine Gross on the topic of Socrate, for which he set Plato’s
words in a nineteenth-century translation by Victor Cousin. He said: ‘Plato is a
perfect collaborator, very gentle and never importunate. A dream, you know!’1 As
a rule, he found living collaborators to be difficult and argumentative, though he
got on well with Picasso. John Richardson, in the third volume of his magisterial
biography of Picasso, notes that the great painter attended Satie on his deathbed,
even changing his sheets; in Richardson’s words: ‘It is a measure of his regard for
Satie that Picasso was able to overcome his fear of illness.’2
In his prefaces, Satie sometimes attempted to dictate the terms of reception of
his work. The most notorious example of this is his preface to Heures séculaires
et instantanées (1914), a triptych of short piano works with elaborate textual
commentary, one of around 60 texted piano pieces he composed in the period
1912–16. Here, Satie states that the performer is forbidden to read out the in-
score texts: he is communicating with the performer in a private language which
1
Letter of 18 January 1917; Ornella Volta (ed.), Erik Satie: Correspondance presque
complète (Paris: IMEC, 2003), p. 277: ‘Platon est un collaborateur parfait, très doux &
jamais importun. Un rêve, quoi!’
2
John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, Vol. 3: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), p. 275.
Preface and Acknowledgements xv
is not to be shared with the public. Or was he joking? This intimate quality of
Satie is explored by Howard Skempton in Chapter 10. Equally notorious is the
performance instruction at the head of Vexations (1893), a work whose singular
impact on the experimental artistic scene is investigated by Simon Shaw-Miller
and Matthew Mendez.
Satie is very far from being simply a farceur. It is clear that he was extremely
well read and curious about contemporary events and scientific inventions.
Christine Reynolds’ chapter on Parade shows that even a road name could be
a source of unexpected extra-musical inspiration: 6 rue Huyghens, in the 14th
arrondissement of Paris, was the space used by the Lyre et Palette society who
mounted events combining music, art exhibitions and poetry readings in the
mid‑1910s, and Reynolds demonstrates that the Dutch scientist Christiaan
Huyghens (1629–95) left his own mark on Parade.
The starting point of Robert Orledge’s chapter, ‘Satie’s Musical and Personal
Logic’, was a statement by Madeleine Milhaud, who knew the composer as well
as anyone could. She said that ‘everything Satie did was logical … It was logic
carried to an extreme. Look at it coldly and it makes sense’. This chapter aims
to do precisely this, exploring and seeking answers in such areas as: Satie the
impoverished, uncompromising professional composer; his hypermorality; his
changes in outward persona; his religious paranoia in the 1890s and his desire for
publicity in this insecure period; his sense of humour; his habitual intransigence;
and his financial incompetence. It shows Satie as a paradoxical composer with his
roots in a medieval French past while being an iconoclast who looked to the future
in his music and ideas, yet who had a surprising lack of interest in technological
advances. Satie’s painstaking calligraphy suggests that much might be explained
by his being a higher-order dyslexic or imagist, alongside Pablo Picasso, Hans
Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll, all of whom he greatly admired. This led
him to view everyday objects and situations in a different way and he seems to
have been fascinated by his own creative processes, by mirror imagery, and by
a three-dimensional, architectural approach to music. The chapter ends with a
detailed analysis of the genesis of the song ‘Adieu’ (1920), showing how Satie
turned a simple cafe-concert waltz into a quirky and sophisticated art song by
systematic, yet unpredictable means.
While every writer on Satie acknowledges that humour is a central facet of
his modus operandi, Ann-Marie Hanlon goes one step further, putting Satie and
the meaning of the comic in its historical and artistic context. Erik Satie was
undoubtedly the leading exponent of humour in high-art music, a predilection
which impacted significantly upon the reception of his music and his reputation
as a composer. In 1911–15, Satie purposely cultivated a humorist persona through
his musical compositions and journalistic writings. Highly motivated by a desire
for attention, humour also served as a critical medium though which he could
comment upon contemporary events and criticise individuals and institutions.
The backlash of Satie’s comic self-promotion became pronounced in the post-war
years as he moved into a more serious phase of composition and audiences and
xvi Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature
critics continued to laugh at works that were not comic in intent. This chapter
explores the various types, methods of creation and functions of humour in Satie’s
public career, with a specific focus on the ‘humoristic’ piano works. In Le rire,
Henri Bergson reveals much about Modernist attitudes to the comic and its low
status within the arts. Situated on the boundary between art and life, Bergson
considers the comic a gesture of impertinence laden with social import. Laughter
is its corrective. With reference to Bergson, this chapter further addresses the
ramifications of a comic approach on Satie’s reputation in Modernist discourses.
Grace Wai Kwan Gates explores some of Satie’s more esoteric productions
in her chapter on his Rose-Croix piano works (1891–4). Satie’s attraction to the
medieval and esoteric can be traced from his earliest characteristic work, Ogives
(1888), through his role as the founder of the Metropolitan Church of Art, and
even to his work in cabarets with fashionable imitation Gothic decor. Numerology
fascinated him, as will be demonstrated in this chapter, and Gregorian chant and
medieval illuminated manuscripts were key influences on his music and visual
art. The chapter focuses on Satie’s Ogives and Prélude de la Porte héroïque du
ciel, both of which have no bar lines (probably for visual reasons) and eccentric
indications to the pianist. Gates, a pianist herself, concludes with a brief discussion
of the problems encountered by performers of these pieces, which may well not
have been written to be performed in public. Satie seemed to revel in opposites:
writing cabaret songs and accompanying them in public, while at the same time
writing private, esoteric works for the church of which he was the sole member.
Caroline Potter’s study in Chapter 4 of Satie as poet, playwright and composer
focuses on the particularly rich creative period of 1913–14, when his increasing
public profile and increasing confidence provoked an upsurge in creativity in
several media. While Satie wrote many songs, only one set, the tiny Trois poèmes
d’amour (1914), features his own texts, a parody of the sixteenth-century ‘poésie
courtoise.’ This chapter explores the cod-medieval style of the vocal lines, the
close links between the three songs (a Satie trait), the unusual poetic form and,
most importantly, the stylistic connections between poetry and music. Satie’s only
extant play, Le piège de Méduse (1913), is generally viewed as a harbinger of
surrealism or Dada. The composer provided seven tiny dances to be performed on
prepared piano and to serve as accompaniment to a dancing stuffed monkey. The
mechanistic aesthetic at the heart of much of Satie’s music will be investigated
through these barrel-organ-like dances, an aesthetic also apparent in the behaviour
of several characters in the play. Satie’s art is viewed through multiple perspectives
(cultural history, textual and music analysis, style analysis) and the essential unity
of his art is highlighted.
Simon Shaw-Miller takes as his starting point Satie’s statement that ‘painters
… taught me the most about music’; he proclaimed in a sketchbook annotation
that ‘musical evolution’ was ‘always a hundred years behind pictorial evolution’.
His painstaking calligraphy and the complexity of pattern in his music (often more
apparent to the eye than the ear) show the importance of the visual dimension. But
his interest in the visual arts is more profound than just notation or presentation.
Preface and Acknowledgements xvii
In part, his musical aesthetic is founded on a perceived common ground with art.
His aim was to create an atmosphere, rather than an emotional journey; to reduce
music to a backdrop, to see it as a framed object; to flatten musical space, to reduce
its emotional colours, to celebrate repetition. This chapter provides an overview
of Satie’s artistic tastes, considers the significance of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the
Satiean context and outlines the importance of the visual arts in his music through
an exploration of works including Vexations, Parade, Entr’acte and his furniture
music. Satie’s impact on American composers of the twentieth century (especially
Cage, Feldman and Wolff), focusing on the crucial influence of visual artists on
their music, is also outlined.
Helen Julia Minors’ chapter focuses on Sports et divertissements, a multi-art
collage in which images by Charles Martin are co-presented with Satie’s humorist
piano miniatures published in a facsimile of his own calligraphy, superimposed
with his own narrative text. This chapter offers a fresh analysis of the multi-art
processes at play between Satie’s music and text which is interpreted in dialogue
with the images. How can one mediate the experience of Sports? In what ways
can we interact with the work? There are many components to interpret, from the
images to the visual presentation of both text and music. In order to appreciate the
multi-art nature of this work, we must search the piece to become aware of its many
attributes. As in Apollinaire’s Lettre-Océan, water is one of many representative
issues in Sports: this chapter focuses on Le Bain de mer.
Christine Reynolds’ chapter on Parade, Satie’s collaboration for the Ballets
Russes with Cocteau, Picasso and Massine, outlines why Cocteau had the idea for
Parade in the first place, what his expectations were of Satie’s score and how his
work with Massine on the choreography (in the later stages) was underpinned by his
realist philosophy. He was certainly the driving force behind the idea of achieving
a new type of theatrical realism within the existing French realist tradition. When
Picasso came along, Cocteau’s basic ideas were considerably enhanced, not, to
begin with at least, overturned in any way. In fact, Picasso’s designs for the Red
Curtain and the decor underpinned Cocteau’s original ideas of inside/outside the
fairground tent (another aspect of the realist philosophy). It was not until late in
the preparations for Parade that some of the ideas close to Cocteau’s heart were
omitted, though not through any fault of Picasso. Yet Picasso’s input dramatically
changed the course of Satie’s music in a cubist (i.e. realist) way, as well as forcing
a new type of choreography because of the cumbersome costumes/carcasses that
the Managers had to wear. In spite of his disappointment that Parade had not
followed all his ideas, Cocteau was nevertheless very proud of having instigated
what he saw as the beginnings of a new French realism.
The major works of Satie’s final creative years (1923–4) are all collaborations;
these are explored by Pietro Dossena, who focuses initially on Satie’s recitatives
for an opéra comique by Charles Gounod, Le Médecin malgré lui (1858),
commissioned by Diaghilev. Although this work has seldom been investigated,
it is the longest composition Satie finished during his last years and shows the
composer dealing with both stylistic and dramaturgical issues that would have an
xviii Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature
influence on his later production. First, the chapter recalls the origin of Diaghilev’s
commission and Satie’s reaction to it, and then focuses on Satie’s problems
dealing with music by another composer. His final stylistic solution envisaged
a compromise between Satie and Gounod’s musical languages: a case study
(including a plausible reconstruction of meetings between Satie and Diaghilev)
investigates the genesis of a short passage of the opera (from Act 3, Scene 7).
The recitatives for Le Médecin malgré lui influenced Satie’s approach to the
1924 ballets Mercure and Relâche. Gounod’s opera, with its traditional division into
separate ‘numbers’, invited a very meticulous organisation of the work on Satie’s
part: he divided his ‘scènes nouvelles’ into nine numbers, and prepared preliminary
rhythmic and tonal plans before drafting the score. The following year he would
apply similar procedures to Mercure and Relâche, for which he wrote detailed
structural and tonal plans. The dramaturgical suppleness of numbers allowed Satie
to provide an effective musical counterpart to Picasso’s ironically detached ‘poses
plastiques’ (Mercure) and to Cendrars and Picabia’s striking ‘ballet instantanéiste’
(Relâche). It should be noted that neither Parade (1916–17, 1919) nor Socrate
(1917–18) were planned as a series of short numbers, each set in a specific tonality:
the music-hall swiftness of Mercure and Relâche owes more to the light-hearted
number opera Geneviève de Brabant (1899–1900) and to musical miniatures such as
Sports et divertissements; but the concern for tonal centres and neoclassical lightness
are likely to have been directly suggested by the Gounod pastiche.
Erik Satie is typically viewed as music’s first ‘anti-art’ figure, the composer
who did the most to unburden the medium of the heavy spiritual commitments it
had accrued in the wake of Wagnerism’s rise and the theorisation of Kunst-religion.
First gaining currency during the 1910s, this interpretation was fundamental to
the post-war revival of interest in Satie’s work among experimental practitioners,
for whom the elder Frenchman was alleged to have provided a straightforwardly
proto‑Dadaist precedent. Yet this interpretation was always a selective, equivocal
one, for by necessity it completely ignores the formative role that the esoteric
Christian, Rosicrucian circles of 1890s Montmartre played on Satie’s artistic
development. Many accounts consider the ahistorical, ‘amnesiac’ qualities of
Satie’s work to be symptoms of his agnostic musical critique, yet these qualities
could just as easily be traced back to the millenarianism of his pre-Arcueil milieu.
Indeed, when we consider the social and ideological exigencies motivating many
of the key figures of the post-war Satie revival, taking Satie’s ‘spirituality’ seriously
would seem a task particularly worthy of our attention. Matthew Mendez’s chapter
does just that, examining the role the notion of ‘healing through spirituality’
played in the work of some of Satie’s most loyal disciples, namely John Cage,
Joseph Beuys and, to a lesser extent, Dick Higgins. For these individuals, the
Satie legacy was by no means flippantly anti-idealist, but rather suggested that, by
way of a homeopathic, characteristically Rosicrucian procedure, ‘forgetting’ could
serve as a reprieve from the loss of belief and meaning seemingly characteristic
of modernity. However, whether this strategy could ever actually overcome these
maladies remains an uncertain question.
Preface and Acknowledgements xix
The British composer Howard Skempton, a lifelong Satie admirer, explains

Satie’s continuing importance to composers in Chapter 10. This chapter originated
in a conversation with the editor which took place in Kingston on Friday 17
February 2012, and like all the best conversations, it ranged far beyond the initial
remit of the chapter. Skempton focuses on Satie’s impact on English experimental
composers (including himself), but also gives penetrating insights into Satie’s
psychology and offers a novel explanation of the title of Trois morceaux en forme
de poire. Adventurous readers may wish to begin this book with Skempton’s
overview of Satie’s personality.
The book ends with a comprehensive guide to research and catalogue of Satie’s
works compiled by Robert Orledge; it is an updated and considerably expanded
version of the catalogue published in his Satie the Composer (1990).
I would like to thank Gresham College and the Institute of Musical Research,
especially Barbara Anderson, Dawn Fulks, Katharine Ellis and John Irving, for
their financial and logistical support of the research day which was the starting
point of this book. Roy Howat, Emily Kilpatrick, Jane Manning, Paul Archbold,
James Nye and Michael Parsons, as well as several students from the Royal
Academy of Music, also contributed greatly to the success of this event. For
assistance during the production of this book, I would like to thank John Ferguson,
Leonardo Liccini, Caroline Rae and everyone at Ashgate, especially Heidi Bishop,
Laura Macy and Jon Lloyd.
I would particularly like to acknowledge the enormous contribution Robert
Orledge has made to this book and to thank all the authors for their patience and
unswerving commitment to this project. Simon Shaw-Miller’s and Helen Julia
Minors’ help with illustrations was much appreciated. All Satie scholars owe a
debt to Ornella Volta, whose numerous publications are cited frequently in this
book; the collection of the Fondation Erik Satie is now housed in the Institut
Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), l’Abbaye d’Ardenne (http://www.
imec-archives.com/imec.php). All translations from French sources have been
made by the chapter authors unless otherwise indicated.
Caroline Potter
Surbiton, 2013
Chapter 1
Satie’s Personal and Musical Logic
Robert Orledge
Over the past quarter of a century, I feel I have come to know the strange
phenomenon that is Erik Satie quite well through my research. The sad thing
is that if I had been alive at the same time as he was and had known as much
about him then, I don’t think I would have wanted to meet him. At his least
attractive, he was a sponging, irascible alcoholic who refused to speak to his
supportive brother Conrad for over seven years, supposedly because he would
not have a drink with him after their father’s funeral in December 1903. Conrad
undoubtedly feared beginning what would have been an extended binge at his
expense, laced (in that period) with religious paranoia. And Satie, it has to
be said, often appeared to cut off his nose to spite his face, here putting filial
love above present-day reality. Before Satie returned to learning at the Schola
Cantorum in 1905, he felt particularly insecure and uncertain of his musical
direction. And even after graduating there as a composer of proven competence
in 1912 after his courses with Albert Roussel and Vincent d’Indy, he imagined
personal slights where none were intended and usually remained intransigent
towards their supposed perpetrators for long periods of time.
Thus, as late as February 1924, he severed relations with Auric and Poulenc
when he discovered about the backstage goings-on at Diaghilev’s Monte Carlo
opera season the previous month, and their association with his lifelong enemy,
Louis Laloy (who had omitted Satie’s name from the official programme, even
as the composer of the new recitatives for Gounod’s Le Médecin malgré lui).
Whereas he had congratulated Poulenc for his success with Les Biches on 11
January, he told Milhaud a few weeks later that the ballet was ‘the lowest of the
low’ and that Auric’s Les Fâcheux ‘had lost all its charm due to the lassitude of
its author’.1 And he refused to see either composer on his deathbed the following
year, even if he remained devoted to Milhaud, perhaps because he never criticised
him behind his back.
On a smaller scale, a similar thing happened to Henri Sauguet when he
was summoned to turn pages for Satie as he accompanied Jane Mortier in a
performance of Socrate at the Salle Gaveau on 20 June 1923. Although Satie
disliked playing in public, Sauguet says ‘he played well but in a very studied
1
Ornella Volta (ed.), Erik Satie: Correspondance presque complète (Paris: IMEC,
2003), p. 585. Letter of 5 February 1924: ‘Les Biches sont au-dessous de tout; les Fâcheux
ont perdu tout leur charme, grâce à la veulerie de leur auteur.’
2 Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature
manner’, in this instance ‘rigid, with his pince-nez set for battle’.2 Being
spaciously printed, the La Sirène edition had lots of pages and, according
to Sauguet, Satie kept wanting him to turn too early, keeping up a low, yet
undoubtedly audible commentary as follows: ‘Turn … No, not immediately …
come on … let’s go … No! Well, what are you waiting for? Now’s the time!’3
After the (applauded) performance, Satie furiously turned on Sauguet, crying:
‘You are a cretin, worse than Durey.’4 The mild-mannered Sauguet, although it
was not his fault, valued Satie’s friendship and help in his career, and apologised
by letter for his apparent shortcomings. And, for once, Satie apologised two days
later himself and subsequently introduced Sauguet to Diaghilev. This might seem
a fit of pique brought on by nervousness, but the logical explanation is that Satie
wanted to be at one of Diaghilev’s rare revivals of Parade on the same night and
was anxious to get through Socrate so that he could get there in time, perhaps
even just to take his onstage applause at the end. Whether he speeded up Socrate
in the process Sauguet does not say, and the fact that he gave the performance
testifies to the importance he attached to his latest compositions. But he wrote
twice to Diaghilev on the day before the concert reminding him to reserve a box
for himself and his friends and to tell Ernest Ansermet (the conductor) to take
the ballet a bit faster, especially the ‘Prélude du Rideau rouge’, as he had found
his interpretation ‘Flabby and too slow’ (presumably at the final rehearsal).5 So
he had an artistic as well as a personal reason to get to the Théâtre des Champs-
Elysées that evening.
In the light of the Poulenc-Auric-Laloy incident cited above, it can be seen
that Satie was, in reality, hypermoral. His tempestuous affair with Suzanne
Valadon, which lasted between 14 January and 20 June 1893, probably made
him thus, especially as she then went straight off with a banker, Paul Mousis,
whom she later married. His only known relationship found Satie calling on the
police for protection and composing the nine Danses Gothiques in March to
restore his peace of mind ‘and the greater tranquillity of my soul’.6 As he told
the wife of his brother Conrad, who asked in 1912 why he had never married:
2
Henri Sauguet, ‘Quelques extraits des souvenirs’, in Pierre Ancelin (ed.), ‘Henri
Sauguet: L’homme et l’œuvre’, Revue musicale 361–3 (1983), p. 243: ‘Il jouait bien, d’une
façon très appliquée, raide, le lorgnon en Bataille.’
3
Ancelin (ed.), ‘Henri Sauguet’, p. 243: ‘Tournez … Non, pas tout de suite … allez-y
… allons … Non! Eh bien qu’attendez-vous? Alors c’est maintenant!’
4
Ibid. Louis Durey was a member of Les Six, with whom Satie had fallen out earlier
because of his admiration for Ravel: ‘Vous êtes un veau, pire que Durey.’
5
See Volta (ed.), Correspondance, pp. 542–4: ‘C’était mou & trop lent.’ Satie
preferred the interpretatations of Félix Delgrange. The second Diaghilev letter (p. 544) also
shows that he did not like Cocteau’s extraneous ‘noises’ in Parade: ‘We have before us a
likeable maniac’ (‘Nous avons devant nous un aimable maniaque’).
6
‘Neuvaine pour le plus grand calme et la forte tranquillité de mon âme’ (see BNF
MS 10048), composed between 21 and 23 March 1893.
Satie’s Personal and Musical Logic 3
‘Quite simply, the fear of being horribly cuckolded … And I would have
deserved it: I am a man that women do not understand.’ The same day, he added
to his then friend, Roland-Manuel: ‘Besides, men don’t understand me any
better. Some of them, I should say.’7 Yet Satie enjoyed the company of young
women, christening Germaine Tailleferre ‘his soft and gentle “daughter”’.8 He
also preferred women pianists to men, telling Henri-Pierre Roché that he would
like one as his ‘accomplice’ to perform Parade with him in America – finding
‘female pianists [like Marcelle Meyer] decidedly more intelligent than men
[like Ricardo Viñes]’. He also wanted Roché ‘to find me a female virtuoso with
enormous malice’ for his piano solos!9 After 1911, he contented himself with
visiting his early interpreter, Paulette Darty (now Mme Edouard Dreyfuss), on
Sunday afternoons at her luxurious country chateau in Luzarches, where Jacques
Guérin remembers ‘Paulette sitting on a folding-stool and casting a line into the
stream’ on the estate. ‘Satie, in quiet and genuine admiration, stood behind her,
commenting on her successes.’10 A first-rate free lunch was also a good logical
reason to be there, and in this case his devotion never wavered, even if Paulette
now resembled a plump mother hen.
Despite his somewhat suspicious enthusiasm for the activities of salt-of-the-
earth characters like working-class truck drivers, Satie disapproved strongly of
the homosexual circle he found himself drawn into through his later commissions,
as we have seen. He disliked Cocteau, kicking him under the table at dinner
parties, and subsequently wrote libellous articles and letters waging war against
‘Omoplates’ and ‘Homogènes’ like Poulenc and Auric (in Auric’s case erroneously).
He envisaged all sorts of homosexual and drug-taking activities in Monte Carlo
in 1924, as well as despising the arrivisme of his previous protégés from Les Six.
And he had already distanced himself from this group in 1923, transferring his
allegiance to Sauguet and his Ecole d’Arcueil in his desire to maintain his position
as godfather of the most extreme avant-garde. Another gripe was that both Poulenc
and Auric came from wealthy backgrounds, and for this reason (alone it would
seem) he did not admire the music of Lord Berners. He told his young Belgian
7
See Volta (ed.), Correspondance, p. 175. Letters of 14 September 1912: ‘La peur
d’être horriblement cocu, tout simplement … Et ce serait mérité: je suis un homme que
les femmes ne comprennent pas./Les hommes ne me comprennent pas mieux, du reste.
Quelques-uns, devrais-je dire.’
8
‘Ma douce & gentille “fille”’, as he dedicated her piano duet copy of Parade.
9
Letter of 1 December 1918 in Volta (ed.), Correspondance, p. 347. Sadly, the
American tour Roché and Satie planned never came off. It was to have included Socrate,
his ‘œuvre maîtresse’, as its climax, performed by ‘four sopranos (two high and two
mezzo)’: ‘les femmes pianistes décidément plus intelligentes que les hommes./me trouver
une virtuose d’une énorme malice’.
10
Jacques Guérin, ‘Erik Satie. “Un Dimanche à Luzarches”’, L’Optimiste 2 (June–July
1992), p. 8: ‘Paulette parfois prend un pliant et, assise au bord du ruisseau, lance une ligne.
Satie debout derrière elle, commente les coups heureux. Il est docile, il l’admire vraiment.’
friend E.L.T. Mesens in 1921 that his fellow eccentric was ‘a professional amateur.
He hasn’t understood’.11
Many aspects of Satie’s strange personal logic, which sometimes ventured
towards the paranoid, stemmed from his own position as an impoverished,
uncompromising professional composer. As such, he never took on any other form
of paid employment and survived ignominiously on the generosity of friends like
Dukas, Milhaud, or his brother Conrad. In the summer months, when his wealthier
acquaintances were sunning themselves on the Riviera, matters often became
desperate. This was especially true during the war, and his celebrated letter to
Valentine Gross in August 1918 shows things at their nadir. For once, he admitted
that ‘I loathe this ‘beggar’s’ life … I shit on Art: it has cut me up too often’.12
And this was shortly after his substantial commissions for Parade and Socrate,
for Satie was also financially incompetent. When he had money, he spent it almost
immediately. Besides being over-generous to his friends, it also explains the many
new umbrellas, handkerchiefs, shirts and wing collars found in his otherwise filthy
Arcueil apartment after his death. The logic behind these was that Satie was making
provision for future periods of poverty and the preservation of his carefully controlled
public images. The same logic undoubtedly applied to his prodigious appetite, for
his brother Conrad testified that he ‘can eat 150 oysters’13 at one sitting, and Mme
Geng, the proprietress of an Arcueil café, describes a meal in 1905 when she and her
husband, and principally Satie, consumed enough mussels for 20 people.14
From a home that no one was ever allowed to enter (apart from the stray dogs
he took pity on, for he loved animals) and which had no running water or heating,
Satie managed to emerge immaculate each day, emerging ‘into the world as an actor
steps out from the wings’, as Roger Shattuck so eloquently observed.15 Madeleine
Milhaud, who apprehensively packed his suitcase for his final departure to the
Hôpital Saint Joseph in February 1925, was shocked to discover how little he had.
As she recalled:
11
Quoted in E.L.T. Mesens, ‘Le souvenir d’Erik Satie’, Revue musicale 214 (June
1952), p. 150: ‘C’est un amateur-professionnel. Il n’a pas compris.’
12
Volta (ed.), Correspondance, p. 334. Letter of 23 August 1918: ‘Cette vie de
“mendigot” me répugne … J’emmerde l’Art: je lui dois trop de “rasoireries”.’ At this point,
Satie even considered a paid job, and Gross contacted a Monsieur Lebey, who proposed that
Satie create a new teaching course. Satie proposed ‘The Modern Aesthetic’, but the plan
never came to fruition. He had also briefly considered taking a position in April 1892 (see
Volta (ed.), Correspondance, pp. 29–30).
13
From notes taken after a walk around Montmartre with his brother on 30 September
1914, now in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas: ‘Il peut
manger 150 huîtres.’
14
See the letter to Louis Lemonnier of 13 November 1905 in Volta (ed.),
Correspondance, p. 120. According to Conrad, Satie could also consume an omelette made
of 30 eggs at a single sitting!
15
Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (London: Faber, 1959), p. 142.
I asked Braque, the painter, who was a big, tall man, to stand between the bed
and the suitcase, and so I was able to pack because Satie couldn’t see. Then,
when we arrived at the hospital, the nun who was supposed to take care of Satie
asked for the soap, and I had to tell her that he didn’t have any, because in fact he
never washed with soap. He scrubbed his skin very carefully with pumice stone
and his skin was as soft as it can be. It seems that the ancient Chinese did that,
at least that’s what he said.16
Later, Madeleine had to collect his laundry from his concierge in Arcueil ‘and
Satie blew up again because there were only ninety-eight handkerchiefs when it
seemed that he had given ninety-nine or a hundred to the laundry’.17
The process of impoverished deception and everyday continuity began with
the famous seven identical dun-coloured velvet corduroy suits. Satie purchased
these at La Belle Jardinière department store in 1895, either from a small legacy or,
more likely, with the assistance of the wealthy Le Monnier brothers from his native
Honfleur. With these he created his second persona as ‘The Velvet Gentleman’ and
he was anxious that all his suits should all be preserved in as near-identical a
condition as possible. The clue as to how he achieved this comes from the painter
and art historian Francis Jourdain, who asked Satie to join him one evening for the
dress rehearsal of the melodrama The Fatal Card: ‘He was wearing a hat, coat and
shoes of velvet corduroy, and he asked me to let him go back home and change.
He returned wearing a suit and an overcoat identical to those he had taken off, only
with the velvet in very slightly better condition.’18 And protecting his umbrellas
under his coat when it rained is explained both by his desire to keep them new and
by the fact that Satie loved rain but hated sunshine. He told his brother Conrad that
the ‘sun was his personal enemy, [it was] brutal and said bad things about him’19
and in Verrières ‘the owner of a wine shop would always say to his wife, whenever
the weather looked bad: “Today, it will rain all day; doubtless we shall see the
gentleman of Arcueil.” At noon, Satie would appear with his umbrella.’20 Besides,
carrying umbrellas at all times was a family trait, as his friends discovered at his
16
Interview with Roger Nichols in Paris, 9 December 1993. Cited in Robert Orledge,
Satie Remembered (London: Faber, 1995), p. 212.
17
Interview with Roger Nichols, cited in Orledge, Satie Remembered, p. 213.
18
Francis Jourdain, Né en 76 (Paris: Les Editions du Pavillon, 1951), p. 245 (translated
by Roger Nichols in Orledge, Satie Remembered, p. 39): ‘Etant coiffé, vêtu et chaussé de
velours à côtes, il me demande de lui donner le temps de rentrer se changer. Il revient vêtu
d’un complet et d’un pardessus identiques à ceux qu’il avait quittés, mais d’un velours un
tout petit peu plus fin.’
19
Conversation of 21 October 1914, now in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Ccnter in Austin, Texas: ‘Son ennemi personnel, brutal, dit du mal de lui.’
20
Pierre-Daniel Templier (trans. E. and D. French), Erik Satie (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1969), p. 57: ‘A Verrières, à une certaine époque de sa vie, un marchand de vins disait
à sa femme, lorsque le temps était couvert: “Aujourd’hui, c’est l’eau pour la journée, nous
funeral. And they also fitted with his final persona as an anonymous professional
notary, which he adopted around the time he entered the Schola Cantorum. This
persona also allowed him to go straight from the bars he loved around the Gare
St Lazare (like Chez Graff) or Montparnasse (like Le Lion or La Rotonde) to the
high society events that he was increasingly invited to after the succès de scandale
of Parade in 1917.
As with his earlier frequented bars in Arcueil and Montmartre, he did much of
his composing there. Pierre de Massot says that he wrote much of Parade in Le
Lion in 1916–17,21 though he wrote his articles and copied out his neat scores in
Arcueil. How a score like Relâche remained immaculate amidst the accumulated
detritus of a quarter of a century remains a mystery. But Satie never composed
in restaurants, because eating was a far more important activity, and he preferred
simple and substantial dishes cooked well. No one ever saw him drunk, though his
capacity for alcohol of all types and for mixing his drinks was legendary. His one
lament was that ‘the bars are full of people quite happy to offer you a drink. But
none of them ever thinks of lining your stomach with a sandwich’.22
Some aspects of Satie’s logic, however, require more explanation. Whilst
he was a musical iconoclast, he had no interest in modern innovations like
recording, or the telephone and the radio. Recordings during his lifetime were
rare and he had nothing to do with the first one in 1912.23 As to recording his
own piano music, as Debussy and Fauré did, he was probably never asked,
and he would have been even more nervous about doing so than they were.
He is only known to have listened to the Radiola24 once (which he called the
‘sémaphore auditif’),25 when he heard a broadcast by Milhaud at the apartment
of his friends, the Henriquets, at 7.30 pm on Monday 3 March 1924. Similarly,
he only ever mentions using the telephone once, when he rang the Comtesse
de Beaumont on 22 March 1922.26 He asked friends to take the phone off the
hook when he visited them, and presumably he only rang the Comtesse because
she was a wealthy patron and because he was excited about the new concept
of choreography he had devised with André Derain, in which the movements
were to come before the music rather than deriving from it. But this logical
concept was sadly never put into practice, even in the tiny private divertissement
verrons sans doute le monsieur d’Arcueil.” A l’heure du déjeuner, Satie apparaissait avec
sa parapluie.’
21
Pierre de Massot, ‘Quelques propos et souvenirs sur Erik Satie’, Revue musicale
214 (June 1952), pp. 125–6.
22
René Lanser, ‘Notes et souvenirs – Erik Satie’, Matin d’Anvers (9 July 1925): ‘On
trouve dans tous les bars des gens disposés à vous offrir un verre. Aucun ne songera à vous
lester d’un sandwich.’
23
The song La Diva de l’Empire, recorded for Pathé by Adeline Lanthenay.
24
An early name for the radio in France.
25
See the letter to Milhaud of 3 March 1924 in Volta (ed.), Correspondance, p. 596.
26
Volta (ed.), Correspondance, p. 475.
La Statue retrouvée produced for the Comtesse by Cocteau, Picasso, Satie and
Massine the following year, when Massine was the last to join the team.
In passing, Satie did not even trust the post and put letters and packets whose
content he was uncertain of unopened into one of his two grand pianos, perhaps
fearing an unpleasant surprise or even a bomb. This happened with the Christmas
gift that Milhaud’s mother sent him in 1922. On 19 December, he told Milhaud
that: ‘I have received a package signed G. Milhaud and coming from the Colonial
Exhibition in Marseilles. This package has not yet been opened. What is it?’27
It turned out to be chestnut fondants, for which Satie thanked her in his usual,
charming manner on New Year’s Eve.
While Satie wrote for the future and lived very much in the present, his roots
were in the past – in plainsong, Gothic architecture and the history of medieval
France. Such paradoxes abound in his strangely logical world, and what the
inventor of the prepared piano (for Le Piège de Méduse), total chromaticism
(Vexations), minimalism (Gymnopédies), and the first coordinated film score
(Entr’acte) was most concerned about was the ‘exteriorisation’ of his musical
thought in print. Hence the barless, but regularly metered piano pieces of 1913,
without repeated clefs, and with those wonderful but mostly irrelevant comments
to amuse the performer that had begun with the Gnossiennes in 1890.28 The
music appeared bizarre to the public (who mostly didn’t buy it), but it was
utterly logical for Satie to want his music to look as striking as literary or artistic
publications, and to want to combine music, poetry and art as he did in the Sports
et divertissements of 1914. In this instance, Stravinsky refused the fee offered by
Lucien Vogel because it was too small, whereas Satie rejected it because it was
too large. Illogical? No, because Satie was in awe of Stravinsky and would never
have imagined him to be so mercenary. And his bizarre texts and programme
notes for Le Guide du concert, which begin with a true statement and then launch
into whimsy, arose from the same desire to amuse and be different, with a self-
deprecation that begins with the 3ème Gymnopédie ‘which is now to be found
underneath every piano’, as he told readers of Le Chat Noir journal in 1889.29
A typical example of an explanation by Satie can be found in his preface to the
Sports et divertissements in 1914 (cited in Chapter 5, p. 101).
27
Volta (ed.), Correspondance, p. 508: ‘J’ai reçu un paquet signé G. Milhaud &
venant de Marseille (Exposition Coloniale). Ce paquet n’est pas encore ouvert. Qu’est-ce?’
28
Perhaps the classic example of this is the last of the Heures séculaires et instantanées
of July 1914, entitled ‘Affolements granitiques’ (‘Granitic distractions’). The Harvard
sketches (b ms Mus 193 (39)) show this regularly barred in 3/4 time with the ending notated
in F major. All the fake chromaticism was added later for publication.
29
Le Chat Noir VIII/369 (9 February 1889), at the end of an advertisement for the
Ogives: ‘Sa Troisième Gymnopédie, actuellement sous tous les pianos.’ This had been
printed privately in red ink with Gothic titles by Satie in November 1888 and was available
from his father Alfred’s music store at 66 boulevard Magenta.
Satie’s concern for the aesthetic marriage of music and prose led him to
invent all lower case type for uspud in 1892, for which he made his own musical
woodblocks, which had sudden changes of clef and stave to ‘distance Stupid
people’30 from his score, an attitude that persisted throughout his career. Similarly,
he invented ‘punctuation form’ in Rosicrucian works like the Prélude du Nazaréen,
in which recurring cadences of various lengths act as commas or full stops in the
repetitive cells from which the music is constructed.
On another level, the absence of any coordination between music and stage in
all of his early theatre works arose not from Satie’s inability to match their often
violent, exotic or esoteric action in musical terms, but from a desire that the piece
should itself be self-sufficient and should not fall into the Wagnerian tradition of
descriptive, hyperexpressive music which he despised. Besides, an anonymous
though stylistically identifiable score could be used for other occasions. The same
concern for self-sufficiency amid theatrical chaos can be found as late as the final
ballet Relâche, in which Satie fashioned the two halves around René Clair’s film to
be precisely proportioned mirror images of each other.31 This was even more true
of Parade, in which everything originally revolved around the central Steamboat
Ragtime, everything was at the same pulse, and yet the work has no definitive
form – there being different endings for the concert hall and the stage.
Another aspect of Satie’s Rose+Croix music that seems weird and illogical
until you know the reasoning behind it springs from his desire for publicity during
this early period of relative obscurity. This was his aim in challenging (and actually
arranging) a duel with Eugène Bertrand (then the director of the Paris Opéra),
as it seemed to be the only way to persuade him even to look at his score for
uspud in December 1892. Publicity also accounts for his hilarious performances
of uspud with harmonium at the Auberge du Clou, because he knew full well that
a composer like Debussy would nevertheless be able to understand the seriousness
of purpose behind the ‘scenic backcloth’ of the music. And in the Rose+Croix
piece Fête donnée par des Chevaliers Normands, Satie, with what he saw as his
limited technical means at the time, set out to prove that a viable piece could be
constructed from a simple musical system based on intervals, though this was the
only occasion (of many) in which the sensitive composer did not take over from
the logician during the construction process.32
If we turn now towards Satie’s writings and drawings, we find that they
are, without exception, meticulously neat and painstaking. Only the musical
sketchbooks reveal signs of untidiness and what was surely at times the white
heat of inspiration. This can be at least partially explained by a theory first put
to me by Sarah Nichols. This includes Satie in a group of distinguished creators
30
See copy no. 16 (of 100) of the large uspud brochure (Paris, 1892), p. 8, now in the
private collection of Johny Fritz, Luxembourg: ‘pour l’éloignement des Stupides’.
31
See Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), p. 180.
32
See ibid., pp. 186–9.
alongside Picasso, Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Andersen, all of whom were
higher-order dyslexics or imagists and all of whom Satie admired. Typically,
his exceptional intelligence and different logical approach made him frequently
frustrated with what he saw as the inadequacies of others (especially music critics),
and this led to frequent ‘explosions’. He was as fascinated with his own thought
processes as Lewis Carroll was, and he too explored them deliberately. Similarly,
he only made progress with Parade after the like-minded Picasso joined the team
and gave him ideas he could work with (unlike Cocteau). So, with Satie, periods
of elated bonhomie (often exacerbated by drink and little food) alternated with
others of almost embarrassing shyness and timidity (hence his often-repeated and
rather feeble jokes at society gatherings). He was anti-authoritarian and very much
in favour of the young, seeing himself as coming ‘into this world very young in a
very old age’. Underneath he was sensitive to others yet volatile whenever he felt
himself threatened.
Most importantly, he seems to have conceptualised his ideas, which made
the two-dimensional concept of writing extremely laborious (‘it took him a good
twenty minutes to write a six-line postcard’, according to Jean Wiéner).33 As
such, he masked his shortcomings in his slow and conscious calligraphy, which
means that the many little drawings he made of everything from spaceships to
advertisements for medieval sorcerers must have happily filled many lonely hours
in a run-down industrial backwater like Arcueil. At the same time, the higher-order
dyslexia would have given him a spatial approach to music (which explains his
fascination with Cubism and sculpture) and made him attracted to transformational
thinking, magic and the potentials of formal mirroring. A particular case of this is
the original concept of the Gymnopédies with the first two as a mirroring pair. Both
were constructed in two halves and the first originally had a four-bar introduction
and no balancing coda, whereas the second had a coda and no introduction. And
in the first there are only four bars that vary between the two balancing halves,
whilst in the second it was the melody in the first half that Satie revised. However,
the rule of three took precedence in the end, with Satie adding an introduction to
the Second Gymnopédie for its later publication in 1895 to make it seem like the
others. On this rule of three, incidentally, Satie said of the Aperçus désagréables
in 1913 that ‘before I compose a piece, I walk round it several times, accompanied
by myself’,34 and if the second and third pieces in a set were as good as the first, it
was ‘the absolutely new form’ he had invented that ‘was good in itself’.35 This was
33
Jean Wiéner, ‘Un grand musicien’, Arts 1/25 (20 July 1945), p. 4: ‘il faut vingt
bonnes minutes pour rédiger un pneumatique de six lignes’.
34
At the end of a publicity document for his publisher Eugène-Louis Demets, cited in
Ornella Volta (ed.), Satie Ecrits (Paris: Le Champ Libre, 1981), p. 143: ‘Avant d’écrire une
œuvre, j’en fais plusieurs fois le tour, en compagnie de moi-même.’
35
Reported by Paul Collaer in La musique moderne (Brussels: Editions Meddens,
1963), p. 136: ‘J’ai inventé une forme absolument nouveau … si [les autres pièces] sont
encore bonnes, c’est que la forme que j’ai imaginée est bonne en elle-même.’
rather like viewing the same sculpture by his friend Brancusi from three different
angles, and shows a truly three-dimensional, almost architectural approach to
music.
Satie was obsessed with making lists (like Marcel Proust) as much as with
devising compositional systems and numerology (like Schoenberg and Berg),
and these lists would have struck him as funny in their fantastical concepts. Like
many higher-order dyslexics, his frustration with early learning led to reports of
idleness and lack of progress at the Paris Conservatoire in the 1880s, where he was
good at dictation but poor at sight-reading. In fact, the edition of Mendelssohn36
that he practised from shows him to have been more interested in working out
a definitive form of his signature on the cover than in the virtually pristine
piano pieces themselves. His dislike of playing or even discussing his music in
public follows on from his early experiences. While the spelling difficulties we
normally associate with dyslexia were more the province of his friend Debussy,
this hypothesis explains so much that it deserves serious credence in Satie’s case
and is in no way meant to be condescending. Besides, his ability to see things
differently from others made him a connoisseur of modern art. He considered his
friend André Derain (who had an equally scurrilous sense of humour) to be ‘the
greatest painter of the Fauvist period’. After 1912, it was his encouragement that
kept Derain going when he thought his career was over, and he told friends that ‘it
was Satie who saved me as a painter’.37 Equally, Picasso’s mistress from 1904 to
1912, Fernande Olivier, said that ‘The only person that I heard argue clearly and
sensibly about Cubism was Erik Satie’,38 and in a fast-changing world of multiple
-isms riddled with charlatans, Satie’s uncanny ability to spot the good from the bad
could have made him a fortune.
As far as important innovative ideas were concerned, Satie’s logic proved
faultless with the benefit of hindsight. He was the first to see the overwhelming
need for French music to remain French in the face of the obsession with late
Beethoven and Wagnerism in nineteenth-century Paris. He never shared Debussy’s
love-hate relationship with the master of Bayreuth, and though he was bowled
over by Debussy’s achievement in Pelléas et Mélisande, he felt he had prepared
the way by warning him near the outset of their long friendship in the early 1890s
that ‘we need our own music – without sauerkraut if possible. Why not make use
of the representational methods of Claude Monet, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and
so on? Why not make a musical transposition of them? Nothing simpler. Are they
36
Now in the collection of James Fuld in New York. The Peters Edition dates from
c. 1881.
37
Related by Satie to Robert Caby from his hospital bed in 1925 and passed on to me
in an interview in September 1987.
38
Ornella Volta, L’Ymagier d’Erik Satie (Paris: Editions Van de Velde, 1979), p. 65:
‘L’unique personne que j’ai entendue raisonner clairement et simplement du cubisme ce
fut Erik Satie.’
not expressions too?’39 Satie himself flirted briefly with so-called ‘Impressionism’
in The Dreamy Fish in 1901, but soon discovered it was not his province. But
the pared-down new ‘modern fugue’, which he perfected while at the Schola
Cantorum, was. Typical examples of these, with their repetitive subjects, loose
episodes and lack of obvious contrapuntal tricks, can be found in En habit de
cheval (1911), which, perhaps unsurprisingly by now, refers to what the horse,
rather than the rider, was wearing. Also to emerge around the time of Socrate was
Satie’s compositional aesthetic, in which he distils the essence of his restrained
and logical art. The key elements are as follows:
A melody does not imply its harmony, any more than a landscape implies its
colour…
Do not forget that the melody is the Idea, the outline; as much as it is the form
and the subject matter of the work. The harmony is an illumination, an exhibition
of the object, its reflection.
One cannot criticise the craft of an artist if it follows a plan. If there is form and
a new style of writing, there is a new craft.
The Idea can do without Art.
Let us mistrust Art: it is often nothing but Virtuosity.40
And after all, Satie was a man of ideas, a creative spirit whose influence and example
lives on in the present century and has proved more lasting than the concept of
serialism, which he anticipated in Vexations in 1893 but wisely did not pursue.
There were many good sides to Satie’s character too, another being his love of
children, whom he took on country outings at his own expense in Arcueil around
1910 and taught about pitch using local drainpipes as examples. But children were
39
‘Claude Debussy’, written 15–25 August 1922 in Arceuil for Vanity Fair, but
never published. Cited in Volta, Ecrits, p. 69: ‘Nous devions une musique à nous – sans
choucroute, si possible./Pourquoi ne pas se servir des moyens représentatifs que nous
exposaient Claude Monet, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc.? Pourquoi ne pas transposer
musicalement ces moyens? Rien de plus simple. Ne sont-ce pas des expressions?’
40
From BNF MS 9611, entitled ‘Subject Matter (Idea) and Craftsmanship
(Construction)’ (‘La Matière (Idée) et la Main d’Œuvre (Couture)’). See Orledge, Satie the
Composer, pp. 68–9 for the full text: ‘Une mélodie n’a pas son harmonie, pas plus qu’un
paysage n’a sa couleur…N’oubliez pas que la mélodie est l’Idée, le contour, ainsi qu’elle
est la forme & la matière d’une œuvre. L’harmonie, elle, est un éclairage, une exposition de
l’objet, son reflet./…On ne peut pas critiquer le métier d’un artiste que si celui-ci continue
un système. S’il y a forme & écriture nouvelle. Il y a métier nouveau./…L’Idée peut se
passer de l’Art./Méfions-nous de l’Art: il n’est souvent que de la Virtuosité.’
very different from adults, and when the adult world discovered him (through
Ravel championing his music at the Société Musicale Indépendante in 1911),
he was, illogically, not pleased. However, his explanation to his newly forgiven
brother Conrad on 17 January reveals that he felt confused by the enthusiastic
reception for his early works by the young opponents of Vincent d’Indy, who
found his recent music dull. Now the fruits of his supposed ignorance, which had
led him to enrol at d’Indy’s Schola Cantorum, were being acclaimed! Satie found
this ‘total nonsense’,41 even if he soon realised that it would create a demand for
his subsequent compositions. For that is where his true interest always lay. In the
same letter he also denounced his cabaret work as ‘more stupid and dirty than
anything’. But now, at last, he was able to give it up, and it is ironic that he soon
fell out with his then admired benefactor Ravel initially because he wanted his
new young protégé, Roland-Manuel, to take lessons with his old teacher, Albert
Roussel, whereas Roland-Manuel preferred the more celebrated Ravel.
On the subject of changing views by the usually intransigent Satie, one can
also cite the case of Alfredo Casella. In a rare example of frankly expressed
musical opinion in 1918, Satie agreed with Henry Prunières in saying that ‘in his
music the form is generally lacking in sincerity and he switches too easily from the
style of Fauré to the style of Stravinsky’. Even so, Satie found Prunières indulgent
and thought he might have added ‘that he is always lacking in intelligence. Is it
intelligent to depict Latin visions with Slavic means; to confuse the sky of Italy
with the sky of Russia; to dress Romans as Cossacks? That’s what our dear Casella
does’.42 Above all, Satie would have disliked the absence of an authentic Italian
voice in the Casella works he must have heard and, as we have seen, he was an
unqualified admirer of Stravinsky. He also saw Casella as a poor pianist as well
as a jack-of-all-trades (for he hated pastiche), probably because he had accepted
an official post as professor of piano in Rome in 1915. Later, however, when
Casella’s style became more neoclassical and Italian in the 1920s, and he began to
champion young Italian composers, Satie changed his views (no doubt assisted by
Casella conducting a performance of Socrate). He then supported him in getting a
commission from Rolf de Maré’s Ballets Suédois with the folk-inspired La Giara
in 1924, and this was performed shortly before his own ballet Relâche at the
Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, where its success pleased Satie very much.
Before I give a detailed example of Satie’s musical logic at work, I should like
to cite two evaluations of Satie that tell us more about his logic and reinforce some
41
Letter to Conrad Satie of 17 January 1911, cited in Volta (ed.), Correspondance, p.
145: ‘C’est à n’y rien comprendre … C’est plus bête et plus sale que nature.’
42
Letter of 3 April 1918, cited in Volta (ed.), Correspondance, p. 324: ‘Chez lui la
forme manque généralement de sincérité qu’il passé trop facilement du style de Fauré au
style de Strawinsky … vous pourriez ajouter que toujours il manqué d’intelligence. Est-ce
intelligence de dépeindre des visions latines avec des moyens slaves; de confondre le ciel
de l’Italie avec le ciel de Russie; d’habiller les Romaines en Cosaques? C’est ce que fait
notre cher Casella.’
of my earlier observations. The first comes from Francis Picabia, with whom he
collaborated on Relâche, his final ‘instantanéiste’ ballet in 1924:
Satie’s case is extraordinary … He’s a mischievous and cunning old artist. At

least, that’s how he thinks of himself. Myself, I think the opposite! He’s a very
susceptible man, arrogant, a real sad child, but one who is sometimes made
optimistic by alcohol. But he’s a good friend, and I like him a lot.43
The second comes from Madeleine Milhaud, who knew him well and could still
imitate Satie’s chuckle with his hand to his mouth to perfection at the age of 100:
He was a most lovable person: unpredictable, with a certain charm. His way
of speaking was very spontaneous – the complete opposite of his writing …
Satie never told a dirty story; I never met anyone so polite. But he could be
very violent. As Cocteau said: ‘Satie with never blows up without a reason.’
Everything Satie did was logical, based on the fact that he was very sensitive and
could be hurt by the slightest thing. It was logic carried to an extreme. Look at it
coldly and it makes sense. He had no feeling for the mores of his time. He was
extremely proud and he never showed his poverty to anyone. ‘Poverty entered
my room one day’, he said, ‘like a miserable little girl with [large] green eyes.’44
Satie’s musical logic, which reveals a process of self-discovery with many

experimental blind alleys, is traced through numerous detailed examples in my
book Satie the Composer.45 In this chapter I should like to concentrate only on
the year 1920, and pp. 71–7 of Satie the Composer show how two very different
43
From a letter to André Breton of 17 February 1922, just after Breton’s ‘trial’ for
anti-Dadaism at the Closerie des Lilas restaurant, at which Satie presided. He remained
faithful to this movement and had no time for the automatic writing and dream visions of the
Surrealists, led by Breton, whose quarrel came to a public head at the premiere of Mercure
in 1924. Cited in Michel Sanouillet, Dada à Paris (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1965),
p. 516: ‘Le cas Satie est extraordinaire … C’est un vieil artiste malin et roublard. C’est du
moins ce qu’il pense de lui; moi je pense le contraire! C’est un homme très susceptible,
orgueilleux, un véritable enfant triste, mais que l’alcool rend par moment optimiste. C’est
un bon ami que j’aime beaucoup.’
44
From an interview with Roger Nichols at the Exeter Festival on 4 June 1987. The
quote about poverty comes from the same letter to his brother Conrad of 17 January 1911,
cited in Volta (ed.), Correspondance, p. 146. Cocteau’s other bon mot about Satie was
that composition for him was rather a process of ‘decomposition’ – his approach being so
analytical and painstaking.
45
Pietro Dossena has also undertaken further detailed genetic analyses focusing on
key passages in Satie’s compositions. His valuable discoveries about Le Médecin malgré
lui can be seen in Chapter 8 and his article ‘A la recherche du vrai Socrate’ in the Journal
of the Royal Musical Association 133/1 (2008), pp. 1–31. He has also carried out extensive
research into the Sports et divertissements and the Messe des pauvres.
Example 1.1 Satie, ‘Adieu’: first version
pieces emerged that autumn. The first is the Elégie for his lifelong friend Debussy,
which began as a series of parallel fifths, bitonally exploiting the ambiguity
between E and F minor as it unfolded chromatically, whilst never clearly
asserting either key. This is followed by no less than 28 trials for the seemingly
straightforward start of the ‘Marche Franco-Lunaire’ from La Belle Excentrique,
which show how Satie was anxious to make a really striking, chic and Parisian
initial impression in his final years. And in passing, Satie’s afterthoughts were
invariably his happiest inspirations. Like the strange, disembodied ending of
Socrate, that seems to go on revolving into infinite space, but also comes back
to the bass F sharp on which it began – who would have thought that Satie only
added this at the proof stage and that several of his earlier trials resolved the
long monotone passages (on A and B) telling of Socrate’s death, neatly onto C?
The tiny song ‘Adieu’, the last of the Quatre petites mélodies, composed to
words by Raymond Radiguet in November–December 1920, offers an excellent
additional example. Its original title in Les Joues en feu (Lettres d’un Alphabet)
was ‘Mouchoir’ and in the poem, an ageing Admiral is reassured that he will not
lose face by waving his old handkerchief. How else does one get rid of the flies
of the past?
One might well wonder why 16 bars of music lasting only 35 seconds
occupied Satie for almost two months until one studies the four pages of sketches
that begin the notebook known as BNF MS 9674. Satie began by creating a
rather staid rhythm on a monotone that was, frankly, at odds with Radiguet’s
amusing mini-poem (Ex. 1.1).
This led to his first attempt at a melody, beginning with the descending scale
Satie was to use much more effectively to end the final version (compare Exx.
1.1 and 1.3). But it would have taken him some time to realise this. You can also
see the first ideas for harmonisation in bars 10–12, at the point Satie knew would
Example 1.2 Satie, ‘Adieu’: second version
ultimately mark the turning point and climax of the song from his initial immersion
in the poem (which, like Debussy, he almost certainly learned by heart first). The
interesting thing is that his bassline in bar 11 is reversed in the final version in bar
10, and the rising figure in the upper part was to become a unifying feature of the
final accompaniment. But both of these discoveries would again have taken some
time to emerge.
Example 1.3 Satie, ‘Adieu’: final version
Then Satie made a second, more flexible monotone rhythmic setting over the
first, which he erased, but which still remains visible in the manuscript. This was
more responsive to Radiguet’s poem and shortened the song, which he first set as
bars 3–14 in the final version, changing the first two lines from descending scales
to palindromes (see Ex. 1.2).
This seemingly tiny change was important, both because it gave the voice its
own initial identity and because it still linked in with the rising accompaniment
as an echo across bars 3–4. Lastly, Satie added a brief introduction and balancing
coda, making what started out as a café-concert waltz into a quirky and
sophisticated art song.
Then, sometime before the fair copy reached publication by the Editions de
La Sirène in 1922, Satie added the bass octaves to the coda, added the pause and
slow up in bars 12–13 and moved the Elargir marking from bar 12 to bar 15 to
emphasise the coda (cf. Exx. 1.2 and 1.3).
This had the added benefit of balancing the introduction in which the treble
octaves were initially pitched an octave lower (see Ex. 1.2). The miraculous thing,
of course, is that once Satie had established the nature of the accompaniment in
his first draft and decided on the final format of the song in his second, producing
the quirky harmonies in the third seems to have occurred quite easily, with only
two (though significant) second thoughts in bars 7 and 10 (Ex. 1.2). So Satie ended
up with a meticulously balanced 16-bar song in a 6 + 4 + 6 format with which
he was finally satisfied in December 1920. The process of creation may seem
laborious for a mature and experienced composer, but the process of conscious
self-discovery and the painstaking logic behind it are both fascinating and typical
of Satie the composer.
Chapter 2
Satie and the Meaning of the Comic
Ann-Marie Hanlon
Introduction
The Prince of Humorists, that’s Erik Satie.1
In early Modernist France, Erik Satie was the leading exponent of humour in
high-art music and, consequently, was regarded as one of the most controversial
composers of his time. His idiosyncratic style of musical humour reached its zenith
in a series of ‘humoristic’ piano suites composed between 1912 and 1915, where
humour is generally considered to be the defining feature.2 The persistent use of
humour in his writings and compositions of this period certainly distinguished Satie
from his peers and gained him notoriety during his short public career; however,
the consequences of this humoristic approach resulted in a reluctance or refusal
on the part of most music critics to take his aesthetic and ideological contributions
to musical discourses seriously. Satie’s reception was strongly influenced by the
humanist-Romantic perception of the comic that dominated French society at this
time: in music in particular, humour was viewed as a subversive form of expression
and intellectual resistance. Even the most supportive critics related their concern
that humour functioned as a significant barrier to engagement with Satie’s music. In
1913 Roland-Manuel wrote that ‘these astounding fantasies definitively create an
insurmountable partition between the public and him’.3 The barrier to engagement
with Satie’s music was inextricably linked to the concept of the musical canon and
its ideological opposition to humour. The purpose of this chapter is twofold: first,
to comprehend the nature of this barrier and, second, through an understanding of
how humour operates, to address the need for new methodologies in overcoming
the barrier it presents. Part I addresses the ideologically opposed relationship
between humour and the canon in contemporary discourses. In his humoristic
1
René Chalupt, ‘Le Piège de Méduse, Comédie Lyrique par M. Erik Satie’,
L’Occident: Architecture, Sculpture, Peintre, Musique, Poésie 139 (June 1914), pp. 245–6,
at p. 246: ‘Le Prince des Humoristes c’est M. Erik Satie.’
2
The humorous Sonatine bureaucratique (1917) is often included in this category
because of the aesthetic similarities it demonstrates with these earlier works.
3
Alexis Roland-Manuel, ‘Silhouettes d’Artistes: Erik Satie’, L’Echo musical (Revue
Mensuelle Illustré), 5 April 1913, pp. 1–3, at p. 2: ‘Ces ahurissantes fantaisies créent
définitivement entre le public et lui l’infranchissable cloison.’
period Satie participated in a unique way in contemporary musical debates as

a counter-hegemonic commentator on contemporary ideas of canon. In setting
the context for the reception of Satie’s humour and in establishing the primary
ideological concerns that his humoristic works presented, this discussion is
primarily informed by Henri Bergson’s essays on laughter. Part II is concerned
with how we can overcome this barrier, a legacy of the canon in Satie’s time
that continues to affect how we approach humour in his music today. In this
section a variety of methodological approaches specific to the study of parody and
irony are introduced and explored through direct engagement with Satie’s music.
Satie’s pivotal role as an avatar of musical modernism will never be adequately
acknowledged or valued unless the issue of humour in his music and the truly
revolutionary role it played in his contribution to those discourses is understood.
Since 1911, critics have been engaged in identifying the possible sources
and influences of Satie’s humour; however, this approach has been limited in its
ability to reveal much of the meaning of the comic. The origins of Satie’s humour
are not a primary concern in this study, but rather how it is created and, perhaps
more importantly, why he chose this expressive medium: what critical function
did humour serve in his writings and compositions and how did this affect his
reception? Satie utilised many types of humour in his works, including irony,
satire and parody. Yet, regardless of the type of humour employed, they all shared
a common critical function in the expression of his personal ideologies, and his
adoption of humour was ultimately subversive in intent. Comprehension of the
ideological motivations that lay behind his explicit use of humour in music is vital
in understanding his intellectual participation in Modernist discourses. Therefore,
this study of the comic also considers the affective (the ethos of humour) and
formal (structural techniques, humour as structure) dimensions of Satie’s music.
Humour can function on structural, aesthetic and ideological levels, and these
elements often overlap in creating comic meaning. The following discussion
introduces theories that allow us to analyse these three roles of humour in music
and suggests ways in which we can begin to broach the barrier that humour – a
very complex and culturally specific construct – presents in studies of Satie.
Scholarly engagement with humour has been hindered by an uncertainty
surrounding possible methodological approaches and the lack of a music-specific
vocabulary for dealing with this subject. Categorisations of humorous styles and
techniques in music remain largely undefined, except in reference to the study
of specific discourses or individual composers. The vague and often inadequate
terminology that surrounds discussions of Satie’s humour requires clarification.
Many of the terms we associate with Satie, such as ‘humoristique’ and ‘fantaisiste’,
were first attributed to him in the French musical press in response to the humoristic
works, and the historicity of these terms must be addressed. Terminology we
perhaps take for granted, such as parody and irony, is frequently confused or
badly defined in discussions of music. This study focuses specifically on two
forms of humour associated with Satie that are commonly defined in terms of
negative intent: irony, which judges, and parody, which mocks. These definitions
Satie and the Meaning of the Comic 21
imply that humour only operates in a negative or destructive manner, when this is
certainly not the case. The issues surrounding the terminology of humour must be
negotiated when establishing a context for the analysis of the humoristic works.
Humour serves a range of functions in society, from the maintenance of the status
quo to its deconstruction; however, it is not a universal language and its range of
meanings is socially, historically and culturally specific. In the words of Bergson:
‘To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which
is society, and above all we must determine the utility of its function, which is a
social one … Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common.
It must have a social signification.’4 All interpretations of humour are dependent
upon an awareness of context and in the case of Satie, we have to reconstruct this
context on account of our historical, cultural and social distance from our subject.
Part I: Humour and Context
The Canon
In the humoristic period, and periodically throughout the rest of his life, Satie
participated in the discourses of canon formation in a directly confrontational
manner and employed humour as a rhetorical expressive device. He repeatedly
challenged and ridiculed the ideologies of canon in his music and music journalism.
Alenka Zupančič observes that comedy ‘materializes and gives a body to what can
otherwise appear as an unspeakable, infinite Mystery of the other scene’.5 The
materialism of humour means that it possesses a particular ability to challenge
or even attack symbolic structures such as the canon. Humour can transform
an abstract normative (such as the canon) into a concrete, visible subject, and
remove it from its comfortable hegemonic position: humour can ‘radicalise’ the
norm. As is often the case with hegemonic ideologies, they are rarely noted by the
general public: it is those who cannot identify with or fit into the normative that
are most motivated to participate in counter-hegemonic forms of discourse. Satie’s
ideological and aesthetic attacks on the musical canon were designed to destabilise
its power, a highly subversive act. The maintenance of the musical canon requires
cultural reinforcement and music criticism is the primary site where the heated
debate on Satie’s canonicity occurred. Through an analysis of the sources of
music reception, the tensions between the hegemonic (‘legitimate’) discourses
and counter-discourses of Satie are rendered visible. Humour emerged as the most
pervasive problem identified by the critics: it exerted a profound impact upon the
formation of his public reputation and, subsequently, his author-function.
4
Cited in Simon Critchley, On Humour (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 4.
5
Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2008), p. 210.
Concerns and criteria of canon extend beyond musical matters to include the
composer’s public and private activities, behaviour and even personality.6 This
is particularly evident in the reception of Satie, as anecdotal references to his
humorous behaviour are used to create a particular reputation. Reception is closely
linked to the construction of reputation and two images of Satie are presented in
the critical press ad infinitum during the humoristic period: Satie the ‘humorist’
and ‘precursor’. His self-promotion as a humorist largely undermined any possible
prestige associated with the latter image. Citron notes: ‘To be a professional
composer is to be taken seriously in one’s own time and possibly in the future.
It involves reputation, authority and the circulation of a name within culture.’7
Satie’s penchant for humour was a significant contributory factor in achieving
his exclusion from the French musical canon. The following discussion examines
the reasons why humour was considered so polemical at this time and seeks to
understand why many of the problems early critics encountered in addressing
Satie’s humour persist today.
Bergson and the Contemporary Context
Humour has been a concern of many influential philosophers from ancient to

modern times. In order to contextualise the wider contemporary debate surrounding
humour in music in Satie’s tine, Henri Bergson’s series of three critical essays on
the meaning of the comic are insightful in their elaboration of a priori attitudes
towards humour in art.8 In early Modernist France, Bergson was regarded as
an extremely influential philosophical thinker, so much so that Etienne Gilson
has described the first third of the twentieth century as the ‘age of Bergson’.9 In
‘Le Rire’ (‘Laughter’), Bergson contemplates the social, moral and ideological
roles and functions of humour in society, and in doing so provides an invaluable
insight into contemporary thought on this subject. Many of the societal and artistic
debates concerning humour found in ‘Laughter’ are reflected in the reception of
Satie’s humour.
Bergson states that through these essays he endeavours to ‘contribute to a
better understanding of the real nature of art and the general relation between art
6
Katherine Bergeron, ‘Prologue: Disciplining Music’, in Katherine Bergeron and
Philip V. Bohlman (eds), Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 1–9, at p. 1.
7
Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2000), p. 80.
8
These essays reached a wide audience through their initial publication in La Revue
de Paris in January, February and March 1900.
9
Etienne Gilson, in R.C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France 1900–1914
(Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1988), p. 207. Bergson’s bi-weekly public lectures
at the Collège de France in Paris attracted a cult following and the 400-seat lecture room
could not accommodate the masses who turned up to hear him speak.
and life’.10 He argues that laughter functions as a ‘sort of social gesture’; therefore,
humour plays an important critical role as it can indicate ‘a slight revolt on the
surface of social life’.11 Critics overlooked the critical function that humour played
in Satie’s music, particularly the challenge it presented to the contemporary ideals
of canon. Bergson observes that the comic can serve a dual function in society: it
can be used to attack the status quo or to discipline (to humiliate or silence) the
dissenter.12 The corrective role of laughter is fulfilled by the ‘professional comic’
or, in Satie’s case, the professional critic. His humorous attacks on the norm were
responded to in kind by the music critics, who often used irony and sarcasm as
rhetorical strategies to target and publicly admonish him.
In the third essay, ‘The Comic in Character’, Bergson betrays his ideological
sympathy with elitist Romantic notions of high art through his use of the comic/
serious binary opposition. He discusses high art in spiritual and moral terms, and
outlines why the comic is a lesser form of expression that can never be considered
‘great’:
So we were probably right in saying that comedy lies midway between art and
life. It is not disinterested as genuine art is. By organising laughter, comedy
accepts social life as a natural environment, it even obeys an impulse of social
life. And in this respect it turns its back upon art, which is a breaking away from
society and a return to pure nature.13
Satie’s humoristic works depended upon the existence of the everyday within
his art, particularly through musical borrowings, and he made few attempts to
conceal these elements. In his 1916 biography, Roland-Manuel appropriates
Bergson’s definition of the comic formula of laughter in the defence of the popular
features of Satie’s humoristic music: ‘This rupture of equilibrium, this mechanical
encrusted on the living – as Henri Bergson excellently said – these grimaces, these
disarticulations precisely constitute the everyday practices of the circus, that must
be considered as superior aesthetic entertainment.’14 Bergson would certainly not
have approved of Roland-Manuel’s assessment of Satie’s ‘superior’ music.
10
Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley
Brereton and Fred Rothwell (Rockville: Arc Manor, 2008), p. 64.
11
Ibid., p. 94.
12
Ibid., p. 17.
13
Ibid., p. 81, emphasis added.
14
Alexis Roland-Manuel, Erik Satie. Causerie faite à la Société Lyre et Palette, le
18 Avril 1916 (Paris: Roberge, 1916), p. 6. A copy of this publication that Roland-Manuel
inscribed for Satie resides in the Music Department of the Bibliothèque Nationale de
France, (8°Vm Pièce 463). ‘Cette rupture d’équilibre, ce Mécanique plaqué sur du vivant –
comme l’a dit excellemment Henri Bergson – ces grimaces, ces désarticulations constituent
justement les procédés ordinaires du Cirque, qu’il faut considérer comme le divertissement
esthétique supérieur.’
The materiality of humour contests many Modernist expectations and

assumptions of high art inherited from nineteenth-century Romanticism: the
artwork should be unique, original and elevated above the realm of the everyday.
Humour, by its nature, is only achievable through the inclusion of an everyday
element within the comic formula, a point of reference discernible to the audience
or listener. Bergson emphasises the relationship between the comic and the
everyday, noting that ‘comedy depicts characters we have already come across and
shall meet with again. It takes note of similarities. It aims at placing types before
our eyes. It even creates new types if necessary. In this respect it forms a contrast
to all the arts’.15 In his view, this is why the comic can never belong in the domain
of high art, an opinion shared by most music critics in early twentieth-century
France. In a talk given in Brussels in April 1921, Auric stresses the anti-Romantic
nature of Satie’s humour: ‘Let’s not be surprised if [the majority] placed Satie
straight away, and for too long, in the domain of humour – a very small domain
evidently for the hearts that only beat when listening to Fervaal or l’Etranger.’16
The term ‘small’ in this context is synonymous with ‘insignificant’.
Humour opposes the pure aesthetic which canonic or legitimate art of this period
was expected to demonstrate. Bergson notes that the comic lies in opposition to
formal refinement: ‘It partakes rather of the unsprightly [sic] than of the unsightly,
of rigidness rather than of ugliness.’17 The feature of rigidity is particularly
noticeable in the humoristic works, which are characterised by their mechanical
repetition and insisting rhythms. The comic also denies the spiritual experience
of high art as it invokes a response of laughter rather than respectful silence. The
audience’s reaction to Satie’s humoristic works presented a direct challenge to
concert etiquette, and the sacred space of the concert hall was desecrated through
laughter in the eyes of many critics. Bourdieu repeats Bergson’s sentiments later
in the twentieth century and clarifies that laughter is not the domain of aesthetes,
but rather resides in the realm of the popular aesthetic.18
In discussions of taste and laughter in the early twentieth century, laughter
was considered an unacceptable form of expression in the high-art scene. In 1911
the composer-critic Jean Huré wrote an article reporting his recent experiences
during an evening at a café-concert in Paris, where he regretted that laughter
in the concert hall was unthinkable.19 In a discussion of humour he outlines the
stereotyped differences between ‘la mauvaise musique’ and ‘la bonne musique’,
15
Bergson, Laughter, p. 72.
16
Georges Auric, ‘Le Rôle du prophète’. A typed copy of this talk can be found in
the Satie Archives, IMEC, l’Abbaye d’Ardenne: SAT 40.2, ‘Galerie Georges, Brussels 12
avril 1921’. ‘Ne nous étonnons pas si elle situa aussitôt, et pour trop longtemps, Satie dans
le domaine de l’humour – un tout petit domaine évidemment pour des cœurs qui ne battent
qu’en écoutant Fervaal ou l’Etranger.’
17
Bergson, Laughter, p. 21, emphasis in original.
18
Bourdieu, Distinction (London and New York: Routledge Classics [1984] 2010), p. 26.
19
Jean Huré, ‘L’Art au Café-Concert’, Revue musicale SIM (October 1911), pp. 63–4.
and laments that the critics of ‘officialdom’ ‘have never had the curiosity to
examine, to consider, the reasons why bad music is loved, by those we call “the
vulgar”: the “vulgar” composed indistinctly of factory workers, of the bourgeois,
of the people of the world’.20 Two years following this article, Satie would bring
laughter to the high-art concert hall. The humoristic works baffled critics, yet were
adored by contemporary audiences. At many of the premieres, they were given
an encore on account of the audience’s reaction to them: ‘finally, the Véritables
préludes flasques (pour un chien), by Erik Satie, that merited the honour of an
encore’.21 In December 1913 Auric recalls the reception of the humoristic works
in concert halls during that year:
Besides the friendly public, not those envious colleagues of prejudiced sectarians,
but the audience of sincere amateurs always shows the greatest enthusiasm for
the humoristic music of Erik Satie. The Préludes flasques, played at the Société
Nationale by Ricardo Viñes, were encored, at the Société indépendante they
were received less favourably and finally, at the Salle Pleyel, Mme Jeanne
Mortier found herself obliged to perform the d’Edriophthalma of the Embryons
desséchés twice to the joyous admiration of an enthusiastic hall.22
This popular reaction was a reason why star virtuoso pianists of the day chose to
incorporate these works into their repertoire, yet it impacted detrimentally upon
Satie’s critical reception. Auric notes that Satie’s humorist self-promotion severely
damaged his reputation: ‘Satie finds himself condemned … It is in good spirit to
punish the smooth talk of this clown.’23
Bergson explains that society is suspicious of comic individuals because of their
non-conformist character: ‘separatist tendencies, that incline to swerve from the
common centre round which society gravitates: in short, because it is the sign of
20
Ibid., p. 63: ‘Or, nous n’avons jamais la curiosité d’examiner, de peser, les raisons
qui font aimer la mauvaise musique par ceux que nous appelons “le vulgaire”: le “vulgaire”
composé, indistinctement, d’ouvriers, de bourgeois, de gens du monde.’
21
René Chalupt, ‘Société Nationale de Musique’ in La Phalange 82 (20 April 1913),
p. 383: ‘enfin, des Véritables préludes flasques (pour un chien), de M. Erik Satie, qui
méritèrent les honneurs du bis’.
22
Georges Auric, ‘Erik Satie: Musicien Humoriste’, Revue française de musique, 4–10
December 1913, pp. 138–42, at p. 142: ‘D’ailleurs le public, non pas celui des confrères
envieux des sectaires partiaux, mais le public des amateurs sincères marque toujours le
plus grand enthousiasme pour la musique humoristique de M. Satie. Les Préludes flasques,
joués à la Société Nationale par M. Ricardo Viñes, ont été bissés, à la Société indépendante,
accueilles avec moins de faveur, et, tout dernièrement Mme Jeanne Mortier s’est vue
obligée, salle Pleyel, d’offrir deux fois de suite l’Embryons desséche [sic.] d’Edroiphtalma
à l’admiration joyeuse d’une salle enthousiasmée.’
23
Ibid., p. 141: ‘M. Satie s’entend condamner … il est de bon ton de châtier ce
“boniment de clown”.’
an eccentricity’.24 If a comic gesture is made, society responds with a gesture that

reveals its attitude towards the comic, yet it refrains from direct intervention if an
immediate threat is not perceived. Satie’s humoristic works were interpreted as a
direct threat on account of their popularity and he was reprimanded for his actions.25
Bergson expresses his belief in the necessity of ‘rules’ in society and declares that its
members have a moral responsibility to supervise and control the comic:
Were man to give way to the impulse of his natural feelings, were there neither
social nor moral law, these outbursts of violent feeling would be the ordinary
rule in life. But utility demands that these outbursts should be foreseen and
averted. Man must live in society, and consequently submit to rules.26
This statement on the relationship between the comic and society strongly parallels
the normative drive in musical circles at that time to discipline and control
composers, such as Satie, who challenged the ‘rules’ of the canon. Bohlman
notes that: ‘Canon and discipline are … ineluctably bound, even though they are
not the same … the canon is the performative, discipline is the performance.’27
Disciplining can be performed in many ways, from a refusal to publish certain
works, finance concerts and provide patronage to particular individuals, to the
expulsion of pupils who do not uphold standards set within institutions. Perhaps
the harshest form of discipline for a composer is to be ignored completely, and
in this regard, the public sources of formal reception in the music and general
press constitute the primary domain within which the disciplining of Satie’s music
occurred. This form of discipline, which mostly coincided with Satie’s non-official
career in the Parisian cabarets, characterised his career before 1911 and persisted
in many of the influential journalistic publications until the controversial premiere
of Parade in 1917, when critics could no longer ignore such a noisy ‘amateur’ who
appeared to display no regard for the serious ethos of the canon.
Satie’s Self-promotion
Throughout his career, Satie’s reputation as a humorist was largely constructed

by the composer himself and the ‘humoristic’ phase coincided with the beginning
of his irony-laden career in music journalism.28 Satie intensively promoted
24
25
Satie’s involvement with the Dada movement was also perceived as a serious threat.
Consequently, the most vitriolic attacks on Satie during his career were directed at Relâche.
26
27
Philip Bohlman, ‘Epilogue: Music and Its Canons’, in Katherine Bergeron and
Philip V. Bohlman (eds), Disciplining Music, pp. 201–2.
28
In 1889 he introduced himself as ‘the sphinx-man, the wooden-headed composer’.
This humoristic advert appeared in Le Chat Noir VIII/369 (9 February 1889); see Ornella
Volta (ed.), Correspondance presque complète (Paris: Editions d’IMEC, 2000), p. 788.
his anti-establishment and humorist reputation from 1912 to 1914 through

the publication of a series of ‘fragments’ under the heading Mémoires d’un
Amnésique and in the programme notes for the humoristic works that appear
in the Guide du Concert. His journalistic endeavours differed considerably
from the serious style of music criticism in vogue at that time. Inspired by
nationalist concerns, music criticism was the prominent medium within which
debates concerning the nature of French music were contested and resolved.
Satie utilised his journalistic writings to engage in this debate; however, the
veil of irony in which his opinions were expressed meant that his contributions
were not taken seriously. In these forays into music journalism, the targets of his
humour are clear: here he employs humour as a tool for critiquing the criteria
of the canon, and more specifically those criteria that he is failing to meet. In an
atmosphere of intense and serious debate, his use of humour in journalism and
in music was the ultimate anarchist statement that would result in his dismissal
from artistic and intellectual discourses on music.
This period of Satie’s public career coincided with a transitional period in the
French music press that witnessed a gradual shift from a hermeneutic to a more
formalist style of criticism.29 The advent of musical modernism necessitated
programme notes, which were frequently published in the Guide du Concert
and in other musical publications. Critics often relied heavily on these notes
and tended to quote from them extensively in reviews of new music. The aim
of these brief notes was to facilitate understanding and inadvertently encourage
musical discussion and analysis. Satie’s writings, however, served to confuse
rather than provide clarification to those readers who wished to understand his
idiosyncratic music. The Guide notes in particular left readers in no doubt of
his subversive status as he consistently insulted the critics and audiences in
advance of premieres (if his words are taken literally).
On 5 April 1913, Satie used the Guide du Concert to advertise a new departure
in composition that would come to be known as his ‘humoristic’ works.30 In
this introduction Satie does not elaborate on the aesthetic innovations they
represent, but focuses instead on their anti-Romantic features of brevity and
simplicity:
29
For a more detailed account of the changes occurring in music criticism and the
impact of Modernism on approaches to musical discourses in this period and the changes
occurring in music criticism, see Déirdre Donnellon, ‘Debussy, Satie and the Parisian
Critical Press (1890–1925)’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Liverpool, January
2000, p. 23.
30
Satie’s humorous concert notes appear in the Guide du Concert on the following
dates: 29 March 1913 (Véritables préludes flasques); 31 May 1913 (Descriptions
automatiques); and 10 January 1914 (Chapitres tournés en tous sens). Notes on Embryons
desséchés were never published, but appear on the cover of the notebook in which this work
was sketched (BN9590).
The Véritables Préludes Flasques (pour un chien) open a series of pianistic

works: Descriptions Automatiques, Embryons Desséchés, Chapitres tournés
en tous sens and Vieux Sequins et Vieilles Cuirasses. In them I devote myself
to the sweet joys of fantasy. Those who will not understand are requested by
me to observe the most respectful silence and to show an attitude of complete
submission and inferiority. That is their true role.31
The term ‘humoristic’ was first applied to Satie by the composer-critic Paul
Martineau in a review of a performance of Véritables préludes flasques (pour un
chien).32 In this period this term was not imbued with any aesthetic significance:
Martineau simply uses it as a substitute adjective for humorous or funny. In
December of the same year Auric mentions how much the public love the
‘humoristic music’ of Satie.33 Satie appropriates the term in only one context of
which we are currently aware: a biography for his music publisher Demets in
December 1913, where he states that ‘the precious composer’ explains here ‘his
humoristic works’.34
It must be noted that a disparity is evident between the works considered
‘humoristic’ in Satie scholarship in general and those described as ‘humoristic’
by Satie himself. In the Guide notes and in his biography for Demets, Satie lists
six ‘humoristic’ works that he considers part of this series: Véritables préludes
flasques (pour un chien), Embryons desséchés, Descriptions automatiques,
Croquis et agaceries d’un gros bonhomme en bois, and he states that the ‘Chapitres
tournés en tous sens and the Vieux Sequins et Vieilles Cuirasses will follow, and
will complete this curious series, so graciously original’.35 He never repeats the
term ‘humoristic’ in another context; however, he persistently emphasises the term
fantaisie to describe his works of this period in general, perhaps indicating other
contemporary works that are similar in conception to his ‘humoristic’ series. For
instance, on the manuscript for Le Piège de Méduse, he writes that ‘this is a play
31
Emphasis added. Erik Satie, Guide du Concert, 29 March 1913, 375–6: ‘Les
Véritables Préludes Flasques ouvrent une série d’œuvres pianistiques: “Les Descriptions
Automatiques”, “Les Embryons Desséchés”, “Les Chapitres tournés en tous sens” et “Les
Vieux Sequins”. Je m’y livre aux joies douces de la fantaisie. Ceux qui ne comprendront pas
sont priés par moi, d’observer le plus respectueux silence et de faire montre d’une attitude
toute de soumission, toute d’infériorité. C’est là leur véritable rôle.’
32
Paul Martineau, ‘Review’, Le Monde musical, 30 May 1913, p. 167: ‘Ils sont très
humoristiques ces Préludes, mais cependant le titre et les sous-titres en constituent encore
la plus heureuse trouvaille.’
33
Georges Auric, ‘Erik Satie: Musicien Humoriste’, p. 142.
34
Erik Satie, ‘Erik Satie’, Bulletin des Editions Musicales, (Agence Musicale E.
Demets), December 1913, p. 42, reproduced in Ornella Volta (ed.), Ecrits (Paris: Editions
Champ-Libre 1981), p. 142.
35
Ibid., p. 142: ‘Les Chapitres tournés en tous sens, et les Vieux Sequins et Vieilles
Cuirasses vont suivre, vont compléter cette curieuse série, si gracieusement originale.’
of pure fantasy’, and in the foreword to Sports et divertissements, he states that ‘it
is a work of fantasy. It should not be seen as anything else.36. Whiting explains that
the term fantaisiste ‘was a catch-all designation for a wide variety of cabaret and
music-hall humorists’ and prior to Satie this term had never been applied to the
domain of concert music.37 Speaking in the third person, Satie identifies himself
as a fantaisiste in 1913: ‘He classifies himself among the “fantaisistes”, who are
“good decent people” according to him.’38 From 1911 onwards, critics frequently
use this term in their descriptions of Satie. An early article by Calvocoressi
describes Satie as ‘a grand fantaisiste, who … has an exacerbated sense of deadpan
humour’.39 Auric names Satie the ‘Prince of Fantasy’ in an article of 1917.40 In his
biography Roland-Manuel similarly emphasises this image of Satie as a fantasiste
in his personality and in his art:
The personality of Erik Satie is like a mocking elf, it conceals itself and escapes
you even when you believe you have grasped it: it escapes you because at its
truest core is the nature of deception: the creation of fantasies … A fantasiste,
that is what Erik Satie is in his art, in his life and in his writings; a number of his
productions … acquire their full value when one knows them as having issued
from the most insane Muse that ever was, and here is the reason why serious
censors and austere critics did not know how to do justice to this music.41
Before the launch of his public high-art career by Ravel in January 1911, Satie
spent nearly 20 years working as an arranger and accompanist in many famous
cabarets in Paris. In the pre-war years, music critics initially overlook his time
36
Fantaisie can be translated as ‘fantasy’ or ‘imagination’. In this context, ‘fantasy’
is the more appropriate translation.
37
Steven Moore Whiting, Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 397.
38
Ibid., p. 142: ‘[M. Erik Satie] Passe pour le plus étrange musicien de notre temps.
Il se classifie lui-même parmi les “fantaisistes” qui sont, selon lui, “de bonnes gens bien
convenables”.’
39
M.D. Calvocoressi, ‘M. Erik Satie’, Musica 103 (April 1911), pp. 65–6, at p. 65:
‘C’est un grand fantaisiste, qui, chaque fois que je rappelle à dessein, il a le sens exacerbé
de l’humour à froid.’
40
Georges Auric, ‘Bibliographie: Musique’, Le Courrier musical (March 1917), pp.
129–30, at p. 130.
41
Alexis Roland-Manuel, ‘Silhouettes d’Artistes: Erik Satie’, L’Echo musical (Revue
Mensuelle Illustré), 5 April 1913, pp. 1–3, at p. 1: ‘La personnalité d’Erik Satie est comme
un farfadet moqueur, elle se dérobe et vous échappe alors même que vous croyez le saisir:
elle vous échappe parce que son plus réel fondement est de nature à décevoir: la fantaisie
… Fantaisiste, Erik Satie l’est dans son art, dans sa vie et dans sa littérature; nombre de ses
productions … prennent toute leur valeur quand on les sait issues de la Muse la plus folle
qui fut jamais, et voici la raison pour laquelle les censeurs graves et les critiques austères ne
sauraient rendre justice à cette musique.’
in the cabaret, yet they frequently invoke language associated with this milieu in
both a positive and negative manner to describe his new humorous approach to
composition. Whilst the descriptors fantaisiste and humoristic were also employed
by Satie in the self-promotion of his new musical style, the term fumiste was
exclusively used by critics. In the first major critical article on Satie in the music
press, Jules Ecorcheville relates that he was an ironist and fumiste in his youth.42
The term fumiste has many connotations, though it is typically employed as a
derogatory term to describe an individual who is frivolous, lazy, a joker or a liar.
Cabaret humour is often described as fumiste, a term that has evident subversive
and lowbrow connotations. Fumisme is often associated with Alfred Jarry, one of
the many writers cited as a possible comic influence upon Satie. In a study of Jarry,
Jill Fell claims that the function of the fumistes ‘was to counteract the pomposity
and hypocrisy which they perceived as characterizing so much of society’ and they
did so through ‘a sceptical-humorous approach’ to their subjects.43
The transgressive connotations of the terms ‘humoristic’, fantaisiste and
fumiste influenced later critical arguments surrounding the premiere of Parade. In
the aftermath of Satie’s self-promotion as a humorist, many critics were unsure of
how to deal with Satie: should he be taken seriously or should he be dismissed as a
joker? Paul Collaer’s insistence that Parade is ‘not a case of fumisterie’ contrasts
with Poueigh’s view that in this work it is unclear ‘where the futurists and cubists
stop and the fumistes and puffistes start’.44 Collaer voices the fear that ‘maybe one
will laugh, if I speak seriously of this music’.
The incorporation of humorous elements in Satie’s music dates back to his
early career as a pianist and songwriter in Montmartre in the late 1880s.45 In his
lifetime, the association of the comic with the everyday connoted a distinctly
lowbrow art form and his associations with this musical milieu also contributed
42
Jules Ecorcheville, ‘Erik Satie’, Revue musicale SIM (15 March 1911), pp. 29–32,
at p. 29.
43
Jill Fell, Alfred Jarry: An Imagination in Revolt (Cranberry, NJ: Rosemont, 2005),
p. 54.
44
Paul Collaer, ‘Musique’, La Flamme, 25 December 1919–1 January 1920, 3: ‘Je ne
comprends pas qu’on ait parlé de ‘fumisterie’ à propos de la Parade d’Erik Satie … Peut-être
sourira-t-on, si je parle du “sérieux” de cette musique.’ Octave Séré [pseudonym for Jean
Poueigh], ‘Le Cubisme et la Musique’, La Rampe: Revue Hebdomadaire des spectacles,
24 May 1917, p. 1: ‘Je ne conclurais donc pas et ne réclamerai point avec le poète “de la
musique avant toute chose”, ne sachant pas où les futuristes et les cubistes s’arrêtent, et où
commencent les fumistes et les puffistes.’ Puffiste was a term used to describe a charlatan,
an individual accused of false advertisement through trickery and jokes.
45
The three Gnossiennes of 1890 contain the first instance of Satie’s unusual
playing directions with instructions such as ‘sur la langue’ (‘on the tip of the tongue’),
‘postulez en vous-même’ (‘seek within yourself’) and ‘sans orgueil’ (‘without pride’).
These cryptic and humorous annotations developed into an integral artistic feature of his
‘humoristic’ piano works (1912–15). He continued this practice in his piano compositions
until the Nocturnes of 1919.
to his non-professional status. Jean Marnold is particularly incensed at the overt

quotation of the military song La casquette du Père Bugeaud in Vieux sequins et
vieilles cuirasses. Marnold invokes Satie’s associations with the Chat Noir cabaret
in order to dismiss the work: ‘Rodolphe Satie probably dedicated this masterwork
to the memory of Erik Salis who without doubt, in his grave, was dumbfounded
by this unexpected homage.’46
Satie’s reputation as a comic composer was further promoted in the first six
‘fragments’ of Mémoires d’un Amnésique (Memoires of an Amnesiac).47 While
these articles are certainly not Satie’s real-life memoirs, they do reflect his
opinions on various issues pertinent to canon formation and the expectations
of a professional composer. Satie used this platform to respond to and dismiss
criticisms directed at him in the music press by mocking the criteria and methods
with which critics assessed art music. The choice of his targets correlates strongly
with his biographical experiences: humour was the medium through which he
publicly he voiced his opposition to musical institutions, particularly those with
which he was once affiliated. He felt that institutions were responsible for stifling
musical creativity and he disagreed with the increasing institutionalisation of
music through academic honours and their promotion of historical genres and
conventions.
In response to his categorisation as a musical amateur in the music press and
his consequent rejection as a composer with ‘official’ status, Satie wrote ‘What
I am’. In this fragment, he sarcastically explains that he is not a composer, but a
‘phonometer’ (a person who measures the intensity of sound). Volta believes that
this statement was a direct response to Octave Séré’s description of Satie as a
‘clumsy, but subtle technician, author of new, sometimes exquisite, often bizarre,
sonorities’.48 In ‘Perfect Entourage’ humour is critically employed to mock the
religious-like veneration of ‘canonised’ works and composers. In music criticism
at this time, religious imagery and terminology appear consistently. Satie lists the
‘glorious works of art’ that surround him in life: ‘a magnificent fake Rembrandt’,
a canvas of unquestioned beauty, the delightful “Portrait attributed to an unknown
46
Jean Marnold, ‘Musique’, 3rd Festival Montjoie!’, Mercure de France, 16 April
1918, pp. 509–15, at pp. 513–14: ‘Probablement M. Rodolphe Satie dédia-t-il ce chef-
d’œuvre à la mémoire d’Erik Salis qui, dans sa tombe, à cet hommage inespéré, en resta
comme deux rondes de flan, sans doute aucun.’ Rodolphe Salis was the director of Le Chat
Noir cabaret, where Satie was employed for a period.
47
Six fragments of the Mémoires appeared in the Revue musicale SIM between
1912 and 1914: ‘What I Am’ (15 April 1912, p. 69), ‘Perfect Entourage’ (July–August
1912, p. 83), ‘My Three Candidatures’ (November 1912, p. 70), ‘Theatrical Things’ (15
January 1913, p. 69), ‘The Musician’s Day’ (15 February 1913, p. 69) and ‘Intelligence and
Musicality Among Animals’ (1 February 1914, p. 69).
48
Volta (ed.), Correspondance, p. 1035: ‘Erik Satie, technicien maladroit mais
subtil, auteur de sonorités neuves, parfois exquises, souvent bizarres.’ Octave Séré was a
pseudonym for Satie’s adversary, the critic Jean Poueigh.
artist”’, ‘my copy of Teniers’.49 He then claims that all these ‘masterly works’
are overshadowed by ‘a fake Beethoven manuscript, a sublime apocryphal
symphony by the master – bought by me, religiously, ten years ago’. In ‘My Three
Candidatures’ Satie expresses his disregard for institutions and the individuals
who run them: ‘Though I am not very conservative, I had the impression that the
Precious Members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts were treating my person with
a degree of pig-headedness and wilfulness that bordered on calculated obstinacy.’50
This fragment must have been a significant anti-establishment statement for Satie
as he felt the need to inform the public of his unhappy relations with the Académie.
In ‘Intelligence and Musicality Among Animals’ Satie ironically criticises the
restrictive nature of musical education in language previously used against him. In
doing so, he also highlights the generic and unimaginative writing style of many
critics who ascribe a few adjectives to a work or a performer rather than engaging
in direct discussion of the musical elements. He apes the style of a music critic to
present the ironic dilemma faced by the nightingale, perhaps a metaphor for Satie
himself, evoking opinions previously directed at his musical talent and lack of
formal education:
As for the nightingale which is endlessly referred to, its musical knowledge is
enough to make the most ignorant listener shrug his shoulders. Not only is its
voice not trained, but it knows nothing about keys, or pitch, or mode, or rhythm.
It may well be gifted. Quite possibly; in fact, quite certainly. But one can say
firmly that its artistic development is not on a par with its natural gifts, and that
the voice it is so proud of, is only a very inferior instrument which in itself is
useless.51
Vladimir Jankélévitch coined the term ‘ironic conformism’ to describe the way in
which Satie ironically appropriates the language or style of a discourse in order to
subvert it.52 This comic technique, however, could more accurately be described
as a parody operating in an ironic mode, a genre commonly used in political
and philosophical debates. For example, Nietzsche condemns Christianity by
appropriating the language and imagery of a Christian sermon to parodic effect: ‘I
49
Translation in Ornella Volta (ed.), A Mammal’s Notebook: Collected Writings of
Erik Satie, trans. Antony Melville (London: Atlas Press, 1996), pp. 101–2.
50
Ibid., p. 102.
51
Translation in ibid., p. 105.
52
Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Ironie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1957), Chapter II, pp. 67–80.
Jankélévitch’s concept of ironic conformism is discussed in further detail by Henri Béhar
in an essay on Dada and Surrealist theatre and by Hélène Politis in an essay on Satie’s
writings: Henri Béhar, ‘Erik Satie ou le conformisme ironique’, in Etude sur le Théâtre
Dada et Surréaliste: Les Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), pp. 101–5; and Hélène Politis,
‘Sermons Humoristiques’, in Ecrits pour Vladimir Jankélévitch (Paris: Flammarion, 1978),
pp. 82–105.
call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion,
the one great instinct of revenge for which no means are too venomous, too
underhand and too petty – I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.’53
Foucault would later copy Nietzsche’s style and this led Deleuze to consider his
work capable of provoking ‘unexpected laughter’.54 Rather than interpret these
fragments as an attack on the ideologies of ‘officialdom’, Satie was simply viewed
as a funny and entertaining eccentric, and certainly not an individual to be taken
seriously.
Part II: Overcoming the Barriers
A misunderstanding exists between the public and him of which I was a victim
myself. He is considered a false original. One does not want to admit that he is
a humorist, a pioneer, nor ever imagine that before him, no composer had the
audacity – or was capable of – writing scientifically bouffe music. The moment
one deigns to make the effort to adopt this idea and to seriously listen to his
seriously-written art nouveau, one will quickly recognise the enormous intrinsic
value of his compositions.55
Comic Techniques
Humour dates surprisingly quickly and is a very culturally specific form of

expression: the phrase ‘you had to be there’ rings particularly true for many
of Satie’s ‘humoristic’ works, which require the recognition of historically and
culturally specific references or codes for the realisation of humorous intent. In
fact, very little of the musical humour in Satie’s instrumental music is instantly
interpreted as such, especially by the non-French listener. Interpreting humour is
reliant upon the existence of a shared ‘discursive community’, or communities,
between the producer and the receiver of the humour.56 The most accessible
53
Quoted in Lisa Downing, The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 14.
54
Ibid.
55
Antoine Banès, ‘Les Concerts: Festival Erik Satie’, Le Figaro, 9 June 1923, p.
4: ‘Il existe entre le public et lui un malentendu dont je fus victime moi-même. On le
considère comme un faux original. On ne veut pas admettre que c’est un humoriste, un
novateur, ni songer que jamais, avant lui, aucun compositeur n’eut l’audace – ou ne fut
capable – d’écrire une musique scientifiquement bouffe. Dès que l’on daignera se donner
la peine d’adopter cette idée et d’écouter sérieusement son art nouveau sérieusement écrit,
on constatera vite l’énorme valeur intrinsèque de ses compositions.’ The term art nouveau
is a play on words in this context.
56
Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London and
New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 91. Hutcheon explains that in the definition of discursive
and overt examples of humour within Satie’s works for a twenty-first-century

listener are those where he plays with conventions or works of the historical
musical canon. In such pieces, he manipulates instantly recognisable contextual
musical codes for comic purpose: the extremely exaggerated codas that conclude
the first and third movements of Embryons desséchés, the surprising arrival of
the siren in the early minutes of Parade, the ‘inane’ conversation between the
clarinet in B-flat and the bassoon followed by a comically brief and clumsy
tuba solo in ‘Jeux de Gargantua’ in Trois petites pièces montées.57 The humour
in these examples is evident to listeners who are familiar with the history of
‘legitimised’ musical culture and its conventions, those who share this particular
discursive community with Satie.
In the introduction to Comedy in Music: A Bibliographical Resource Guide
(2001), Arias outlines 20 ‘principal techniques of comic music’ utilised to achieve
comic effect.58 The range of comic techniques available to composers certainly
exceeds this number (repetition and exaggeration are two notable omissions) and
many of the techniques mentioned overlap significantly; however, it does provide
a helpful checklist for initial musical investigation. Outlined in the following
list are six general categories into which comic techniques in music could be
considered, incorporating those in Arias’ list and others from non-musicological
studies in humour. Many of these techniques appear in Satie’s music, yet they are
also fundamental rhetorical components of non-humorous musical works: context
is paramount in the recognition and interpretation of musical humour:
communities, or the similar idea of a socio-rhetorical discourse community, ‘we all belong
to many overlapping (and sometimes even conflicting) communities or collectives. This
overlapping is the condition that makes irony possible, even though the sharing will
inevitably always be partial, incomplete, fragmentary; nevertheless, something does
manage to get shared – enough, that is, to make irony happen’ (pp. 92–3).
57
Satie inserts the playing direction niaisement (inanely) at the start of this brief
section. Similarly, in Le piège de Méduse, he incorporates the trombone into the score for
comic effect. According to Michael Struck-Scholen: ‘Satie certainly did not use instruments
like trombone or percussion for any good instrumental reason but either out of a simple
desire to shock people by combining instruments which were not socially acceptable or
else just because they happened to be available at music parties so that he could employ
them for his surrealistic brainwaves, as for example, with the “musical wallpaper” (musique
d’ameublement).’ Michael Struck-Schloen, ‘Zwischen Moebelmusik und Zwoelftonkonzert:
Die Posaune im Kammerensemble am Beginn der Neuen Musik (1913–1934)’, in Melos:
Vierteljahresschrift für zeitgenössiche Musik (Schott, 1986), pp. 8–10, at pp. 9–10.
58
Enrique Alberto Arias, Comedy in Music: A Historical Bibliographical Resource
Guide (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), pp. 3–5. The most significant academic
work on humour in music has mostly appeared since 2000 and, consequently, this guide is
already dated.
1. Explicit reference to the comic: setting music to a comic text; alluding to

a well-known comic character; performing the work in an overtly comic
manner.59
2. The employment of comic sub-genres, such as satire or parody, and the
use of comic modes such as irony.
3. Musical surprise: the juxtaposition of incongruous syntactical elements;
exaggeration; repetition; unusual effects of texture, dynamics, rhythms
and melodic design; unexpected or distant modulations, sudden switches
from diatonic to non-diatonic tonalities, the harmonisation of diatonic
melodies with a non-diatonic accompaniment; the use of chance.
4. Comic labelling: the use of comic titles; comic genre designations (e.g.
opera buffa, opéra comique, scherzo (which means ‘joke’)).
5. Alterations/additions to the musical score: visually curious notation;
the use of soggetto cavato (‘the substitution of solmization syllables for
letters’ in notation);60 the addition of texts to instrumental works; tempo
instructions that indicate mood and style in addition to pace.
6. The existence of the double:61 the use of programmatic musical description;
reference or allusion to a particular style, genre, structure or convention;
quotations of extant musical material; inversion;62 the reproduction of
sonorous or visual effects in a precise or allegorical fashion.63
Repetition is a prominent feature of many of Satie’s works and is a compositional

technique he privileged over development. Repetition is a ubiquitous technique
in comedy, and arguably comedy is not possible without repetition as it must
place something we know ‘before our eyes’. Zupančič relates that repetition is
59
Satie explicitly refers to comic characters in the titles of three of his pieces: Lewis
Carroll’s Mad Hatter in Le chapelier (1916) and François Rabelais’ comic giants Pantagruel
and Gargantua in the first and third movements of Trois petites pièces montées.
60
Arias, Comedy in Music, p. 5.
61
Zupančič, in The Odd One In, refers to this technique, a structural comic device, as
‘the theme of the double’. She notes (p. 89) that ‘it is [often] the very condition of comedy
that these doubles do not meet directly, and that they do not know about each other’s
existence’. Bergson describes the same technique as ‘reciprocal inference of series’: ‘a
situation is invariably comic when it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent
series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the
same time.’ Bergson, Laughter, pp. 49–50.
62
‘Inversion’ is a technique described by Bergson that describes a situation where the
roles of characters in a situation are reversed in order to create a comic scene. In music this
may happen when the traditional sequences of a composition are inverted – for example, a
coda occurs at the start of a piece.
63
For example, in movement I of Embryons desséchés, the sound of laughter and
purring are depicted aurally in the music which coincides with the text ‘Vous me châtouillez’
and ‘Petit ronron moqueur’. See the analysis of parody in Embryons desséchés later in this
chapter.
comic because ‘it keeps insisting’.64 Nietzsche and Deleuze have studied the
phenomenon of repetition and both share the belief that repetition is impossible
– it is in fact the difference itself that is repeated. In his critical reception,
Satie’s use of repetition is generally viewed negatively, a sign of his alleged
inability to develop material: his ‘lack’ of musical form was often compared to
developments in Cubist art of the period. In a 1917 article on Cubism and music,
Jean Poueigh notes the correlation between the aesthetic features of Satie’s
music and that of the Cubists and Futurists: ‘A purely sensorial art no longer
allowing form, breaking up the line and where all emotion would be banished,
was beginning to be born. The time for unleashing the futurists and cubists had
come.’65 This view contrasts strongly with Deleuzian ontology, where repetition
is viewed positively: ‘The motor of repetition is not some kind of negativity (we
do not repeat because we fail), but the affirmation of difference itself.’66 In music
Satie often accentuates this difference in the accompanying text (which is never
repeated) through humour. Repetition is a comic technique with an ideological
edge: it counters Romantic expectations of development in his musical language.
In dealing with techniques that can be employed in humorous and non-humorous
music, the analyst must question the ontology of the technique in question in
addition to its structural function. This approach permits further interpretation
on a pragmatic level where the humour is perceived and the intentionality of the
humorist and author is recognised.
Comic Structure
In 1913 Auric described the way in which Satie’s comic titles led many to
assume that the humoristic works lacked structure: ‘Many of those who scorn
the spiritual little masterworks with zany titles warmly applaud the most boring
of sonatas. In one case they praise a traditional form, by virtue of the title,
whereas in the other case a grotesque title conceals a very logical plan from
their ears.’67 Satie uses various structural forms or approaches throughout the
humoristic works, though one particular approach often attracts the attention
of analysts: the juxtaposition of seemingly incongruous musical units. In
64
Zupančič, The Odd One In, pp. 153–4.
65
Octave Séré, ‘Le Cubisme et la Musique’, La Rampe: Revue Hebdomadaire des
spectacles, 24 May 1917, p. 1: ‘Un art purement sensoriel n’admettant plus la forme,
brisant le trait, et d’où se verrait bannie toute émotion, tendait à naître. Le moment était
venu du déchaînement des futuristes et cubistes.’ See also Paul Bertrand, ‘Musique pure
et Musique dramatique’, Le Ménestrel, 17 June 1921, pp. 249–51.
66
Zupančič, The Odd One In, p. 172.
67
George Auric, ‘Erik Satie: Musicien Humoriste’, p. 141: ‘Beaucoup de ceux
qui méprisent les spirituels petits chefs-d’œuvre aux titres cocasses applaudissent
chaleureusement la plus ennuyeuse des sonates. Ici ils louent, grâce au titre, une forme
traditionnelle, tandis que là un titre grotesque dissimule à leurs oreilles un plan très logique.’
structuralist terminology, this feature has been described as ‘motivic assemblage’

or a synthesis where ‘disparate elements’ are combined ‘to make a whole’.68 In a
discussion of ‘Sur un casque’, Whiting states that: ‘Satie seems to have resorted
to his earlier technique of stringing together unrelated snippets without any
“logical” pattern of recurrence (save the return of the initial motif at the end).’69
Analysis of the structure of humour, rather than musical structure, permits us to
engage with a very particular form of musical unity based upon the temporal and
sequential way in which jokes and comedy are structured.
Zupančič distinguishes between jokes and comedy according to how they
work structurally and temporally. Jokes are not structurally characterised through
‘a temporal unfolding’, but rather in the instant at which the point de capiton
appears.70 The point de capiton (or ‘quilting moment’) is the point at which ‘a
duality or split in what might have previously seemed to be a homogeneous
narrative [appears], and produces a short circuit between the two series’. Comedy
by contrast operates in a completely different way: here, comedy is constructed
through a series of comic sequences in which Zupančič observes an unusual
feature of unity in comedy that resonates strongly with Satie’s synthetic style:
continuity is established through discontinuity. As Zupančič notes:
A comic sequence … does not leave the surprising, erratic object-sense to die
away in the air; rather, it picks it up as a new starting point, a new cue to build
with. In this respect, comedy is a paradoxical continuity that builds, constructs
(almost exclusively) with discontinuity; discontinuity (the erratic object-sense)
is the very stuff of comic continuity. Comedy has a marvelous way of starting
on one track and continuing on the other, as if this were completely natural.71
Therefore, a series of consecutive jokes without an inner connection does not

qualify as comedy. On a meta-structural level, the analysis of comic sequences
in Satie’s music may facilitate new interpretations of musical structure and unity,
especially when the musical, textual and visual aspects of the humoristic scores
are treated as an integrated part of the comic experience. In order to identify the
presence of comic sequences, this ‘inner connection’ must be revealed, a criterion
that can only be satisfied through the identification of interlinked ‘Master-Signifiers’
within the comic sequence.72 Zupančič believes that once the Master-Signifiers73
have been identified, the ‘usually antagonistic’ play between them will elucidate
68
See Orledge’s discussion of ‘Motivic construction’ in Satie the Composer, pp. 164–7;
and Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, p. 367.
69
Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, p. 367.
70
Zupančič, The Odd One In, p. 146.
71
Ibid., p. 137.
72
Ibid., p. 177.
73
Zupančič lists (p. 177) the following examples of Master-Signifiers: ‘combinations,
redoublings, symmetrical and asymmetrical repetitions, irresistibly returning obstruction’.
the comic structure, or the process within the work.74 An analysis of the comic
techniques mentioned above could assist in identifying the Master-Signifiers that
mark or highlight the points of continuity through discontinuity within Satie’s
work. These Master-Signifiers can also function as ‘markers of irony’ that alert the
interpreter to the expectation or presence of irony.
Irony
The interpretation of irony or parody within music cannot occur solely through
engagement with music on a structural level. Hutcheon explains that ‘it is very
difficult to separate pragmatic strategies from formal structures when talking
of irony or parody: the one entails the other’.75 For instance, parody cannot be
defined on the basis of the existence of musical borrowing, quotation or allusion:
a parodic intent must be recognised. Similarly, ironic intent must be detected prior
to interpreting ironic meaning: the standard semantic definition of antiphrasis
(the opposite of what is said) is insufficient in describing how irony operates;
it excludes the politico-ideological dimension of the medium and provides little
assistance to an analyst of music seeking methodologies for engaging with irony.
As a comic mode, irony can be used in conjunction with many variants of humour
– for example, satire and parody. Satie displayed a particular penchant for infusing
irony into his musical parodies.
Irony is the term most frequently associated with Satie’s humour, yet it is
typically referenced without qualification. All occurrences of irony are structured
in such a way as to judge a norm through mocking or contradicting reality with the
presentation of an aberration of that reality. The receiver recognises irony through
an initial reaction to what was just said (for example, shocked confusion) and is
alerted to the realisation that he or she must interpret the ironic meaning. Purely
structural definitions ignore irony’s affective function, what is commonly referred
to as irony’s bite or edge. It is in this edge that we recognise the political and
ideological workings of irony. It also explains why Satie was attracted to ironic
humour in his writings and music: ‘But it is irony’s edge that appears to be what gives
certain forms of humour … its status as a “survival skill, a tool for acknowledging
complexity, a means of exposing or subverting oppressive hegemonic ideologies,
and an art for affirming life in the face of objective troubles”.’76
The interpretation of humour is highly individualistic and its reception is
dependent upon how it resonates with individual politics. Therefore, irony has
the ability to elicit a range of interpretations and emotional responses. An ironic
statement can elicit both positive and negative interpretations: while one critic
may recognise irony as playful or humorous, another may interpret the same
74
Ibid.
75
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art
Forms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985, 2000), p. 34.
76
Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 26.
example as irresponsible or trivialising. The existence of irony’s edge in Satie’s

music explains the various and diverse ways in which critics reacted to his
humorous works. For example, one critic interprets his irony as playful, while
another considers it aggressive:
[Playful:] The irony is hidden behind so much seriousness, the joke is so lame,
the capricious wandering off on tangents so unexpected that an ordinary audience
would be disorientated and would only see smoke and mirrors.77
[Aggressive:] He hypocritically uses the stylistic devices of this sentimental

wholesome gaiety, then having evoked a tenderness that becomes charming, the
instant we are well and truly seduced he wrings its neck.78
Indeed, many critics recognise the humorous intent but clearly state that they do
not find this form of humour either funny or appropriate. Rudhyar Chennevière
describes Satie’s musical irony as ‘the vitality of impotence’.79 Jean Poueigh also
finds fault with his ironic form of expression:
These little stories or reflections commenting on the Préludes flasques and other
Embryons desséchés are not always funny. And if the text is removed, nothing
hilarious remains any more … Fundamentally, this absence of humour has to be
intentional and has to stem from the superior irony of Erik Satie.80
Wayne Booth outlines five markers of irony that we can directly apply to analyses
of humour in Satie’s music:
(1) straightforward hints or warnings presented in the authorial voice (titles,

epigraphs, direct statements); (2) violations of shared knowledge (deliberate
77
René Chalupt, ‘Le Piège de Méduse, Comédie Lyrique par M. Erik Satie’,
L’Occident: Architecture, Sculpture, Peintre, Musique, Poésie 139 (June 1914), pp. 345–
6, at p. 346: ‘L’ironie se dissimule sous tant de sérieux, la blague est si froide, les détours
capricieux si inattendus, qu’un public ordinaire serait déconcerté et n’y verrait que du
feu.’
78
Roland-Manuel, Erik Satie, p. 7: ‘Il emploie hypocritement les artifices de cette
gaîté sentimentale de bon aloi, puis, ayant évoqué une tendresse qui va devenir charmante,
il lui tord le cou dans l’instant qu’elle nous séduit pour de bon.’
79
Rudhyar D. Chennevière, Frederick H. Martens (trans.), ‘Erik Satie and the Music
of Irony’, The Musical Quarterly 5/4 (October 1919), pp. 469–78, at p. 473.
80
Octave Séré [Jean Poueigh], ‘Le Cubisme et la Musique’, La Rampe: Revue
Hebdomadaire des spectacles, 24 May 1917, p. 1: ‘Ces petites histoires ou réflexions
commentant les Préludes flasques et autres Embryons desséchés, ne sont pas toujours
drôles. Et si l’on enlève le texte, il ne reste plus rien d’hilare … Au fond, cette absence
d’humour doit être voulue et provenir de l’ironie supérieure de M. Erik Satie.’
errors of fact, judgment); (3) contradictions within the work (‘internal

cancellations’); (4) clashes of style; (5) conflicts of belief (between our own and
that which we might suspect the author of holding).81
Irony has many types which are not defined in relation to Satie’s use of this mode.
Many of its types are primarily defined on a structural level, for example general,
dramatic, verbal and situational irony. An awareness of how these various types
are defined, in conjunction with the list of ‘markers’ and comic techniques, enables
the analyst to identify and interpret them in Satie’s music. Verbal, situational and
dramatic irony are the three most prevalent types of irony found in Satie’s music
and/or writings.
Verbal irony operates through written or spoken language and it is considered
extremely rare in music, as this type relies primarily upon words to indicate the
presence of a secondary ironic meaning that contradicts the directly stated reality.82
In most instances of irony in Satie’s music, text in conjunction with the music
highlights or reinforces the ironic intent. In the humoristic scores, the presence
of various layers of text may perhaps facilitate this type. Verbal irony is very
common in Satie’s writings, particularly in his responses to criticisms of his music
or non-professional behaviour:
I don’t like jokes, nor anything resembling them. What is a joke supposed to
prove? The great Histories of the World tell very few good ones … Proof: It thus
appears, on the delightful summits of Reason, that Joking is only an inferior Art
which should not be taught, which can never aspire to glory, whatever one’s
aim.83
Situational irony is often interpreted when a listener projects norms onto music that
leads them to read the real situation as an ironic, deformed version of itself. Many
characteristics of music facilitate situational irony and Satie takes full advantage of
this type in the humoristic works. He frequently lulls the listener into considering
certain musical elements stable and then uses irony to undermine musical norms
and consequently listener expectations. The judgement that accompanies irony is
usually easy to discern when Satie marries irony and parody. In ‘d’Holothurie’ and
‘de Podophthalma’ in Embryons desséchés, he subjects a revered musical form to
the comic technique of exaggeration in order to create situational irony. An ironic
81
Wayne Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974),
pp. 53–76, quoted in Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 151.
82
For an introductory discussion of types of irony in music, see Eddy Zemach and
Tamara Balter, ‘The Structure of Irony and How it Functions in Music’, in Kathleen Stock
(ed.), Philosophers on Music: Experience, Meaning, and Work (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), pp. 178–206. This discussion focuses on defining irony in structural terms.
83
Translated in Nigel Wilkins (ed.), The Writings of Erik Satie (London: Eulenberg,
1980), p. 78.
musical surprise concludes the two movements: exaggerated bombast codas that
are completely unnecessary and contrast sharply with the overall mood, rhythm and
style of the pieces. These codas severely disrupt the overall flow of the music. The
texts ‘Grandiose’ and ‘De votre mieux’ in ‘d’Holothurie’, and ‘Cadence obligée (de
l’Auteur)’ in ‘de Podophthalma’ mark the presence of irony for listeners and performers
at the beginning of the codas. In the humoristic works, Satie’s ironic treatment of
sonata form, chorale and fugue structures, cadences and codas performs a distinctly
ideological function. Satie constantly felt compelled to assert his independence from
schools and masters in his music and his writings. In appropriating and subverting
easily recognisable structures, he sometimes makes the convention seem absurd,
though this was not necessarily his aim. Nevertheless, critics interpreted this practice
as absurd: the product of a joker, not an intellectual composer.
Dramatic irony occurs when the protagonist does not comprehend the situation
in which they find themselves, while the audience does. In ‘Obstacles venimeux’,
the first movement of Heures séculaires et instantanées (1914), the protagonist
(the music) projects a reality completely at odds with the reality projected in the
text (Ex. 2.1 shows the opening phrase). The music’s cheerful mood is oblivious
to the desolate and surreal reality projected in the text:
This vast part of the world is inhabited by one single man: a negro. He is so bored
he could die of laughing … To help him think the negro holds his cerebellum
in his right hand with the fingers apart. From afar, he looks like a distinguished
physiologist. Four anonymous serpents enthral him, hanging suspended from
the coat tails of his uniform which is distorted with a combination of grief and
loneliness.84
The playing direction ‘Noirâtre’ (‘blackish’) appears on the score in the place
usually reserved for tempo indications, setting the mood for the accompanying
text. In contrast, the music proceeds in a lighthearted, almost frivolous fashion.
The opening left-hand melody is strictly diatonic, based upon the first five notes
of the B-flat major scale. The dissonant accompanying chords add playful colour
to the melody rather than creating a ‘black’ mood upon their sounding on the
rhythmic off-beats. Satie invokes a distinctly humorous cabaret feel throughout
this movement that lies in stark contrast to the text and creates a fine example of
dramatic irony.
Heures séculaires illustrates a salient fact concerning irony: it is not always
humorous. The nineteenth-century construct of Romantic irony, for instance, is
not considered a comic mode: consequently, it has become a common theme in
musical discourses on Romanticism without causing any ideological anxiety.85
84
Volta (ed.), A Mammal’s Notebook, p. 41.
85
Brown describes romantic irony as follows: ‘Romantic irony was less a mode of
humour than an acknowledgement of a gap between means and ends … The category of the
grotesque encapsulated the fundamental Romantic dichotomy, namely the gap between the
Example 2.1 Satie, Heures séculaires et instantanées, I (‘Obstacles venimeux’):

opening
Irony is a comic mode, but it is also a rhetorical strategy that can operate outside
comedy. Therefore, we must ensure that we consider the pragmatic ethos of
irony in the analyses of ironic meaning. Satie’s enduring reputation as a humorist
composer means we may sometimes presuppose the existence of humour when in
fact there is none.
Parody
In musicological discourse, the term ‘parody’ is traditionally associated with two

distinct forms of musical practice, yet neither of them is applicable in Satie’s case:
the Renaissance practice of imitation (the term ‘parodic technique’ is commonly
associated with the mass in this period) and the use of musical borrowings,
quotations or allusions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera parodies.86
Prior to the nineteenth century, parody was widely considered a valid compositional
technique, but in a Romantic milieu that valued originality, the transcendental and
spiritual aspirations of man and his physical limitations; it was a point of dramatic rupture
between the material and the spiritual realms.’ Julie A. Brown, Bartok and the Grotesque:
Studies in Modernity, the Body and Contradiction in Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 10.
86
See Michael Kennedy and Joyce Bourne (eds), The Concise Oxford Dictionary
of Music, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 545; Michael Tilmouth
and Richard Sherr, ‘Parody (i)’, Grove Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.
com/subscriber/article/grove/music/20937?q=parody&search=quick&source=omo_
gmo&pos=2&_start=1#firsthit; and Elisabeth Cook and Stanley Sadie, ‘Parody (iii)’,
Grove Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/
music/O007203.
the sublime, parody was devalued and was no longer considered welcome in high-
art music. Definitions of parody in music dictionaries tend to stress the technique
of one composer parodying the work of another and emphasise the ridiculing
intent of post-Renaissance musical parody. This trend describes the treatment of
parody in Satie’s humoristic works. Parodic musical examples that fall outside
the confines of this narrow focus are largely ignored and musical parody in the
twentieth century is only mentioned in passing, in spite of its prevalence in
musical modernism and post-modernism. Many attempts at defining parody in
music are deficient as they do not account for the cultural and historical specificity
of musical parody. In modernism, parody served a very particular function in the
conscious ideological and aesthetic movement away from Romanticism.
Satie displayed a particular preference for parody in the articulation of
his new ideological and aesthetic direction in the humoristic works. Whiting
notes that Satie’s sketches ‘prove that, for Satie … parodistic quotation was the
inspiration, not the decoration, of his humoristic work’.87 These works allowed
him to directly challenge traditional Romantic notions of genius, transcendence
and originality through borrowing and the non-discrete incorporation of elements
of the everyday into his music. In his parodic borrowing of high-art sources, Satie
highlights the historical, cultural and social distance between his music and that
of the Romantics. His use of parody also challenged the traditional canonic idea
of lineage, an evolutionary concept that dominates discourses on music history:
parody is used to express a rupture with that past rather than a continuation. In
place of accepting tradition, tradition itself becomes contextual, the subject of
a cultural critique. Satie’s musical parody often serves to historicise: he places
music within the history of music. He appropriated humour as a tool to assist
him in reflecting upon the constitution of his art. In an article on irony in Satie’s
humoristic works, Rudhyar Chennevière notes that the humoristic pieces pose
many questions that extend beyond the individual works themselves and this
clearly bothers the author:
Does this music represent no more than a strictly individual pose, a clown’s
grimace before life’s eternal verities? May this music in short be called music?
Has ridicule any right to the name? These numerous interrogation marks which
Satie’s compositions call forth lead us far beyond the mere personality of their
author. The question takes on a wider scope and touches on the values of music
itself.88
Simon Denith notes that in ‘culture wars’, ‘parody can be employed as one of the
weapons in the struggle of the social and political direction’ of the arts. Parody
can ‘become the vehicle for the critique of a whole aesthetic, and the substitution
87
88
Rudhyar D. Chennevière, ‘Erik Satie and the Music of Irony’, Musical Quarterly
5/4 (1919), pp. 472–3.
of another in its place’.89 Satie used parody to this end in many of his humoristic
works, though his aesthetic contribution to musical Modernism in this period was
largely overlooked or dismissed by critics on account of its humorous frame. His
use of parody was interpreted as anti-academic and therefore anti-professional.
Only a handful of contemporary commentators noted that Satie had indeed created
a new genre of piano music with these works and only one critic recognised it as
an inter-art genre: however, none of them took his innovations seriously.
In a similar manner to irony, recognising and understanding parody is dependent
upon particular linguistic, rhetorical and ideological competencies. Parody is a
‘doubled-voice discourse’ where we encounter both a precursor voice and the
parodic author’s attitude towards the precursor text or the discourse within which
that text was created.90 Parody cannot operate without borrowing, a significant
feature of the humoristic works up to 1914. Borrowing is not always parodic:
it can only be considered parody when ‘the textual doubling of parody (unlike
pastiche, allusion, quotation, and so on) functions to mark difference’: parody is
‘transformative in its relation to other texts’.91 Interpreting parody depends upon
recognition of the referent text and the analyst’s historical distance can act as a
barrier in this process. In this respect, the analysis of parody requires in-depth
historical investigation in order to identify the instances of borrowing. Substantial
musicological work has identified musical borrowings, allusions and references in
the humoristic piano works, a significant advantage for scholars interested in the
interpretation of Satie’s humour.
Parody is a form of imitation characterised by ironic inversion and critical
difference from the original parodied text. The presence of irony is responsible for
the range of ethos of which parody is capable: parody does not operate solely in
a ridiculing mode. Satie’s intentionality can only be reconstructed if we can first
identify the targets of his parody and second establish the nature and direction
(the ethos) of this parody. Identifying the target of parody is crucially important in
understanding the nature of the ideological attack it poses.
Denith classifies two primary types of parody: specific and general. In specific
parody, the target is a ‘specific precursor text’, whereas general parody aims ‘at a
whole body of texts or kind of discourse’.92 Examples of both types abound in the
humoristic suites and there are many instances where the two types occur in one
piece. Satie also composed composite parodies where he borrowed from sources
that were initially based on other referent texts. This form of textual layering presents
added layers of interpretive complexity. Composite parodies have been identified
89
Simon Denith, Parody (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 34.
90
Denith coins the terms ‘hypertext’ to designate the parodic work and ‘hypotext’
to indicate the referent or precursor text; however, theorists generally employ the terms
‘precursor’ or ‘referent text’ and ‘parodic text/work’.
91
Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. 38.
92
Denith, Parody, p. 7.
in Vieux sequins et vieilles cuirasses (1913) and Le chapelier (1916).93 In many

cases of borrowing in the humoristic period the precursor texts are already highly
programmatic and intertextual, particularly as so many of them derive from song and
opera sources. Satie was not averse to subjecting his own work to parodic treatment.
Trois morceaux en forme de poire (1903) is an interesting example of ironic parody
in a serious mode from his early career and, more specifically, it is an example
of self-parody. This work marked the conclusion of an early aesthetic approach to
composition which Orledge describes as a period where Satie was searching for ‘a
new direction’.94 Hutcheon explains that ‘self-parody … is not just an artist’s way of
disowning earlier mannerisms by externalizations … It is a way of creating a form
out of the questioning of the very act of aesthetic production’.95 Whiting describes
Trois morceaux as ‘a kind of stylistic résumé’: the self-borrowing in this work dated
back to 1890.96 Shortly after this abrupt conclusion to a style he had been pursuing
for 13 years, Satie returned to music education at the Schola Cantorum at the age of
39 in his search for a new aesthetic direction.
Denith distinguishes two ways in which the referent text is appropriated within
the parodic text: parody with ‘glancing parodic allusions’ is signified through
the borrowing of a phrase or fragment, whereas ‘fully-developed formal parody’
incorporates the entire borrowed text. Satie makes extensive use of the first type
throughout the humoristic works. Sonatine bureaucratique is the only instance
of formal parody identified so far in Satie’s work. Denith notes that the ‘raison
d’être’ of formal parody ‘is its relation to its precursor text or parodied mode’.97
Through an analysis of Satie’s compositional processes as revealed in his extant
notebooks, Orledge reveals that Clementi’s Sonatina in C (Op. 36 No. 1) acts as a
‘pre-established formal plan’.98 Satie then reworks Clementi’s piece with the aim
of destroying many of the elements that situate it historically: the use of Alberti
bass, regular periodisation, diatonicism (Satie incorporates instances of bitonality)
and traditional development which he avoids through musical repetition in order
to make the piece comply with his non-developmental approach to composition.
Whiting notes that ‘Clementi and Satie seem continually to interrupt each other
– usually with a shift in register or change in dynamic or both’.99 Satie uses
various forms of musical surprise in order to subvert Classical principles through
situational irony in this piece.
The musical canon is frequently singled out by Satie as a target for parodic
treatment. He attacks Romantic, Baroque and Classical discourses on music
through the subversion of respected forms and conventions specific to high-art
93
See Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, p. 390; Orledge, Satie the Composer, p. 21.
94
Orledge, Satie the Composer, p. 3.
95
Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. 10.
96
97
Denith, Parody, p. 7.
98
Orledge, Satie the Composer, pp. 27–8.
99
Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 487.
music of these periods, including periodisation and the harmonic treatment of

cadences and codas. Bergson notes that codified forms, conventions or rituals
(ceremonies) can all act as comic templates: ‘any form or formula is a ready-
made frame into which the comic element may be fitted’.100 In doing so, Satie
also attacks the system of music education that teaches these conventions and,
consequently, upholds their value or cultural authority. He eschews traditional
harmonic development and completely rejects Romantic sentimentalism. Music
was arguably the most institutionalised art in Paris in the Modernist period and
Satie felt that musical progress was stinted by the ‘officialdom’ that surrounded
it. This may have led him to seek compositional inspiration in artistic and literary
sources he considered free from such control.
Satie frequently borrowed from the work of masters of the canon in his
parodies. This attack was not personal; rather, it was directed at the more general
discourses and practices in which they participated (dead or alive). Satie stated that
there are very few true ‘poets’ in the history of music, the remainder of composers
are the followers of ‘schools’, ‘pundits’ who imitate the poets.101 In many cases
of borrowing from canonic sources, particularly in his quotations from piano
works, Satie generally holds the composer of the precursor text in question in high
esteem. For instance, the borrowing of a fragment from Chopin’s Sonata in B-flat
minor (Op. 35) in the second movement of Embryons desséchés is frequently
identified as a parody of the original work, but it is more likely that this borrowing
is an example of general parody. It could be argued that Satie’s intent was not to
ridicule Chopin’s work: in fact, Satie was an admirer of the composer, referring
to him as ‘a poet’, the ‘definitive piano composer’.102 Satie’s misattribution of
the borrowing as ‘Citation de la célèbre mazurka de SCHUBERT’ could perhaps
indicate that the target is more likely Romanticism itself: neither the identity of
the author nor the genre in question appear important. Satie may have chosen to
parody this particular Chopin work on account of its explicit emotional sentiment,
since it is an outstanding example of musical pathos and the Romantic concept of
Empfindungen.103
In the parodic codas of ‘d’Holothurie’ and ‘de Podophthalma’, and in
borrowing from Chopin in ‘d’Edriophthalma’, Satie promoted the dissolution
of sentiment in high-art music in Embryons desséchés. In ‘Laughter’ Bergson
highlights ‘the absence of feeling’ which usually accompanies laughter: ‘laughter
has no greater foe than emotion’.104 This lack of feeling directly contradicts
Romantic sentimentalism. In ‘d’Edriophthalma’ Satie employs a number of
100
Bergson¸ Laughter, p. 28.
101
Translated in Wilkins, The Writings of Erik Satie, p. 84.
102
Donnellon, ‘Debussy, Satie and the Parisian Critical Press’, p. 232.
103
Empfindungen is a concept initially proposed by Kant in the nineteenth century to
describe the ability of music to overwhelm the listener through an emotional reaction to the
music: it is the human response to an encounter with the sublime.
104
overtly humorous and parodic gestures to evoke a sense of bathos, the antithesis of
pathos, a quality rarely found in high-art music on account of its associations with
insincere sentiment and triviality of style. Bergson explains that parody is often
achieved through the transposition of the solemn into the familiar. In this context,
parody is viewed as a ‘species of degradation’, a symbolic demotion of the original
text where parody affects ‘the physical dimension of the original text and its moral
value’.105 Satie’s sole intention was not the irreverent humorous treatment of a
masterwork; rather, it was to create cultural distance and propose a new modern
sensibility devoid of Romantic sentimentalism. The lack of sentimentality of
humour made it a perfect anti-Romantic gesture.
It is evident that the ideological critiques and the targets of humour stated
explicitly in Satie’s writings on music coincide with those found in his music. The
incorporation of structural and pragmatic approaches have enormous potential
for exploring the ways in which these works contributed to Modernist discourses
on aesthetics and ideology in music. The invaluable historical investigative work
primarily conducted by Volta, Whiting, Gillmor and Orledge facilitates a new
departure point for scholars today.
Conclusion
I wish my adversaries knew me better than they do. Sometimes they pass me off
as a madman. They may be mistaken.106 (Erik Satie)
Satie might yet be vindicated in his wish. The growing field of humour studies
across a broad range of disciplines within the humanities has resulted in a recent re-
evaluation of the reception of humour in academic discourse. The area of humour
as a cultural expression in music has, however, remained relatively unexplored.
Due to its Modernist association with the trivial, it was not considered a subject
worthy of musicological attention and, by default, this viewpoint also applied to
the largely humorous music of Satie. Occasional examples of humour exist in the
work of many canonic composers; however, unlike Satie, these composers rarely
posed a significant challenge to the status quo. Satie’s direct confrontation with
the ‘great’ tradition of high-art music and his refusal to conform to contemporary
expectations of a ‘serious’ Modernist composer damaged his reputation
considerably. In overcoming the legacy of the canon in Satie studies, scholars
are obliged to look beyond the discipline of musicology in order to find suitable
methodologies and terminologies with which to analyse humour. Formalist
approaches only consider ‘the music itself’, and the limitations of this analytical
approach meant that much of the critical meaning inherent in Satie’s work was lost
from discourses surrounding him during the twentieth century. Instead, Satie was
105
Ibid., p. 61.
106
Wilkins, The Writings of Erik Satie, p. 99.
portrayed simply as a joker, a composer who ‘wrote little of real importance’.107

The ideologically laden discourses of canon formation in the French music press
in Satie’s lifetime prepared the conditions for the posthumous reception of his
work in musicology. At the time of his death in 1925, critics had succeeded in
removing nearly all cultural authority from Satie the composer. Only a handful of
fellow artistic non-conformists remained committed to the defence of his name
and its associations.
Satie admired many of the masters of Western art music, but his ironic and
parodic treatment of the ‘great’ high-art tradition of music led many to perceive
that this was not the case. At a time when Schoenberg was writing himself into the
great tradition, Satie was writing himself out of it. Rather than situating his music
and aesthetics within this tradition, a criterion for entry to the musical canon, Satie
opposed the normative discourses of the period. His refusal to engage with or show
respect for the arbiters of culture in his time condemned his work and any chance
that it would be taken seriously. His protestations were decidedly premature in
an environment where the comic was considered a second-class expressive form.
107
Anon., ‘Obituary: Erik Satie’, The Musical Times 66/990 (1 August 1925), p. 749.
Chapter 3
Satie’s Rose-Croix
Piano Works
Grace Wai Kwan Gates
Introduction
Satie’s compositions can be categorised into the Rose-Croix pieces (1891–4),

cabaret pieces, humoristic pieces with subtexts (1912–16) and later works (post-
1916) that involved collaboration with different disciplines, such as the ballets
Parade (1917) and Relâche (1924). Although these pieces are all different in
style, Satie’s fingerprints are always present. We can see reference in his later
works to his interest in esoteric Rosicrucianism and to the parodistic cabaret
songs he composed in his Montmartre years in collaboration with Vincent Hyspa.
This chapter will focus in detail on the piano works Ogives (1888), Le fils des
étoiles (1892) and Prélude de la Porte héroïque du ciel (1894). These pieces are
chosen to illustrate the unique compositional style of Satie, namely Rosicrucian
symbolism and his extreme minimalist style of scoring the piece. Performance
issues that arise from the lack of conventional performance directions provided
on the score will be discussed.
Rosicrucianism and Symbolism
Rosicrucianism originated in late medieval Germany with Christian Rosenkreuz.

This theology was first practised in Germany and soon after spread towards
Europe. Believers who practised the Ancient Mystic Order Rosae Crucis and
the Rosicrucian Order studied the ancient mystical, philosophical and religious
doctrines and applied such doctrines to modern life in order to seek out their inner
wisdom.1 Satie was attracted to this cult, as proven by the titles of his piano pieces
such as Première pensée Rose-Croix (1891) and Sonneries de la Rose-Croix (1891).
In 1892, Satie was named as ‘Chapel master to the Rose+Croix’ by Sâr Péladan,
who founded the ‘Tiers Ordre esthétique de la Rose + Croix catholique du Temple
1
The Rosicrucian Order: http://www.amorc.org.uk.
et du Graal’.2 Between 1892 and 1893, Satie composed music for Péladan during
the Soirées de la Rose+Croix in the Symbolist painting salon.3
Symbolism was an international artistic trend which originated in France
and was part of a nineteenth-century movement in which art became infused
with mysticism. Péladan himself described the movement: ‘just as Religion has
made itself into art in order to speak to the masses, so Art must make itself into
a religion in order to speak to the minority’.4 As Péladan was a Rosicrucian, it
makes sense that the ‘religion’ he implied in here is mysticism and the Rose-Croix
Order. In practical terms, Symbolism refers to the systematic use of symbols or
pictorial conventions to express an allegorical meaning, which is clearly present
in Rose-Croix theology. According to Thomas D. Worrel, ‘the very core symbol
of our Society is the rose flower attached to the centre of a cross’. He further
explains: ‘The cross symbolizes the meeting at right angles of horizontals and
perpendiculars. Forces going in quite opposite directions but meeting at a central
point, a common ground. It can symbolize the union of opposites and the dualism
in nature. It can be the outstretched archetypal man with the infinite possibilities of
growth being immortal. It represents eternal life.’5 While the rose at the centre of a
cross is ‘at once a symbol of purity and a symbol of passion, heavenly perfection
and earthly passion; virginity and fertility; death and life’,6 it has also been a
symbol for ‘silence and secrecy’.7
Satie both showed an interest in the occult and was influenced by the Symbolist
movement. Examining his Rose-Croix piano pieces, Symbolism is implicit in the
set of Ogives and Prélude de la Porte héroïque du ciel. Explicitly, Satie on several
occasions gave positive comments on paintings by the Symbolist painter Puvis
de Chavannes. These comments mainly focused on the painter’s technique and
the overall atmosphere that he generated. He wanted ‘to realize in music what
Puvis de Chavannes has succeeded in doing in painting, notably to attain extreme
simplification in art. To say in two words what a Spanish orator could express
in long eloquent phrases’.8 Ogives and Prélude de la Porte héroïque du ciel
demonstrate well the application of symbolism and mysticism to Satie’s earlier
pieces. Combining the observation from the above pieces with Puvis de Chavannes’
2
Ornella Volta (ed.), Satie Seen Through His Letters, trans. Michael Bullock (London:
Marion Boyars, 1994), p. 53.
3
Ornella Volta, A Mammal’s Notebook, trans. Antony Melville (London: Atlas Press,
1996), p. 13.
4
Volta (ed.), Satie Seen Through His Letters, p. 54.
5
Thomas D. Worrel, ‘A Brief Study of the Rose Cross Symbol’, http://www.sricf-ca.
org/paper3.htm.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
8
Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), p. 207.
Satie’s Rose-Croix Piano Works 51
painting technique, answers can be derived for the performance practice of Satie’s
Rose-Croix piano pieces.
Ogives (Symbolism and Mysticism)
Composed in 1886, the set of Ogives recorded the beginning of the infiltration of
symbolism and esotericism in Satie’s compositions. Although, strictly speaking,
Ogives was not part of his Rose-Croix piano pieces, this set of piano works could
be seen as the predecessors of them. The esoteric nature of these short pieces was
revealed by the title, as, according to Conrad Satie, ‘it was while contemplating
the ogives of this church (Notre Dame de Paris) for days on end that the composer
conceived Ogives’.9 Architecturally, an ogive is a diagonal vaulting rib or a pointed
arch which was one of the common characteristics of Gothic architecture that
originated in twelfth-century France and could often be found in cathedrals. Being
chosen with deliberation, the ogive symbolised the medieval and esoteric world
in which Satie was interested, and the title Ogives revealed the mystic nature of
this set of piano pieces. An advertisement for the Ogives, which was believed to
have been written by Satie himself, appeared in Journal du Chat Noir (9 February
1889), the house newspaper of the cabaret: ‘The indefatigable Erik-Satie, the
sphinx-man, the composer with a head of wood, announces the appearance of a
new musical work of which from henceforth he speaks most highly. It is a suite
of melodies conceived in the mystic-liturgical genre that the author idolizes, and
suggestively titled Les Ogives.’10
The Musical Structure of Ogives
Worrel wrote that: ‘Numerologically, the cross is sometimes represented by the

number four. Within our own teachings: “No.4 is the Mystic number, and indicates
the operative influence of the four elements. Under this number, or the geometrical
square, Pythagoras communicated the Ineffable Name of God to his chosen
disciples.”’11 Satie must have read about the significance of the number four in
religious and mystical terms and decided to bring this mystic number to the set
of Ogives, beginning with the decision of having four self-contained pieces to
form the set. The next decision that Satie made in relation to the number four is
the number of systems required. Each of the Ogives religiously consists of four
systems with the main melody neatly written out in the first system, followed by
its harmonisation in the next three systems.
9
Volta (ed.), Satie Seen Through His Letters, p. 56.
10
Cited in Steven Moore Whiting, Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert
Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 92.
11
Worrel, ‘A Brief Study of the Rose Cross Symbol’.
Another intriguing finding related to the cross symbol is the representation of

the perfect cube. Worrel mentioned that ‘the traditional Rosicrucian symbol is a
cross of six squares whereon is a red rose of five petals … the cross of six squares
is also the unfolded cube of six faces. The perfect cube has been used to represent
the Holy of Holies since Old Testament times’.12 In the case of the Ogives,
Satie attempted to apply the equilateral characteristics of a perfect cube through
composing the melodies and harmonies in such a way that both the horizontal and
vertical sides of the piece shared the same number of notes.
In the case of the first of the Ogives, 23 notes were used in the single melodic
line, which represents the horizontal side of the perfect cube (Ex. 3.1).
Example 3.1 The 23 horizontal notes in Ogives no. 1
When we examine the first and last chords of all four systems, which represent
the vertical sides of the perfect cube, there are precisely 23 notes altogether. Ex.
3.2 shows the first chord of each system.
Example 3.2 The 23 vertical notes in the first of the Ogives, taken from the first
chord of each system
The third and fourth Ogives show slight deviations from the ‘perfect cube’
compositional plan. In the third of the Ogives, although the first and last chords of
all four systems still add up to 23 notes each, the horizontal melody only consists
of 20 notes. In the fourth of the Ogives, the first chord of all four systems adds
up to 24 notes, which is one note too many compared to the 23 notes of the other
‘three sides’. The diagram in Ex. 3.3 sums up the perfect cube symbolism of all
four Ogives and also the occasional deviation.
Despite the slight deviation from the symbolic perfect cube in the third and
fourth of the Ogives, the above finding certainly supports the assumption that
symbolism and mysticism were part of the main ingredients of these four Ogives.
12
Ibid.
Example 3.3 Perfect cube symbolism and the deviations from this in Ogives
It is worth noticing that such slight ‘deviations’ from a rule are commonplace
in Satie’s composition and with its suggestive title, the delivery of the mystic
atmosphere is no doubt central to all the Ogives. As an interesting side issue, as if
by coincidence, the number 23 that Satie was obsessed with in each of the Ogives
is also the composer’s age in years at the time of composition. Could this be a
simple joke or Satie’s skilful representation of himself as the perfect cube which
symbolised the Holy of Holies?
The Music of Ogives
Having examined the musical structure of Ogives, which showed Satie’s

comprehensive symbolic plan, the music of Ogives will be discussed, including
melody, harmonisation, tempo and rhythm choices. All these aspects illustrate
Satie’s detailed planning in order to bring out the mystical quality of the piece.
The melodies in the Ogives are very simple. Unlike any other pieces that he
composed, each of the Ogives introduced the main melody in the first system
which was then repeated three times with identical harmonisation in the second
and fourth systems. The same chords were used in the third system, although
in different chord positions, for example, changing from root position to first
inversion. The melody is short – as we have seen, it has 23 notes, except the third
of the Ogives which has only 20 notes. When the melodies were harmonised, the
unexpected accidentals pushed the melodies to sound more and more modal. It is
in fact quite logical for Satie to introduce modes in the Ogives as they fit nicely
with the whole medieval esoteric setting of the piece. On another note, the melody
was mostly restricted to stepwise motion, reminiscent of Gregorian chant which
Satie had learned with his first piano teacher, Monsieur Vinot.13
In all four Ogives, Satie harmonised the main melodies solely with block
chords, which provided a still, solemn and solid character. Since the entire
piece was full of block chords, visually, they resembled building blocks in
architecture. In this case, these vertical blocks were reaching for the ceilings
13
Olof Höjer, liner note to Erik Satie: The Complete Piano Music volume 1. 1996.
CD. Swedish Society Discofil, SCD 1070.
of the solemn cathedral (Conrad Satie suggested Notre Dame in Paris) with its
imposing pointed arches (ogives).
As early as the medieval period, the augmented fourth or the diminished
fifth intervals were considered as the Devil’s intervals and they were forbidden
in music composition. However, tritones were extensively used in the late
nineteenth century and composers welcomed the dissonant sound generated by
the tritone. Interestingly, in the Ogives, Satie added all necessary accidentals
to the harmonised chords so that the formation of tritones was prevented. Such
execution was coherent with no exception, as not even one dissonant chord can
be found in all four of the Ogives. Surely, the medieval belief of the association
of the tritone with the Devil is the reason behind Satie’s consistent avoidance of
the dissonant chords, simply because it would be inappropriate for such chords
to exist in this piece which symbolised Notre Dame Cathedral. Below is an
example of the harmonised chords with accidentals to avoid tritones. Ex. 3.4
is taken from the third system of the fourth of the Ogives. It is shown that the
second and sixth chords both have the B-flat accidentals so that the B diminished
chord was avoided and replaced by the more pleasing B-flat major chord. The
same arrangement was applied to chords 14 and 18 of the next phrase. Satie
noticed the B-flat accidental would then turn chord 21 to an E diminished chord
and therefore he carefully applied a natural to this chord to avoid any tritones.
Example 3.4 Accidentals on block chords to avoid tritones in Ogives no. 4
In order to create a tranquil atmosphere, Satie chose Très lent as the

designated tempo for all four Ogives. The stillness of these pieces is further
enhanced by the choice of longer-duration rhythmic values. Only semibreves,
minims, crotchets and quavers are used, with crotchets being the most frequent
choice. The very slow tempo offered ample time for the block chords to ring
(with the use of sustained pedal). As a result, the combination of the slow tempo,
simple single-line melody and block chords produced sonorities mimicking the
sound of church bells.
In the Ogives, inconsistencies tend to appear in relation to the number three.

For instance, the harmonisation of the main melody in the third system of each of
the Ogives is different from the second and the fourth systems. Ex. 3.5 shows that
by comparing the two different harmonisations in the second and the third system
of the first of the Ogives, it is clear that the second system has parallel chords with
a thick texture (the treble clef and bass clef chords total eight notes, a chord of four
notes in each clef), whereas the chords of the third system are mostly in contrary
motion, a striking visual contrast.
Example 3.5 Different harmonisation for the second and third systems of
Ogives no. 1
Finally, it is also striking that the third system of the third of the Ogives has
piano as the dynamic marking which has broken the consistent pattern of dynamic
markings p-ff-pp-ff (one dynamic marking per system) in the rest of the Ogives.
In the case of Satie, interdisciplinary study is crucial in order to understand
his compositional thoughts and to derive assumptions on how to perform his
pieces, which often contain very limited performance directions. Satie made the
powerful statement: ‘It was painters who taught me the most about music.’14 More
specifically, the following comment was his anti-Wagnerian advice to Debussy in
1891 after seeing Puvis de Chavannes’ painting: ‘There is no need for the orchestra
to grimace when a character comes onstage. Do the trees in the scenery grimace?
What we must do is create a musical scenery, a musical atmosphere in which the
characters move and talk. No “couplets,” – no “leitmotiv,” but aim at creating an
atmosphere that suggests Puvis de Chavannes.’15
Puvis de Chavannes (1824–98) was a Symbolist painter and the foremost
French mural painter of the second half of the nineteenth century; his
monumental paintings in Europe are found in venues including the Panthéon and
14
15
Elliot Schwartz and Barney Childs (eds), Contemporary Composers on
Contemporary Music (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1967), p. 32.
the Sorbonne in Paris. Symbolism in art infused with mysticism, which was no
doubt one of the reasons why Satie was particularly interested in de Chavannes.
Having said that, there was another characteristic in de Chavannes’ painting
which Satie appreciated – the extreme simplification, as he mentioned in the
early 1890s quoted on p. 55 above.
Striving for simplification in art, a concept which Satie was inspired to
achieve in his musical works, the French painter chose to be faithful to the two-
dimensionality of wall painting and respectfully reduced reflection in his paintings
in order to preserve the images’ surface legibility. To give a more practical
description, Puvis de Chavannes emphasised two-dimensional wall art painting by
nearly eliminating chiaroscuro (high contrast) and produced figurations in which
flat shapes and colours were dominant. This resulted in figures that lacked gravity,
weight and volume. Colours were increasingly whitened and an opaque medium
with a matte finish was the final device to rid the overall painting of reflection and
preserve the two-dimensional nature of his art in the simplest form.16
Another interesting yet simple method that helped Puvis de Chavannes to
achieve simplification in art was the limitation of pigments used in each work.
He kept a simple range of colours for each painting and used them consistently.
During the application of the limited pigments, he maintained the principle of
simplicity by applying the paint with just one or two layers. Understandably, in
order to avoid any reflection of the images, no glazes were observed in his murals.
It was only very rarely that his murals revealed a third layer among one of the
numerous cross-sections taken for examination. The textures of his paint clearly
differed as thick dry impastos and thin, lean layers that revealed the coarse texture
of the canvas. Puvis was also content to have some areas of canvas uncovered,
especially outlining figures and trees, which often revealed what appears to be a
charcoal underdrawing.17
For Satie to repeatedly discuss Puvis’ work shows how much he respected the
French painter’s art. By examining Satie’s Ogives, we can see numerous examples
of the painter’s traits favoured by him, focusing on the principle of simplicity.
First, it could be said that the two-dimensional characteristic was prominent in the
Ogives. Despite the abstract nature of music which cannot be seen and touched
like visual arts, Satie achieved the ‘images’ surface legibility’ well by making
clever choices in terms of the melody and harmony of the Ogives. Introducing a
single-line melody which is followed by a block chord harmonisation created a
simpler aural experience for both performers and audiences, as one would only
concentrate on the ‘two-dimensional characteristic’ of the piece, i.e. the main
melody and its straightforward harmonisation. The heterophonic texture ruled
out a compositional style that involves layers of melodic lines, such as two-part
inventions or compositions in fugal style. The contrapuntal musical texture, which
16
Dan Duhrkoop, ‘Empty Easel’, http://emptyeasel.com/2007/07/20/chiaroscuro-in-
painting-the-power-of-light-and-dark.
17
Ibid.
Satie had avoided in the Ogives, often adds more depth to the music because apart
from tracing the main melody and the harmonies straightforwardly; details from
the different musical layers could be balanced by being more in the background
or foreground, which inevitably add another dimension to the music. This would
result in the opposite style to what Satie strived for – the two-dimensional
characteristics and the principle of simplicity.
The simple 23-note melodic line in each of the Ogives (except the third piece)
perfectly illustrates Satie’s comment that: ‘To say in two words what a Spanish
orator could only express in long eloquent phrases.’18 Satie obviously found the
one-line melody sufficient for his purposes and he quite happily repeated the same
melody three more times with only two different chordal harmonisations.
Colour in music is generally understood to refer to tone colour (timbre) and
harmonic colour. The use of dissonance adds harmonic colour to a piece of music.
For instance, a chain of major chords followed by a dissonant chord would instantly
change the harmonic colour of the piece and such a device is lacking in the Ogives.
The limited range of harmonic colours in these four pieces seems to be responding to
one of Puvis de Chavannes’ painting techniques, which was to ‘keep a simple range of
colours for each painting and use them consistently. The textures of his paint clearly
differed as thick dry impastos and thin, lean layers that revealed the coarse texture of
the canvas’.19 In the case of Ogives, the ‘simple range of colours’ could be interpreted
as the simple range of harmonic colours which Satie has chosen – only major and
minor triad chords could be found in all four Ogives. Referring back to Ex. 3.5, Satie
harmonised the second and third crotchet notes of the main melody in the first of the
Ogives with two different chords. Simply altering the note from G to F sharp, Satie
achieved a subtle change of harmony from a G-major tonic chord in first inversion to a
B-minor root position tonic chord. His carefully chosen and confined music materials
reveals his attempt to deliver Puvis de Chavannes’s ‘limited pigments’ principle in the
Ogives. As for the ‘thick dry impastos’ and ‘thin, lean layers’, Satie offered his best
musical substitute by composing those consistent ‘thick’ chordal harmonisation and
the ‘thin’ single line melodies throughout the Ogives.
The lack of gravitational pull towards the tonic and dominant in Ogives is
something worth noting, as this is a fundamental idea for him that led him to
compose pieces like Vexations (1893) which created a new experience in the way
in which music was perceived. Instead of relying on developing musical ideas
and being driven by the tonic and dominant gravitational pull, the piece relied
on repetition. Completely opposite to the harmonic language of Ogives, Satie
composed Vexations with a huge number of tritones and none of these tritones
were to be resolved. With the lack of gravitational pull, this compositional style
could be a direct response to another of Puvis de Chavannes’ painting techniques:
his desire to eliminate the gravity and weight of figures. As Russell Clement
commented of the French painter’s works: ‘To maintain the two-dimensionality
18
19
Ibid.
demanded by wall paintings, Puvis nearly eliminated chiaroscuro (visual art

terminology for high contrast) and produced figurations in which flat shapes and
colours were dominant. Figures lost gravity, weight, and volume.’20 The block
chord harmonisation in the Ogives seemed to be purely there for the pillar effect:
that is, to symbolise the vertical line of the cross, the ogive and the cathedral
structure. In no sense was Satie trying to work out chord progressions based on
the principles of the traditional tonic-dominant harmonic gravitational pull that
was crucial to all common practice music. As a result, this work has no goal to
head towards, no exposition, development and recapitulation, no drama and,
most importantly, when examining the musical ideas within the structure of the
piece, the beginning, the middle and the end of the piece are all the same. The
piece provides a musical journey that mocks one’s perception of time.
Performing the Rose-Croix Piano Works
Ironically, while other composers of the later nineteenth century were busy
exploiting new possibilities with piano composition and performance, none of
this mattered for Satie, especially in his Rose-Croix pieces. Prélude de la Porte
héroïque du ciel is a good example of how Satie rid pianists of the chance to
express themselves. There is no opportunity to perform with a dramatic dynamic
range, nor are there any virtuosic passages to impress audiences. The urge to
perform a piece with romantic expressive gestures has therefore been suppressed.
The peculiar musical setting with the absence of bar lines, time signatures, key
signatures, articulation and dynamic markings and phrase marks provokes performers
into thinking about Satie’s performance intentions. This unconventional scoring
method is further mystified by eccentric indications like ‘Superstitieusement’,
‘Avec déférence’, ‘Très sincèrement silencieux’, ‘En une timide piété’, ‘Eviter
toute exaltation sacrilège’, ‘Sans orgueil’ and ‘Obligeamment’. These descriptions
seem to depict different moods or atmospheres rather than being, strictly speaking,
performance indications. As Satie’s friend Contamine de Latour stated: ‘Satie
decided one day, with great jubilation, to replace the standard tempo marks (lent,
grave, etc.) with his own made-up expressions (without pride, with amazement,
even whiter if possible, etc.) which addressed the pianist’s feelings rather than
his or her technique.’21 After knowing that the descriptions were to address the
pianist’s feelings, was it Satie’s intention to have those feelings delivered to
audiences during a public performance or were they purely discreet emotional
journeys for performers themselves to undertake? Despite the unclear aims of
these descriptions on the score, researchers including Orledge and Gowers have
20
Russell T. Clement, Four French Symbolists: A Sourcebook on Pierre Puvis de
Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Maurice Denis (Westport: Greenwood
Press, 1996), p. 32.
21
Volta, A Mammal’s Notebook, p. 169.
provided detailed musical analysis on these Rose-Croix pieces. The analytical

results have proven to be useful in understanding Satie’s performance practice,
which is an area that needs to be explored in more detail. Prélude de la Porte
héroïque du ciel will provide a case study on performance practice in Satie’s piano
music.
Prélude de la Porte héroïque du ciel was a prelude to Jules Bois’ esoteric
drama. Bois had eclectic interests in fields such as psychology, spiritualism,
occultism, theosophy, astronomy and metaphysics.22 This drama casts a poet who
is sent forth by Christ on a dangerous mission to supplant the Virgin Mary by the
Cult of Isis, a central figure in ancient Egyptian religion. Although the prelude
was written for a mystic drama, Orledge wrote that: ‘The occult never penetrated
beneath the surface of his Rose-Croix music. Apart from being slow, hieratic and
ritualistic, it is in no way descriptive of the plays associated with it, for it has its
own independent and purely musical logic.’23 Harmonically, Prélude de la Porte
héroïque du ciel is formed of consecutive unresolved seventh chords. Despite the
lack of phrase marks in this prelude, the logical musical patterns led Patrick Gowers
to regard these consecutive unresolved seventh chords as ‘jigsaw-like motifs’ and
the prelude’s structure as ‘mosaic structure’. The descriptions of ‘jigsaw-like
motifs’ and ‘mosaic structure’ were tailor-made for the musical content because
these motifs were not to be expanded or developed: they were simply organized
within Satie’s small-scale piano works. Gowers also devised the term ‘punctuation
form’24 for this prelude, which means that recurring jigsaw-like motifs ‘punctuate’
the piece and gave it its form and structure. The punctuation phrase shown below
(Ex. 3.6) first appeared at the twelfth crotchet beat and it reappears in seven other
places, either at the same pitch, transposed or slightly varied. On two occasions,
this punctuation phrase only had three crotchet beats, half the length of the original
phrase. Its consistent rhythmic pattern provides a unifying agent for the Prélude,
which could sound disorganised and arbitrary without it.
Example 3.6 Example of a punctuation phrase in Prélude de la Porte héroïque

du ciel
22
Henri Antoine Jules Bois Collection, Biographical Note, http://library.binghamton.
edu/specialcollections/findingaids/hajulesb_m3.html.
23
24
Patrick Gowers, ‘Satie’s Rose-Croix Music (1891–1895)’, Proceedings of the
Royal Musical Association 92 (1965–6), pp. 1–25.
Gowers’ punctuation form analysis suggests that Prélude de la Porte héroïque

du ciel is another example of Satie’s preference for the filtration of other arts
into his music; this time, Satie turned to prose and poems for inspiration. The
poetic influence was not an impulse experiment but a reflection of his surrounding
stimulation, as during the Rose-Croix period, he was heavily involved with the
cabaret, an environment in which his compositional style was nurtured alongside
musicians, painters, poets and satirists.
Gowers suggested that the way to listen to this prelude was to ‘let the
punctuation phrases slip by almost unnoticed and concentrate on the chain,
thinking of it as far as possible as a whole, rather than as sections divided by
a response in the manner of a litany’.25 Gowers’ idea of ‘prose-like structure’
leads to the following assumption: if one is to listen to the prelude as if it were
prose, it would make sense for the performer to interpret the music in the manner
of reciting prose. In order to understand what Satie, from the angle of a poet,
might have in mind on how this piece should be played, it is useful to consider
the nature of the French language. The French ‘pronounce each syllable with
approximately equal strength and to maintain for each vowel its full quality’,26
unlike English poems, which emphasise strongly the stressed syllables and
reduce the vowels of unstressed syllables. Philip Ball mentioned that French
songs tend to have a rather regular pulse, as in French, the durations of adjacent
vowels are more similar than in English.27 As a result, a few hypotheses on
performance issues can be drawn for Prélude de la Porte héroïque du ciel and
the suggested performance practice can also be applied to other Rose-Croix
pieces with similar musical characteristics.
Orledge commented that this Rose-Croix work is ‘slow, hieratic and
ritualistic’ and a slow tempo dominates all of his Rose-Croix pieces. For
instance, in all three Sonneries de la Rose+Croix, uspud and Danses gothiques,
the tempo marking is Lent. In the odd case like Le fils des étoiles, despite having
modéré as the tempo description, the metronome marking of crotchet 54–60
would still be considered nowadays to be a slow rather than a moderate tempo.
As a result, a slow tempo choice, together with the rather monotonous choice
of rhythmic patterns (only crotchets and quavers with no dotted rhythms) for
this prelude, resembles the ‘equal strength syllables’ and ‘full quality vowels’
in the French language. This slow tempo is also agreeable to the description
‘calme et profondément doux’ at the beginning of the prelude, which indicates a
serene atmosphere.28 The description ‘calme’ hence implied a slow tempo choice
25
Ibid., p. 19.
26
Bernard Tranel, The Sounds of French: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), p. 35.
27
Philip Ball, The Music Instinct (London: Bodley Head, 2010), p. 360.
28
It appears that there is no connection between this tempo indication and that given
by Debussy at the head of ‘La cathédrale engloutie’ – ‘Doux et profondément calme’ –
though the coincidence is striking.
regardless of whether it came with or without the added tempo term lent for
further justification. Examples can be found in Satie’s works L’Initiation (1892),
the second act prelude of Le fils de étoiles and Danses gothiques.
The application of pedal, if any, would be for legato effect on each block
chord in order to create a smoother sound, similar to how one speaks and how
poets recite poems in a fluent manner. Lavish use of pedal that creates blurry
harmonies or grand sonority would seem undesirable after understanding Satie’s
attempt to create the mosaic structure where each jigsaw-like motive was self-
contained and clear harmonies are crucial. Besides, using sustained pedals to
help build a grander sound for the sake of achieving the ebbs and flows of the
music are totally irrelevant simply because such ebbs and flows were not present
in the mosaic structure pieces. Phrases sound lyrical, like spoken sentences,
even though they are the combination of several self-contained jigsaw ‘pieces’
which could be rearranged and joined with other ‘pieces’ in a quasi-random
manner. This is quite similar to the case of Ogives, as the start, middle and end
of each piece has no major difference in character. For this prelude, a single
motif could appear at the start, in the middle or the end of a phrase. In Ex.
3.7, the second, third and seventh systems are selected to illustrate how Satie
ingeniously organised a chosen motif to expose its self-contained nature within
the punctuation structure. Punctuation phrases appear twice – at the beginning
of the second system and at the eighth crotchet beat of the third system. Motif X
is introduced midway between the two punctuation phrases, and it reappears in
the seventh system, following another punctuation phrase and therefore marking
the start of a new phrase.
Whether the arrangement of these motives was a random act or a conscious
compositional process, it seems as if Satie would like the motives to be heard
in a subtle manner; Gowers suggested the performer should ‘let the punctuation
phrases slip by almost unnoticed’.29 If that is indeed the case, there is no reason
to highlight, at any point, the transition from motif to motif. In order to achieve
this, any expressive use of the pedal and agogics that would disturb the subtlety
of the punctuation phrases is to be avoided.
Another interesting musical element that possibly relates to the practice of
reciting prose was Satie’s choice of rests. Throughout the piece, only crotchet
rests and quaver rests were used. Under closer examination, when there is a
pause in the discourse, this rest is consistently a quaver long. A quaver rest also
appears after every punctuation phrase (see Ex. 3.7). It is logical to think that
these quaver rests provide the short silence that symbolise one taking a breath
in between long sentences or at the end of a full sentence. If this assumption is
true, the quaver rest could be ‘played’ with a small amount of rubato without the
need to stick to its actual rhythmic value.
In terms of the application of dynamic markings in all Rose-Croix pieces,
it appears that Satie had given specific dynamic markings to some but not all
29
Gowers, ‘Satie’s Rose-Croix Music (1891–1895)’, p. 19.
Example 3.7 Punctuation phrases and a self-contained motif in Prélude de la

Porte héroïque du ciel
pieces. The presence of precise dynamic markings in pieces like Première pensée
Rose+Croix, Sonneries de la Rose+Croix, Le fils des étoiles and uspud means the
absence of dynamic markings in Prélude de la Porte héroïque du ciel and Danses
gothiques was deliberate and should not therefore be seen as a hint from Satie to
allow performers to improvise the range of dynamics within the piece. The written
music should be performed with the most plain and unvaried dynamic level. As
different dynamic levels works in relation to each other, the choice of a particular
dynamic level for the Rose-Croix pieces would vary between performers. Using
Prélude de la Porte héroïque du ciel as an example, the determining factors would
be the performer’s own perception of ‘Calme et profondément doux’ as well as
practical performance issues, for instance, the size and the acoustic facilities of the
performance venue and the instrument itself.
Ogives was the first of Satie’s piano works to lack a time signature and bar
lines. Such unconventional choices of musical presentation were frequently found
in the Rose-Croix piano pieces and later compositions up until 1915. It is not
entirely clear why Satie decided that some pieces should have a time signature
and bar lines and others should not. For instance, the collection published by
Salabert as Carnet d’esquisses et de croquis (1899–1913) consists of 15 short
pieces and among these, only ‘Songeries vers Jack’ and ‘Arrière’ have no bar
Example 3.8 The first system of Gnossienne no. 3
lines and time signatures. Similarly, among the 12 chorales30 that he composed
in 1906, only the tenth and eleventh chorale shared such characteristics. After the
12 chorales, Satie reverted to composing pieces with time signatures and bar lines
until 1913, when he changed his mind again for Le piège de Méduse (1913), Sports
et divertissements (1914), Les trois valses distinguées du Précieux dégoûté (1914)
and Avant-dernières pensées (1915).
The unique style of scoring in the Ogives can be seen as Satie’s early attempt
to advertise himself as a controversial and pioneering composer, a person who
refused to follow the mainstream and who perceived his surroundings with a
different pair of eyes. Still eye-catching for today’s performers, the lack of essential
performance directions and the odd performance descriptions as substitutions
had no doubt attracted the attention of publishers and musicians at the time. This
unique style had a positive effect on his career as a composer and it was certainly
a style favoured by Satie, as proven by his adoption of such a scoring style again
in his later compositional years. From the viewpoint of a composer, creating music
without bar lines and time signatures instantly provides a much freer approach to
the setting of a phrase and the total length of consecutive phrases. Such practice
could be seen as Satie questioning the long tradition of composing with time
signatures and bar lines. ‘Were time signatures and bar lines really necessary for
every single piece of music composition?’ he might have asked himself. ‘I would
like to explore phrases with irregular length, and why should I be hindered by
the traditional bar lines and time signatures which only interrupted my thinking?’
Or, similarly, he might have thought, for example, in the case of the famous
Gnossienne no. 3 (1890): ‘Weren’t the semibreves obvious enough to show my
intention of the quadruple time signature?’
No matter what Satie had in mind when he chose to rid his compositions of bar
lines and time signatures, the visual outcome was impressive. From a performer’s
point of view, it is no doubt that the absence of bar lines offers a more free-flowing
perception of the melodies. Counting regular beats within a bar consciously or
subconsciously would no longer be the case and performers could focus purely
on the musical flow. The visual perception thus becomes more similar to the aural
perception as the music can be scanned without the bar lines separating each phrase
30
Satie did not give the title Douze petits chorals. The title was an editorial addition
by Salabert.
Example 3.9 The third, fourth and fifth systems of Le fils des étoiles, third act
prelude
into different measures. For the first time, the visual experience of a performer
closely resembled his aural experience, i.e. to be able to perform and listen to a
piece of music without being reminded of every first beat of the bar. Consequently,
the music score itself became a piece of visual art.
However, the pieces with no bar lines and time signatures were not at all
musically chaotic. In fact, Satie designed his own ‘unifying agent’ so that the
pieces worked coherently. First of all, instead of creating varied rhythmic patterns
in these pieces, the rhythmic variety was rather limited. In most cases, only two
different rhythmic values were included for the majority of the piece, for example,
crotchets and quavers or crotchets and minims. An exceptional case is the third
prelude of Le fils des étoiles, which has the most diverse rhythmic values from
semiquavers and quavers to crotchets, minims, triplets and dotted rhythms. It
might sound chaotic having to include all these different rhythmic patterns without
the presence of bar lines and time signatures, but Satie intentionally arranged the
different rhythmic patterns in groups, so that there was a chain of crotchet block
chords followed by a chain of semiquaver rhythms. Ex. 3.9 shows how these
blocks of different rhythmic groups work perfectly alongside each other.
The change from one rhythmic group to another resembles the change of
background scenery of the esoteric drama as the prelude was supposed to be
composed for Péladan’s mystic play, though it is unknown whether the piece
referred directly to the play. These different blocks of rhythmic patterns could also
be some kind of mosaic structure in a bigger scheme.
In his pieces with limited rhythmic variety but phrases of irregular lengths,
Satie organised his musical ideas – still without the need of bar lines and time
signatures – with consistent phrase markings throughout the entire piece. Examples
can be found in Danses de travers (1897) and Pièces froides (1897). Other works
without bar lines and time signatures have only block chords and no phrase marks,
such as the two Préludes du Nazaréen (1892, originally conceived as a single
piece) and Vexations (1893).31 Poking a bit of fun, these pieces could be seen as
puzzle games designed by Satie since the lack of performance direction among
these mazes of block chords would no doubt prompt musicians (and quite likely
musicologists) to work out his musical logic in order to perform these pieces with
full understanding.
Since the way in which Satie composed was unique, it is not helpful to turn to
composers or performers of his time hoping to obtain guidance on how to perform
his pieces. Satie made this situation even more difficult by not leaving any
recorded performances of his own works, though this was common practice for
composer/performers of his era such as Debussy, Poulenc, Elgar, Rachmaninoff
and Stravinsky.32 Despite this unfavourable situation, Satie’s musical logic was
never random and it has allowed music researchers to gradually discover his
ultimate intentions. New ideas lie beneath Satie’s consecutive block chords
compositions: today’s performers understand this new concept of music with
a timeless quality which does not necessarily have strong forward momentum
and, as a result, listeners and performers can experience music that resembles
a ‘frozen’ time space. With this logic in mind, it makes perfect sense to avoid
expressive gestures like agogic accents and rubato, which are only effective
when a sense of musical progression is present. Evenness in the articulation of
the block chords is vital and performers should prepare themselves to be fully
submerged in the still and tranquil musical atmosphere and not be tempted with
the common twentieth-century French piano performance practice that Satie
seems to have deliberately avoided.
Similarly, performers should be aware that Satie’s stripping of all performance
directions does not mean that there is a lack of feeling or expression in his
music. For Satie, ‘boredom was mysterious and profound’33 and through his
piano pieces, he managed to explore this feeling, which was not a sentiment that
his contemporaries aimed to include in their music. Boredom is a powerful yet
frustrating emotion and for pieces that involve such high level of repetition, Satie
managed to turn this negative emotion into something positive and artistic, as in
31
The Préludes du Nazaréen and Vexations have been thoroughly researched by
Robert Orledge with detailed findings in Satie the Composer and his article ‘Understanding
Satie’s “Vexations”’, Music & Letters 79/3 (August 1998), pp. 386–95.
32
Robert Philip, Early Recordings and Musical Style: Changing Tastes in Instrumental
Performance, 1900–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 1.
33
Cited in Ornella Volta (ed.), Erik Satie à Montmartre (Paris: Musée de Montmartre,
1982).
well-known Vexations, which has inspired many composers from the twentieth
century onwards, including John Cage.34 As Orledge puts it, ‘repetition and
objectivity were to be encouraged not despised’.35 Satie demonstrated this belief
perfectly through pieces like Ogives and Vexations, and numerous pieces which
have repetitive accompaniment and rhythmic patterns, such as the accompaniments
of Gymnopédies (1888), Gnossiennes (1890) and Pièces froides (1897). Outside
his musical world, Satie did not fail to impress himself or the public with his
interest in boredom and repetition by obsessively purchasing handkerchiefs,
umbrellas and seven identical velvet suits, which gained him the nickname ‘The
Velvet Gentleman’.
34
See Chapter 9 in this book by Matthew Mendez for detail on this topic.
35
Chapter 4
Satie as Poet, Playwright and Composer
Caroline Potter
Erik Satie’s creativity exploded in several different directions around 1912–14.

His manuscripts and correspondence testify to his talent for calligraphy, and his
drawings, usually in black or red and usually created for himself, show that he was
an artist gifted in several media. The poet Suzanne Kra wrote that ‘our composer
[Satie] was also seen as a poet’,1 though while Satie wrote many songs, only one
set, the tiny Trois poèmes d’amour (1914), features his own texts. Steven Moore
Whiting believes that his increasing success as a composer gave him confidence
to work in other media: ‘In Satie’s case, it was finding the route to glory in 1911
[when Ravel promoted his music] that enabled him to try out paths beyond the
realm of musical composition; journalism from 1912 on, theatrical comedy in
1913, lyric poetry in 1914, and public lectures (causeries) from 1916 on.’2
Satie is well known for the in-score texts accompanying some of his piano
pieces from the Véritables préludes flasques (1912) onwards, just before his
excursion into poetry and playwriting. These texts provide further evidence of
his need in this period to enhance his music with other artistic forms. While these
texts are sometimes absurd, or comments directed to the performer, or both, the
elaborate commentaries of Heures séculaires et instantanées (1914) are more
like prose poems which feature echoes of French poets, including Verlaine and
Hugo, and allude to contemporary events. From 1912, his occasional journalism
found regular outlets in L’œil de veau, a short-lived journal published by his friend
Roland-Manuel,3 and the more established Revue musicale S.I.M. Gaston Picard,
the co-editor of L’œil de veau, recalled the style of the journal followed: ‘No
particular trends. Imagination – an imagination which I would describe as literary.
A humour for which our collaborator le bon maître Erik Satie set the tone.’4
1
Ornella Volta (ed.), Erik Satie: Correspondance presque complète (Paris: Fayard,
2003), p. 929: ‘notre compositeur [Satie] était perçu, aussi, comme un poète’. Satie sent a
letter to Suzanne Kra on 31 July 1917 (p. 295): ‘J’ai lu avec attention vos poèmes. Ils me
plaisent infiniment.’ Suzanne Kra was the daughter of the publisher Simon Kra and the
translator of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke (pp. 928–9).
2
Steven Moore Whiting, Satie the Bohemian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 442.
3
1990), p. 213. The journal ceased publication after the May 1912 number.
4
Gaston Picard, ‘Quelle enquête serait plus intéressante ?…’, Belles-Lettres 62–6
(December 1924), pp. 176–7: ‘Pas de tendance. De la fantaisie – une fantaisie que
Given Satie’s extensive literary interests and his desire to control the
appearance of his music, it is surprising that only one vocal work features his
own texts. Perhaps the topic of the Trois poèmes d’amour is unexpected, as Satie,
as far as we know, had little direct experience of romantic relationships. His only
documented affair (with the painter Suzanne Valadon) lasted, according to him,
from 14 January until 20 June 1893; reports that he may have had another brief
relationship in 1914, with the poet Henriette Sauret, are as yet unconfirmed.
The songs were composed, according to the manuscripts, on 20 November, 25
November and 2 December 1914,5 and were originally headed ‘Musique de M.
Erik Satie (sur des paroles magiques de lui-même)’. Robert Orledge discovered
Satie’s original preface to these songs in a sketchbook; the following does not
appear in the published version:
These poems do not discuss the love of Glory, the love of Lucre, the love of
Commerce or of Geography. No. These poems are poems of the love … of Love;
they are simple and devout pages wherein are reflected all the tenderness of a
virtuous man, very proper in his ways. You can listen to them without fear. They
are three in number: the first has as its title: Love Poem No. 1; the title of the
second is a little less glorious: Love Poem No. 3; as to the third poem, its title
is more modest still: Love Poem No. 2. I am going to sing them to you myself,
with a single vocal cord, in the same way as was customary in ancient times, at
the court of our good old kings of the 12th, of the 12th arrondissement.6
(Satie subsequently decided against this quixotic 1, 3, 2 numbering.) The Trois

poèmes d’amour have a fake medieval flavour, hence the otherwise obscure
reference to ‘the 12th [century]’; the love expressed in these songs is an idealised,
courtly love, though not without some surprising contemporary twists. Satie was
interested in all things Gothic – particularly drawings of castles and suits of armour,
calligraphy and architecture. This interest dates back at least as far as his first
j’appellerai livresque. Un humour dont notre collaborateur le bon maître Erik Satie donnait
le ton.’
5
6
Translation in Robert Orledge, ‘Satie’s Approach to Composition in His Later Years
(1913–24)’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 111 (1984–5), p. 159. Original in
the Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS 9615 (1), p. 1: ‘Ces poèmes ne traitent pas de l’amour
de la Gloire, de l’amour du Lucre, de l’amour du Commerce ou de celui de la Géographie.
Non. Ces poèmes sont des poèmes d’amour ... de l’Amour; ce sont des pages bêtes et simples
où se voit toute la tendresse d’un homme vertueux, très convenables dans ses manières. Vous
pouvez les écouter sans crainte. Ils sont au nombre de trois: le premier a comme titre: Poème
d’Amour No. 1; le titre du deuxième est un peu moins glorieux: Poème d’Amour No. 3; quant
au troisième poème, son titre est plus modeste encore: Poème d’Amour No. 2. Je vais vous
les chanter moi-même, sur une seule corde vocale, ainsi que cela se pratiquait, dans l’ancien
temps, à la Cour de nos bons vieux rois du XIIe, du XIIe arrondissement.’
Satie as Poet, Playwright and Composer 69
significant work, the four Ogives for piano (1888)7 – and the nine (3x3) Danses
gothiques (1893). Steven Moore Whiting refers to the ‘stagey medievalism’ of the
Montmartre café scene in the 1890s, a scene into which Satie fit perfectly,8 though
he moved away from this obsession after the 1890s. Satie was employed at this
time as a pianist at the Chat Noir cabaret, a venue which produced its own journal,
edited during its heyday by Alphonse Allais, Satie’s fellow Honfleur native. The
proprietor of the Chat Noir, Rodolphe Salis, contributed short stories in cod-
medieval style, with ‘authentic’ antique spelling, to the Chat Noir journal; the most
interesting things about these stories by far were the elaborate illustrations which
echo Satie’s Gothic doodlings. It is curious to see Satie’s interest in the medieval
being revived more than 30 years later, seemingly out of the blue, with the Trois
poèmes d’amour. One could speculate that his connection with Henriette Sauret,
a poet whose work was published in L’œil de veau, may have triggered these love
poems. On a less romantic level, she was the dedicatee of Satie’s ‘Observations
d’un imbécile (Moi)’, a text published in L’œil de veau in February 1912. The
following number of the magazine (March–April 1912) featured a prose poem by
Sauret with the Satiean title ‘Le Froid’ on p. 82.9
The three songs form a rhyming set for several reasons. First, as in many of
his piano works including the Gymnopédies, Satie created a group of three pieces
which are deliberately similar in mood and texture – like viewing a sculpture from
three different angles, as he said of his Gymnopédies. He was not at all concerned
about providing variety within a set of pieces. Second, the predominance of
conjunct quaver movement, intentionally reminiscent of the regular, flowing
rhythm of Gregorian chant, in the vocal line is common to all three songs and is
another quasi-medieval feature. Leaps wider than a second are rare and therefore
attract attention (e.g. line 4 of song 1, ‘Pour plaire à son amante’, features an
octave leap from the first to the second word). Satie’s reference to ‘a single vocal
cord’ no doubt refers to the limited vocal range of the songs, which remain in the
speech register throughout. Third, Satie avoids the first person singular pronoun
(‘Ne suis que grain de sable’, ‘Suis chauve de naissance’) for archaic effect and
also to further position the narrator as a self-effacing supplicant. In October 1892
Debussy famously described Satie as a ‘gentle medieval musician lost in this
century’,10 words which seem to anticipate this work.
7
See Chapter 3 of this book.
8
9
Sauret’s engagement was announced in the Journal des débats politiques et
littéraires, on p. 2 of the number dated 2 October 1912: ‘M. André Lévy, dit Arnyvelde,
homme de lettres, avec Mlle Henriette Sauret, femme de lettres, fille du général de division
Sauret.’
10
Cited in Robert Orledge, ‘Satie, Koechlin and the ballet Uspud’, Music & Letters
64/1 (1987), p. 27. In footnote 4 on the same page, Orledge mentions that Debussy wrote
these words (in red ink) as a dedication to Satie on a copy of Debussy’s own Cinq poèmes
de Baudelaire.
Most importantly, the poetic form of each poem is identical and all the rhymes
are identical. Satie uses a simple ABA form in all three poems, repeating (or
almost repeating) the opening two lines to round off each. Satie employs lines
with seven syllables – or, more precisely, six syllables plus a mute ‘e’ at the end
of each line, which should be pronounced in poetry or classical song, but should
traditionally not be a stressed syllable. However, Satie perversely abandons
the quaver movement of the rest of the song for the final syllable of each line,
stretching the mute ‘e’ syllables out to a crotchet length and no doubt poking fun
at the usual stress patterns of spoken French by underlining the weak syllable.
Satie’s interest in numerology and hidden musical systems of various sorts is well
documented, not least by Robert Orledge, and this use of an obsessive rhyme
scheme, adherence to which is more important than the meaning of the words, is
therefore closely connected with his compositional practice.
The three poems are shown below:
1.
Ne suis que grain de sable,
Toujours frais et t’aimable.
Qui boit, qui rit, qui chante
Pour plaire à son amante
Tout doux, ma chère, belle
Aimez votre amant frêle:
Il n’est que grain de sable
Toujours frais et t’aimable.
[I am but a grain of sand/Always fresh and kind to you./Who drinks, who laughs, who
sings/To please his lover/Gently, my dear, lovely one/Love your fragile lover;/He is
but a grain of sand/Always fresh and kind to you.]
2.
Suis chauve de naissance,
Par pure bienséance,
Je n’ai plus confiance
En ma jeune vaillance.
Pourquoi cette arrogance
De la si belle Hortence?
Très chauve de naissance,
Le suis par bienséance.
[I’ve been bald since I was born/By pure decorum,/I no longer trust/In my youthful
gallantry./Why this arrogance/Of the so lovely Hortense?/Very bald since I was
born,/I am by decorum.]
3.
Ta parure est secrète,
Ô douce luronnette.
Ma belle guillerette
Fume la cigarette
Ferai-je sa conquête
Que je voudrais complète?
Ta parure est secrète,
Ô douce luronnette.
[Your finery is concealed,/Oh gentle little strapping girl./My lovely cheerful one/
Smokes a cigarette/Will I make conquest of/She whom I want to complete?/Your
finery is concealed,/Oh gentle little strapping girl.]
The manuscripts feature prefaces to each song which are not reproduced in the
published edition of the songs. Exceptionally for Satie, these are romantic, heart-
on-sleeve expressions of feeling which have no apparent ironic or satirical edge.
Before the first song, Satie writes: ‘The poet dares to make a discreet declaration
of love to his beloved, a pale vow. The latter listens to him coldly, on the tip
of her lips.’11 There is a similar flowery statement prefacing the second song,
‘Suis chauve de naissance’: ‘Here, the poet expresses his utter devotion, his utter
thoughtfulness. He is uncertain of his own power and shows great anguish.’12
Finally, the third song is preceded by: ‘The Poet, in the grip of vertigo, seems to be
mad with love. His heart bursts in his stomach; his eyelids tremble like leaves.’13
As we will see, these florid sentiments are rarely reflected in the music.
The poems suggest an ironically witty courtly love, a topic which again
evokes the medieval period. Many commentators have wondered whether the
narrator is Satie himself – considering lines such as ‘Suis chauve de naissance’
– though he was not bald at the time that he wrote these songs. In any event,
the narrator positions himself as a humble petitioner, presenting himself as a
grain of sand (‘Ne suis que grain de sable’) who seeks only to please his lover.
The lady in question is named as ‘la si belle Hortence’ in the second song –
a suitably old-fashioned name (and old-fashioned spelling), evoking a France
in medieval times. Christopher Dawson believes that this poem ‘combines the
pretentiousness of the précieux dégoûté (whose three waltzes has been written
a few months earlier) with a thematic incongruity caused by the constraints of
rhyme to create a similar effect of conflict and parody’, later noting that the
‘theme subservient to rhyme’ anticipates Dadaist poetry.14
11
‘Le poète ose faire, à son amante, une discrète déclaration, un pâle aveu. Celle-ci
l’écoute froidement, du bout des lèvres.’
12
‘Le poète exprime ici toute sa dévotion, tout son recueillement. Il doute de son
pouvoir personnel; & monte une énorme angoisse.’
13
‘Le Poète, pris de vertige, semble fou d’amour. Son cœur éclate dans son ventre; ses
paupières tremblent comme des feuilles.’
14
Christopher Dawson, ‘Erik Satie Viewed as a Writer: With Special Reference to His
Texts from 1900 to 1925’, unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1993, p. 110.
The distinct similarity of each song could be connected to the rhetorical

device of anaphora (Christopher Dawson notes it with reference to his writing
style, but the phenomenon is also applicable to his music). The Cambridge Guide
to Literature in English defines anaphora as ‘the rhetorical device of repeating
the first word or words of successive sentences or clauses’; in the Trois poèmes
d’amour, as we have noted, the first two lines of each poem are repeated at the
end and, in addition, all rhymes are identical. In Dawson’s words, ‘it would
appear for him anaphora was a source not only of aesthetic balance but also of
thematic precision, allowing the reader to extract the essence of his thoughts
from a series of similar statements in much the same way as an audience may
deduce the essence of a gymnopédie from a series of musical examples’. Satie’s
use of this technique is, according to Dawson, ‘a further example of the classical
nature of his art’.15 This strong internal similarity in each poem, together with
the use of regular rhythm in the vocal line, gives a mechanistic effect which is
typical of Satie. The use of mechanical-type devices in a set of love songs could
be seen as an ironic distancing from the feelings involved, and the overall effect
is dehumanising and depersonalising.
The mute ‘e’ ending lends itself to the use of diminutives, often with comic
effect. Steven Moore Whiting has documented Satie’s extensive borrowings
from popular song, showing that he used various songs by others as a basis
for parodies. It is evident that he was similarly reliant on the works of others
for much of his literary output, including many of the in-text commentaries
of his piano works. For the Trois poèmes d’amour, Satie is indebted to Pierre
de Ronsard’s (1524–85) famous poem ‘à son âme’, beginning ‘Amelette
Ronsardelette, Mignonnelette, doucelette, Tres-chère hostesse de mon corps’.
This poem was memorably set by Ravel in 1923–4 featuring open fifths in the
largely one-handed piano part – a part Ravel said facilitated playing the piano
and smoking at the same time.
Three verses were published in an article on Satie’s writings by Nigel Wilkins
in 197516 that are also based on identical rhymes at the end of each of their six
lines. Wilkins indicates that Satie is the author of these lines, while Steven Moore
Whiting suggests that his cabaret collaborator Vincent Hyspa may well be the
author. Whoever the true author is, these verses have much in common with the
texts of Trois poèmes d’amour, not least because the rhyme scheme is here more
important than the logical meaning of the verses:
15
Ibid., p. 217.
16
Nigel Wilkins, ‘The Writings of Erik Satie: Miscellaneous Fragments’, Music &
Letters 56/3–4 (1975), p. 303. See also Steven Moore Whiting, ‘Erik Satie and Vincent
Hyspa: Notes on a Collaboration‘, Music & Letters 77/1 (February 1996), pp. 64–91; the
reference to these verses can be found on pp. 78–9. Whiting notes that the text was written
in 1904 and that Satie sketched a song, ‘Les fantômes’, setting these three verses (now
housed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, BN 9599).
1. Voici Messire Printemps/Le plus beau des temps/C’est ce temps charmant/Si

cher aux enfants/Jamais autre temps/Ne plaît autant. [Here is Mister Spring/The
most beautiful time/It’s this charming time/Which children love/No other time/
Pleases as much]
2. C’est le temps des pâquerettes/De mille fleurettes/De mille bleuettes/Et des

alouettes/Des petites bêtes/Des maux de têtes. [It’s the time of daisies/Of a
thousand little flowers/Of a thousand cornflowers/And larks/Of little creatures/
Of headaches]
3. On voit des petites coteaux/Des petits ruisseaux/Des petits roseaux/Des

petits oiseaux/Et des arbrisseaux/Des vermisseaux. [We can see little hills/Little
streams/Little reeds/Little birds/And shrubby trees/Little earthworms]
While these short verses are undated, the second and third have much in common
with the Trois poèmes d’amour texts in the use of diminutives, some invented,
at the end of each line, and the almost free association of words based on this
rhyming syllable. The first of these verses is more conventional in content, its only
Satiean characteristic being its obsession with the notion of time. The unexpected
conclusion which undermines both the second and third verses is reminiscent
of the prose poems in Heures séculaires et instantanées, as are the Verlaine-like
references to an idealised Nature in all three verses. However, the mood created
is ultimately far from Verlaine’s ‘heure exquise’, ending as it does in a headache.
Peter Dayan draws attention to the second line of the last of the Trois poèmes
d’amour (repeated as the final line): ‘Ô douce luronette.’ In Dayan’s words,
‘a “luronne” is … a woman with an approach to love which aligns itself with
the stereotypically masculine rather than the stereotypically feminine, being
enterprising rather than modest. But the adjective “douce” undermines that
alignment’.17 Harrap’s French-English Dictionary defines ‘une luronne’ as ‘a
strapping, beefy woman’. I assume, therefore, that a ‘luronette’ is a small version
of the same. Dayan’s analysis of the poems highlights the ambiguity of gender
roles, the narrator (presumably male) often being portrayed as a modest creature
and ‘the one adjective applied to the narrator himself (“chauve”) has a feminine
ending’,18 though this adjective does not exist in any other form. However, we
should remember that the roles in Socrate, set by Satie in 1917–18, are male
characters which, in the first performance, were sung by a single female voice:
there is therefore no gendered connection between voice and character. The gender
of the singer was a secondary consideration for Satie, and while the dedicatee
of the three songs is Henri Fabert (who gave the first performance with Satie on
2 April 1916), the composer made a neat copy for the soprano Jane Bathori, a
17
Peter Dayan, ‘Erik Satie’s Poetry’, Modern Language Review 103 (2008), pp. 409–
23, at p. 420.
18
Dayan, ‘Erik Satie’s Poetry’, p. 419.
frequent collaborator.19 Orledge mentions that ‘the vocal line of the first song (“Ne
suis que grain de sable”) was originally pitched an octave higher’20 and I wonder
whether Satie abandoned this in order to keep the vocal range within the speech
register.
An odd feature of the poems is the shift from the second person singular to
plural and back again in the first and third songs (the second song avoids these
pronouns altogether). In the first song, the pronoun jolts from the suggestion of
‘tu’ in ‘Toujours frais et t’aimable’ (lines 2 and 8) to ‘Aimez votre amant frêle’
(line 6). While ‘ton amant frêle’ would have worked in this poetic form, Satie
perhaps wanted to avoid the assonance of ‘ton amant’, or he liked the shivering
repeated ‘r’ sounds of ‘votre’ and ‘frêle’ in the same line, highlighting the
apparent fragility of the narrator. Or perhaps he wanted to show that the narrator
is nervous and uncertain how to address his beloved. Incidentally, ‘toujours
frais et t’aimable’ is also a phonetic pun. ‘Et aimable’ is correct French, but
the hiatus between ‘et’ and ‘aimable’ may have been considered awkward by
Satie; while ‘et t’aimable’ is more euphonious, it incorrectly suggests that the
words used are ‘est aimable’ (in which case a liaison between the two words
would be correct), creating ambiguity to the ears of French speakers. By the
final poem, the narrator is happy to say ‘Ta parure est secrète’ (lines 1 and 7),
no doubt partly because ‘Votre parure’ would have involved an extra syllable,
ruining the poetic form.
The brevity of the poems echoes contemporary poetry by Satie’s friend
Apollinaire, though this is also a stylistic characteristic of Satie as a composer,
and as a writer he is fond of the aphorism: the unity of style of Satie’s oeuvre is
striking. The piano parts are unusual, not least because their relationship with the
vocal line seems non-existent on the surface, but in fact the pianist shadows the
singer’s Gregorian chant-like melodic material in inner parts. Satie made a rare
and fascinating (and completely serious) statement about his beliefs as a composer
in a sketchbook for Socrate in 1917 which illuminates his harmonic practice in the
Trois poèmes d’amour:
A melody does not imply its harmony, any more than a landscape implies
its colour. The harmonic character of a melody is infinite for a melody is an
expression within the overall Expression.
Do not forget that the melody is the Idea, the outline; at the same time as being
the form and the subject matter of the work. The harmony is an illumination, an
explanation of the subject, its reflection.21
19
20
Orledge, ‘Satie’s Approach to Composition’, p. 159.
21
Robert Orledge’s translation, cited in Orledge, ‘Satie’s Approach to Composition’,
p. 157. Original in BN ms. 9611(4), p. 3 and cited in Wilkins, ‘The Writings of Erik Satie,
p. 301: ‘Une mélodie n’a pas son harmonie, pas plus qu’un paysage n’a sa couleur. La
Example 4.1 Erik Satie, Trois poèmes d’amour, 1 (‘Ne suis que grain de sable’):
bars 5–8
Any bar of the Trois poèmes d’amour could be chosen as an example of the half-
concealed interrelationship between the vocal and piano parts; the second half of
‘Ne suis que grain de sable’ is as clear an example as any (Example 4.1).
Here, selected notes from the vocal line appear in the piano part, though the
vocal line jumps from one voice to another in the piano and does not usually act as
an obvious cue for the singer. Orledge notes that ‘even before Satie wrote his article
on subject matter and craftsmanship [partly quoted above], he was clearly adhering
to its principles in practice’.22 The piano parts are sometimes chordal in texture and
sometimes more varied, and there are many seemingly random registral changes
and elaborations of the rhythm which prevent this being a simple accompaniment
and show that the ‘melody does not imply its harmony’ in a straightforward
manner. Steven Moore Whiting notes that ‘Satie conveys a modal flavour by de-
emphasising leading notes and avoiding V-I progressions in accompaniments that
are, for him, unusually triadic and euphonious; this alone lays a patina of antiquity
on these settings’.23 The music therefore uses conventional tonal vocabulary, but
its syntax is skewed.
Robert Orledge, in his detailed study of the manuscripts of the songs,
comments: ‘Much was changed en route to the printed version, most noticeably
in the excision of the humorous preface, epigraphs and characteristic private
directions to both singer and pianist, as well as a loud inflated “ritournelle” for
the first song, which itself went through both an amusing cadential version and
a slightly more appropriate revision before being cut altogether.’24 ‘Ta parure est
secrète’ is the strangest of all; according to Orledge, manuscript evidence shows
that the odd decorative flourishes in the piano part were added at a very late stage
in composition. What these flourishes signify is unclear: could their decorative
situation harmonique d’une mélodie est infinie, car une mélodie est une expression dans
l’Expression … N’oubliez pas que que la mélodie est l’Idée, le contour; ainsi qu’elle est
la forme et la matière d’une œuvre. L’harmonie, elle, est une éclairage, une exposition de
l’objet, son reflet.’
22
Orledge, ‘Satie’s Approach to Composition’, p. 163.
23
24
Orledge, ‘Satie’s Approach to Composition’, pp. 15–19.
style echo the word ‘parure’? Could this be a flamboyant ‘romantic song’
gesture disconnected from its appropriate musical context, which deliberately
disrupts the chant-like rhythmic and melodic style in the rest of the songs? The
manuscript also shows a flowery, romantic epigraph to this song: ‘Le poète, pris
de vertige, semble fou d’amour. Avec tendresse son cœur éclate dans son ventre;
ses paupières tremblent comme des feuilles.’25 This could be compared to Satie’s
use of several different linguistic registers in one article or other text.
In February–March 1913, Satie wrote his only known play, Le piège de
Méduse (translated by Nigel Wilkins as Baron Medusa’s Trap), adding seven
short dances by June of that year.26 It is described on the title page as ‘Comédie
lyrique en un acte de M. ERIK SATIE avec musique du danse du même
monsieur’. Typically, Satie was reluctant to offer any serious analysis of his
work, commenting in the published preface: ‘This is a work of fantasy … not
realistic. A joke. Don’t read anything else into it. The role of Baron Méduse
is a sort of portrait … It’s even my portrait … a portrait of my whole body.’27
While this upfront reference to the name character being a portrait of himself
appears most uncharacteristic of Satie, when Pierre Bertin played the role in the
public premiere in 1921 in the presence of the author, Satie was very angry that
Bertin appropriated many of his mannerisms. Some of the Baron’s gestures seem
calculated to deliberately distance the character from his creator: for instance, at
the end of Act 1, we see Méduse on the phone (Satie hated new technology, even
refusing to use a telephone).
It is a very short play in nine brief scenes, which is around 25 minutes
long in performance, and it features seven tiny musical interludes which were
originally written for a piano with a sheet of paper inserted between the strings
to create a percussive effect – the first known example of a prepared piano.
The characters are: Baron Méduse, described as being very rich, with a private
income; Polycarpe, his servant; Frisette, his daughter; Astolfo, her fiancé; and
Jonas, who does not have a speaking role but is referred to several times. Jonas is
a stuffed monkey who performs dances accompanied by the musical interludes.
One possible source for the monkey may be La Fontaine’s fable ‘The Monkey
and the Leopard’, which features the monkey as the star of the show who can
speak, dance and perform magic tricks. This monkey, the fable makes clear, is
a creature who may not have the surface attraction of the leopard, but has many
other talents which more than make up for his unprepossessing appearance.
(Incidentally, La Fontaine’s monkey arrived into town in appropriately Satiean
transport: ‘three boats’.) We shall see that a more specifically musical source
may have had a more crucial impact on Satie in this simian context.
25
Ibid., p. 162.
26
27
‘C’est ici une pièce de fantaisie … sans réalité. Une boutade. N’y voyez pas autre
chose. Le rôle du baron Méduse est une façon de portrait … C’est même mon portrait …
un portrait en pied.’
The names of the play’s characters have varied origins: Polycarpe is the
patron saint of noise;28 Frisette has a typically ‘feminine’ fluffy Molière-type
name; Astolfo’s name has an Italian ring to it; and while the name Méduse
evidently echoes the Greek mythical character with multiple heads (who was,
of course, female), there is no reference to Greek myth in the play.29 Works
based on classical subjects have been commonplace in French culture since the
seventeenth century, and perhaps Satie wanted to toy with readers’ expectations
that his play might be a grand Classical affair. Whether he knew that his friend
Paul Dukas was wrestling with a ballet scenario entitled Le sang de Méduse
during 1912–13 is unknown – and why Dukas abandoned his project, which
survives as an extremely detailed scenario with no music, is also a mystery.
What provoked Satie to write a play at this stage in his life is unclear. In
1898, he wrote a five-act play in collaboration with Jules Dépaquit (with whom
he also wrote Jack in the Box), and Ornella Volta has suggested that Le piège
de Méduse may be a condensed version of this play, which is now lost.30 In
1892, he and his close friend Contamine de Latour collaborated on the ballet
uspud, and at the turn of the century Satie wrote music for a marionette opera,
Geneviève de Brabant (1899–1900), and two unfinished works, The Angora
Ox and The Dreamy Fish (both c. 1901) to texts by the same friend, though
there is no evidence that the composer contributed to the texts. Satie would have
studied French classical literature at school, and in 1923 he wrote recitatives for
Gounod’s opera based on Molière’s play Le Médecin malgré lui, as we shall see
in Chapter 8 of this book.
Satie’s article ‘Choses de théâtre’, published in the Revue musicale S.I.M. on
15 January 1913, gives more clues about his revived theatrical interest. Here,
he mentions a plan to write a theatrical work featuring a master, a servant and a
skeleton monkey which can be animated,31 which sounds like an initial sketch
for Le piège de Méduse. The following undated fragmentary text (now in the
Woods-Bliss Collection at the Houghton Library, Harvard University and not
previously available in English) may also have been an early draft of some ideas
used in the play:
For a moment, everyone thinks he’s going to play the game with the cork, using
the one from the carafe.
28
Dawson points out that Cocteau refers to Polycarpe in his polemic Le coq et
l’Arlequin, which praises Satie’s musical style as a suitable one for young French musicians
to follow (Dawson, ‘Erik Satie Viewed as a Writer’, p. 129). Cocteau’s book was written in
1916–17 – therefore a few years after Satie’s play.
29
Dawson believes (‘Erik Satie Viewed as a Writer’, p. 128) that the name may be an
oblique reference to Satie’s wish to ‘petrify time in his music’.
30
Dawson, ‘Erik Satie Viewed as a Writer’, p. 123.
31
Article reprinted in Ornella Volta (ed.), Satie Ecrits, (Paris: Champ Libre, 1977),
p. 71.
The door opens: the Gentleman and Lady enter without noticing the bear. They
appear to think that people are playing a party game – not an amusing one, either.
They are surprised to see everyone climbing everything that is climbable. They
have come to ask the young lady’s hand in marriage for their son – and they
move towards the Lady, greet her and compliment her.
He has come to flirt with the young lady, because he intends to marry her himself.
Completely overwhelmed, the Lady tries to explain the situation to everyone.
As soon as they see the bear, the poor people, deeply scared, immediately
clamber on all the furniture and stick themselves on the ceiling. The panic is at
its height. When will this all end?
But the Bear Tamer has moved towards the window and opened it. He reappears
with a barrel organ.
This animal doesn’t recognise his master any more.
Straight away, the bear dances, even having the cheek to smile.32
This story is scribbled in a notebook of sketches for Satie’s ‘pantomime’ Jack in

the Box (1899), a work based on a lost text by his friend Jules Dépaquit; whether
the tale of the bear and the barrel organ is related to this text, and whether the
author of the text is Satie, Dépaquit or a combination of the two is tantalisingly
unclear. Another undated fragment (reproduced by Volta immediately below this
story) comes from a different source but has topics in common with it: ‘The servant
32
Reprinted in ibid., p. 151: ‘Pendant un instant, tous s’imaginent qu’il va jouer au
bouchon avec celui de la carafe.
La porte s’ouvre: le Gentleman et la Lady pénètrent sans remarquer l’ours. Ils ont l’air
de croire que l’on joue à un jeu de société – peu amusant, du reste.
Ils sont surpris de voir toute la compagnie grimpée sur tout ce qui est grimpable. Ils
viennent demander la main de la jeune fille pour leur fils – et se dirigent vers la Dame, la
saluent et lui font des compliments.
Il est venu flirter avec la jeune fille – car il a l’intention de l’épouser lui-même.
Complètement ahurie, la Dame essaie de leur expliquer la situation.
Dès qu’ils voient l’ours, les pauvres gens, pris d’une frousse intense, escaladent aussitôt
tous les meubles et vont s’accrocher au plafond. La panique est à son comble. Quand tout
cela finira-t-il?
Mais le Montreur d’Ours a pu gagner la fenêtre et l’ouvrir. Il réapparaît avec un orgue
de Barberie.
Cet animal ne reconnaît plus son bon Maître.
L’ours danse immédiatement, ayant même le culot de sourire.’
considers that the bear looks strangely like M. Thiers. He does not hesitate to draw
attention to himself by his bestiality.’33 Several elements of these strange bitty tales
– a bourgeois home in which people behave far from conventionally, a marriage
proposal, a dancing animal, a servant – are shared with Le piège de Méduse.
Satie’s prose writings show some similarities with the work of the humorist
Alphonse Allais (who was also from Honfleur), and Roger Shattuck, in his
influential The Banquet Years, places Satie in the context of other artists associated
with ‘the absurd’ – Apollinaire, Le Douanier Rousseau and, most significantly,
Alfred Jarry, whose Ubu Roi (premiered in 1896) Satie must have known.
Specific connections between Ubu Roi and Le piège de Méduse include the use of
childlike, naïve elements, the inclusion of a puppet and the external appearance
of conformity combined with the absurd. Although these artists in different media
may appear to have little in common, they share a desire to portray real life in all its
ridiculous variety, rather than the idealised heroes of the eighteenth-century play
and novel. Satie’s Le piège de Méduse, whose title may suggest a Greek, heroic
theme, takes this move away from idealism a step further: this is not a traditional
five-act classical drama, but a short and absurd play. Le piège de Méduse was
first performed privately in January 1914 at the home of the composer Roland-
Manuel’s parents: Roland-Manuel himself played the role of Méduse, his fiancée
Suzanne Roux was Frisette, and his half-brother Jean Dreyfus danced Jonas. Satie
played the prepared piano. For the public premiere on 24 May 1921 in the Théâtre
Michel, Satie orchestrated the dances for a small ensemble of clarinet, trumpet,
trombone, percussion, violin, cello and double bass; the ensemble was conducted
by Darius Milhaud.34
Le piège de Méduse has been viewed by many critics as a harbinger of
surrealism or Dada; Nigel Wilkins described the play as ‘a Dada drama’.35 The
expression used by the literary critic Henri Béhar, borrowing from Vladimir
Jankélévitch, to describe the behaviour of the characters is ‘ironic conformity’.36
On the surface, the play appears to be a portrait of typical bourgeois behaviour
(compare with Molière), the main plotline being Astolfo’s visit to his prospective
33
Ibid., p. 151: ‘Le domestique trouve que l’ours ressemble curieusement à M.
Thiers. Il ne tarde pas à se signaler par sa bestialité.’ ‘M. Thiers’ is a reference to Adolphe
Thiers (1797–1877), French Prime Minister under King Louis-Philippe in 1836 and later
the Head of State who suppressed the Paris Commune in 1871. He never became President.
His political views were therefore the opposite of the left-wing Satie; the composer no
doubt also poked fun at him because he was notoriously short and ugly. Volta mentions in
the second (1981) edition of the Ecrits that a bear (called Caviar) was a star attraction at the
Nouveau Cirque in Paris in the early years of the twentieth century.
34
35
Wilkins, ‘The Writings of Erik Satie’, p. 239.
36
See Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Ironie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1957), pp. 67–80; and
Henri Béhar, ‘Erik Satie ou le conformisme ironique’, in Etude sur le Théâtre Dada et
Surréaliste: Les Essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), pp. 101–5.
father-in-law, Méduse, to ask for his daughter’s hand in marriage. In Christopher

Dawson’s words: ‘Erik Satie’s concern with communication has its basis not in the
problem of existence, but in Man’s tendency to conform. For him, this tendency
was most evident in the bourgeois, whose rigid lifestyle and lack of imagination
he would mock in his article “La Journée du musicien”.’37 This connection is all
the more convincing because ‘La Journée du musicien’ (where Satie outlines his
– wholly fictitious – daily routine, including riding a horse around his grounds)
was written at the same time as Le piège de Méduse. The inclusion of a stuffed
dancing monkey, who comes to life between the parodistic bourgeois scenes, is the
most obvious example of surrealist incongruity in the play. Satie, though, was an
animal lover (dogs were the only living things that penetrated his tiny and filthy
flat in Arcueil) and he wrote an article entitled ‘L’Intelligence et la Musicalité chez
les Animaux’ a year after ‘La Journée du musicien’. Here, he praises the natural
talents of animals and birds – for example, ‘homing pigeons are not instructed for
their task in the rudiments of geography’38 – and university education is described,
in comparison to this form of learning, as ‘nulle’.
The social status of Méduse is, on the surface, established. He is independently
wealthy and can afford a servant, though Polycarpe does not behave as a social
inferior – quite the reverse. He addresses his master as ‘tu’ and at his first
entrance in Scene i, he is ‘dressed in superb livery’ and says he ‘has to go out
this evening to a billiards match’ attended by Napoleon! The servant constantly
berates his master, creating humour in an inversion of the traditional relationship
(and perhaps stressing Satie’s left-wing credentials). But even this relationship is
rather more complex than it appears. In Scene viii, Méduse says ‘I am handing in
my resignation as a member of the Union’, and Polycarpe responds ‘You don’t
have the right’. At the end of the tiny scene, Polycarpe is diminished – Méduse
asserts his right to resign, threatens to shoot Polycarpe and tells him to hide in the
cellar. The stage directions at the end of the scene read: ‘Exit Polycarpe. Hard to
believe he is the same man.’ In the final scene of the play – in which, following
theatrical tradition for once, all the characters are together on stage for the first
time – Méduse sets a trap for Astolfo, hence the title of the work. He asks his
future son-in-law: ‘Savez-vous danser sur un œil? ... sur l’œil gauche?’ (‘Do you
know how to dance on an eye … on the left eye?’); Astolfo initially replies with
a question mark, and then admits he does not. This was the correct response and
Méduse welcomes him into the family. Not everything in this most peculiar play
fails to make sense…
Satie draws the only female character, Frisette, in one dimension only; she is
presented purely as the daughter of one character and the future fiancée of another.
In fact, Méduse refers to her in Scene ii as ‘ma fille de lait’, suggesting that he is
37
Dawson, ‘Erik Satie Viewed as a Writer’, p. 148.
38
Article originally published in La revue musicale SIM (1 February 1914, p. 69) and
reprinted in Volta (ed.), Satie Ecrits, pp. 23–4; ‘les pigeons voyageurs ne sont nullement
préparés, à leur mission, par un usage de la géographie’.
Frisette’s wet nurse! As he goes on to say: ‘Oh, that’s some story. I won’t recount
it to you; you wouldn’t understand anything … Neither do I, actually.’39 There
is more gender-bending confusion in the following scene, where Frisette first
appears and Méduse asks her: ‘So, you want to marry? You don’t want to remain
a bachelor?’40 Even Frisette’s name suggests fluffy frivolity. While the name
places her in Molière’s era, her verbal interjections (in Scene iii, these are mostly
repetitions of ‘Oui, papa’) recall none other than Yniold, Golaud’s son, who has
a small but irritating role in Pelléas et Mélisande, which of course is best known
in the setting by Satie’s friend Debussy. It is possible, therefore, that Frisette’s
repetitive language is not just mechanistic but also a private joke between Satie
and his more celebrated friend. While Satie was certainly no proto-feminist, I
would be wary of reading too much into his portrayal of this cardboard female
character. His Trois poèmes d’amour and Socrate show that he had little consistent
interest in traditional gender roles, and Frisette is really no more and no less a
stereotype compared to the other characters in his play.
The musical interludes in Le piège de Méduse are arranged as follows:
Scene i – Dance i (Quadrille)

Scene ii – Dance ii (Valse)
Scene iii, Scene iv – Dance iii [untitled, ‘Pas vite’]
Scene v, Scene vi – Dance iv (Mazurka)
Scene vii – Dance v [untitled, ‘Un peu vif’]
Scene viii – Dance vi (Polka)
Scene ix – Dance vii (Quadrille)
This shows a symmetrical arrangement of musical numbers: the first and final
dances are Quadrilles. Andrew Lamb, writing in the New Grove, notes that: ‘The
music of the quadrille was made up of lively, rhythmic themes of rigid eight- or
sixteen-bar lengths, the sections being much repeated within a figure’; traditionally,
quadrilles have several named sections, and generally ‘the music was in 2/4, and
was usually adapted from popular songs or stage works’.41 However, it will come
as no surprise to learn that Satie’s Quadrilles are short and completely unrelated in
tempo, rhythm and even their implied time signature, though bar lines are absent
in all of the dances (Examples 4.2a and 4.2b show the opening of each Quadrille).
The third and fifth dances are untitled, a Mazurka appears in between, the
first Quadrille is followed by a Valse and the final Quadrille is preceded by a
Polka. The bewildering variety of national dance types evoked by Satie’s titles
39
‘Oh! c’est toute une histoire. Je ne vous la raconterai pas: vous n’y comprendriez
rien … Moi non plus, du reste.’
40
‘Alors, tu veux te marier ? Tu ne veux pas rester vieux garçon ?’
41
Andrew Lamb, ‘Quadrille’, in Deane Root (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of
Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/22622?q
=quadrille&search=quick&source=omo_gmo&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit.
Example 4.2a Erik Satie, Le piège de Méduse, first dance (‘Quadrille’): opening
Example 4.2b Erik Satie, Le piège de Méduse, seventh dance (‘Quadrille’):

opening
add further to the absurdity of the play and move it away from any specific time
or place; we have already noted that the variety of nationalities evoked by the
characters’ names adds to this effect. There is nothing remotely Polish or Austrian
about any of the characters or situations, though for the Polka, Jonas the monkey
is directed to slap his thighs and scratch himself with a potato.
All the dances are mechanistic, matching the artificiality of the dancing stuffed
monkey, and Satie favours a brisk triple time or a march-like rhythm, though no bar
lines are shown on the score. The mechanical aesthetic matches the behaviour of
other characters in the play too, not least Frisette, and links the play to other Satie
works, including the Trois poèmes d’amour, which similarly distance any feelings
behind a repetitive and occasionally ridiculous regularity. Like Molière, Satie finds
humour in mechanistic behaviour – and his clockwork humour is underlined by
Jonas the monkey, who is the only ‘real’ mechanical being in the play.
One is again reminded of the text fragment (quoted above) featuring a bear
dancing to his master’s barrel organ. Satie may well have intended his piano
interludes to evoke this mechanical instrument, not least because a jerky dancing
puppet monkey (or bear) often accompanies a barrel organ, though a more likely
source of inspiration could be the barrel piano (tingelary). The barrel piano is
operated with a hand crank; it was often seen on British streets in the first half
of the twentieth century and the operator was frequently an ex-serviceman who
had been injured in the war. Unlike the barrel organ, the barrel piano has an
acoustic sound as it has strings and hammers. The coin-operated barrel piano –
sometimes with additional instruments such as the xylophone, bells or drums –
was popular on mainland Europe and was often seen in cafés. Satie’s deformed
piano sound in his Piège de Méduse interludes matches the low-rent sound of
the barrel piano and could well explain why he chose to prepare his piano. And
perhaps he saw himself as the animal trainer, as he played the piano at the first
performance.
The humorous commentaries on the score are twofold; in Ex. 4.2a and other
dances, the instructions in roman type are directed to the choreographer, and those
in italics to the pianist. This extends Satie’s practice in his humoristic piano pieces,
where there are several amusing directions to the pianist which are, traditionally,
not supposed to be read out loud. Interestingly, the directions to the pianist in the
Trois poèmes d’amour were, as we have seen, excised from the published version,
perhaps to distance these songs from a musical or presentational style that no
longer interested Satie.
The First Quadrille features the instructions to the performer: ‘Mettez-vous
dans l’ombre … Ne sortez pas de votre ombre. Soyez convenable, s’il vous plaît:
un singe vous regarde’ (‘Put yourself in the shade … Do not come out of your
shadow. Behave yourself, please: a monkey is watching you’). These put the
pianist firmly in the background, while the monkey, who dances ‘avec gentillesse
… Il devient fou, ou en a l’air’ (‘sweetly … He goes crazy, or it looks as if he has’)
is the centre of attention and the one who expresses the music. The relationship
between the two protagonists is precisely that of organ grinder and performer, with
the pianist being simply a poker-faced operator of an instrument who appears to
be subservient to the monkey. In the Mazurka, the performer is asked to ‘Riez sans
qu’on le sache’ (‘Laugh, without anyone knowing’) while ‘Le singe pense à autre
chose’ (‘The monkey is thinking of something else’); in the fifth dance, the pianist
is told ‘Ne prenez pas un air désagréable’ (‘Do not look disagreeable’), and in the
sixth (Polka) ‘Dansez intérieurement’ (‘Dance inwardly’).
As in his collection of short piano pieces Sports et divertissements (1914) and
the piano accompaniments to his Trois poèmes d’amour, Satie favours abrupt
registral and textural changes in his piano writing. The Italian writer Tomasi di
Lampedusa considers that this is ‘surrealist music’, though as Ornella Volta rightly
points out, the self-proclaimed leader of the surrealists, André Breton, knew
nothing about music and positively disliked it.42
It is also interesting to note some links between Le piège de Méduse and texts
by other authors set by Satie. Notably, the final song in Ludions (to very short
poems by Léon-Paul Fargue), ‘La grenouille américaine’, concludes with the line
‘avec ses lunettes d’or’ (with his golden glasses), an expression which appears
in the first scene of the play (‘mes lunettes d’or’). As Fargue wrote his nonsense
42
Ornella Volta (ed.), Erik Satie: Le piège de Méduse (Paris: Le Castor Astral, 1988),
pp. 57–8.
poems especially for Satie, it is likely that he was familiar with the play and
possible that he was inspired by the composer’s own writings.
In the words of Henri Béhar: ‘Anticipating the Dada movement by several
years, Satie illustrates one of its key themes: the questioning of meaning. His
language is constantly ridiculous, always changing register, turned upside down,
creating confusion.’43 For instance, the ‘trap’ question set by Méduse to Astolfo
features the expression ‘danser sur un œil’, creating humour with a reference to
a body part at the opposite end from the expected one – the term for ‘pirouette’
is ‘danser sur un pied’ (‘dance on a foot’). Similarly, the dances are not always
connected with their titles, feature frequent registral or rhythmic jolts, and their
length is not always specified (several of the dances can be repeated to fit in with
the monkey’s actions if required). Satie’s musical and poetic languages are quirky
and innovative – the work of a creator who is always recognisable, no matter what
medium he employs.
43
Henri Béhar, Le théâtre dada et surréaliste (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), p. 138:
‘En précédant le mouvement Dada de plusieurs années, Satie illustre l’un de ses thèmes
fondamentaux, qui est la mise en cause du langage. Il utilise une langue constamment
cocasse, toute en ruptures de ton, en coq-à-l’âne, en confusions.’
Chapter 5
‘The Only Musician with Eyes’: Erik Satie
and Visual Art
Simon Shaw-Miller
Why shouldn’t we make use of the methods employed by Claude Monet, Cézanne,
Toulouse-Lautrec, etc.? Nothing simpler. Aren’t they just expressions? (Erik Satie,
c. 1892)1
The quotation given above was the advice from the 30-year-old Erik Satie to his
26-year-old colleague Claude Debussy: to make (French) music, why not use the
techniques of (French) painters? As always with Satie’s writings, we should not
take the seemingly simple statement at face value – or, rather, we should take it at
face value, but it is not the simple statement that it might first appear to be. The
quotation needs to be seen in the context of his arguments for a national French
music, to be promoted in the face of Wagner’s continuing aesthetic dominance.
In order to escape the rule of German musical sensibilities, Satie here suggests
that French painters provide the most appropriate models for French composers.
He appears to suggest that this is possible because at root art and music are ‘just
expressions’, but expressions of what?
Satie is far from a conventional or romantic composer concerned with the
expression of subjective emotions, so what is expressed here is not clear. Perhaps
it is modernity, or a version of it. It is certainly art; Satie wrote of Stravinsky
in a passage that mixes ornithology with art: ‘Stravinsky is a magnificent bird
and I’m a fish. Stravinsky isn’t modern: he’s a painter who uses violent colours,
but his subjects are always classical and sometimes legendary.’ He went on: ‘It
was nonsense to compare birds and fishes.’2 In short, Satie was modern and, like
Stravinsky, he too made art, albeit different from that of the Great Russian. Satie’s
musical ambitions were simply artistic; he aspired to the condition of art. More
than most, he was aware of the importance of image for music, both in the various
1
Rollo Myers, Erik Satie (London: Dennis Dobson Ltd, 1948), pp. 33–4. In 1922
Satie published this recalled conversation from c. 1892 in an article on Debussy for Vanity
Fair which is reproduced in Ornella Volta (ed.), Ecrits (Paris: Editions Champ Libre, 1981),
p. 69: ‘Pourquoi ne pas se servir des moyens représentatifs que nous exposaient Claude
Monet, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc.? Pourquoi ne pas transposer musicalement ces
moyens? Rien de plus simple. Ne sont-ce pas des expressions?’
2
Ornella Volta, Satie Seen Through His Letters (New York: Marion Boyars, 1989),
p. 143.
Figure 5.1 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, ‘The Hangover’ (portrait of Suzanne

Valadon) (1889, Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA)
personae he so carefully cultivated throughout his life and also in the way his
music was put before the public, in concert (in the fullest sense) and notation. He
developed a holistic aesthetic, one that joined his art and life, and one that sought
collaborations between the arts and between artists.
As the opening quotation makes clear, for Satie, art and music are fundamentally
analogous. This chapter will explore some of the ways in which Satie’s art and
ideas manifest this comparative aesthetic.
There are many ways in which Satie is connected to visual art. At the most
practical level, he socialised, formed friendships and collaborated with artists,
including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky),
Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta, Constantin Brancusi, Marcellin Desboutin, Antoine de
La Rochefoucauld (artist and financial backer of the Rose+Croix), André Derain,
Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara and, of course, Suzanne Valadon,
whose vexatious love affair with Satie provoked a lasting resonance.
Satie’s early occupation as a pianist in the clubs and cabarets of Montmartre
bought him into close contact with artists and writers rather than with composers.
Cabarets, it should be emphasised, were important fin de siècle sites of multimedia
‘The Only Musician with Eyes’ 87
Figure 5.2 Ramón Casas, El Bohemio, Poet of Montmartre (1891, courtesy

of Northwestern University Library)
artistic experimentation, not least in the Auberge du Clou, a ‘cabaret artistique’

in which Satie worked as the piano accompanist to shadow-puppet productions
under the direction of the Catalan artist Miguel Utrillo (Miguel Utrillo y Molins).3
Utrillo attracted into this circle artists from the Barcelona-based ‘modernismo’
movement such as Ramon Casas (1866–1932), whose 1891 portrait of Satie was
chosen by the Spanish committee for the 1900 Exposition Universelle; Santiago
Rusiñol (y Prats) (1861–1931), a painter and later writer; and Enrique Clarasso
(1857–1941). Satie wrote a work entitled Noël in December 1892 for the first of
Utrillo’s shadow-puppet theatre pieces to a text by Vincent Hyspa (both lost),
and most substantially the ‘Christian ballet in three acts’, which might possibly
have been intended as a shadow theatre piece, which gloried in the nonsense title
uspud. It was probably composed a little earlier than Noël and consists of blocks
of music with interspersed narration. If it was performed at Auberge du Clou as a
shadow play, Satie probably played it on the harmonium, as in Rusiñol’s portrait
of the composer, with the narrative passages read out between the musical
sections. It was written in collaboration with Contamine de Latour4 and was
conceived during the height of Satie’s involvement in Rosicrucian ideas.5 It was
produced as a limited ‘deluxe’ edition, with all the text innovatively written in
lower case, score extracts and a cover with a medallion design depicting Latour
and Satie in profile by Suzanne Valadon, with whom the composer had begun an
affair in January 1893. This is an early example of Satie’s concern for the visual
presentation of his musical ideas and is an issue to which I shall return.
In explaining Satie’s aesthetic position in the 1890s, Rusiñol relates the composer’s
approach to that of painting, as Satie did himself in the opening quotation. Rusiñol
3
Miguel (1862–1934) was also possibly the father of Suzanne Valadon’s son,
the artist Maurice; see Jeanine Warnod, Suzanne Valadon (New York: Crown, 1981).
Speculation exists that Maurice was the offspring of a liaison with an equally young
amateur painter named Boissy, or with the well-established painter Puvis de Chavannes,
or even with Renoir or Degas. In 1891 a Spanish artist, Miguel Utrillo y Molins, signed
a legal document acknowledging paternity, although there still remain questions as to
whether he was in fact the child’s father. According to Diego Rivera, as recounted by
Ruth Bakwin in her memoir, Rivera apocryphally recalled that after Maurice was born
illegitimately to Suzanne Valadon, she went to Renoir, for whom she had modelled nine
months previously. Renoir looked at the baby and said: ‘He can’t be mine, the color is
terrible!’ Next she went to Degas, for whom she had also modelled. He said: ‘He can’t
be mine, the form is terrible!’ At a café, Valadon saw an artist she knew named Utrillo,
to whom she spilled her woes. The man told her to call the baby Utrillo: ‘I would be glad
to put my name to the work of either Renoir or Degas!’ (H.M. Sheets, ‘Parting with the
Family van Gogh’, New York Times, 22 April 2006).
4
His given name was José Maria Vicente Ferrer Francisco de Paula Patricio Manuel
Contamine. He was born 10 months before Satie and died 10 months after him.
5
Satie hoped to see it produced at the Opéra, but when the Opéra director Eugène
Bertrand failed to respond to Satie’s suggestion, the composer challenged him to a duel!
Figure 5.3 Santiago Rusiñol, portrait of Erik Satie at the harmonium

(private collection, 1891)
correlates Satie with the contemporary painter (and Rusiñol’s teacher) Pierre Puvis
de Chavannes (1824–98). He wrote in the newspaper La Vanguardia that Satie:
directs his efforts towards realizing in music what Puvis de Chavannes has
achieved in painting, that is to simplify his art in order to raise it to the ultimate
expression of plainness and economy, to say in a few words what a Spanish
orator would not express in elegant phrases, and to pervade his musical work in
a certain sober indefiniteness that would allow the listener to follow inwardly
according to the state of his soul, the path traced out for him, a straight path
carpeted with harmony and full of feeling.6
In a way related to Satie’s own cross-art analogies, Puvis referred his art to that
of music. In making a remark about the relationship of drawing to colour, he said:
‘The cartoon is the libretto … the colour is the music.’7 And Maurice Denis picked
this up in his description of Puvis’ work: ‘Exhibition of sketches by Puvis de
Chavannes. One must not feel one’s way around on a large surface: fix and specify
the main lines and colourings. Great importance of the melodic line in decoration
… For colour, be concerned especially with the general harmony.’8
Both Puvis and Satie were anti-Wagnerian (I will say more on this in relation
to Satie below). Puvis remarked, after having been bored to stupefaction by a
performance of Die Walküre: ‘It almost amounts to ingratitude, for a number of
people, through their extreme goodwill towards myself, have coupled my name
with that of Wagner. And throughout my life I have had a horror of things obscure
or hazy! Judge from that.’9
A bond can also be perceived in Puvis and Satie’s shared attitude towards the
cultural establishment: a certain distance, but by no means an outright rejection.
Puvis, for example, after having gained considerable success, at the time of the
Universal Exposition of 1867 received the cross of the Legion of Honour, being
made first an officer, and then commander in 1889. But while he had shown in the
official Salon from 1859, he had also resigned twice, in 1872 and 1881, before
becoming one of the moving spirits behind the secession to the Société Nationale
des Beaux-Arts in 1890, acting as its president from the following year up to his
death. Satie likewise produced work both inside and outside the establishment,
first as the ‘laziest student in the [Paris] Conservatoire’, according to his piano
teacher Emile Descombes,10 and later in 1905 as a 39-year-old student at the
Schola Cantorum in Paris, while continuing to work in cabarets. He studied at the
Schola Cantorum between 1905 and 1908 because of his interest in counterpoint,
and this, together with a concern for medieval aesthetics (in Debussy’s words, ‘a
gentle medieval musician lost in this century’11) as filtered through the Rosicrucian
Order, make him as anti-Romantic as Puvis, whose depiction of an ancient world
in flattered perspective, with simplified forms and modeling and limited pastel
6
Ornella Volta, Erik Satie à Montmartre (Paris: Musée Montmartre, 1982), pp. 8–9.
7
L. Bénédite, ‘Puvis de Chavannes’, Art et Décoration (November 1898), p. 151.
8
M. Denis, Journal 1 (March 1899) p. 152, quoted in R.J. Wattenmaker, Puvis de
Chavannes and the Modern Tradition (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1975), p. 12.
9
Cited in ibid., p. 3.
10
Emile Descombes (1829–1912), a pianist and follower of Chopin; teacher, in
addition to Satie of Maurice Ravel, Reynaldo Hahn and Alfred Cortot among others.
11
Robert Orledge, ‘Satie, Erik’ in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians, vol. 22 (London: Macmillan, 2001), p. 313.
Figure 5.4 Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, ‘Le Bois sacré cher aux arts et aux
muses’ (1880, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon)
palette, provoke a similar sense of stasis, plainness and careful simple composition,
all echoed in Satie’s non-developmental musical language.
Both Puvis and Satie were attracted to classical subjects and titles; Satie was
even referred to as the ‘Greek musician’ by Rusiñol and his circle. Like Satie,
Puvis aspired in his work to emotional reduction and control, and influenced the
symbolists with his concern for the deferral of emotive impact. By this I mean
that the symbolic content of the works becomes an indirect vehicle for revelation:
Puvis’ major works do not aim to immediately provoke an emotional response
or meaning; rather, it is through the reading of them, and an understanding of
their symbolic content, that meaning is generated. Puvis’ art exhibits an aesthetic
marked by simplicity in boldness of composition, schematic drawing often in
profile, silhouettes or full frontal, a limited palette of earth-dominated colours,
shallow relief and general lack of pictorial depth, a matt aspect to the surface, a
general simplification and neutrality of subject, and antique figures representing
types rather than individuals. Robert Goldwater characterised it well (in words not
inappropriate to Satie):
Almost alone among the painters of the middle of the nineteenth century, Puvis
foreshadowed a major development of the twentieth: the simplification and
reduction of the means of the artist … His was really a restriction of the means
employed, and however short the distance he traveled, his direction was the
direction of later art. That this was often felt without being understood does not
detract from its importance.12
As with Satie, we have an aesthetic move towards objectivity as opposed to

emotive subjectivity, and an objectivity achieved by the employment of art
as object, as token or, more extremely, as totem. This is an aesthetic impulse
that connects the sensibilities of symbolism to cubism, neoclassicism and the
rappel à l’ordre which followed the First World War. Satie’s music, in Daniel
Albright’s words, ‘doesn’t develop, doesn’t cue emotions, but just lies there,
furnishing the ear. Satie’s music has a disconcertingly high specific gravity, a
strange leadenness; filled with fatuous and illegible mood-indications, it resists
semantic construction, remains on its private Franco-lunar planet’.13 From the
Gymnopédies (1888), Satie emphasises perspective rather than progress. As
Roger Shattuck has put it, Satie ‘takes one musical idea and … regards it briefly
from three different directions. He varies … the notes in the melody but not its
general shape, the chords in the accompaniment but not the dominant shape’.14
This is a radical departure from Wagnerian musical priorities; a concern with
nuanced variation rather than development, colour and repetition rather than
continuous harmonic development. To return us to the opening quotation, Satie’s
work could therefore be construed to employ painterly methods, to be post-
impressionist, cubically constructed, perhaps even to be Dada in its refusal to
adhere semantically. But these are issues to which I shall return.
Paris to New York
On another level of inter-art aesthetic, and with the same indirect panache as his
comment to Debussy, Satie elsewhere insisted that ‘painters … taught me the
most about music’15 and proclaimed in a sketchbook annotation that ‘musical
evolution’ was ‘always a hundred years behind pictorial evolution’.16 Such
statements, and his frequenting of artists’ lofts, studios, bars and salons, link
him to other, later cultural figures, like those of the New York School of artists
and musicians in the 1950s.
12
Robert Goldwater, ‘Puvis de Chavannes: Some Reasons for a Reputation’, Art
Bulletin xxviii (March 1946), pp. 33–43, at pp. 41–2.
13
Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature and
Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 192–3.
14
Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France,
1885 to World War 1 (New York: Vintage, 1968) p. 141.
15
Volta, Erik Satie à Montmartre, p. 8.
16
See Volta (ed.), Ecrits, p. 158; see also Ornella Volta (ed.), A Mammal’s Notebook:
Collected Writings of Erik Satie, trans. Antony Melville (London: Atlas Press, 1996), p.
146.
The composer Morton Feldman, who was prominent among the New York
School, made a statement that ends almost identically to Satie’s: ‘If you understand
Mondrian then you understand me too. In the beginning I have nothing, in the end
I have everything – just like Mondrian – instead of having everything to start with
and nothing in the end … I think the big problem is that I have learnt more from
painters than I have from composers.17 Feldman, perhaps more than any other
composer, consistently explains his own music and musical interests in terms of
the visual arts.18 Although I do not have space to develop it here, it should be
noted that Feldman’s mature musical aesthetic likewise has much in common with
Satie’s reductive approach. As Peter Dickinson put it, ‘[Feldman’s] humanity in
renouncing the grandiose is comparable to Webern or Satie’,19 and Feldman was
attracted to the ‘clear purity’ of Satie’s piano music.20 But Feldman’s colleague,
John Cage, was the musician with an especially close rapport, both personally
and aesthetically, to visual art and artists, and who was also, not incidentally,
responsible for the renaissance of interest in Satie’s work.
In 1963 Cage organised what was probably the première of Satie’s Vexations
exactly 70 years after it was composed in 1893.21 Its composition marked the end
of Satie’s short but intense affair with the trapeze artist, artist’s model and painter,
Suzanne Valadon.22 The affair was only a little longer than the piece, lasting about
six months (from 14 January to 20 June 1893). The work, while consisting of only
a 13-bar motif, is to be repeated, according to the instructions at its head, 840 times
(Example 5.1).
17
Morton Feldman, ‘Middelburg Lecture’, 2 July 1985 (original in German, see H.-K.
Metzger and R. Riehn (eds), Musik-Konzepte, Die Reihe über Komponisten, 48/49, Morton
Feldman (May 1986), pp. 25–6; and R. Mörchen (ed.), Morton Feldman in Middelburg:
Words on Music: Lectures and Conversations, vols. 1 and 2 (Cologne: MusikTexte, 2007).
18
See, for example, the catalogue Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual
Arts (Irish Museum of Modern Art, July 2010).
19
Peter Dickinson, ‘Feldman Explains Himself’, Music and Musicians (July 1966),
pp. 22–3. In a note, Dickinson adds that Feldman particularly admires Satie’s Socrate as ‘a
kind of white music’ and regrets the fact that the work is more discussed than performed.
See Chris Villars (ed.), Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964–1987
(London: Hyphen Press, 2006), p. 20.
20
See Vertical Thoughts p. 10; and Chapter 10 of the present book.
21
For comments on the issue of the first performance of Vexations, see Gavin Bryars,
‘Vexations and its Performers’, Contact 26 (Spring 1983), pp. 12–20. It was more recently
performed at Kings Place, London, on Saturday 1 May 2010, starting at 7.00 pm. It is also
interesting to note that Cage knew of the work before he considered performing it. It existed
for him as an interesting idea, before he thought it would make interesting musical sounds,
betraying an important shift in sensibilities.
22
The composition that marked the beginning of their affair was a song entitled
‘Bonjour, Biqui, Bonjour’ (1893), illustrated with a drawing of Valadon by Satie (‘Biqui’
was Satie’s nickname for her).
Figure 5.5 Suzanne Valadon, Portrait of Erik Satie (1893, National Museum
of Modern Art, Pompidou Center, Paris) Oil on canvas; 41 × 22 cm
Example 5.1 Satie, Vexations
Cage staged this (probably first) performance in September 1963, in the Pocket
Theater, New York, with 12 players (10 and 2 substitutes) who played continuously
for 18 hours and 40 minutes.23 One of them, the composer Christian Wolff, wrote:
The performance of Vexations is hard to forget. I’m often telling people about
it. Two things in particular stick in my mind. The first was the effect of the
music on the players. Aside from agreeing to the mechanics of sitting on stage,
playing, staying on to count repetitions for the following pianist, all according
to schedule, the pianists had neither rehearsal together nor had any discussion
about the playing. As the first cycle of pianists went round the playing was
quite diverse, a variety – quite extreme, from the most sober and cautious to the
willful and effusive – of personalities was revealed. Musically the effect seemed
disturbing. But after another round the more expansive players began to subside,
the more restrained to relax, and by the third round or so the personalities and
23
The performers were: John Cage, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Philip Corner,
Viola Farber, Robert Wood, MacRae Cook, John Cale, David Del Tredici, James Tenney,
Howard Klein (the New York Times reviewer who was asked to play in the course of the
event) and Joshua Rifkin.
playing techniques of the pianists had been almost completely subsumed by the
music. The music simply took over. At first a kind of passive object, it became
the guiding force. As the night wore on we got weary, or rather just sleepy, and
the beautiful state of suspension of self now became risky. Alertness had to be
redoubled not to miss repetitions or notes. An element of comedy – now that
solidarity and easiness were evidently there – joined us. The other thing I recall
was the question of how Satie came to write this piece. Had he written it, and
then decided why not do it 800-odd times over, or had he thought, if a piece
were to be repeated so many times, what kind of piece should it be, and then set
out to write Vexations? We decided on the latter, because of the extraordinary
durability of the music.24
This work betrays an unusual conception of time, longer than Feldman’s late
works and requiring a mode of address and reception that gives new meaning to
the expression longue durée. Such a radical approach is paralleled in the aesthetic
of a composer in Cage’s circle at the time of the performance of Vexations, La
Monte Young. Some of Young’s extended duration works are conceived as having
no beginning and no end, existing between performances, which themselves can
last days.25 Satie’s piece can take differing amounts of time, depending on the
tempo adopted, but is usually between 12 and 24 hours in duration.
Robert Orledge has drawn attention to Satie’s use, in Vexations, of a particular
enharmonic notation which, for example, spells chords 13 and 33 differently,
even though they are the same-sounding pitches on the piano.26 This disparity
between sound and look points to the importance for Satie of notation as a form
of visual communication between composer and performer; maybe in part an
ironic consequence of his own short-sightedness? This concern with the look of
his music is not unique to this piece, as we have seen in relation to uspud; in fact,
I would argue that it is fundamental to Satie’s aesthetic, which is visually, as well
as sonorically, inflected.
Notes and Words
The witty communications to the performer that start with the Gnossiennes in 1890
but which litter almost all his works are infamous, what Albright calls ‘fatuous and
illegible mood-indications’, but may not be as fatuous as they first appear.27 A list
24
Bryars, ‘Vexations and its Performers’, pp. 12–20.
25
For example, see the website of the Dream House sound and light environment
(http://dlib.info/home/eastburn/projects/dreamhouse).
26
Robert Orledge, ‘Understanding Satie’s Vexations’, Music & Letters 79/3 (1998),
pp. 386–95.
27
In conversation with the author and pianist Roy Howat, he remarked that while
most of Satie’s performance indications cannot be taken literally, ‘sometimes they evoke a
of them is collected in Ornella Volta’s edition of Satie’s writings and arranged

alphabetically, ranging from ‘a bit hot’ and ‘a bit rococo but slow’ via ‘laugh
without anyone knowing’, ‘flat on the floor’, ‘like a nightingale with toothache’,
‘obligingly’, ‘pale and priest-like’ and ‘put yourself in the shade’ to (a favourite
of mine, in a piano piece) ‘with your head between your hands’, concluding
‘with no shine’ and ‘you see’.28 Indications that speak around the music, offering
synaesthetic, theatrical and poetically precise possibilities and guidance; this last
listed one, ‘You see’, emphasises the significance of looking. They signify for the
first time an important shift in performer-composer relations. They (to quote from
the first Gnossienne) ask the interpreter to ‘[apply or] postulate within yourself’
(‘postulez en vous-même’); they represent conceptual complexity and silent
questing rather than indicating technical language and manual virtuosity: ‘open
your head’ (‘ouvrez la tête’),29 ‘be visible for a moment’.
Embryons desséchés
This inclusion of texts often goes beyond performance directions or titles and
sometimes modulates into narratives or commentaries, as in the Embryons
desséchés (Desiccated Embryos) of 1913, a witty, three-part piano work that is
a mini-disquisition on crustaceans. For example, d’Edriophthalma, the second
movement, has the following commentary at the head of the page: ‘Crustaceans
with sessile eyes, that is to say, stalkless and immobile. Being naturally very
sad, these crustaceans live in seclusion from the world, in holes pierced through
the cliffs.’ Marked ‘sombre’, the music is a parody of the third movement of
Chopin’s monumental Piano Sonata no. 2, Op. 35, the Funeral March, here
reducing Chopin’s eight- or nine-minute movement to a couple of minutes: an
ironic commentary on the very sad disposition of the lonely Edriophthalma.
It is a compressed variation on the shape of Chopin’s piece, maintaining the
same ABA form, with the march (Chopin has B-flat minor) and a contrasting
more lyrical central section (Chopin’s Lento is in D-flat major), followed by
a recapitulation of the opening march theme. This is not the only time that
Satie made reference to this sonata by Chopin, as I shall discuss in relation to
Cinéma. As the movement progresses, various passages have additional text
written between the treble and bass staves: ‘They are all together. Oh how sad! A
responsible father starts to speak. They all start weeping (quote from the famous
mazurka of Schubert). Poor creatures! (slow down) How well he spoke! Big
creative sort of metaphor that’s useful, or even distract the performer from doing something
well-intentioned or “meaningful” that Satie foresees and doesn’t want. But it’s also possible
that on some occasions he’s just amusing the reader en passant. I’m not sure they – like
anything to do with the man – can be tied down in any definable way’ (January 2012).
28
Volta (ed.), A Mammal’s Notebook, pp. 46–9.
29
From the third Gnossienne.
groan (very slow).’ The dynamic is predominantly marked between p and pp,
with no clefs after the first line and no bar lines. It opens with broken open fifth
chords, answered by a descending scale passage in a dotted-quaver-semi-quaver
rhythm, related to the Chopin, with a steady crotchet pulse in the left hand. As
it modulates into the lyrical middle section, it is marked by the text ‘after a
famous mazurka by Schubert’, an explicit parody of the lento middle section
of the Chopin movement, with the same arpeggiated left-hand accompaniment,
melodic descending scale and rhythmic outline in the right hand. It would be
wrong, in my view, to regard this or any of Satie’s texts as extra-musical. The
text, music and presentation to the eye are integral to the whole conception, a
melopoetic, witty and intimate conversation between composer and interpreter.
Such texts are usually considered to be for the eyes of the performer only.
In the preface to his piano suite Heures séculaires et instantanées (1914), Satie
forbade ‘anyone to read the text aloud during the performance’ and mockingly
added that: ‘Ignorance of my instructions will bring my righteous indignation
against the audacious culprit. No exceptions will be allowed.’30 However, this
only appears to refer to this piece and the instruction was never repeated. It is
always dangerous to take Satie’s comments, which were often ironic or jocular,
at face value; why should this one be an exception? Whether spoken, conveyed
in some other form to the audience or just kept for the silent entertainment or
instruction of the interpreter, the texts should not be seen as extra-musical. They
are as necessary to a full appreciation of the music as tempo or dynamics are.
Both this work and Sonatine bureaucratique, for example (and they are only
examples of a wider tendency), have a melopoetic integration that tells a tale,
evokes imagery and possesses poetry. They also contain references to wider piano
repertoire and other musics, both in the text and the notation, which together
constitute a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. As Mary Davis has
pointed out, such texts bring to mind the contemporary poetry of Guillaume
Apollinaire in their use of vernacular language and celebration of the everyday,
and the delight in linguistic play that was referred to at the time as blague.31 But
while such ‘play’ may be initially a private communication between interpreter
and composer, it is this refusal by Satie to ‘limit’ music to just the notes that
constitutes one of his most significant contributions to music and cultural history.
The imaginative titles of Satie’s works, as well as the notation and performance
indications, were often painstakingly rendered in his own beautiful calligraphy.
Allied to these semantic and graphic aids are more subtle shifts in notational
practice, such as the removal of bar lines first evidenced in his 1886 song Sylvie,32
30
‘Je défends de lire, à haute voix, le texte, durant le temps de l’exécution musicale.
Tout manquement à cette observation entraînerait ma juste indignation contre l’outrecuidant.
Il ne sera accordé aucun passe-droit.’
31
Mary Davis, Erik Satie (London: Reaktion, 2007), pp. 85–6.
32
Sylvie is one of the Trois mélodies to words by J.P. Contamine de Latour (Elégie,
Les anges, Sylvie), op. 20, composed in 1886 (published in 1968 by Salabert).
but almost ubiquitous thereafter. The elimination of bars not only has the effect
of suppressing the overt role of meter, but also has the powerful visual effect of
opening the musical gesture, allowing for a fluid and more visually expressive
disposition. And, not least, the complexity of musical pattern in some of his
works is often more evident to the eye than to the ear: a manifestation of his
obsessive delight in numerology.33 In short, Satie manipulated, to great visual
effect, compositional complexes in which text, notation and image work in
concert to communicate musical information.
Yet Satie’s interest in the visual is more profound than just notation or
presentation. In part his musical aesthetic is founded on a perceived common
ground with art. His aim, to recall earlier comments on Puvis, was to create an
atmosphere, rather than an emotional journey; to reduce music to a ‘backdrop’
(musique d’ameublement); to see music as a framed object; to flatten musical
space; to reduce its emotional colours; to celebrate repetition. In the extreme case
of Vexations it additionally opened up musical time to the condition of objectivity,
where a piece could display its many sides in slowly revolving patterns, not
unlike a cubist composition.
Satie and the Gesamtkunstwerk
Perhaps the most important way in which Satie is connected to the visual is via a
synthetic impulse. This drive is to be seen in opposition to an aesthetic of purity
and the perception of musicality as pure form – in short, an opposition to the
concept of absolute music. This desire he shares with his negative counterpart,
the German composer Richard Wagner. In the quotation with which I opened
this chapter, Satie is at pains to explain to Debussy why it was necessary for
French composers to free themselves from the ‘Wagnerian adventure’. However,
this should not be confused with a simple anti-Wagnerian stance; his position is
more complicated than that. Elsewhere he is concerned to emphasise that he was
not opposed to Wagner. He is reported to have said in conversation with Debussy
that ‘we have had enough of Wagner. Quite beautiful; but not of our stock …
We should make musical scenery, create a musical climate where the personages
move and speak – not in couplets, not in leitmotifs: but by the use of a certain
atmosphere of Puvis de Chavannes’.34 He was opposed to Wagnerians rather
than Wagner. In an article on Stravinsky in which he explains that Stravinsky
had done much to set free contemporary ‘Musical Thinking’ – ‘which had very
great need of it, poor thing’ – Satie continues:
33
See Courtney S. Adams, ‘Erik Satie and Golden Section Analysis’, Music & Letters
77 (1996), pp. 242–52.
34
Cocteau, cited in Robert Orledge (ed.), Satie Remembered (London: Faber, 1995),
pp. 45–6. Cocteau adds: ‘Remember, at the period I’m speaking of Puvis de Chavannes was
a dangerous artist, mocked by the right.’
I am pleased to have recognized this, having suffered so much from Wagnerian

oppression – I mean, the oppression of Wagnerians. For in those days, Wagner’s
genius was miserably worshipped by Mediocrity & Ignorance together,
followed by a sheep-like crowd.
Oh can you imagine how difficult it was to be a Wagnerian! – even joking: one
only had to say aloud “Oh, Oh … How lovely!” to be taken for an expert or …
an imbecile.’35
It is easy to over-state the opposition between Satie and Wagner, a pairing one
writer has referred to as the ‘David and Goliath’ of music.36 But there is, of
course, a profound opposition between Satie’s mature aesthetic and Wagner’s
overarching artistic ambition. However, they are also linked by a joint impulse, a
concern that music should be more than simply sound. Just as the look of music
was highly significant for Satie, and some of his most important works were
produced in collaboration with writers or visual artists (unlike Wagner, whose
stage works were less cooperatively conceived), Wagner’s conception of the
Gesamtkunstwerk was opposed to the idea of absolute music, the philosophical
aspiration to an aesthetic of ‘pure’ musical sound. For Wagner, the future of the
arts lay in their joining together (albeit under the banner of music). The future
was to be sought in a return to the Greek ideal of artistic synthesis, where poetry,
theatre and music are conjoined in a spectacle of tragic drama. Satie (like Puvis),
as we have seen, was also drawn to the Greeks, but whereas for him this produced
a poised musical stasis, Wagner aspired to carry all before him on a tsunami of
emotional power. Wagner’s music is ever thrusting, forward moving, unsettled
and longing for emotional release or closure.
It is Wagner’s ability to narrate music of such coiled tension that makes it
both irresistible and dangerous. While Satie shares Wagner’s concern to expand
music’s purview from the reductively sonoric, his aesthetic was not one of such
emotively vaulting ambition; on the contrary, Satie’s music is ‘anti-teleological’
(as Leonard Meyer has put it in relation to Cage).37 The sonorities seem to exist
for their own sake; they are not always moving forward to climax and release.
They have, in this sense, the quality of musical objects rather than grand musical
narratives.
35
Satie from a manuscript, on 10 sheets of paper written on one side, numbered 1
to 10, in a school exercise book, reproduced in Volta (ed.), A Mammal’s Notebook, p. 119.
Published in the magazine Vanity Fair as ‘Igor Stravinsky: A Tribute to the great Russian
Composer by an Eminent French Confrère’ (February 1923), p. 39.
36
Lothar Klein, ‘Twentieth Century Analysis: Essays in Miniature’, Music Educators
Journal 53 (December 1966), pp. 25–6.
37
Leonard Meyer, Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-
Century Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 73.
Figure 5.6 ‘Choral inappétissant’, Satie’s score. Typ 915.14.7700, Houghton

Library, Harvard University
Sports et divertissements
One of Satie’s most arresting and integrated musical objects is his score of
Sports et divertissements (Sports and Recreations) composed in 1914. This is a
combined work of poetry/text, music and image, a collection of 21 miniatures
for piano. Each piece is very short, none more than four lines long, on such
‘sports’ as fishing, hunting, yachting, golf, the races, sledging, and tennis,
and such ‘recreations’ as blind man’s buff, swinging, commedia dell’arte,
serenading, bathing, carnival, ‘puss in the corner’,38 picnics, a water slide, the
38
According to L.M.F. Child (The Girl’s Own Book (1833, Massachusetts, USA, p.
28), ‘Puss in the Corner’ is ‘a very simple game but a very lively and amusing one. In each
corner of the room or by four trees which form nearly a square, a little girl is stationed,
another one stands in the centre who is called the Puss. At the words ‘Puss, puss in the
corner’ they all start and run to change corners, and at the same time the one in the middle
runs to take possession of the corner before the others can reach it. If she succeeds in getting
tango, fireworks and flirting. Each contains Satie’s own beautiful calligraphic
notation in black ink on red staves (no bar lines), together with his stylised,
irreverent textual narratives.
The work is prefaced by Satie, advising us to ‘leaf through … with a kindly
and smiling finger’ and ‘Don’t look for anything else here’; in other words, this
is a work simply to delight, but is none the less for that. His comments are an
admonishment to signify the danger of separating music from image and text.
All elements are to be consumed together. To underscore this point, the preface
concludes with an ‘Unappetizing Chorale’, which he notes was composed ‘in the
morning, before breakfast’. He writes:
For the shriveled up and stupid I have written a serious and proper chorale.
I have put into it all I know of boredom.
I dedicate this chorale to all those who do not like me.
I withdraw.
He withdraws from dry music to make way for the joining of image, text and
music; the composer stands to one side to make way for the work. The ‘pure’
music of the chorale is there to give those ‘shriveled up and stupid’ who ‘look
for something else’ an exercise to occupy them. It is marked ‘Grave’ with the
indication ‘grim and cantankerous’ underneath.
Although finished in 1914, the publication of the work was interrupted by the
war, finally coming out in 1922. It was produced as a limited edition folio of
loose-leaved manuscripts with separate illustrations.39 It measures approximately
43 cm (or 17 in) square and is bound in a decorative red print, celebrating ‘love,
the greatest of all games’. The whole folio allows for an arresting display of the
manuscript and accompanying image. The design and illustrations are by the
graphic artist Charles Martin (1884–1934), who worked for fashion journals such
as Vogue and Gazette de Bon Ton (whose owner, Lucien Vogel, commissioned the
work) and as a ballet and theatre designer.40 On returning from the war, Martin set
about reworking his original illustrations to make them more current. While his
first images had reflected contemporary fashion before the war, to publish in the
1920s with such illustrations would have been decidedly out of vogue. His new
images partook of a more contemporary mode and a somewhat angular version of
the current Art Deco graphic style.
to the corner first, the one who is left out is obliged to become the puss. If A and B undertake
to exchange corners and A gets into B’s corner but puss gets into A’s then B must stand in
the centre. In order to avoid confusion and knocking each other down it is well to agree in
what direction you will run before the race begins. If a little girl remains puss after three or
four times going round the room they sometimes agree that she shall pay a forfeit.’
39
In a limited edition of 225.
40
He studied at the Montpellier Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the Académie Julien and the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris 1908–10.
The original illustrations were black-and-white line drawings that had quite
closely mimicked Satie’s text. For example, the piece on sea bathing entitled ‘Le
Bain de mer’ has the following text through the musical notation: ‘The sea is
wide, Madame. In any case, it is pretty deep. Do not sit on the bottom. It is very
damp. Here come some nice old waves. They are full of water. You are completely
soaked! “Yes, Sir”’ (see Example 6.1 on p. 128). Martin’s 1914 image shows a
woman drooping, or perhaps sheltering, in a man’s arms, while behind him a large
wave, which has already upturned another figure, is about to engulf them. Satie’s
music (about 30 seconds in duration) has a left-hand, wave-like arpeggiated figure
accompanying a scalar melody, until a gently rocking figure in thirds is itself
interrupted by a slower cadence on ‘You are completely soaked! “Yes, Sir”’ (see
Example 6.2 on p. 129).
The 1920s image, on the other hand, instead shows a sunny day and radiating sun
over a much calmer sea (see Example 6.3 on p. 130). The woman is now diving from
a board into the sea, while a boat and another figure swims by, the arch of her diving
body echoed in the bent arm of the swimmer. Unlike its predecessor, this image has
no clearly identifiable central characters to which the text might relate; it is a more
unified and abstracted composition. Many of Satie’s texts deliberately confuse the
subject position, referring to them in the second person so as to signify both the
figure in the image and the performer, the viewer and the object: ‘You have a lovely
white dress’, ‘It is very curious you will see’, ‘shall we play’, etc. These Art Deco
images utilise pochoir, a refined stencil technique, which allows the combination
of strong colour without any ‘muddying’ or loss of clarity and enhances the two-
dimensionality of the images. The physical restrictions of the page work for both
Satie and Martin, framing, objectifying and containing their work, and while the
Gesamtkunst quality of this manuscript stands out, it is, I would claim, but the high
point of a more general concern Satie had for the look of his art.
The most obvious way in which Satie’s art extends beyond the purely sonoric is in
his collaborations with artists on his larger-scale works and in his connection to the art
movements of cubism and Dada. For the sake of economy, I shall consider Cubism in
relation to Parade and Dada in relation to Entr’acte, while making no specific claim
that the former can be contained within the rubric of cubism any more than the latter
can within Dada. I shall conclude with some thoughts on ‘Furniture music’.
Parade and Cubism
Parade is in many ways a riposte to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, as perhaps is

Sports et divertissements, yet both can be said to maintain the totalising, synthetic
impulse, if in rather different ways. The desire to blend and mix in modernism is
as powerful as its counterpoint, the desire to purify and specialise. In his essay of
1864, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, Charles Baudelaire provided a foundational
definition: ‘By “modernity” I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the
half of art whose other half is the eternal and immutable … This transitory, fugitive
element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or

dispensed with.’41 It is this side of modernity that Satie celebrated. What Satie’s art
shows is the desire to celebrate the everyday, the ephemeral, the popular, the mix
of fashion, popular song and joke, and the modernism of the cabaret. This makes
his art no less significant than its abstract and hermetic modernist cousin, but it
perhaps makes it more French and less German, or at least less Wagnerian. In his
larger-scale theatre works such as Parade, we find, rather than one Übermensch,
one director, a collaboration between artist, poet, choreographer and composer;
rather than folk myth, we have a one-act scenario based on the circus; instead of
leitmotif, we have popular musical references and a range of everyday noises. The
effect of the work is again greater than the sum of its parts.
Parade was to be the only new work offered in the 1917 season by Diaghilev’s
Ballets Russes, and it brought together the talents of Jean Cocteau, who wrote
the scenario, with Diaghilev’s new lead dancer Léonide Massine, who was
responsible for the choreography, and Pablo Picasso, who designed both the
décor and the costumes. It was quite different from the standard Ballets Russes
fare of oriental spectacle. Described by its creators as a one-act ‘ballet-réaliste’,
Parade was a literal sidestep into the world of sideshows, the ‘parade’ of the
title being the pre-performance opportunity for acts to attract an audience for the
main show. The storyline is simple: a French and an American manager introduce
three acts, a Chinese magician, two acrobats and a little American girl (evocative
of a Hollywood starlet),42 in the hope of enticing the audience inside to see the
whole show. There is also a third ‘manager’ in the guise of a two-man pantomime
horse, as the original idea of having a black manager riding a horse proved too
troublesome to realise. It is a performance that represents an absent performance,
one that is never seen, and no tickets are sold; it is a form of theatrical deferral.
Apollinaire declared in a programme note, published before the first performance,
that the piece was ‘so clear and simple that it seems to reflect the marvellously
lucid spirit of France’; it was esprit nouveau, ‘a kind of surrealism’ (the first time
the word was used). Its newness, for him, lay precisely in its combination of the
arts; a synthetic art form that sort to reconcile contradictory elements (and here he
linked it to cubism): ‘here consummately achieved for the first time, that alliance
between painting and dance, between the plastic and mimetic arts, that is herald of
a more comprehensive art to come’.43
Some of those contradictory elements were manifest in the costumes, in that
Picasso’s 10-foot high costume designs for the two managers (American and French),
which make movement very limited, are the opposite of what was expected in a ballet
41
See Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger (eds), Art in Theory, 1815–
1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998), p. 497.
42
See Christine Reynolds, Chapter 7 of this book.
43
See Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Programme for Parade, 18 May 1917’, in Vassiliki
Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou (eds), Modernism: An Anthology of Sources
and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), pp. 212–13.
costume. They are costume as sculpture, early examples perhaps of kinetic sculpture.
Picasso may well have been ironically referring to the way in which cubism had
already migrated into the popular music hall. He played an active role in the traffic
between popular culture and art, and was a voracious consumer and refashioner of
the iconography of contemporary life. The movement between popular imagery and
art was at this time a ubiquitous, if contested, series of mutual exchanges.44 And this
movement between popular culture and art is as evident in Satie’s music as it is in
Picasso’s designs. Apart from the references to popular music found in Satie’s score
– the most obvious being Satie’s paraphrase of ‘That Mysterious Rag’ by Irving
Berlin in his ‘Steamship Ragtime’ for the Little American Girl45 – there is another
related element of the music that can be linked to cubism, and that is in Satie’s use
of ‘found sounds’ such as the typewriter, the revolver and sirens.
These ‘found sounds’ probably originated at Cocteau’s suggestion. Cocteau’s
handwriting occurs throughout Satie’s original score, indicating places where
‘aural and verbal enhancements’ were to take place, such as the flaques sonores
or sound puddles,46 the revolver shots ‘from Westerns’ as Cocteau’s note puts
it (‘coups de revolver des films du Far West’), and 20 typewriters.47 It appears
that Cocteau’s original conception was to have Satie’s score as a musical
backdrop to a more contemporary soundscape: he wrote on the first page of
Satie’s handwritten score: ‘The music for Parade is not presented as a work in
itself but is designed to serve as background for placing in relief the primary
subject of sounds and scenic noises.’48 Cocteau’s aspiration in proposing such
sounds was to provide a more coherent narrative, more theatrical than balletic,
that eventuated in, for example, the American Girl’s connection to the sinking
of the Titanic (using a ship’s siren, Morse code sounds, etc.). Cocteau himself
suggested that: ‘These imitated noises of waves, typewriters, revolvers, sirens
44
See Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular
Culture (New York: MOMA, 1990).
45
Although he never stated his use of ‘That Mysterious Rag’, it is more than a simple
borrowing. It is rather a recomposition that maintains the rhythmic outline but reharmonises
and reorganises; as Mary Davis has put it, ‘he presents it in reverse order, beginning with
24 bars that correspond to the original chorus, moving on to sixteen bars based on Berlin’s
verse, and ending with eight bars that paraphrase Berlin’s introduction. In each of these
sections, Satie also alters the original melodies, following a formula that turns rising
passages into descending ones, stepwise patterns into skips, and repeated notes into distinct
and different pitches. In combination with his advanced harmonic scheme for the piece,
these melodic changes obscure the original tune, masking the model so thoroughly that
Satie’s use of Berlin’s music escaped critical notice until 1961’ (Davis, Satie, p. 112). See
also Nancy Perloff, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of Erik
Satie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
46
See Satie, Parade: Ballet Réaliste (Partition d’orchestre), (Paris: Editions Salabert,
1917) p. 20 (4 before fig. 9)
47
Satie’s score, Frederick R. Koch Foundation, p. 12, for example.
48
Ibid, p. 1.
or aeroplanes, are, in music, of the same character as the bits of newspapers,

painted wood-grain, and other everyday objects the cubist painters employ
frequently in their pictures, in order to localize objects and masses in nature.’49
The use of collage techniques helps to construct a complex interplay between
the popular, the artistic and the everyday. This play is fundamental to the avant-
garde’s dialogue with modern life; the tension in modernity between celebration
and disparagement of popular culture. In these first few decades of the twentieth
century, the terms of exchange are fairly fluid, but by the middle of the century,
positions had tended to polarise.50
However, when Cocteau says the score imitated these everyday sounds, he is
wrong. To imitate would be more akin to what Messiaen does with birdsong or
Beethoven with a thunderstorm. What Satie did in the final score was simply to
employ these sounds or noises as part of the musical soundscape; they are musical
sound. They are closer to what the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo claimed was
necessary in his 1913 manifesto The Art of Noises:
Every manifestation of life is accompanied by noise. Noise is thus familiar to

our ear and has the power of immediately recalling life itself. Sound, estranged
from life, always musical, something in itself, an occasional not a necessary
element, has become for our ear what for the eye is a too familiar sight. Noise
instead, arriving confused and irregular from the irregular confusion of life,
is never revealed to us entirely and always holds innumerable surprises. We
are certain, then, that by selecting, coordinating, and controlling all the noises,
we will enrich mankind with a new and unsuspected pleasure of the senses.51
In some ways, Satie is even more radical than Russolo, for Russolo designed
musical instruments specifically to play noises, his ‘intonarumori’, whereas Satie
used the noises themselves. Again, it is not until John Cage that we get these
‘extraneous’ sounds as ‘sounds in themselves’ and consequently as music. What
happens here is what happens in cubist painting: a radical interruption in the
etiquette of representation.
These found sounds or objects stand both for themselves and also as
representations. The roulette wheel, for example (fig. 6 in the published score),52
sounds both like a roulette wheel, a representation of chance and as a percussive
effect. The pistol shots (just before fig. 22) interrupt, surprise and shock, sounding
as gun fire, but again also as part of the percussive texture of the piece, and in the
49
Original published in Vanity Fair, 1917; cited in Orledge, Satie the Composer, p. 224.
50
See Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review 6/5 (1939),
pp. 34–49.
51
Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon
Press, 1986), pp. 23–30.
52
Paris: Editions Salabert, 1917 (p. 17).
first full performance, the effect must have been even more marked and surprising.53
Satie himself seems to have been somewhat equivocal about the role of these noise
elements, although his acceptance and employment of them says much about his
perceptive critical sensibility; he wrote on 19 June 1923 to Diaghilev that: ‘I don’t
much like the “noises” made by Jean [Cocteau]. There’s nothing to be done about
that: we have before us a charming maniac.’ As Georges Auric (in some ways
Satie’s mouthpiece at this time) put it, ‘the music of Parade submits humbly to
present-day reality, which stifles the song of the nightingale beneath the rumble of
tramcars’.54 It is in this cubist sense that the ballet is ‘réaliste’.
At a technical level, it is possible to regard Satie’s concern with juxtaposed
music blocks – the unmodulated transitions between styles – as analogous to
cubism in its sudden shifts of perspective, while it also recalls the way in which
music-hall entertainment constantly and abruptly juxtaposes different materials.
Parody is another element, as is the simple melody with ostinato accompaniment
of popular song. It has a clear structure: three central movements, one devoted
to each character, with a chorale and prelude introduction (as with Sports, it
begins with a ‘Schola Cantorum’ unappetising chorale, this time followed by a
short fugato). It ends with a finale and short coda which balance the two-part
introduction: the coda is based on the fugato subject from the prelude.
As a Gesamtkunstwerk, Parade may be more ‘coincidence’, or artistic
coexistence, than ‘unified synthesis’. But this fragmentation and parallelism is
central to its aesthetic and does not make it any less Gesamt than productions by
Wagner. As a work it is more, in total, than the sum of its parts, and therefore I
would argue that the contribution of all the participants was of equal significance.55
Parade was as radical and as far-reaching in its (different) modernity as that earlier
Ballets Russes ‘cause célèbre’, The Rite of Spring.56
Although Satie later fell out with Cocteau, and the poor reception of
Parade resulted in a famous lawsuit (and short-term imprisonment for Satie),57
the composer remained interested in Picasso’s work for the rest of his life. He
53
Some of the ‘noises’ were suppressed in the 1917 premiere and were later restored
in the 1921 revival. See Deborah Menaker Rothschild, Picasso’s Parade: From Street to
Stage (London: Sotheby’s Publications, 1991), p. 88.
54
See Volta (ed.), Satie Seen Through His Letters, p. 126; Diaghilev’s letter quoted
after p. 128.
55
Here I differ from Orledge’s view that Cocteau was a less significant collaborator
(see Orledge, Satie the Composer, pp. 224–5).
56
The Rite had its premiere in Paris on 29 May 1913. It too was a collaborative effort:
choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, music by Igor Stravinsky and sets, costumes and scenario
by Nicholas Roerich.
57
This was due to his quarrel with the critic Jean Poueigh, whom Satie (in)famously
referred to in a letter: ‘What I know is you are an ass-hole – and, dare I say so – an unmusical
“ass-hole”’ (Volta, Satie Seen Through His Letters, p. 132). The critic sued and Satie was
sentenced to eight days in jail.
compared the artist’s return to classicism following the war to his own move to
‘classical simplicity, with a modern sensibility’ (in Socrate, for example), which
he claimed he owed to his ‘Cubist friends. Bless them’.58
Satie went on to develop a number of other significant works following the
short run of Parade in 1917 and its revival in 1921. In 1924 the ‘Parade team’
of Satie, Massine and Picasso (minus Cocteau) were reunited by the impresario
Etienne de Beaumont for a new ballet entitled Les Aventures de Mercure. With no
real scenario this time, Satie composed directly from Picasso’s drawings as they
emerged. He described this project:
You can imagine the marvellous contribution of Picasso, which I have attempted
to translate musically. My aim has been to make music an integral part, so to
speak, with the actions and gestures of the people who move about in this simple
exercise. You can see poses like them in any fairground. The spectacle is related
quite simply to the music hall, without stylization, or any rapport with things
artistic. In other respects, I always return to the sub-title ‘Pose plastique’, which
I find magnificent.59
Entr’acte, Cinéma and Dada
Perhaps the most modern incarnation of the Wagnerian impulse to the

Gesamtkunstwerk is to be found in cinema. Here there is a unity of sight and sound,
which, with the advent of synchronised sound in 1927, two years after Satie’s death,
produced a technical synchronicity and control over the audio and visual that was
not possible on the stage. Entr’acte (Interval) is the film at the centre (during the
interval) of the ballet Relâche and Satie’s music for this film is called Cinéma. It was
to be his last major score. Like Parade, the ballet can be characterised as a form of
deferral, inasmuch as the title of the ballet (Relâche) is the conventional billboard
notice indicating that the theatre in question is closed.60 Although the cinematic
‘interlude’ is set between the first and second acts, it is not incidental; it is in fact
longer than the first act and is about the same length as the second.
The ballet Relâche survives in a number of versions and is particularly innovative
for its incorporation of film. It originally had a section of the film at the beginning; a
slow-motion sequence showing Satie and Picabia jumping on the roof of the Théâtre
des Champs-Elysées and then firing a cannon towards the audience. Picabia, together
with the poet Blaise Cendrars, were the devisers of the scenario. The ballet company
was the Ballets Suédois and featured two soloists, cast as a fashionable woman and
a man in a wheelchair, a male chorus and a ‘fireman’ who wandered about smoking
58
Ibid., p. 152.
59
Davis, Satie, p. 133.
60
Ironically the main dancer, Jean Börlin, fell ill just before the first performance, so
the premiere was postponed; the theatre really was relâche!
and pouring water from buckets. The film, although integral to the conception of the
whole project, is also freestanding and will be dealt with here in isolation from the
ballet as a special example of artistic synthesis.
Satie’s score Cinéma for René Clair’s film Entr’acte ideally utilises what I
have been calling his ‘musical block structure technique’, which consists primarily
of short repeated units of music – which here are a musical analogy for editing
between shots (the film consists of 346 enumerated images). The most distinctive
of these musical fragments is the dotted rhythmic combination (Example 5.2).
Example 5.2 Satie, Cinéma: opening rhythmic figure
This eight-bar (with anacrusis) rhythmic figure opens the score and recurs
throughout the film (eight times in total).61 It is closely related to the rhythmic
motif made more explicit a little later (between figs. 11 and 12), which is headed
‘Marche funèbre’ and is a quote from Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor,
Op. 35 (referred to in Embryons desséchés as that famous mazurka by Schubert!)
Example 5.3 Satie, Cinéma: Chopin ‘Marche funèbre’ figure
The Chopin march was, even by this time, such a standard cue for accompanying
funerals and deaths in silent films that it was virtually a cliché.62 Satie transposes it
down a semitone to the key of A minor, with a plain scalar melody on the horn and
61
8x8 = a simple example of Satie’s numerological approach.
62
It was first played at Chopin’s own burial at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris in
1849, in an arrangement by Napoléon Henri Reber. It was also orchestrated by Elgar and
Stokowski and later used at the funeral of such different figures as John F. Kennedy and
Leonid Brezhnev. Chopin’s funeral march has antecedents in Rossini’s march to the scaffold
from his opera La gazza ladra and possibly Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 12 in A flat op.
26, and even negatively in Berlioz’s Symphonie funèbre et triomphale. As Kramer has put
it, Chopin’s many models suggest that he ‘was productively engaged with the funeral march
as a genre, a social medium with broad implications’ (see Lawrence Kramer, Interpreting
Music (Berkeley: University of California Press), 2010, p. 121).
gong beats. He then repeats it in D minor, with a clashing oboe melody a semitone
apart. The crotchet, dotted quaver, semiquaver, minim motif is repeated in various
harmonies with added trumpet melody until a new cue is reached at fig. 13. Satie is
using a species of found sonoric object, one that both represents itself as a formal
unifying device and an outside musical object. The rhythm of this quotation
permeates the music: the opening fragment appears in exact repeats 58 times in
the course of the piano score, together with other dotted-rhythm figures, which can
clearly be heard to relate to the Chopin motif.63 This found musical object, like all
such ‘collaged’ objects, signifies a number of things simultaneously: ‘itself’ as a
formal musical pattern, the sonata by Chopin as a quotation, a reference to silent
film music in general and so on. Satie organised the score into 40 double-barlined
sections that allow for them to be repeated ad lib to fit the film, given its different
possible running times. The use of music in such units or motifs is especially
effective in film, because its non-developmental nature ensures a stable foundation
on which the visuals can rest. Even the most fragmented of images can appear
relatively contiguous if accompanied by music that maintains similarity. Satie’s
score Cinéma allows precisely that.
René Clair’s film, which was shot entirely on location in Paris in June 1924,
can be considered as having two parts: the first is essentially non-narrative and
the second follows the ‘narrative’ of the funeral cortège. The film opens with a
90-second sequence featuring Satie and Picabia and an animated cannon which
was originally intended to be shown before the curtain rose. It continues with a
disorientating sequence of images of Parisian rooftops, dolls with inflatable heads,
a ballet dancer seen from below, lights, boxing gloves, Paris by day and night,
animated matchsticks on a man’s head, a chess game played by Marcel Duchamp
and Man Ray interrupted by a shower of water washing their game away, a paper
boat superimposed on the roof tops, the revelation that the dancer has a beard and
pince-nez, upside-down faces, a coconut apparently suspended on a jet of water,
a marksman (the principal male dancer of Relâche, Jean Börlin) aiming first at us
and then the coconut,64 which is then proliferated by multiple exposure and finally
shot open, to reveal a pigeon that flies off to land on the marksman’s hat. In turn,
the marksman is shot by Picabia and falls off the building. Following an image of
the sun, the rest of the film unfolds in a fragmentary way the eccentric progress
of a prancing funeral procession (that of the marksman), complete with a hearse
pulled by a camel. The hearse breaks free and is then chased, with increasing speed,
by the procession. This part of the music, as I have mentioned, begins with the
63
See Cinéma, Entr’acte symphonique de ‘Relâche’, the piano reduction for four
hands by Darius Milhaud published by Rouart-Lerolle, Paris, in 1926. The score is not
included in Relâche, being written under the separate heading of Cinéma.
64
Could this be a pun on Cocteau? If so, it would not be the first time: in the Dada
journal Z published in March 1920 (the first and last issue, edited by Paul Dermée), we find
‘Auric Satie with the Cocteau nut’ (a pun on Erik Satie, coconut and the expression ‘à la
noix’ – ‘not up to much’). See Volta (ed.), Satie Seen Through His Letters, p. 175.
Figure 5.7 Camel cortège, still from René Clair, Entr’acte
Chopin quotation and continues with ‘expandable’ repeat zones, thus offering a neat
solution to image-sound synchronisation at this stage in cinema history. The hearse
chase features the chromatic cues between figs. XX and XXIV, when the coffin falls
off the hearse into a field. Börlin emerges from it, magically makes the mourners
disappear (the music figs. XXIV to XXV) and finally disappears himself. The word
‘fin’ appears on the screen as the musical Cinéma rhythmic figure is repeated, only
to have Börlin jump through the screen to land on the ground and to be kicked back
through the screen as the film rewinds to restore the word ‘fin’.
The director René Clair was self-evidently interested in the emerging formal syntax
of cinema as a kinetic medium, opposing it to photography, and thus emphasised
camera effects and movement. There are consequently very few stationary shots in
the whole film and scenes are generally quite short. Satie’s music therefore provides
continuity against which these changes can occur without too much confusion: the
overall impression of movement and speed remain, but without the perplexity that
could have resulted had the music not remained simple and repetitive.
The Dadaists, many of whom have cameo appearances in the film (Picabia, Man
Ray, Duchamp), shared with Clair an interest in ontological artistic questions. Film
provided them with a method of investigation and juxtaposition that they were fast
to exploit. The film consists of an array of visual enquiries: watching people run in
slow motion; watching things happen in reverse; from underneath; watching people
disappear. The film’s montaged nature conforms to the Dadaist view that real sensual
experience should not be mediated by logic. At the very end of the film, where the
funeral procession has been speeded up, Satie’s music heightens the impression of
speed; this mutual enhancement is an example of the way Entr’acte realises the idea
I mapped out earlier of a synthetic aesthetic impulse.
Furniture Music
I shall conclude with a coda on what is probably Satie’s most Dadaist conception.
It is an idea that also underlines important aspects of Satie’s aesthetic as far from
the concept of absolute music. Furniture music (musique d’ameublement) is in
tune with Dada’s interest in ontological issues in that it is music that questions its
identity as music (if we partly define music as sound that requires a ‘listening’ mode
of address). Here music functions much as many film directors would prefer – as
atmospheric background, music that is not directly heard; rather, it is just felt or
‘experienced’, part of the mise-en-scène. Satie was concerned to provide music for
those environments when ‘focused’ listening was not possible or appropriate:65 sons
industriels or bespoke sonic wallpaper. On 8 March 1920, during another entr’acte,
this time between the acts of a play by Max Jacob, Ruffian toujours, truand jamais, in
the Galerie Barbazanges, Satie, with the support of Milhaud, performed ‘utilitarian
music’ or musique d’ameublement, which was not to be listened to. Including short
quotes from composers he did not much like (Ambroise Thomas and Saint-Saëns),
he set five musicians around the hall. He thus allowed the music to occupy space
outside the confines of the ‘stage’ as a focus for attention, as Milhaud recalled:
‘In order that the music might seem to come from all sides at once, we posted the
clarinets in three different corners of the theatre, the pianist in the fourth, and the
trombone in a box on the first floor.’ The music had no visual focus to help dissipate
musical attention. He did not, however, achieve his desired aim. Although invited to
‘walk about, eat, drink’, the audience remained seated. Milhaud recalled: ‘It was no
use Satie shouting: “Talk, for heaven’s sake! Move around! Don’t listen!” They kept
quiet. They listened. The whole thing went wrong.’66
Disinterestedness has a complex philosophical pedigree and is not an issue
I have space to discuss here. For Satie, it was appropriate only for especially
composed works whose aim was to be a ‘furnishing divertissement’:
Which do you prefer:
Music or Ham? It seems this is a question one should ask oneself when the hors
d’oeuvres arrive. In many places sweet and excellent silence has been replaced
by bad music. It is thought smart by most people to hear falsely pretty things,
and listen to silly, vaguely churchy ritornellos, while they drink beer or try on
a pair of trousers; to appear to appreciate the sonorous tribute of basses and
bassoons, and other ugly pipes, while thinking of nothing at all. Peuh! All this
65
See, for example, on the migration of music into the retail sector, L.L. Tyler,
‘“Commerce and Poetry Hand in Hand”: Music in the American Department Stores, 1880–
1930’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 45/1 (Spring 1992), pp. 75–120. See
also Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store,
1869–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
66
Darius Milhaud, ‘Lettre de Darius Milhaud’, Revue musicale 214 (June 1952), p. 153.
is pretty painful for a man of my age … The remedy? Heavy taxes; terrible
vexations; severe repression. Cruel torture, even. Should people be allowed just
to go ahead and make our poor life ugly?67
We have heard Satie’s ‘vexations’ already.

As I said at the outset, it has not been my purpose in this chapter to simply
survey Satie’s visual art connections, but rather to raise ideas around which Satie
and the visual might be seen to orbit, to integrate the visual into his aesthetic, to
appreciate thereby Man Ray’s view that Satie was the ‘only musician who had
eyes’68 and to show he is to be better understood if we look as carefully as he did.
67
Satie, ‘A Simple Question’ (unpublished text), reprinted in Volta (ed.), A Mammal’s
Notebook, pp. 105–6.
68
Cited in Orledge, Satie the Composer, p. 240.
Chapter 6
Exploring Interart Dialogue in Erik Satie’s
Sports et divertissements (1914/1922)
Helen Julia Minors
Sports et divertissements is representative of the interdisciplinary innovations

of French artistic culture at the start of the twentieth century due to its merging
of music, poetry, calligraphy, etchings and pochoir prints. This multi-art collage
album was commissioned by Lucien Vogel (1886–1954):1 it co-presents images
by Charles Martin (1884–1934) alongside piano miniatures by Erik Satie which
are superimposed with Satie’s own descriptive poetic text. Both music and text
are written in Satie’s calligraphy and presented in facsimile. A chorale supplies a
musical preamble on the same page as Satie summarises the nature of the piece
in a prose preface: ‘This publication consists of two artistic elements: drawing,
music. The drawing part is composed of lines – witty lines; the musical part is
represented by dots – black dots.’2 The staves are emphasised because of their
1
I am very grateful to Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Assistant Curator in the Printing
and Graphics Department, and Mary Haegert, Department of Public Services, Houghton
Library, Harvard University. Both have been very generous with their time in answering my
various questions. I should also like to thank Ray Heigemeir from Stanford Music Library,
Stanford University, for his assistance in answering questions about La Pêche (1914).
Moreover, thanks are due to the staff at the Département de la musique, Bibliothèque
nationale de France for their assistance in accessing Satie’s sketchbooks. The early stages
of this chapter were presented in two parts at the study day ‘Nostalgia and Innovation
in Twentieth-Century French Music’, Lancaster University, 8–9 May 2009, in association
with the Royal Musical Association, and at the International Conference on Music Since
1900 (ICMSN) at Keele University, 2–5 July 2009. Thanks to Deborah Mawer and Nick
Reyland for providing me with these opportunities. I am also grateful to Davinia Caddy for
discussing some of these ideas with me in the early stages, to Adam Greig for reading an
early draft of this piece and for making some welcome suggestions, and to Grant O’Sullivan
for preparing the music examples.
Lucien Vogel was the publisher of Gazette de bon ton founded in 1912 and was the
founder of Vu in 1928. He worked previously as editor for Art et décoration, which ran
from 1897 to 1939.
2
Sports et divertissements (Paris: Lucien Vogel, 1922), Copy no. 9, housed at the
Houghton Library, from the collection of Philip Hofer, class of 1921, Department of Printing
and Graphic Arts, Harvard University, Typ. 915.14.7700 PF. This copy includes only the
1922 version of La Pêche and two versions of Le Pique-nique from 1914. The 1922 images
unusual red colour. Significantly, Satie does not refer to his prose poetry, perhaps
identifying cohesion between music and text. He warns the reader: ‘Don’t look
for anything else in it.’3 In his seemingly flippant attitude, as commented upon by
Steven Moore Whiting, he plays with words, using oxymorons, aphorisms and
unusual word combinations in a ‘take it or leave it attitude’, as is evident in this
preface.4 The visual emphasis of the piece alongside this warning is paradoxical.
Satie’s aim ‘to confuse’5 the reader is taken here as an invitation to examine the
piece in a fashion which is contrary to the preface.
Sports defies a single classifying label or genre home because of its
pluralistic nature. Its multiple visual identities, with images produced in both
1914 and 1922, alongside a visually important score reside in a work of 20
parts which each depict a different leisure scene. The various artistic media and
their application within this album warrant exploration in light of its interart
approach: spanning pre- and post-First World War France, the images do not
simply accompany the music or vice versa; rather, each of the images, music
and texts is presented ‘as if it were operating in another’ medium.6 In other
words, music is presented as visual art to be viewed, visual art is presented as a
musical score to be performed, poetry is presented as part of the musical score
on the staves, though not as a libretto, and all this is presented in the form of a
limited edition art album. Equality is assumed between the different elements,
each contributing to produce the ‘work’.
This chapter offers a fresh analysis of the multi-art processes at play between
Satie’s music and text which is interpreted in dialogue with Martin’s images. There
are many components to interpret and questions regarding how Satie related to the
1914 images, let alone the reproduced 1922 images. In order to appreciate the
interart nature of this work, the spectator must search the piece to become aware
of its many attributes. In what way can one, and might one, mediate the interart
experience of Sports et divertissements? How can such mediation encompass the
along with Satie’s scores are reproduced in Erik Satie, Sports et divertissements, Twenty
Short Pieces for Piano, trans. Stanley Applebaum (New York: Dover Publications, Inc.,
1982): ‘Cette publication est constituée de deux éléments artistiques: dessin, musique. La
partie dessin est figurée par des traits – des traits d’esprits ; la partie musicale est représentée
par des points – des points noirs.’
3
Ibid., preface: ‘que l’on n’y voie pas autre chose’.
4
Steven Moore Whiting, Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 443.
5
Erik Satie (1920), in Ornella Volta (ed.), Ecrits (Paris: Editions Champ-Libre, 1977;
revised edn 1981), p. 45: ‘Je me suis toujours efforcé de dérouter les suiveurs, par la forme
et par le fond, à chaque nouvelle œuvre.’ Translated in Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 142: ‘I have always striven to confuse
would-be followers by both the form and the background of each new work.’
6
Peter Dayan, Art as Music, Music as Poetry, Poetry as Art, from Whistler to
Stravinsky and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 3.
Exploring Interart Dialogue 117
various artistic elements? Due to the visual emphasis of the work, presented as a
large musical score which can be rested on the piano stand, for performance at the
piano, there is an invitation to enquire how a performer, spectator or researcher
may interact with the work. Notions of an imagined experience and a process of
conceptual mapping are set up in order to examine how we receive this multi-
dimensional work as a piece in the form of a collage-album.
Primary Source: Sports et divertissements (1914 and 1922)
Sports et divertissements was not published until after the First World War.
Ornella Volta has charted the gestation of this work: Martin’s original images
were completed in 1914 and Satie completed his last score, Le Golf, on 20 May
1914, as dated on the manuscript. Due to the outbreak of the First World War, the
manuscript was not printed and the Vogel firm closed. Vogel sold the manuscript
to the publisher, Maynial, only to purchase the manuscript back from Maynial
six years later. Fashions had changed, however, as epitomised by Coco Chanel’s
black cocktail dresses, and cultural activities had progressed in the interim. As
a result, Martin chose to recreate his illustrations to tailor his drawings for the
post-war milieu.7 Three versions of the album exist. First, the original conception
was Martin’s 1914 illustrations with the facsimile of Satie’s music, to which
the spectator may find Satie’s text-music-image correspondence, at least to the
activities if intentionally not to the image, as it is not certain whether Satie saw
Martin’s images before composing his 20 scenes. Indeed, the multifarious nature
of the work may profit from separate creative stimuli, though Orledge proposes
that the level of narrative comparison between music, text and image in Le Golf
suggests at least one exception.8 Second, a version contains Martin’s 1922 images,
as he reconceived the album alongside the same facsimile of Satie’s music.
Third, and in keeping with Vogel’s publishing house, an exclusive limited edition
numbered version was published: this comprises 10 copies containing with both
the 1914 and 1922 images. Some have two versions of Le pique-nique from 1914;
some do not have the 1914 version of La Pêche. Copy number 9, housed in the
Houghton Library at Harvard University, includes both examples of the former
and is lacking the latter.9 The colophon outlines the numbered series:
7
The creation of this album is outlined in Ornella Volta, ‘Give a Dog a Bone: Some
Investigations into Erik Satie’, trans. Todd Niquette, http://www.satie-archives.com/web/
articl10.html, originally published as ‘Le rideau se lève sur un os’, Revue Internationale de
la Musique Française 8/23 (1987).
8
9
The printing invoice is reproduced in Volta, ‘Give a Dog a Bone’. Since then we have
these following editions. Rouart-Lerolle created a new edition: Score only, black and white,
plus Martin’s title logo 1926. Re-released 1964 by Musique Contemporaine (Salabert). 1962
Dover Publications: Satie’s score and Martin’s 1922 illustrations in black and white with
10 reserved examples for the Librairie Maynial, containing a series of 20 plates

designed the first time by Charles Martin and engraved on copper in 1914,
numbered from 1 to 10 and 215 examples numbered 11 to 225. It has been
drawn, besides, 675 ordinary examples containing music and a single plate on
the frontispiece, numbered from 226 to 900.10
The plates of copy no. 9 are 39 cm high by 43 cm wide: this size would enable a
clear perspective of the images and music for a chamber performance. The limited
publication, large format and skilled presentation of Sports et divertissements was
usual for Vogel’s Gazette de bon ton, for which Martin worked as an illustrator.
Many of the artists used a pochoir, a stencil, to form the basis of the image which
was then hand-coloured on handmade paper.11 The artisan skills made the magazine
distinctive from its outset in 1912.12
Martin’s 1914 images are etchings (not line drawings are noted by Davis),13
printed in brown tinted ink. They focus on the people and their clothing, usually
situated in the front centre of the images, with the leisure activity in the background.
A realistic tone is set, with accurate proportions. The ladies wear long dresses,
high collars and occasionally hats. La Pêche is a good illustrative example of
this realistic yet minimal style. The woman stands elegantly clothed, while the
man kneels in order to bag the fish which has been caught. The 1922 adaptation
the cover illustration of Le Tango in colour, with English translation by Stanley Applebaum.
Martin’s cameos are missing from this edition. A commercially available version with the
original 1914 as well as the 1922 images is not available. However, the 1914 etchings
were reproduced in Ornella Volta (ed.), Erik Satie: A Mammal’s Notebook (London: Atlas
Press, 1996), pp. 25–40. Stanford University Library houses a version including only the
1914 images; Princeton University Library houses a copy including the pochoir plates and
the Getty Research Institute houses one of the reserved 10 copies, measuring 40 cm by 44
cm. Heidi Nitze Collection, in New York, houses copy 7, as used by Orledge, Satie the
Composer, p. 214.
10
Satie, Sports, Harvard University, Typ. 915.14.7700. The printing information can
be found on the back of sheet 62 (the sheets are unnumbered, but progress in a loose fashion,
in the same title order as that commonly published): ‘10 exemplaires, réservées à la libraire
Maynial, contenant une suite des vingt planches de Charles Martin dessinées une première
fois et gravées sur cuivre en 1914, numérotées de là 10 et 25 exemplaires, numérotées de 11
à 225. Il a été tiré, en outre, 675 exemplaires ordinaires contenant la musique et une seule
planche en frontispice, numérotées de 226 à 900.’
11
For more details regarding this artistic process, see Alison Levie, French Art Deco
Fashion: In Pochoir Prints from the 1920s (London: Schiffer Publishing, 1998).
12
Many of the images have since been used on posters, postcards and other
memorabilia. There are a number of websites which reproduce images from Gazette, many
from art dealers. A detailed list of the images is shown at http://www.victoriana.com/
GazetteduBonTon/designerdresses.html.
13
Thanks to Caroline Duroselle-Melish at the Houghton Library, personal
communication (20 July 2009).
supplements a secondary message of courtship to the title, in that we see a couple

resting by the water, the woman sat within the arm of the gentleman. The 1922
images contrast with the first as they are pochoir prints. Compliant with the
advances made in the Gazette, these pochoirs are colourful, with plenty of pastel
shades. Though the people tend to be centred in the image, they are integrated into
the artistic space, shown to be interacting with their environment and not simply
each other. La Pêche in Martin’s second version is far more detailed: the water is
textured in pale and dark blue strips. Cubist-inspired shapes and multiple shades of
one colour contribute to a visual depth. The visual detail incorporates two French
flags in the top-right-hand side of the image, affirming a nationalistic arena.
Other primary source evidence can be found in Satie’s notebooks housed at
the Bibliothèque nationale de France.14 Orledge usefully provides a detailed index
outlining the content of these books.15 The alterations in text and music illustrate the
care and attention Satie took in both art forms. Significantly, he does not cue the text
precisely to the music: it is not presented as a text to be sung, spoken or performed
in any specific way. Rather, it is written above, beneath and through the staves. The
detailed workings include a much-adapted text to introduce the chorale: an entire
paragraph, written in note form, is crossed out, in which Satie removes an apology:
For those who are not satisfied [with] the descent in the dissent of the bass voice
which we do not hear, especially when they descend below the plain serious (old
style). I’m sorry. Please let me present to you, not in the form of genuflection, to
all choirs a chorale of all humility.16
The differences between the drafts and the final version are illustrative of other text
changes which occur throughout the volume: conditional sentences, explanations
and representational descriptions are often removed in preference of a text which
affirms the situation.
These notebooks emphasise Satie’s visual interest as he not only sketches ideas
and revises sections, but also drafts a version which is almost complete. Care is taken
with the spacing of the music on the page: although the facsimile contains music
without bar lines, Satie’s sketches and drafts are carefully barred: for example, Le
14
Erik Satie, ‘Sports et divertissements pour piano. Musique d’Erik Satie: brouillons
et esquisses’, Ms. Autogr. (1914) 10 cahiers, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms 9627(1–
10). There are 10 books of sketches: for accuracy, in what follows I reference the manuscript
code first, then the book number in parenthesis, then the page of the book.
15
16
Ms 9627(9), 8: ‘Que ceux qui ne seront pas satisfaits [avec] le descente, en le
dissent à voir basse à voix de contrebasse on ne les entendra pas, surtout s’ils descendaient
au-dessous du uni grave (vieux style). Pardonnez-moi, je vous prie et permettez-moi de me
présenter à vous sous la forme de ce choral tout de génuflexion de ce choral tout d’humilité.’
Tango,17 Le Golf18 and Quatre-coins19 are beamed every two crotchet beats, while
Le Bain de mer20 is beamed in four beats. The draft of Le Water-chute21 is beamed
every three beats. Structural changes occur (as in La Pêche,22 Satie crosses out three
bars and adds others by noting ‘2ème fois 4’) and complex passages are reworked
(as Orledge illustrates with the five versions of a scalic descent in Le Water-chute)23
and endings are often rewritten (a change occurs to the ending of Le Bain de mer,24
in which Satie numbers bars 14, 16 and 15, in this order, and crosses out bar 15).
Satie and an Interart Aesthetic
During Satie’s varied career, he persistently worked with extra-musical media

and stimuli. At the start of his musical creativity, he already incorporated an acute
cultural awareness. Ogives (1888) incorporates plainsong, played in octaves,
with varying phrase lengths.25 It was written in response to the architecture of
Notre Dame de Paris, which is notable for its flying buttresses, a 90-metre tall
tower and panoramic views of the city from its towers.26 Chanson Hongroise
(1889) appears to have been inspired by Romanian folk music at the Exposition
Universelle in 1889. In composing the ballet Parade (1917), he collaborated
with some of the leading artists of the day: Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), Pablo
Picasso (1881–1973) and Léonide Massine (1896–1979). The film Entr’acte for
the ballet Relâche (1924) saw Satie produce work with René Clair.27 As the Satie
scholar Mary E. Davis notes, the meeting of the different arts often brings forth
a discussion of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk – the concept of a total art work;28
likewise, Alan M. Gillmor described Sports as a ‘tiny Gesamtkunstwerk’.29
17
Ms 9627(8), 16–17: this contains no text.
18
Ms 9627(9), 12–13: this is a sketch of the music.
19
Ms 9627(7), 1: this includes the text.
20
Ms 9627(5), 2.
21
Ms 9627(5), 4.
22
Ms 9627(1), 2.
23
Ms 9627(5), 5. See Robert Orledge, ‘Satie’s Approach to Composition in His Later
Years (1913–24), Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 111 (1984–5), pp. 155–79.
24
Ms 9627(5), 3.
25
See Grace Wai Kwan Gates, Chapter 3 of this book.
26
Karl Baedeker, Baedeker’s Paris and its Environs (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker
Publishing, 1924), pp. 264–7.
27
A detailed catalogue of Satie’s compositions can be found in the appendix of this
book.
28
Mary E. Davis, ‘Modernity à la mode: Popular Culture and Avant-Gardism in Erik
Satie’s Sports et divertissements’, The Musical Quarterly 83/3 (Autumn 1999), p. 433.
29
Alan M. Gillmor, Erik Satie (London: Macmillan Press, 1988), p. 182. See also
Simon Shaw-Miller’s remarks on pp. 99–103.
However, Satie mocks Wagner in his famous reference that composers should
create music ‘without sauerkraut’.30 He aspired to generate a new manner in
which music and visual art could relate: ‘whilst Marcel Duchamp and Picabia
introduce words into their paintings, only Satie employed a simultaneous
counterpoint of poetry, music and drawing within a single composition’.31 Satie
is an integrated artist, in that he inhabits the role of composer, writer and visual
artist, as demonstrated in Sports.
Many multi-art processes are at play between music, text and image. The
presentation of the work as a visual album questions the nature of music and its
relationships to the other arts, not only in its co-presentation, but also because of
the uncertainty regarding whether the music is to be performed at all and, indeed,
how such a performance could be achieved in order to experience all the art forms
simultaneously. Is it a work for a single spectator (whether reading the album,
performing the music while viewing the images, or any other approach which
might be taken), a chamber work to be displayed on the piano stand for a small
audience collected around the piano in a private salon or, as Whiting speculates,32
a work ripe for projection on large screens in a concert hall? The presentation of
the work as an object resonates with Peter Dayan’s first rule which resides at the
heart of an interart aesthetic: that it should ‘be considered as an object, a thing …
and not as the conduit or vessel for any concept, message, emotion, or anecdote’.33
The album is presented as though ‘all the arts worked in the same way’, due to
their similar presentation on similarly sized loose sheets within the album, which
contradicts the nature of how music is heard and images are seen.34 There are
many components to interpret, from the images and calligraphy, to the combined
visual presentation of both text and music, to the scale of the pages, the colours
of both the score and 1922 images, as well as the title pages containing Satie’s
calligraphy and small emblems. In order to appreciate the multi-art nature of this
work, the spectator must search the piece to become aware of its many attributes.
Imagining the Moment
In exploring how we experience and think about the multi-layered, interart

presentation of Sports, Satie’s approach to composition requires some consideration.
30
Satie, Ecrits, 69: ‘sans choucroute’. With thanks to Austin Sherlaw Johnson
for bringing my attention to the library of James Harding. This copy of Ecrits includes
Harding’s notes, two letters from Ornella Volta (March and June 1979), a programme for
‘Intégrales Erik Satie’ (May 1979) and a list in date order, in Harding’s hand, of the titles
and dates of each piece in Sports et divertissements.
31
32
Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, pp. 407–8.
33
Dayan, Art as Music, p. 2.
34
Ibid., p. 3.
In establishing Satie’s musical ‘logic’, Orledge remarks that Satie ‘conceptualised

his ideas’ with a ‘spatial approach to music’.35 Such a three-dimensional way of
thinking about music shares a frame of reference with visual art and sculpture; it
provides an insight into Satie’s compositional aesthetic within Sports, in using
music as a visual element in a collage album. Moreover, Orledge affirms that Satie
was ‘attracted to transformational thinking, magic and the potentials of formal
mirroring’.36 The loose leaves of Sports allow for music and image plates to be
positioned side by side, and in some cases, as referred to below, the shaping of
music and image result in a mirroring effect. The work is an interdisciplinary
experience reliant on time, space and the moment. These terms are relevant to
much recent interdisciplinary work in music and the other arts, and they are
comparable to the writings of Satie’s contemporary, Apollinaire.
Apollinaire’s surrealism superimposes the art forms of poetry and drawing,
most notably in Calligrammes (1913–17). Apollinaire is one of many artists
of the period to invent new ways in which the arts could be co-presented. His
Calligrammes present poetry in the form of a visual image. Unlike his earlier poems,
Calligrammes do not subscribe to symbolism; rather, Apollinaire reforms poetry
by fusing it to other media. To borrow from Dayan again, the poetry is the image;
the image is the poetry.37 Its new significance lies in visual shape and presentation
space, altering the emergent meaning of the literary text by the presence of the
visual parameter; consequently, it supplements the poetic medium. The experience
is situated between the senses: the spectator views the image and interprets its
representations (whether intended or otherwise) as a piece of art, but also reads the
text as a meaning bearing semantic commentary. Apollinaire promotes surrealist
‘dissonance’ in his interest in ‘the lack of intelligible correlation between sounds,
gestures, colors, acrobatics’.38 Apollinaire’s interest in simultanism bears affinity
to the multi-dimensional realisation which Sports requires. The result ‘give[s] the
impression of a full and instant awareness within one moment of space-time’.39
Whiting shares a similar opinion of Sports as each image is intended, in title at
least, to distil ‘a single moment’ of each activity.40 Simultanism occurs when
35
Robert Orledge, ‘Satie’s Musical and Personal Logic’, presented in Erik Satie: His
Music, the Visual Arts, His Legacy, at Gresham College London (16 April 2010) and as
Chapter 1 of this book.
36
Ibid.
37
Dayan, Art as Music.
38
Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other
Arts (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), p. 248. Albright uses the term ‘dissonance’
to refer to a contradiction between artistic media, representing a state of interaction which
is not complementary. In contrast, he uses ‘consonance’ to refer to artistic complementation
and equality. Both are used to refer to states of artistic relationship and dialogue.
39
Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes, eds. Ann Hyde Greet and S.I. Lockerbie
(Berkeley: California University Press, 2004), p. 3.
40
different things are enacted at the same time without precise synchronisation to
one another: such a simultaneous conceptual digestion of artistic elements might
explain the spectator’s mediation of Sports.
The Calligrammes are a contrapuntal creation between media, as text produces
an image either in concord or in dissonance with its literal meaning. Likewise,
Sports blurs the lines between music and image in the presentation of the score. A
visual contrast also arises between Martin’s 1914 and 1922 images in the stylistic
differences between, on the one hand, the realist etchings and, on the other hand,
the cubist pochoir prints which contain the multifarious dimensions of Picasso’s
cubism in the use of segmented colour sections and delineated shapes.
I am aware that I play out a conceptual game in questioning how to mediate
Sports: I enact a performance of the work in a virtual environment – that of
my own interactions and negotiations with the work. Though it is possible to
actualise the music in performance, such an act would go against Satie’s own
advice, as he stresses that it is a work for the ‘imagination’.41 Elsewhere, in
Heures séculaires et instantanées (1914), the performance of text and music was
considered by Satie in his preface: ‘I forbid the text to be read aloud while the
music is playing. Any failure to observe this will incur my just indignation with
the presumptuous sinner.’42 Poulenc later confirmed: ‘it was forbidden under pain
of major excommunication to read out the stories and funny remarks with which he
decorated his music, either before or during a performance’.43 The Sports album,
as presented on the page, is only figuratively performed if read. There is inevitably
a change in the way we consider the piece when performed or when we recognise
the work as a musical score as well as a fashion album. As the philosopher Brian
Massumi posits, in exploring the effect of virtual events, there is ‘conceptual
displacement’ in that we interpret sonorous movement, but only in an implicit
manner.44 Rather than experiencing physical movement and sensation, it ‘might
be culturally-theoretically thinkable’.45 Motion and stasis, actual and virtual,
frame his discussion, moving beyond traditional ideas of opposition. These ideas,
applied to Sports, suggest that something might be actualised from a conceptual
experience: in affinity with Satie’s request of the imagination, Massumi’s theory
supports a view that the spectator may enact the album in thought.
41
Satie, Sports, Harvard University, Typ. 915.14.7700, preface.
42
James Harding, Erik Satie (London: Secker & Warburg, 1975), p. 126.
43
Francis Poulenc, ‘La musique de piano d’Erik Satie’, La Revue musicale, 214
(June 1952), p. 25: ‘De même qu’il ne faut pas, sous peine d’excommunication majeure,
Satie dixit, lire, avant ou pendant, les histoires et les indications bouffes dont il émaille sa
musique.’ Translated in Roger Nichols, The Harlequin Years: Music in Paris 1917–1929
(London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), p. 218.
44
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect and Sensation (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 1.
45
Ibid., p. 4.
In affinity with Satie’s call for this work to be imagined, Baudelaire appears
to offer an explanation of this artistic reasoning: ‘It is imagination that has
taught mankind the moral significance of colour, outlines, sounds and scents.’46
The senses appear to be crossed within the imagination as the corresponding
attributes of the piece are deliberated. An impression of synaesthesia arises within
his poetry: ‘Scents, colors and sounds correspond.’47 Satie’s deliberate fusion
of the arts, along with interplay of cultural attributes and musical style within
Sports, is representative of Baudelaire’s conclusions that ‘today every art shows
the craving to overlap into the neighbour art’.48 For example, Satie encouraged
Debussy in the adoption of extra-musical processes, urging him to ‘make use of
the representational methods of Claude Monet [et al] … Why not make a musical
transposition of them?’.49 Similarly, poets were concerned with sonority and
musicality. Among the symbolists, Rimbaud’s Voyelles (1871) plays with the
different sound potentials of the vowels he uses. Composers were attracted to these
sonorous – ‘music above all’50 – symbolists: examples include Chabrier, Debussy
and Fauré, who set works by Verlaine; Debussy set Mallarmé; and Baudelaire’s
poems were set by both Debussy and Fauré.
In contrast to Baudelaire’s correspondances, which suggests similarity in
experiencing the artistic elements and relationships, Apollinaire promotes surrealist
dissonance in his interest in ‘the lack of intelligible correlation between sounds,
gestures, colors, acrobatics’.51 If the artistic elements are in a state of dissonance
or ‘contest’,52 how might a simultaneous digest of them occur? It seems to be
this lack of cohesion that allows the imagination to marry the elements. Dayan’s
assessment of the interart aesthetic makes clear that the connection between
46
Charles Baudelaire, ‘Richard Wagner’, in Charles Baudelaire, Baudelaire: Œuvres
complètes, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 773: ‘C’est l’imagination qui a enseigné à
l’homme le sens moral de la couleur, du contour, du son et du parfum.’
47
Ibid., p. 784. Also cited in Hervé Lacombe, The Keys to French Opera in the
Nineteenth Century, trans. Edward Schneider (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001), pp. 251–2.
48
Baudelaire, ‘L’art philosophique’, in Baudelaire: Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, p. 598:
‘qu’aujourd’hui chaque art manifeste l’envie d’empiéter sur l’art voisin’.
49
Letter from Erik Satie to Claude Debussy (1922), in Satie, Ecrits, p. 69: ‘Pourquoi
ne pas se servir des moyens représentatifs que nous exposaient Claude Monet, Cézanne,
Toulouse-Lautrec, etc.? Pourquoi ne pas transposer musicalement ces moyens?’ Translated
in Robert Orledge, ‘Debussy and Satie’, in Richard Langham Smith (ed.), Debussy Studies
50
Paul Verlaine, ‘L’art poétique’, cited in Glenn Watkins, Soundings: Music in the
Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer Books, 1988), p. 67.
51
Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, p. 248.
52
Nicholas Cook posits a model of musical multimedia which tests for similarity and
difference. The extreme state of difference is referred to as contest, in which media battle
for attention. Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
media ‘must always be incalculable’.53 Marcel Proust (1871–1922) raises similar

points in his anti-symbolist essay when he refers to the imagination’s role in
interpretation, noting that art can ‘produce an unheard melody which the poet can
make reverberate’.54 Something additional, not present in an art, can be generated.
In a similar sense, Sports is experienced in multi-dimensional terms. For
example, the musical text offers a visual symbolic presentation in La Balançoire,
dated 31 March 1914. Satie writes the music on three staves, which allows the
repetitive octave leaps to assume a larger space on the page, over two staves,
and separates the melody, as though it were for a soloist. The visual separation
of melody and accompaniment which jumps between staves corresponds to the
woman on the swing, who moves separately from her companion. The comparison
is based on a visual analogy read between the score and the expectation of the
swing moving to and fro, between the octaves. The arts may well be brought
together in the imagination, but their stimulus bears reference to a reality beyond
art.55 The negotiation of the audio and visual arts, with the ‘real’ fashions versus
the ‘imagined’ work, is not easy. The spectator is displaced due to the suggested,
and internally experienced, marriage of an audio yet visually presented art, and a
visual concrete art which metaphorically speaks of the plastic arts, not least in the
titles given to some pieces, for example, Le Tango.
Considering Satie’s appeal to the spectator’s imagination, alongside a
culturally determined album bearing specific representational qualities, it is
possible to posit a moment experience (as it might be referred to) in which
imagination and thought act out of time (beyond the linear, quantitative, metrical
or clock-measured time), in that each identifiable fragment which forms the
total experience is digested. This audio-visual act requires linear time, but it
is not restricted by it. If the different arts were placed on a line, representing
an order in which things might be experienced, they display disconnectedness,
but the whole experience co-presents each parameter and therefore connects
the arts in time and space, if not in a structural logic.56 As such, this moment
experience is an illusion, in comparison to Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, in which
53
54
Marcel Proust, Chroniques (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), pp. 137–44. Cited in Mary
Lydon, ‘Skirting the Issue: Mallarmé, Proust and Symbolism’, Yale French Studies 74
(1988), p. 174.
55
Jean Baudrillard has argued that a hyper-reality now exists in which something
goes beyond the real and beyond metaphor, creating a simulated version of the real without
metaphor. In using Disneyland as an example, he posits that one can define reality through
the experience of the simulated version of reality. See Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings,
ed. Mark Foster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 5–6.
56
This chapter considers this notion in terms of the contemporaneous arts and does
not analyse the concept of time in terms of psychology or cognitive science. For a summary
of various thoughts on time in regard to music, see Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music:
Semiotic Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 81–114.
one ‘create[s] an impression of multiple and simultaneous consciousness, noting

that perceptions and ideas are abruptly juxtaposed’.57 The fragments are not
joined by a formal structure but through, as Albright terms it, ‘an ideological
logic’.58 It is not thought of in defined spatial or measured temporal terms;
rather, the spectator forms a version of the activities in Sports. An audio-
visual simultaneous taking-in of identifiable features results in a multi-sensory
‘encompassing of experience’59 which has yet to be rationalised – or, as Albright
puts it, the spectator has a ‘mentally unprocessed sensory experience’.60
The usual experience of music, as a sonorous live event, is displaced as we
experience it in visual terms. Apollinaire was aware of the different ways in which
we experience art and music; as summarised by Simon Shaw-Miller, ‘painting is
a simultaneous experience whereas music is a successive one’.61 The transference
between audio and visual art forms is conceptually mapped: it is such mapping
which allows the spectator to mediate the work. A view of Sports as a thinkable
event resonates with the interart aesthetic that asserts one thing in terms of another
and presents art as an object for digestion. It resonates with Satie’s preface and
supports Apollinaire’s concept of simultanism.
Apollinaire presents one thing not in terms of another, as a metaphor, but as
that other. This is not to say that they are similar, but that they assert an ‘analogy’.62
The experience of the arts cannot be rigid and predetermined as, according to
Apollinaire, ‘each work becomes a new universe with its own laws’.63 The
elusive nature of the interart aesthetic, as Dayan exposes, is ‘founded on an effect
of deflected attention’.64 This notion is integral to considering the experience
of Sports: the moment experience digests the artistic elements within the terms
57
Apollinaire, Calligrammes, p. 3.
58
59
Timothy Matthews, Reading Apollinaire: Theories of Poetic Language (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 221.
60
Albright, Untwisting the Serpent, p. 264. An alternative method for appreciating
this process is in semiotic terms, in which a sign must be interpreted. Nattiez’s ‘trace’ level
offers an arena for conceptualising a way in which simultanism might occur as a taking in
of the material attributes which ‘result from the poetic process’. The ‘sensory unprocessed’
experience is only part of an interpretative rendering of the piece. See Jean-Jacques Nattiez,
Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 15.
61
Simon Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 136.
62
Guillaume Apollinaire, Architectural Record (May 1910), pp. 413–14, cited by
63
Guillaume Apollinaire, Œuvres en prose complètes, ed. Pierre Caizergues (Paris,
Gallimard, 1991), pp. 2, 112: ‘chaque œuvre devient un univers nouveau avec ses lois
particulières’. Translated by Dayan, Art as Music, p. 73.
64
Ibid.
of the work (in this instance, a French fashion album which deliberately fuses
inconsistent elements with visual primacy).
Lettre-Océan from Calligrammes is a pertinent example as it incorporates
musical staves which, on one hermeneutic level, might suggest the visual layers
of the ocean, yet on another alludes to the potential sound of music. Lettre-Océan
places both sides of the postcard in a single frame, modifying expectations. The
letter is shaped and depicted as the ocean, which in turn can be read as a poem,
but a representational reading differs from Apollinaire’s aesthetic. Our experience
is displaced: text can be seen as image, and image can be read as text. Or can it
be experienced as though it were another medium? The presentation fuses the
corresponding text-image in the creation of something else – an analogy. It is
not narration;65 the layout of the text and its representation is secondary to the
experience of the Calligramme.
Sports et divertissements offers a title worthy of a fashion magazine and brings
with it a new element in the form of its musical contribution, making for a unique
edition on the one hand and an artistic document to challenge the interart aesthetic
(namely to set music, text and image side by side without directions on how to
view the product) on the other. As Davis reveals, the position of Sports within the
French ladies’ fashion magazine culture provides a context regarded for its high-
quality, luxurious and limited edition volumes. She explores Sports in its fashion
context, charting the fashion magazines and their impact and similarity with the
art work of Sports. The resulting analysis reads a cultural discourse founded in
fashion. Man Ray distinguished Satie from his contemporaries by noting that
he was a musician ‘with eyes’,66 suggesting the importance of the audio-visual
interaction in Satie’s work.
Like Apollinaire’s Lettre-Océan, water is one of many themes in Sports: Le
Bain de mer, Le Water-chute and La Pêche are case studies below.
Le Bain de mer
Le Bain de mer (11 April 1914) can be read as a musical-visual depiction of the
shape of waves. The visual correspondence is set up through the ascending and
descending arpeggios spanning two octaves throughout the piece. The arpeggios
descend by a semitone at the point where Satie writes: ‘Don’t sit down at the
bottom.’67 The mimetic music-text correspondence enforces the shape of the 1914
image in which the couple are stood in the sea. Their location is an illusion as the
waves are formed from limbs. A knee, a foot, a hand and a hat can be seen to their
right. The spectator’s perspective is displaced by various means: first, the limbs
65
66
As explored by Simon Shaw-Miller in Chapter 5 of this volume.
67
Satie, Sports, Harvard University, Typ. 915.14.7700, sheet 22: ‘Ne vous asseyez
pas dans le fond.’
Figure 6.1 Le Bain de mer, Satie’s score. Typ 915.14.7700, Houghton Library,
Harvard University
personify the ocean; second, the static, central place of the couple positions the
water as though it were a boat holding them.
The brutality of the ocean in the 1914 etching is in stark contrast to the angular,
two-dimensional perspective of Martin’s 1922 pochoir. The green tones of the water
and the pink swimsuit offer a calm tone. The lady dives from an unseen surface and
appears to be about to land in a small rowing boat. The image captures different
activities (diving, swimming and rowing) and superimposes them in a shared
foreground. Music likewise offers contradictions and counterpoints. In Satie’s
sketches, he drafts the piece and reorders the material: the upper system is labelled
bars 8–13, then 1–2, while the lower system is numbered bar 3–81, following on from
the previous two bars.68 There is a notable difference in the text: in the centre of the
system of bar 6 (beamed every four beats), Satie writes ‘prenez garde [be careful]’.
The third bar includes: ‘Très large, peut-être [Very wide, perhaps]’. The uncertain
text is removed in the completed version: it does not clarify the representation,
but rather allows the spectator to raise his or her own questions in correlating the
different and separately presented artistic media. Jean Roy’s discussion of Satie’s
poetry confirms the significance of such textual changes – ‘all music is a coded
68
Ms 9627(5), pp. 2–3.
Figure 6.2 Le Bain de mer, Martin’s 1914 etching. Typ 915.14.7700, Houghton
Library, Harvard University
language that one cannot understand’ – but his ‘poems give us valuable insights into
the climate of Satie’s work’.69 Some of these insights come from the intertextual
references which occur throughout Sports. For example, a reference to Debussy’s
‘La mer est plus belle’ occurs in the opening sentence ‘La mer est large’.
In his biography of Satie, Rollo Myers refers to Sports, which is: ‘On a
miniature range, perhaps; but is artistry a matter of dimensions?’70 This rhetorical
question on the scale of Sports might also be read in terms of mediating the work.
The separation of artistic methods, by the loose sheets, illustrates only the basic
dimensions of the work: a conceptual mapping of them occurs in the moment,
as they are explored. In Le Bain de mer, the spectator is encouraged to see the
ocean in the score. The removal of bar lines and time signatures lends itself to
a temporally freer experience and is comparable to Apollinaire’s removal of
punctuation. Though we may experience each piece in a non-linear fashion, the
album is divided into sections which dictates a condition for its reading (one views
the content of Le Bain de mer as a section of the whole work). Apollinaire places
an emphasis on the ‘instantaneous pictorial apprehension’.71 How long this takes,
69
Jean Roy, ‘Satie Poète’, La Revue musicale 214 (June 1952), p. 55: ‘comme toute
musique est un langage chiffré qu’on sent plus qu’on ne peut le comprendre, ces poèmes
nous donnent en outre de précieuses indications sur le climat de l’œuvre de Satie’.
70
Rollo Myers, Erik Satie (London: Dennis Dobson, 1948), p. 90.
71
Figure 6.3 Le Bain de mer, Martin’s 1922 pochoir print. Typ 915.14.7700,
Houghton Library, Harvard University
by clock time, is unimportant, as ‘during’ implies a limit to the experience. Rather,
the moment experience is dependent upon the spectators’ choices. This process is
not instantaneous as simultanism implies; in moment experience, linear time is
suspended because there is no longer a need to divide time into fragments as in
performance. A ‘telescoping of time’72 appears to take place.
Le Water-chute
Satie’s score for Le Water-chute, dated 14 April 1914, shares a visual consonance
with the 1914 image with a forte descending melodic D-minor scalic passage
which closes with a piano quaver motive (Ex. 6.1). The turn shape perpetuates
the curving water in the etching. Satie’s notebooks display various redrafts: a
problematic creation of the more complex melodic passages is evident. One such
example includes the descending scalic passage in Le Water-chute, of which he
made five attempts.73 Among the changes, the rhythm material was altered from a
quaver to a semiquaver descent.
72
Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France
1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage Books, revised edn 1968), p. 310.
73
Ms 9627(5). Orledge has explored some of these creative changes in ‘Satie’s
Approach to Composition in His Later Years (1913–24), pp. 155–79.
Martin’s 1922 image subverts the experience, placing the spectators in the
foreground through which we participate in the anticipation of the chute’s dip
into the water. The cubist regularity of the image, with demarcated waves in bold
green, teal and grey-blue colours, acts as a snapshot of a single moment within the
ride. The striking light blue and white of the sky emphasises the pastel and darker
tones of the water. The green colours are consistent with Le Bain de mer.
Example 6.1 Satie, Le Water-chute: descending scale passage
The spectator’s experience is guided, in part, by Satie’s use of multi-layered

structural-stylistic models. Le Water-chute is modelled on a waltz with a regularised
three beat (the draft is beamed in three)74 and ascending inverted chords in the left
hand, after the character of Schubert’s piano waltzes. The use of dance forms in
Satie’s work provides a given structure and metrical sense to the music, as in the
slow dance forms in the three Gnossiennes. The regular beat visually suggests a
time restriction, a hierarchical emphasis on the first beat, while the absent bar line
removes the measured emphasis and restrictive associations.
The character of the waltz is modified because of its change in territory: the waltz
is no longer placed in a formal setting, but is used to encode a reference to the waltz’s
use in music hall and popular culture. High art meets popular activities on many
levels. Davis claims that: ‘The waltz parody serves simultaneously as a reminiscence
of the past and as the basis for the musical evocation of this newest amusement.’75
Moreover, this musical specificity is at odds with the interart complexity which
the spectator navigates. The cultural codes interpreted in such a subverted context
change our understanding of the symbolic references, therefore altering the function
of the waltz. The musical reference requires the pictorial and textual cross-references
in order for it to be seen as a complete work and not a fragment.
The conceptual experience of motion is generated through our understanding
of the waltz’s emphasis on rhythmic regularity (see the opening of the piece in
Ex. 6.2). This is at odds with Satie’s own text, which tells of a stomach-churning
experience: ‘Watch out!’76 Satie supplements a narrative to the static image in
74
Ms 9627(5), pp. 4–5.
75
Davis, ‘Modernity à la mode’, p. 453.
76
Satie, Sports, Harvard University, Typ. 915.14.7700, sheet 44: ‘Attention’.
Le Water-chute, though responds, it seems, to the central female’s open-mouthed

gasp in Martin’s 1914 etching: ‘If you have a strong heart you won’t be too sick.’77
There are some striking similarities and counterpoints which offer meaningful
communication. The chute, situated to the left, towers over a brimming wave and
dipping boat, in which sit two women and two men. Acceptable attire is seen in the
high collars of the women’s dresses and hats for the men.
Example 6.2 Satie, Le Water-chute: opening
The temporal nature of music is clearly conveyed in Le Water-chute via

rhythmic regularity. Similarly, the activities presented in the images have duration
– they start and end. The nature of this publication detracts from experiencing a
temporality or grammatical structure. As Greet and Lockerbie note, Calligrammes
‘abandon[s] linear and discursive structures’,78 and in the same audio-visual
co-presented experience, Sports navigates clear from a structured concert
performance. Le Water-chute is a prime example due to its visual music, which
mirrors that of the waves in both of Martin’s images. The arts have been subjected
to a modal change as the musical score is viewed as visual art. Sports acts beyond
the usual artistic boundaries: their separation on different pages further encourages
the spectator to imagine their interactivity. Indeed, Rey asks whether the work is
for the ear or the eye.79 The moment experience will not experience each element
equally: certain features will be privileged.
La Pêche
The previous examples have focused on the people, their conversations cited in
the poetry, their images and activities. Satie chooses here to focus on the fish.
Satie contributes a symmetrical musical structure which coexists in a mimetic
relationship with his text: ‘Murmurs of the water on a stream bed’ start and finish
the narrative accompanied by a consistent water motif (Ex. 6.3).
The accompanying theme oscillates in triple quavers between tone and tritone.
Such water association bears affinity with Debussy’s use of repeating short motives
constructed of regular rhythms and alternate intervals. For example, four bars before
77
Ibid.: ‘Si vous avez le cœur solide, vous ne serez pas trop malade.’
78
Apollinaire, Calligrammes, p. 3.
79
Anne Rey, Satie (Paris: Seuil, 1995), p. 72.
Example 6.3 Satie, La Pêche: water motif
rehearsal figure 3 of the first movement of Debussy’s La Mer, ‘De l’aube à midi sur
la mer’, the meter changes to 6/8, at which point semiquavers move from a perfect
fifth to a minor third inside the fifth.80 This harmonically dissonant grounding in La
Pêche can be read to symbolise the perpetual motion of the water. The changeability
of the river is perhaps put forth by Satie’s indeterminate key. Movement is
represented by association of the activities, even though no visual detail is given to
show the water in the 1914 image. A couple stands on a small pier looking down at
a fish tail, though the image has no detail showing the water. The absence of water
in the image is completed by the music. The correspondence is founded in our visual
understanding of water’s malleable horizontal surface. This is also demonstrated in
Monet’s paintings which emphasise water, removing any shadow of buildings from
the water, leaving a surface formed from multiple brush strokes of blues, greens and
pinks, including Charing Cross Bridge, La Tamise (1903) and Le Grand Canal et
Santa Maria della Salute (1908). Alfred Cortot noted that Satie’s La Pêche produced
an ‘exact correspondence between music and the theme’.81 This, although accurate
from one perspective, produces what the poem and image cannot. The musical text,
with its motivic oscillation, is seen as an image.
The 1922 image favours a fashion pose, ‘le look’. The melodic and visual
shapes correspond in that the musical phrase is conjunct, gliding up and down;
similarly, the water ripples are drawn in a smooth, only slightly curving horizontal
line which could be compared to a musical stave. The structural similarity between
music and text projects a layer of contrast with the visual image. The tonal
ambiguity plays out the pluralistic nature of the visual image-music component of
Sports. The visual contrast of the pink, vertically hanging scarf in the centre of the
1922 image structures the visual space. Symbolic references are read between the
arts, finding correspondences in structure and implied motion. The fish themselves
are present in musical motives in the form of ascending and then descending
scalic motives, played twice and then once in parallel fourths following Satie’s
reference to ‘Arrival of a fish, of another, of two others’. However, Martin’s 1922
image displays no fish, but rather two doves. The post-war milieu might interpret
80
Claude Debussy, La Mer: trois esquisses symphoniques (Paris: Editions Durand et
Cie, 1905), pp. 5–7.
81
Alfred Cortot, ‘Le cas d’Erik Satie’, La Revue musicale 183 (April–May 1938), p.
266: ‘Dans tout ceci, concordance exacte de la musique au thème qu’elle interprète.’
these doves and the French flag as a nationalistic signal of freedom. The overt
representation of some attributes, with the deliberate separation of the arts, forms
an interesting contradiction with the interart aesthetic. Nevertheless, the many
readings allow for and demonstrate the multiple mediations of the work.
Interart Mediation
Considering the interdependency of the artistic elements, presented in such a way

as to highlight their separation, an interesting presentation of this work would be
as an art installation, in which a spectator can walk through rooms dedicated to
each movement; surrounding them would be four walls displaying the music and
text, the 1914 and 1922 images, and the title page with the small icon representing
each movement. The music could be issued via an iPod, allowing the spectator to
control his or her individual experience.82
Sports is a cultural-historical document, presented in hybrid form, with all
components forming a montage directed at the imagined conceptual enactment,
described here as a moment experience, of the various sporting and leisure
activities. Images are unable to offer the actual motion of water, which the musical
score suggests (or which can be actualised in performance). Likewise, music
cannot reveal precise physical objects. The conceptual mapping of music, image
and text is necessary to experience the work. The collective album is experienced
through a process of interpretative analogy, as Apollinaire argued in his own work,
which relies on the instantaneous taking in of the visual components. Tangible
points of significance are perceived as cross-referential, producing emergent
meanings through an intellectual thinking of the arts. Symbols act as a vehicle,
as in Baudelaire’s symbolist Correspondances, to express meaning. The stylistic
similarities or metaphorical equivalences may be read, but meaning does not
reside only in one art: the kaleidoscopic album generates meaning through the
experience of the entirety. The contradiction, counterpoint and uncertainties feed
the imagination. If all were said (or shown), there would be little for the spectator
to complete.
The simultaneous exposure to all the elements of the album, placing the three
sheets of each piece side by side, privileges its visual form. Its capacity to present
contemporary culture through a liberated framework is innovative, though it
generates further questions regarding audio-visual dichotomy, specifically when
music is visually presented in such a refined manner. The arts’ innate separation,
via artistic media and our senses, further promotes this work as an object: a
document to be interpreted in terms drawn from the many arts.
82
Such an experience is partially attempted for other works in Maisons Satie, in which
sculptures representing specific pieces are displayed while Satie’s music is broadcast in the
room. The exhibition is housed in Satie’s childhood home, Maisons Satie, 67 boulevard
Charles V, 14600 Honfleur.
A cultural interpretation of possible experiences has been outlined.

Apollinaire’s simultanism raises questions regarding how we perceive our
experience, but guides the way in which Sports might be understood. The
spectator mediates the experience with an awareness of the contextually
significant features and contemporary artistic concerns. The elitist nature of the
album, targeting the collector, ensured an audience which would have been aware
of current artistic concerns and developments. Following Satie’s challenge – to
imagine the work but not to examine its content – produces an experience of the
moment, but first one needs an awareness of the contextual cultural concerns.
Sports is a fascinating artistic matrix, representative of Satie as an integrated
artist, and, as Milhaud heralded, it resides within many contemporary artistic
movements as ‘one of the most characteristic works of the French school’.83
It is ironic that the high-market production of the album has resulted in the
mutilation of it, with music and text reproduced for pianists, and separate
versions of the album with selected images (as outlined above). The limited
number of ‘complete’ albums, containing both sets of images, propagates the
interart mystery that is the experience of Sports.
83
Darius Milhaud, Etudes (Paris: Claude Aveline, 1927), p. 42, translated in Davis,
‘Modernity à la mode’, p. 432.
Chapter 7
Parade: ballet réaliste
Christine Reynolds
On 18 May 1917, Parade: ballet réaliste was given its premiere by Serge
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. It was the
culmination of more than a year’s work by its four collaborators: Jean Cocteau
(1889–1963), a poet, novelist and would-be leading light of the avant-garde; Erik
Satie, an iconoclast who was steadfastly untouched by the Romantic music that,
even in 1917, still formed the traditional backbone of ballet; Pablo Picasso (1881–
1973), artistic genius and creator during the previous decade of cubism; and
Léonide Massine (1896–1979), a young dancer and successor as choreographer
in the Ballets Russes to the great Nijinsky. Parade was considered both puzzling
and controversial and it received some harsh, even vicious, words in the press:
‘une mystification’ wrote an anonymous reviewer in L’Intransigeant on 28 May
1917; ‘as regards the argument or the theme, I will not say a word: where there is
nothing, the critic loses his rights’ was Jean Poueigh’s pompous conclusion in Le
Carnet de la Semaine on 3 June;1 even worse was Jean d’Udine’s ‘Dung-like jest,
faecal amusement’ in Le Courrier musical.2 A more sympathetic assessment came
from the diary of Cocteau’s diplomat friend, Paul Morand, on 19 May:
Full house yesterday at the Châtelet for Parade. Scenery by Picasso, like a
travelling show, graceful music by Satie, sometimes Rimsky, sometimes dance-
hall. The Managers, cubist constructions, caused surprise. The little American
girl and the characters doing tricks had lovely costumes. Massine good, too,
as the Chinese juggler. But Cocteau’s central idea – freeing dance from its
conventions in favour of lifelike gestures and his modern themes (the cranking
of a car, photography, etc.), stylised in movement, didn’t seem quite right. Lots
of applause and a few hisses.3
1
‘De l’argument ou thème, je ne parlerai point: où il n’y a rien, le critique perd des
droits.’ In ‘Le Carnet des coulisses’. The reviews cited were all kindly supplied by Déirdre
Donnellon.
2
‘Plaisanterie stercoraire, amusement fécal.’ See ‘Couleurs, Mouvements et Sons –
Les Ballets russes en 1917’, Le courrier musical (June 1917), p. 239.
3
‘Salle comble hier au Châtelet, pour Parade. Décors de toile, genre spectacle forain,
de Picasso, une musique gracieuse de Satie, tantôt Rimsky, tantôt bastringue. Les Managers,
constructions cubistes, ont surpris. La petite fille américaine et les faiseurs de tours avaient
de charmants costumes. Massine bien aussi, en jongleur chinois. Mais l’idée centrale de
A travelling show is indeed the subject of Parade. Its setting is a street fair or ‘fête
foraine’ that had been a feature of French life for centuries and was still popular
as late as 1914. Parade, Georges Seurat’s well-known painting of 1887–8, depicts
the same scenario: a street with people watching a performer outside a ‘baraque’
(booth) trying to entice them inside to see the show. Cocteau’s characters, a Chinese
conjuror, an American girl and an acrobat, were stalwarts of travelling fairs.4 When
Picasso joined the project, he added an extra realist touch: that of each performer
having his or her particular Manager, as we see to the right in the Seurat painting.
When, in 1917, Cocteau added the subtitle ‘ballet réaliste’,5 he stressed the
artistic philosophy he had begun to formulate in 1910 when, aged 21, he had written
a one-act play La Patience de Pénélope. Its subtitle, ‘Mensonge’ (‘Lie’), indicated
even then his belief that theatre is, by its very nature, an artificial experience, a point
of view at odds with what Parisian audiences had come to expect. They would have
agreed with the playwright Henri Bataille: ‘The main point [of the theatre] is to
give the spectator, through his senses, a more penetrating and more vivid view of
life.’6 La Patience de Pénélope required the audience to dress in ‘costume antique,
grec ou romain’,7 emphasising the theatricality of the occasion and requiring their
involvement in the performance. Cocteau wanted to give a real theatrical experience.
The discussion about realism in the arts had begun in the 1820s in France.
Victor Hugo soon contributed, arguing in the preface to his play Cromwell (1827)
that ‘everything that is in nature is in art’, a point of view that paved the way,
in the revolutionary times of nineteenth-century France, for the dominance of
ordinary people as artistic subjects. The writer Emile Zola’s vivid description of
drunkenness (L’Assommoir), prostitution (Nana) and incest (La Curée) amongst
others held up a dark mirror to the Second Empire society of 1852–70. Gustave
Courbet’s painting L’Enterrement à Ornans (1849) showed village people on a
massive canvas measuring 314 cm by 663 cm, a size traditionally reserved for
historical or mythological subjects. However, this revolution brought in its wake
a problem for the artist: how to challenge the imagination and how to take the
public beyond the mere appearances of everyday life. As early as the 1840s, the
poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire foresaw that ‘in the course of time [the
Cocteau de se dégager des poncifs de la danse pour grouper une série de gestes de la vie,
et ses thèmes modernes (mise en marche d’une auto, photographie, etc.) stylisés dans du
mouvement, n’a pas paru tout à fait au point. Beaucoup d’applaudissements et quelques
sifflets.’ Paul Morand, Journal d’un attaché d’ambassade 1916–17 (Paris: Gallimard,
1996), p. 243.
4
As Deborah Menaker Rothschild points out in Picasso’s ‘Parade’ (London:
Sotheby’s Publications, 1991).
5
On pp. 144 and 145 of Cocteau’s Roman notebook, dated Turin 1917. It is catalogued
as Pièce 24 of the Fonds Kochno in the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Paris.
6
Cited by Barrett H. Clark in Contemporary French Dramatists (Cincinnati: Stewart
& Kidd, 1916), p. 43.
7
See Claude Arnaud, Jean Cocteau (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), p. 773, n. 51.
Parade: ballet réaliste 139
public would] have singularly diminished its faculties of judging and of feeling
what are among the most ethereal and immaterial aspects of creation’.8 Yet when
the Symbolist poets tried to be ‘ethereal and immaterial’, they were accused of
ignoring the everyday.9 Artists were faced with a difficult task. Even in the 1920s,
Cocteau still bemoaned the fact that the public ‘is challenged as little as possible
in understanding a higher realism’, whatever that meant.10
A series of fortuitous meetings and influences during 1913 and 1914 helped
the young Cocteau to refine the artistic philosophy that would lead to Parade.
In June 1913, the Russian actor turned metteur-en-scène Vsevolod Meyerhold
visited Paris to work on the play La Pisanelle for Ida Rubinstein’s company.
According to the ballet critic André Levinson, Cocteau attended the rehearsals
and saw Meyerhold’s skills in action.11 Meyerhold’s central tenet was that
theatre should return to the ‘fairground booth principle’, to the purely theatrical
traditions of vaudeville theatre. In his essay of 1912, ‘The Fairground Booth’,
Meyerhold said that ‘the public expects invention, play-acting and skill. But
what it gets is either life or a slavish imitation of life’.12 Meyerhold promoted an
interactive experience between the audience and the actors, one that included the
grotesque (an incongruous element to jolt the people out of their complacency),
movement and the use of mask, that is, of instant recognition of a character, as in
the commedia dell’arte. Cocteau’s swift reaction was to write on 30 August 1913
to the impresario Gabriel Astruc, outlining his intention to stage Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Le Songe d’une nuit d’été) ‘avec une tentative de
mise en scène et d’interprétation nouvelles’ (‘with an attempt at a new production
and interpretation’).13
Coincidentally, on 29 September 1913 the highly influential Il Teatro di Varietà
(called Le Music Hall in French) was published by the Futurist painter Filippo
Marinetti, criticising contemporary theatre ‘because it vacillates stupidly between
historical reconstruction … and photographic reproduction of our daily life’.14
8
‘Au bout d’un certain temps [aurait] singulièrement diminué la faculté de juger et
de sentir ce qu’il y a de plus éthéré et de plus immatériel.’ Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres
completes, vol. II (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1976), p. 619.
9
See Henri Régnier, ‘Poètes d’aujourd’hui et poésie de demain’, Mercure de
France128 (August 1900), p. 349.
10
‘Est donc peu exercé que possible à comprendre un réalisme supérieur.’ ‘La
Jeunesse et le scandale’ in Jean Cocteau, Œuvres complètes, vol. IX (Lausanne: Marguerat,
1950), p. 327. These words refer to his play of 1921, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel.
11
See ‘Le ballet de Jean Cocteau’, Comœdia (10 June 1924), p. 5.
12
See Edward Braun (ed.), Meyerhold on Theatre (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 124.
13
For information about this project, see Olivia Mattis’ excellent article ‘Theater
as Circus: A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Library Chronicle of the University of Texas at
Austin 23/4 (1993), pp. 41–77.
14
See R.W. Flint, Marinetti, Selected Writings (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972),
pp. 116ff.
Marinetti praises the ‘Variety Theatre’ for its ‘imaginative astonishment’, ‘delicious,
impalpable ironies’, ‘dynamism of form and colour (simultaneous movement of
jugglers, ballerinas, gymnasts)’ and for the way in which it ‘seeks the audience’s
collaboration’.15 The interest in movement reflected the influence of Emile Jaques-
Dalcroze, which had swept through Europe during the preceding few years. In 1911
he had met Diaghilev and Nijinsky. In 1913 he had told Stravinsky, Diaghilev’s
protégé, that ‘you hold in your hands the future of the dance’. No surprise, then, that
in the winter of 1913 Cocteau attended the newly opened school of eurhythmics
started by his friend, Paul Thévenaz, one of Dalcroze’s pupils. And by 4 February
1914, Cocteau had dreamed up David, the doomed forerunner of Parade, and had
earmarked his collaborators as Stravinsky and Thévenaz.
Although David was never performed, it demonstrates a major step in
Cocteau’s thinking before Parade.16 It too was to be a ‘Parade en trois tours’
(‘in three parts’), in which a voice directly addressed the audience (‘Come in
ladies and gentlemen! Come inside – join us! In the back! Inside!’)17 with the
same fairground patter and setting as Parade. This acted as a mask, instantly
recognisable, and the patter provided the interaction with the audience. Cocteau’s
somewhat heavy-handed message in David was that the triumph of art over
philistinism could only be seen by making the effort to go inside the booth. And
his text, overly esoteric, underlined that accessing worthwhile art was difficult
(‘Come into the heart of our hard stone’).18
Cocteau’s disappointment when David failed to materialise was tempered
by his discovery of the cubists, thanks to an introduction in 1914 to the painter
Albert Gleizes. Akin to a Damascene experience, it would eventually lead Cocteau
to Picasso and Parade, via a renewed but unsuccessful effort to stage Le Songe
in which Cocteau showed his grasp of Meyerhold’s ‘grotesque’ and Marinetti’s
‘ironies’. It was to be staged in the Cirque Médrano in Montmartre, with actors and
clowns performing together, a situation so unusual that, according to Cocteau, the
actors ‘refused to interact with the clowns’ during the rehearsals in early 1915.19 In
addition, Cocteau made Shakespeare’s characters topical (Titania was to be a Red
Cross nurse, for example). He asked the cubists Albert Gleizes and André Lhote
to work on the costumes and scenery, ‘Picasso [being] ill’, demonstrating how
high he was now setting his sights. And as musical director he chose the composer
Edgard Varèse, who in turn enlisted Satie and others to write incidental music, thus
ensuring that the music was both modern and French. Although the project came
to nothing, Cocteau was ready artistically for Parade.
15
Ibid.
16
There are four David notebooks, all in the Carlton Lake Collection in the Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
17
‘Entrez Mesdames et Messieurs! Entrez dedans – entrez chez nous! Au verso! A
l’intérieur!’
18
‘Entrez au cœur de notre dur caillou.’
19
Mattis, ‘Theater as Circus’, p. 77.
Cocteau never heard Satie’s completed Cinq Grimaces for Le Songe, and
the two met only in October 1915, through the artist Valentine Gross. Cocteau
heard Satie’s music for the first time at the soirée Satie-Ravel on 18 April 1916
at the Salle Huyghens. He was so impressed that he asked Satie to collaborate
on Parade and by 1 May had sent Satie his ideas. Thus, the Salle Huyghens was
important, as we shall see. During the summer of 1916, Cocteau managed to
persuade Picasso to join the project. In August Picasso agreed and on 5 September
Cocteau, full of optimism, wrote to Valentine Gross: ‘I believe Parade to be a
kind of renewal of the theatre and not a mere opportunity for music.’20
Cocteau’s characters and setting acted as an instantly recognisable mask. To
enhance this, Cocteau wanted Satie’s score to include sounds from the fair, and
to this effect a sheet of paper in Satie’s hand21 lists the various noises: sirens,
a typewriter, a steam engine, an electric bell, a dynamo, revolver shots and a
gong, amongst others. Satie’s letters22 of 24 and 29 March 1917 to Cocteau, at
rehearsals in Rome, urged him to be more precise about the placement of the
noises before the copying-out of the orchestral score. In the event, however,
‘material difficulties (amongst other things lack of compressed air) robbed us of
dynamo, Morse machine, sirens, express train, aeroplane. We could hardly hear
the typewriters’.23 This was just one of the disappointments which Cocteau had
to bear.
The other two concerned the texts. As in David, Cocteau wanted to include a
vocal part that emanated from the fairground booth, emphasising a harsher view
of the show inside. In Part 1, Le Chinois, this is brutal: ‘they put out his eyes,
pulled out his tongue’ (‘Ils lui crevèrent les yeux, lui arrachèrent la langue’).24
In Part 2, L’Américaine, it concerns the sinking of the Titanic, an unhappy
reminder for the well-to-do audience of 1917, no doubt as Cocteau intended. The
Koch score shows that all vocal parts had the ‘paroles supprimées’ (‘words cut
out’). Cocteau had also planned a spoken text to mimic the Managers’ fairground
patter, to be shouted through a megaphone from the orchestra pit, but this too
was abandoned, as Cocteau explained in ‘La Collaboration de Parade’:
20
University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre (Carlton
Lake Collection).
21
BNF 9677(5).
22
For the text of Satie’s correspondence, see Ornella Volta (ed.), Erik Satie:
Correspondance presque complète (Paris: IMEC, 2000), pp. 284 and 285.
23
‘Difficultés matérielles (suppression de l’air comprimé entre autres) nous ont privé
de dynamo, appareil Morse, sirènes, express, l’aéroplane. A peine pûmes-nous entendre
les machines à écrire.’ Jean Cocteau, ‘La Collaboration de Parade’, Nord-Sud (June–July
1917), pp. 29–31.
24
See the score taken to rehearsals in Rome. It is in the Frederick R. Koch Collection
in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. I shall refer to it in
the text as the Koch score.
I realised that one voice alone, even amplified, for one of Picasso’s managers,
was inappropriate, was intolerably unbalanced. It would have needed three
voices per manager … At that point I substituted for the voices the rhythm of
feet in the silence.25
Cocteau’s letter to Guillaume Apollinaire at the end of April or the beginning of

May 1917 shows that this was a last-minute decision: ‘I don’t have a minute since
we met and moreover I have to devise and construct machines to amplify the sound
for Parade.’26 These disappointments considerably weakened Cocteau’s artistic
message, causing him to comment much later that Parade was just ‘a skylight
opened onto what contemporary theatre should be’.27
Satie set to work in May 1916 on what appeared to be an overture to precede
the entrance of the Chinese Conjuror. It appears in the short score labelled ‘I
Le Chinois’ (BNF 9602(1)), copied out some months after the beginning of the
project, but before November 1916, when a Prélude was specially composed to
open the ballet. In the short score Satie writes after 10 bars ‘Rideau (du Théâtre)’
(‘(Theatre) Curtain’), indicating where the curtain would rise, then, at bar 23 in
red ink, ‘2d rideau’. This is an acknowledgement of the input of Picasso, who
would indeed paint a second (front) curtain. As we shall see, Satie’s compositional
process falls into two distinct periods: from the beginning of May 1916 to
early September, when Picasso began to make his presence felt; and from early
September to 12 January 1917, when the score for the première was complete
apart from the orchestration. Throughout, Satie retained Cocteau’s tripartite
framework of Le Chinois, L’Américaine and Acrobate, which eventually became
Le Prestidigitateur Chinois, La Petite Fille Américaine and Acrobates. These
three parts expanded to six by May 1917, and by May 1919 to seven for the ballet
and eight for a concert performance.
Satie took considerable trouble with the lively overture music, trying out
different themes, accompaniments, tempi and time signatures (in BNF 9603(3)).
For the Conjuror’s music, he sketched out a Danse macabre-like theme and a
rambling 32-bar melody with an accompanying text, presumably taken from
Cocteau’s notes: ‘The conjuror puts an egg under a silver dome. He makes several
mysterious movements and lifts up the dome: the egg is transformed into a calf’s
25
Cocteau, ‘La Collaboration de Parade’, pp. 29–31: ‘je constatai qu’une seule
voix, même amplifiée, au service d’un des managers de Picasso, choquait, constituait une
faute d’équilibre insupportable. Il eut fallu trois timbres par manager .. C’est alors que je
substituai aux voix le rythme des pieds dans le silence’.
26
‘Je n’ai pas une minute depuis notre rencontre et en plus il faut que j’invente et
construise des machines à amplifier le son pour la parade.’ Pierre Caizergues and Michel
Decaudin (eds), Correspondance Jean Cocteau/Guillaume Apollinaire (Paris: Jean Michel
Place, 2001), p. 33.
27
‘Une lucarne ouverte sur ce que devrait être le théâtre contemporain.’ Jean Cocteau,
Le Coq et l’Arlequin: notes autour de la musique (Paris: Stock, 1979), p. 30.
head.’28 Musically, this is very different from the final version of Part 1. In fact,
the remainder of this notebook (BNF 9585) is empty, suggesting that it was at this
point that Satie abandoned Parade for other things, only resuming his work at the
beginning of August.
To complete Part 1, Satie used two new sketchbooks: BNF 9603(5) and the
first three pages of BNF 9672. Page 1 of the first sketchbook shows the harmonic
series beginning on the fundamental note F together with the words ‘Flaques,
Jets, Girations’ (‘Puddles, Gushes, Gyrations’) as shown in Ex. 7.1. Taken by
themselves, the words mean little, but the fact that they are echoed in the ‘Flaques,
Trépidations, Géométrie’ (‘Puddles, Flickers, Geometry’) of the slightly later BNF
9672 indicates that they and the harmonic series are relevant to Parade. In fact,
the C, E flat, F is the only reference to the pentatonic motif of the Conjuror’s
theme. Pages 10–11 of BNF 9603(5) has two sketches for the short ‘Roue de la
loterie’ music (‘Wheel of fortune’) that links the introduction with the Conjuror’s
entrance. More importantly, however, pp. 18–19 of the same sketchbook show
the vocal section, which is meant to emanate from a box, of Le Chinois followed
immediately by the opening of Part 2, L’Américaine. Cocteau wrote to Valentine
Gross on 31 August 1916 that Part 1 was finished, describing its ending as follows:
‘There is a huge silence and the box sings! “They put out his eyes, they tore out
his tongue.” The Chinaman goes off and the little [American] girl comes on to
the sound of a typewriter orchestra.’29 The point here is that Cocteau makes no
mention of the repeat of the ‘Roue de la Loterie’ music or of the Conjuror’s opening
pentatonic music, which, in the final version, both follow the vocal section to
round off Part 1. One has to assume that these were not yet envisaged.
Example 7.1 A sketch for Parade from the end of August 1916 (BNF 9603(5),
p. 1)
Sketchbook evidence shows that Part 1, without the repeats, is based on the
Golden Section. Satie was fastidious about numbering his sketches, and in BNF
9602(1), the short score of Part 1, the end of the vocal section, on p. 18, is marked
‘268’. This is the number of beats from where the introductory music begins,
showing that where the music is in duple time Satie has counted two beats per bar,
but for triple time he has counted only one beat per bar. Courtney Adams shows
28
‘Le prestidigitateur met un œuf sous une cloche d’argent. Il fait plusieurs passes
mystérieuses & soulève la cloche: l’œuf est mué en tête de veau.’
29
‘Il y a un énorme silence et la boîte chante! “Ils lui crevèrent les yeux, lui arrachèrent
la langue.” Le chinois sort et la petite fille entre sur un orchestre de machine à écrire.’ Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
that Satie’s works based on the Golden Section ‘cluster within two periods – early
(1887–92) and late (1914–19)’.30 She also points out that every three-movement
work for solo piano between August 1914 and October 1919 was constructed
using the Golden Section (except the Sonatine bureaucratique, whose form was
already fixed). Since Satie was planning a three-movement ballet, there is a very
strong chance that he would have favoured this kind of construction.
A composition based on the Golden Section is characterised by its marking of
‘milestones’ in the music. In Part 1, the introduction and the ‘Roue de la loterie’
link end at beat 68, before the Conjuror enters. This suggests the possibility that
the milestones will be marked out using multiples of 34, a Fibonacci number,
the Fibonacci series being popular with composers in this type of construction.31
Beat 104 marks the end of the section before the very long second pentatonic
section begins (34 x 3 = 102); beat 174 marks the beat before the start of the
third pentatonic section (34 x 5 = 170); and at beat 268, Part 1 originally ends
after the vocal section (34 x 8 = 272). This system has a very pleasing logic
to it, especially as the multipliers of 34 (that is, 2, 3, 5 and 8) are themselves
Fibonacci numbers.
The first meeting with Picasso about Parade took place on 2 September. By 5
September, Satie told his friend Henri-Pierre Roché that ‘Picasso is astounding’
(‘Picasso est épatant’), and by 14 September, he told Cocteau that ‘Picasso has
unusual and new ideas for “Parade”’ (‘Picasso a des idées curieuses et nouvelles
pour “Parade”’). We can only guess that these ideas included the invention of the
Managers as well as the conversion of Part 2, L’Américaine, into a representation
of cinema. Indeed, this would have been appropriate since, before the construction
of cinemas, the fêtes foraines were instrumental in bringing film to the public.
But from the evidence of p. 4 of BNF 9672, it would seem that Picasso also had
a more direct input into the structure of the music, although he may not have
been aware of it. The ‘Flaques, Jets, Girations’ of BNF 9603(5) now give way to
‘Flaques, Trépidations, Géométrie’ written above the following words: ‘C Sphère
Cube Cylindre.’ In this context, the C must refer to the artist Cézanne, since Satie’s
words paraphrase the artist’s famous dictum: ‘treat nature by means of the cylinder,
the sphere, the cone’.32 This geometricisation, as the art historian Herbert Read has
said, was Cézanne’s way of pinning down reality.33 It would also be Satie’s.
30
Courtney Adams, ‘Erik Satie and Golden Section Analysis’, Music & Letters 77/2
(1996), pp. 242–52.
31
The Fibonacci series is as follows: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377,
610, 987, etc.
32
‘Traiter la nature par le cylindre, la sphère, le cône.’ This was written in a letter
to the painter Emile Bernard on 15 April 1904, but was not published until 16 October
1907, after Cézanne’s death, in Mercure de France LXX/248 (1907), p. 617, no doubt
where Picasso and Satie would first have seen the idea. The English translation is in Charles
Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 37.
33
Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art (London: Faber, 1969), p. 156.
Cézanne was a hugely influential figure for the cubists and, it would seem, for
Satie too. In 1891 he advised Debussy: ‘Why not use the means of representation
demonstrated by Claude Monet, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc.? Why not transpose
these means musically?’34 Satie’s reinterpretation of Cézanne in BNF 9672 shows
him on the threshold of a new musical challenge: that of recreating a sphere-like
structure, a cube-like structure and a cylinder-like structure in Parade. It is my view
that he implemented the first of these when he introduced circularity into Part 1 by
inserting after the vocal section a repeat of the ‘Roue de la Loterie’ link followed
by the Conjuror’s memorable fortissimo pentatonic opening music. Because these
appear in the same order as when the audience first heard them, they suggest that
the ‘parade’ of Part 1 will begin again, as in a real street fair. This idea echoes what
Picasso had done in his famous painting of 1911–12, Ma Jolie (in the Museum of
Modern Art in New York). The words ‘ma jolie’ (‘my pretty one’), painted on the
canvas, are taken from the contemporary popular song, ‘O Manon, ma jolie, mon
cœur te dit bonjour’. It was a cubist way of forcing the viewer to interact.
The circular device of Part 1 was in place by the time Satie wrote out the short
score in BNF 9602(1) and would also be used in Parts 2 and 3, with the same
effect. But Satie’s masterstroke lay in the reuse, after Part 3, of the introductory
music that had originally opened the ballet. The effect was to make one think that
the whole show was starting again. Subsequently called Suprême Effort et Chute
des Managers (Supreme Effort and Downfall of the Managers), it first appears on
p. 18 of BNF 9303(1) and can be dated to January 1917.
Part 2, originally called L’Américaine and begun, as we saw, before Picasso
joined Parade, became a cubist tour de force following the artist’s input. Its main
landmarks are an 8-bar introduction, a 48-bar Ragtime and Trio section, a wave
section and a vocal part that is followed by a repeat of the 8-bar introduction.
These are separated by short snatches of infill material that include a couple of
ragtime snippets, a whole-tone section, some scales and a variety of ostinati. The
sketchbooks are surprisingly detailed and show how Satie’s original intentions
were to make Part 2 an overall length of approximately 384 beats. The printed
piano duet version is only 340 beats, whereas the sketchbooks show an overall
length of 388 beats that surprisingly include added ostinati that appear to have no
valid aesthetic purpose.
Mathematically, 384 represents the total surface area of a cube whose six faces
measure 8 x 8 square units (8 x 8 x 6 = 384). But a cube with these dimensions can
also be subdivided into 8 smaller cubes each with a total surface area of 96 units,
with each of its six faces measuring 4 x 4 square units (4 x 4 x 6 = 96). It is the
34
‘Pourquoi ne pas se servir des moyens représentatives que nous exposaient Claude
Monet, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, etc.? Pourquoi ne pas transposer musicalement ces
moyens?’ See Ornella Volta (ed.), Erik Satie: Ecrits (Paris: Champ-Libre, 1977), p. 69.
Emile Bernard wrote one of the first ‘hommages’ to Cézanne in 1889. Under the general
title Hommes d’aujourd’hui, it was called ‘Paul Cézanne’ and was published by Vannier,
19 quai St. Michel.
number 96 that occurs in each of the landmarks in Part 2, all of which, with the
exception of the 8-bar introduction, were composed after Picasso’s involvement.
The opening of Part 2 first appeared on p. 19 of BNF 9603(5) by the end of
August, as we saw from Cocteau’s letter to Valentine Gross. Each quaver beat
then consisted of two semiquavers together with a three-note quaver chord, giving
five notes per beat (see Ex. 7.2). After Picasso’s involvement, this was changed
to triplet semiquavers underpinning the three-note chord to give a dual effect:
to imitate the ‘trépidations’ or ‘flickers’ of the cinema, but also to increase the
number of notes in this passage to 192 (there are 32 quaver beats each with six
notes, giving a total of 192 or 96 x 2).35
Example 7.2 The original opening of Part 2 of Parade, showing semiquavers

instead of sextuplets (BNF 9603(5), p. 19)
Satie turned his attention to the wave section next. The wave first consisted of
32 notes, 16 ascending and 16 descending set out in a perfect curve reminiscent of
the first half of a sine wave (BNF 9672, p. 6). This was changed (on pp. 8–9) to 24
ascending and 24 descending notes. In the Koch score the 48 notes are doubled in
the Primo part, as in the published piano duet version, to give a total of 96 notes
for the wave. The underlying ostinato is not included in this number. It is the wave
that Satie highlights and we shall come to the reason for this.
The vocal part is perhaps the most intriguing of the landmarks. Satie’s first
thought, on p. 7 of BNF 9603(4), was to have 16 bars of ostinato, the middle eight
of which underpin the vocal part. Each bar’s ostinato has eight notes, making a
total of 128 notes (16 x 8). Satie then adds the vocal part, ‘Tic Tic Tic Le Titanic
s’enfonce dans la mer’.36 Because the ‘e’ of ‘s’enfonce’ is pronounced in French,
the melody has 13 syllables (and therefore 13 notes). The sketch indicates that
these should be doubled, surprisingly well above any voice’s range, adding 26
notes in all to make a total of 154. Then as an afterthought a further four bars of
ostinato are added (32 notes) after the original double bar of the sketch to give a
new total of 186. Finally, in order to create a further three syllables (three notes),
Satie adds ‘allumé’ (‘lit up’) to the vocal line which, when doubled, adds six more
notes to make a final total of 192 notes (96 x 2).
The Ragtime du paquebot is a self-contained piece of 96 minim beats (with
a 2/2 time signature) that falls into two distinct halves of 48 beats each: the
35
Except that the last group of the triplet semiquavers has been shortened to a quaver
and a rest.
36
‘Tic Tic Tic The Titanic goes down into the sea.’
Ragtime itself, then the Trio and shortened reprise of the Ragtime. Nancy Perloff37
and others have shown that Satie based this on the song That Mysterious Rag
by Irving Berlin and Ted Snyder. Satie wrote the Ragtime and Trio after all the
other landmarks of Part 2 were in place. It was a ready-made piece of music and
therefore was relatively easy to manipulate. The fact that it was a ‘ready-made’ is
also allied to the cubist practice that inserted newspaper articles and other non-
painted items onto the canvas. In fact, Satie referred to it as ‘Canevas-Rag’ in
his letter of 25 October to Valentine Gross. His first thought, in pp. 8–10 of BNF
9603(4), was to have a four-bar introduction followed by a 22-bar melody (giving
a possible 52 beats). In the event, however, he dispensed with the introduction
and inserted two extra bars of melody to create the 24 bars (48 beats) that form
the finished version of the first half. The Ragtime inverts the order of the original
model: Satie’s Reprise was Berlin’s original Introduction, his Trio was Berlin’s
verse and his Ragtime was Berlin’s original Chorus. Satie omitted Berlin’s ‘Till
ready’ bars preceding the Verse, as well as the repeats of the Chorus.
In the light of the structure of Part 2, Satie’s claim in 1912 to be a
‘phonométrographe’ (a ‘sound-measurer’) seems perfectly logical. Referring to his
earlier works Le Fils des étoiles (1891), Trois morceaux en forme de poire (1903),
En habit de cheval (1911) and the Sarabandes (1887), he wrote: ‘one sees that no
musical idea presided over the creation of these works. It’s scientific thought that
dominates’.38 This is nowhere clearer than in his treatment of the wave in Part 2 of
Parade. The fact that Satie tackled this early on in his sketches for Part 2 shows
its importance, and the original 32 notes, labelled ‘Vague’ (‘Wave’), show what
any mathematician or physicist would instantly recognise as the first half of a sine
wave. When more notes are inserted, Satie retains a perfect wave shape, changing
the clef to accommodate the extra notes. It is the visual effect that is important.
There is a point of comparison here with Le Bain de mer (Sea-bathing), one of
Satie’s Sports et divertissements of 1914 (only published, however, in 1923). Here
the wave-like shapes follow Satie’s written commentary: ‘La mer … est assez
profonde … Voici de bonnes vieilles vagues’ (‘The sea … is quite deep … Here
are some good old waves’).
So why did Satie choose to include what appears to be such a rare example
of musical realism in Parade? The wave is a reference to the scientist Christiaan
Huyghens (1629–95), whose greatest achievement was his wave theory of light,
first discovered in 1678. As physicists know, the wave theory applies to light and
37
Nancy Perloff, ‘Art and the Everyday: The Impact of Parisian Popular Entertainment
on Satie, Milhaud, Poulenc and Auric’, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1986.
Published as Nancy Perloff, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle
of Erik Satie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
38
In an article ‘Ce que je suis’ (‘What I am’) in ‘Mémoires d’un amnésique’, Revue
musicale SIM 4 (1912), p. 69, cited by Volta (ed.) in Ecrits, p. 19: ‘on perçoit qu’aucune
idée musicale n’a présidé à la construction de ces œuvres. C’est la pensée scientifique qui
domine’.
sound. Huyghens was immortalised in Paris by the naming of rue Huyghens off
the Boulevard Raspail in Montparnasse, the artistic hub of Paris in 1916–17. At
number 6 rue Huyghens was a studio that in 1916 was opened as a concert and
exhibition venue by its owner, the Swiss painter Emile Lejeune. It became the
Salle Huyghens, where, as discussed earlier, Cocteau first heard Satie’s music.
Later, in November that same year, the first exhibition of the Société Lyre et
Palette was also held at the Salle Huyghens. Taking part were the painters
Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Ortiz de Zarate and Moïse Kisling. I believe that
Satie used the wave as a covert reference to the place that in April had instigated
the ballet. But he may also have known at the time of the wave’s composition
(September–October 1916) that Picasso would soon be exhibiting at the Salle
Huyghens which would therefore unite the three collaborators. It is another
example of cubist realism.
During the eight bars of the pause that follow the sketch of the wave section,
the words ‘Sans Fil’ (‘Wireless’) are inserted. Once again, Satie indicates that
scientific discoveries underpin his musical references. Guglielmo Marconi had
invented radio telegraphy in 1896 and in 1901 he succeeded in transmitting the
letter S in Morse code from Cornwall to St John’s, Newfoundland by wireless
communication. This event caused a sensation. It was not until 1915, however,
three years after the sinking of the Titanic, that spoken messages were successfully
transmitted by radio. Thus, the vocal ‘transmission’ in Part 2 about the sinking
of the Titanic was extremely modern, but anachronistic. The insertion of the
Morse code that was meant to replace the sung words and which can be seen in
the Koch score was more accurate in this respect. It read ‘Sinistrés au secours’
(‘Victims, help’). The letter S (shaped like a sound wave) that occurs five times
almost certainly refers to Marconi’s epoch-making transmission in 1901.
The juxtaposition of the Huyghens sound wave and the Marconi wireless
communication shows Satie commenting additionally on the very essence of
music – of sound itself – which was not only wave-like but, thanks to the wonders
of science, could, even in Satie’s day, travel huge distances. The sounds in the
ballet mirror these old and new discoveries in their very different styles. The
Prélude that Satie would compose in November 1916 to open the ballet is a fugal
movement similar to what Huyghens would have heard in the seventeenth century.
Yet Part 2’s ragtime rhythms crossed the Atlantic when Marconi was working on
his wireless telegraphy. For Satie, sound is sound, regardless of the period. It is all
produced by waves that can be measured.
There is one more point of interest in Part 2: the use of tritones. This interval is
the symbol of a cube par excellence. It spans six semitones (echoing the six faces of
a cube), and three tones (representing the three edges that meet at each of the cube’s
four corners). It is also an augmented fourth (each face of a cube has four sides).
In Part 2 the tritone is used in numerous ways: as an ostinato; to shape a melody;
to construct a scale linking two sections (see Ex. 7.3); and as simultaneous melody
and harmony. There are over 250 tritones in Part 2, showing Satie putting this cubic
symbol into the very detail of the music.
Example 7.3 Parade, tritones used as a scale (piano duet, Ed. Salabert, 1917,
p. 9)
Part 3, Acrobates, is relatively straightforward in terms of its cylindrical

structure. The sketches show that Satie had clear aims from the start, the first
being continuity of line, which can be traced from the A in bar 1 to the A 160 bars
later. The line is sometimes on the surface of the music, sometimes in an inner
part, sometimes static in an ostinato or a pedal point, while at other times moving
quickly in a scale. Sometimes, however, the line traces a whole-tone scale, and
this is Satie’s other aim: if Part 3 is to have the properties of a cylinder, it needs
both linearity and circularity. These coincide for the first time at bar 13, when
the opening melodic A, which had been left hanging, links to C flat, D flat, E
flat, F, a line that moves in a clockwise direction round the circle of fifths before
changing direction and moving back to E flat, then D flat, B, A, G, and F in an
anti-clockwise movement. It is a graphic depiction of a complete circle and, as one
would expect in a cylinder, he does the same thing at the end of the movement,
when the opening bars are repeated. During Part 3, snatches of whole-tone scales
also accompany the line to remind us that a cylinder is circular throughout. At
bar 33 of the piano duet, for example, the line is buried in the inner part (D, C
sharp, B flat, A), but surrounding it are A, G, F, E flat, moving in an anti-clockwise
direction round the circle of fifths. Between bars 41 and 52 the line is static on
C sharp, but the accompanying ostinato is a whole-tone one (B, C sharp, F and
G). There are many such examples. The cylindrical intent is further underlined
by Satie’s instrumentation, which is particular to Part 3: the xylophone (with its
cylindrical resonators) and the ‘bouteillophone’ (‘bottlephone’), the latter marked
in BNF 9603(1), p. 12.39 The two low pedal points (E and F) between bars 77 and
104 (points d’orgue in French) are scored for organ, whose pipes, of course, are
cylindrical. In an article of 1930, Cocteau recalled the importance of the organ
notes for Satie:
For Parade, [Satie] demanded the construction of an organ with two notes …
On the eve of the performance, he made a scene, pretending that if the fragile
39
According to a letter from the conductor Ernest Ansermet to Diaghilev in November
1917, the bouteillophone was represented by a mixture of celesta and bells for a performance
in Madrid. (Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Paris, Fonds Kochno, Pièce 1).
instrument, with which the stagehands were messing about, became unplayable,
it was entirely the fault of Apollinaire and myself.40
The organ begins almost at the mid-point of the movement and lasts for 29 bars – a
considerable time.
Before beginning Part 3, Satie completed the Prélude by 12 December 1916. It
is labelled ‘Prélude du Rideau Rouge’ (‘The Red Curtain Prelude’) and Hommage
à Picasso’ (on pp. 2 and 3 of BNF 9603(1)). On p. 5 is the ‘Suite pour finir le
ballet’ (‘Suite to finish the ballet’). The Suite au Prélude du Rideau Rouge, as it
came to be known, briefly takes up the material of the Prélude before reaching
its concluding C-major chord. The Prélude and Suite were heard as the audience
contemplated Picasso’s front curtain. The original introductory music was now
hijacked for the appearance of the first Manager.
On the face of it, Parade, with its many disparate sections, seems to lack an
overall unity, but it is in fact a masterly demonstration of a new way of writing
that remains true to music’s most basic constituent, the harmonic series that Satie
had set out in BNF 9603(5). Just as Cocteau’s aim was to return theatre to its roots,
and Picasso’s aim in cubism was to explore the reality of the two-dimensional
canvas, so Satie remained true to the harmonic series. The tonal harmony implied
by F-A-C is used in the original introductory music, in the fugal Prélude, which
opens in C, in the Suite, which ends on a firm C-major chord, and in the Ragtime
of Part 2, also in C major. The pentatonicism of C-E flat-F structures Part 1: as
the predominant harmony and as the Chinese Conjuror’s memorable motif. The
tritone (A-E flat) is embedded in Part 2. And the whole-tone harmony of E flat-F-A
expresses the circularity of the cylindrical structure of Part 3. Yet, just as cubism
took non-artistic materials such as sand, oilcloth and newspaper, and incorporated
them into painting in order to discover new truths about art, so Satie’s music also
made a virtue of non-musical qualities, turning geometry into valid tools of the
trade in order to see what the possibilities were. But, unlike the Futurists (and, to
a much lesser extent, Cocteau), whose big new idea was to turn noise into music,
Satie remained true to the elements of music.
In his artistic credo Satie wrote: ‘Do not forget that the melody is the Idea,
the outline; as much as it is the form and the subject matter of a work.’41 Unity in
Parade can be found, additionally, in the F and E that, melodically, pervade the
ballet. In Satie’s original introduction, E would have been the first note heard.
40
‘Pour Parade, [Satie] exigea la fabrication d’un orgue à deux tons ... La veille
de la représentation, il fit une scène, prétendant que si le fragile instrument, avec lequel
les machinistes s’amusaient, était devenu injouable, c’était uniquement de notre faute, à
Apollinaire et à moi.’ From ‘Deux de mes collaborateurs’, cited in Pierre Caizergues and
Josiane Mas (eds), Correspondance Jean Cocteau/Darius Milhaud (Paris: Massalia, 1999),
p. 67.
41
Satie’s full Credo is cited in English in Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer
Both F and E are returned to frequently in this section (see Ex. 7.4). In Part 1,
E is the prominent note of the Conjuror’s motif (twice held for four-and-a-half
beats and insisted on three more times). E is also the last melody note to be heard
in Part 1 and forms a link with the F and E that introduce Part 2, at the top of
the shimmering chords. E is also the first melody note of the Ragtime, whereas
in Berlin and Snyder’s original ragtime, C was the first note of the Chorus. In
Part 3, E and F are the focal points of the line and F is the first and last note of
the anti-clockwise journey round the circle of fifths. E-F-E are also the notes of
the organ part. In the Suprême Effort et Chute des Managers it is F and E that
dominate melodically. Knowing Satie’s love of and constant use of puns, it is
tempting to see him using F and E (in French, Fa and Mi) as a symbol for Famille,
no doubt how he saw the Ballets Russes collaboration. If so, it is yet another realist
device reminiscent of the cubists that became embedded in the music. These notes
are conspicuous by their absence in the Prélude and Suite. There was no need:
Picasso’s curtain depicted a family of performers.
Example 7.4 Parade, original introductory music: the fourth and final statement
of the theme (piano duet, Ed. Salabert, 1917, p. 3)
Correspondence shows that, following Satie’s request to Diaghilev in 1919 to

use Parade in a concert performance, the two men met at the Hôtel Westminster
in Paris on 18 April to discuss Satie writing an extra three minutes of music.
Satie worked quickly and Parade with its new ending was performed at the Salle
Gaveau on 11 May. The sketches for the new Choral and Final appear as ‘Parade
FIN’ (BNF 9602(4)). BNF 17677(5) contains a fair copy which indicates that in
concert performances the Final, which reprises music from Parts 1, 2 and 3, would
precede the Suite au Prélude du Rideau Rouge, whereas it would end the ballet
in theatre performances, omitting the Suite. The Choral would begin the ballet in
all performances. The first three bars of the Choral, and of the ballet after May
1919, reproduce the characteristic rhythm of the Choral from Satie’s En habit de
cheval (1911). It was Satie’s way of making a joke about the furore caused by the
appearance, in 1917, of the third Manager in the guise of a circus horse. En habit
de cheval translates as ‘dressed for riding’ or, more appropriately in this case,
‘dressed as a horse’. But this musical self-quotation is doubly relevant since En
habit de cheval was first called Divertissement (‘Amusement’).
When Cocteau approached Picasso about Parade in August 1916, the
moment could not have been more propitious. Picasso, then 34, was seeking a
new direction both in his personal and professional life. He was still grieving
over the death the previous year of his mistress Eva Gouel, and his closest
friends, Georges Braque and Guillaume Apollinaire, were at the front. On the
other hand, he was enjoying financial if not public success thanks to loyal
collectors (Gertrude Stein, for example) and dealers (especially Daniel-Henry
Kahnweiler). However, with a lack of direction in his personal life and little
further potential in cubism, his present situation was ripe for change, and indeed
Parade became a life-changing experience for him: he married Olga Koklova,
one of Diaghilev’s dancers, in July 1918; he gained an entrée into the upper
échelons of society; and, following his trip to Rome and Naples in February
1917, he could reveal his passion for the classical style that he had so far kept
hidden.42
Picasso was especially suited to Parade because, as John Richardson points
out, he had a ‘precocious taste for the theatre’.43 A drawing of 1894, done when
Picasso was only 13, is called Scene Backstage at a Theatre. From 1895 he
frequented the Quatre Gats cabaret-restaurant in Barcelona to watch Miguel
Utrillo produce plays and sketches with black-painted zinc and décor. During
his first visit to Paris in 1900, he befriended people like Oleguer Junyent, a stage
designer, and Pompeu Gener, a drama critic. Much of Picasso’s early cubist
work has a theatrical feel, with figures appearing to project forward from the
canvas as if on a stage, instead of receding in the traditional manner. The famous
Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) is an example of this technique. He loved the
circus, especially the Cirque Médrano, and from 1905 included in his paintings
the same characters and props (the circus horse, the dog belonging to the troupe,
the large chest doubling as a seat, the drum and the ball) that would appear in the
Parade front curtain (the Rideau Rouge). His interest in the commedia dell’arte
prompted him to adopt as his alter ego Harlequin, whom he placed in circus
paintings (La Famille de saltimbanques (1905)) and other contexts. As we shall
see, Harlequin was central to the Parade curtain. The cinema was another love.
Richardson refers to Picasso’s ‘private box at the local cinema, where he and
his friends were in the habit of going night after night [in 1916]’.44 Picasso’s
costume for the Little American Girl of Part 2 makes her look like Pearl White,
42
A point made by Professor Elizabeth Cowling in a lecture at the Edinburgh Festival
in 2003.
43
See John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. I (London: Pimlico, 1991), p. 41. I am
indebted to Richardson for biographical information on Picasso.
44
Ibid. p. 398.
the famous American actress who made the Perils of Pauline and the ‘Elaine’
series of films.45
The Musée Picasso in Paris has several undated sketches of theatrical material
that have been assigned to 1916–17.46 They are almost certainly Picasso’s first
thoughts for the décor of Parade, since some show characters onstage, set against
footlights and curtains (MP 1550 and 1549) and with spectators (MP 1546). Other
sketches show simply a baraque in a street, indicating a shift in thinking: the décor
no longer imitates what happens onstage, but becomes the entrance to the baraque
(MP 1564, for example). Many sketches, however, still include spectators (MP
1560 for example), as in the Seurat picture, showing that Picasso had not yet made
the artistic leap that would imply that the real audience of the Théâtre du Châtelet
were the spectators. The final décor has no painted audience.47 It retains the overall
cubist style, the baraque, the tall buildings in the street and, most importantly, the
floorboards which can be seen in MP 1566.
Picasso must soon have realised on joining the project that Cocteau had
taken no account of the Managers that traditionally introduced a parade, as in
Seurat’s painting, where one of these iconographic figures stands, with a cane
under his arm, to the right of the picture. There was a profusion of sketches for
the three Managers, but three clear ideas emerge: a Manager on horseback (MP
1581); Managers wearing giant carcases (MP 1599); and the integration of the
Managers with the décor (MP 1599). The Manager on horseback proved difficult
to achieve. The final arrangement (MP 1593) shows two dancers forming a horse
with an empty Manager carcass attached to the horse’s back. It is well known that
before the premiere, the Manager figure fell off the horse and was not reinstated
until November 1919, when Massine told Picasso that ‘the manager on the horse
was very successful and it was a lot funnier than before’.48 The carcass idea for
the French and American Managers (MP 1611) reflects the primary concern of
cubism: the dichotomy between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional.
Les demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), as we saw earlier, has a sculptural quality, but
it was not until Guitarist (1913) that Picasso truly merged painting with sculpture.
The guitarist’s body is depicted in collage and is also drawn on a two-dimensional
board, yet has protruding newspaper arms and a cardboard guitar.49 This is almost
certainly the closest parallel before Parade to the Managers, who carry on their
45
Rothschild, Picasso’s ‘Parade’ deals in detail with Picasso’s designs for the
costumes.
46
See Michèle Richet, Musée Picasso, Catalogue of the Collection, vol. II, Drawings,
Watercolours, Gouaches, Pastels (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), pp. 159, 160 and 165.
47
Pictured in Rothschild, Picasso’s ‘Parade’, p. 205.
48
‘Le manager sur le cheval est très réussi et c’est beaucoup plus drôle qu’avant.’
Musée Picasso, Paris, catalogue number A.P.C.S. 792. I am very grateful to Tatiana Massine
for permission to view Massine’s letters to Picasso.
49
Now dismantled but pictured in John Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. II (London:
Pimlico, 1996), p. 253.
giant carcases, trees, fencing, bits of buildings and so on as if they have just
stepped out of the two-dimensional décor.
The most complex and enigmatic of all Picasso’s designs for Parade is the Red
Curtain, especially as it was shown only briefly during Satie’s Prélude and Suite
au Prélude. There are just five sketches in the Musée Picasso, all but one showing
that Picasso wanted a two-part composition: on the left, a winged horse with an
équestrienne, and on the right, a group of performers gathered round a table. These
disparate groups are separated by a ladder, but the whole composition is linked by
its enveloping red curtains and a Renaissance-style landscape in the background.
The sketches leave few clues about the underlying meaning of the curtain. At
its most superficial level, the curtain depicts performers resting, watching an
équestrienne practising on a circus horse that has wings attached to its back. The
horse and the group of performers that include a harlequin, a sailor and a Moorish
figure are instantly recognisable from popular French culture.50 Yet the presence
of a winged horse enabled Picasso to open a door to a classical symbolism that
most of the audience would have failed to grasp. In Greek mythology, Pegasus
was the son of Poseidon, god of the sea, and Medusa, a moon-goddess.51 Pegasus
was loved by the muses and drank at Peirene, a never-failing spring. Born of water
and the moon, he represents the dual immortality of creative powers, which is
further emphasised by the presence of a foal. Therefore, the curtain was partly
about creativity.
On the back of the horse stands an équestrienne, a Siren-like creature, with a
girl’s face but a bird’s feathers. Sirens traditionally had a bird’s feet, but here the
feet are hidden to give an ambiguous reading. According to Graves: ‘Sirens …
were carved on funeral monuments as death angels … but [were] also credited
with erotic designs on the heroes they mourned; and since the soul was believed to
fly off in the form of a bird, were pictured … as birds of prey waiting to catch and
secure it.’ Graves says that the Sirens lived on a ‘green sepulchral island … [which]
the Latins [placed] on the Sirenusian Islands near Naples, or on Capri’.52 Picasso
visited Naples with Cocteau and Stravinsky in early 1917 and would probably
have known about this legend. As we have seen, Picasso was still mourning Eva
Gouel and there are various clues that the Siren figure represents her. Various
paintings link Eva to a bird. One is Seated Woman (Eva) Wearing a Hat Trimmed
with a White Bird (1915–16). In 1917 Eva was for Picasso a Siren-like figure,
erotic, but, as it turned out, deathly too.
Yet the Siren in Greek mythology can also look prophetically forward. By not
showing the Siren’s bird-like feet, Picasso’s équestrienne looks uncannily like a
50
See Rothschild, Picasso’s ‘Parade’, pp. 219–20 and 234.
51
See Robert Graves’ excellent two-volume The Greek Myths (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1955) for information on this and subsequent classical references.
52
See section 170.7 of Graves, The Greek Myths.
dancer from Les Sylphides,53 which formed part of the Ballets Russes season in
May 1917. Olga Koklova, whom Picasso had met and courted in Rome, was one
of its dancers. She would be the future Madame Picasso, hence the duality of the
Siren figure. As Axsom so rightly says: ‘Picasso often allowed a single shape to
evoke multiple associations and identities.’54
On the right side of the curtain, the most prominent figure, in red and black, is
Harlequin, Picasso’s alter ego. It was Apollinaire who added a mystical dimension
to Harlequin in his poem ‘Les Saltimbanques’, sent to Picasso on 1 November
1905, the year in which Picasso completed the major painting of the same name.55
The final line refers to the Harlequin and therefore to Picasso himself as ‘arlequin
trismégiste’, a pun on the mystical Hermes Trismegisthus (Thrice Great).
The performers in the curtain echo Les Saltimbanques and the prominence of
Harlequin amongst them suggests that Picasso is recalling Apollinaire’s poem and
linking Harlequin, himself and Hermes, the messenger of Olympus. Like Picasso,
Hermes was known as an inventor and a thief (a literal one in 1908 when, together
with Apollinaire, he was wrongly accused of stealing a figure from the Louvre).56
Picasso’s work is littered with subject matter stolen from a wide variety of sources:
from other artists, from contemporary life, from his own work and so on. Just as
Hermes invented the lyre, so too did Picasso invent the new artistic language of
Cubism, as if he, like Hermes, had been given a magic eye by the three Fates,
symbolising the gift of perception.
The Harlequin figure also demonstrates Picasso’s love of mysticism and the
occult. The writer and artist Max Jacob taught him astrology, palmistry and the
Tarot, and his interest deepened when he met Apollinaire in 1904 and the painter
André Derain (also a friend of Satie) in 1906. Aspects of the occult, especially the
mystical hand gestures (one hand raised and the other pointing downwards) taken
from the Magician card of the Tarot, permeate his work from 1903 (in La Vie, for
instance) and, according to John Richardson, ‘thirty years later [he] would still draw
on the Tarot in his writing as well as his painting’.57 Picasso uses the imagery of
the Tarot in the curtain, as if laying out the cards to see if Parade will be good for
him. There are many versions of the Tarot, but the Marseilles pack with its strong,
Renaissance-like imagery and primary colours corresponds to Picasso’s conception.
The Tarot represents a quest. The Harlequin figure of the curtain equates to
the Fool (the first card, unnumbered in the Tarot) who is on a journey, and the
other picture cards will reveal his fortunes. With a dog at his heels, as in both the
53
A point made by Richard Axsom in Parade: Cubism as Theater (New York and
London: Garland, 1979), p. 141.
54
Ibid., p. 160.
55
Rothschild, Picasso’s ‘Parade’ outlines the research undertaken by Theodore
Reff to establish that Apollinaire did indeed send this poem in 1905 and not, as previously
thought, in 1909. See p. 253, notes 2 and 3.
56
See Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. II, pp. 22–3.
57
Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. I, pp. 270–274.
card and the curtain, and indeed in real life, as Picasso was a fanatical dog-lover,
the central Picasso/Harlequin figure sets out to assess his future: ‘ignorant of the
dangers and pitfalls that await him, the Fool is a young traveller embarking on
life’s path, inexperienced, impulsive, carefree and careless’.58 This was certainly
Picasso’s case: ballet was a completely new venture, a puzzling choice for his
fellow painters who viewed him as foolish in this respect.
To the Fool’s right is a sailor figure, a representation of the Magician card,
numbered I. The sailor has the same hand gestures (one hand raised, the other
hanging down) as on the Tarot card and also wears the same wide-brimmed hat in
the shape of a lemniscate, or horizontal sign for infinity, that represents the idea
of new life.59 With direct reference to the colours of the Chinese Conjuror’s iconic
costume, the sailor/Magician wears a prominent red and yellow sash. But the
Magician also represents Picasso and his magical artistry, for the sash resembles
the one he wore in a self-portrait photograph of 1915–16,60 and the pipe is shown in
Cocteau’s photographs of him on 12 August 1916.61 The Magician card represents
new opportunities and gives courage to bring these to fruition.
Next to the sailor is a woman with a pointed, wide-brimmed hat and curly hair
hanging down to her shoulders. Referring to the cinematic Part 2, Picasso sets her
against a background that is square, like a cinema screen. She is like Mary Pickford
who, in her publicity photographs, often wears a hat showing her famous girlish
ringlets. But Mary Pickford, not acting but resting, would look like a woman rather
than the adolescent she played onscreen. The Tarot card La Papesse (the High
Priestess), numbered II, in which the figure stands against a backcloth and wears
an elaborate hat, symbolises the duality of a woman/child figure and represents ‘the
initiate with potential as yet unfulfilled’,62 just as Picasso was in ballet terms.
The next two characters resemble the Acrobats of Part 3, linked together with their
arms round each other. The female is bare-breasted, a reference to Lydia Lopokova
who danced the female Acrobat, ‘[refusing] to wear the body-tights because they
revealed too much of her bosom’.63 Tarot card III, the Empress, symbolises fecundity,
just as a bare-breasted woman does, and card IIII, the Emperor, who holds a sceptre
(the male Acrobat figure in the curtain holds up a chalice), is the symbol of material
wealth and status. As we have seen, Picasso’s reputation was becoming established
in 1917. The black servant, standing behind the male Acrobat figure, equates to Tarot
Card V, the Pope. This is often called the Chiron card after the wise King of the
Centaurs in Greek mythology. The male Acrobat in the curtain holds up his chalice
for wine that the servant, with his folded arms, appears to be refusing. The Centaurs
were known to have a communal wine jar. With its link to the half-man, half-horse
58
Joan Moore, The Amazing Book of Tarot (Godalming: Bramley, 1998), p. 13.
59
Juliet Sharman-Burke, Understanding the Tarot (London: Rider, 1998), p. 21.
60
Richardson, A Life of Picasso, vol. II, p. 415.
61
See Billy Kluver, A Day with Picasso (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
62
Moore, The Amazing Book of Tarot, p. 14.
63
Rothschild, Picasso’s ‘Parade’, p. 124.
Chiron figure, this card refers to the third Manager in Parade. Yet the Pope card also
implies conventionality, marriage vows and a need for outward approval – all things
that Picasso was seeking in 1917.
In the exact centre of the Curtain sits a musician, a guitarist whose black cross-
garters link him to Tarot card X, the Wheel of Fortune, which signifies a new
beginning. This is a clear reference to Satie’s music, and Picasso places a sphere
(the blue ball), a cube (the wooden chest) and a cylinder (the classical pillar) in
a triangle surrounding the group of figures. On the left side of the curtain, card
XVII, the Star, is represented by the blue ball, with its eight-pointed star, and
seven smaller stars. The Tarot card shows a naked girl pouring water into a stream.
Picasso dispenses with the girl but retains the water with the blue of the ball and
the Aquarius sign. This card brings hope, new opportunities and success.
The last card that Picasso lays out is number XXI, the World, which shows a
naked dancing woman in a garland (or mandala, the Sanskrit word for circle). In the
curtain the woman is the équestrienne, and the mandala is formed by the red curtains
to her left, the ladder to her right and the horse’s wings encircling the lower part of
her body. As Moore states: ‘The Fool has completed his journey and all his previous
trials and experiences culminate in card Twenty-one. The World indicates a spiritual
awakening; desires fulfilled, triumph. The final goal reached. Joy and a new life.
Twenty-one is a most fortunate card.’64 It is entirely fitting that the World is depicted
by the Eva/Olga/Siren figure of the équestrienne. Picasso implies that Parade will
be a way of exorcising his demons and beginning a new life.
The Red Curtain depicts an inner space enclosed by red theatre curtains,
but set against a Renaissance-type landscape that could equally represent the
outdoors. Its characters could have stepped out of the Renaissance, a time when
perspective was invented, and to underline this, Picasso’s floorboards bring to
mind the perspective in Uccello’s famous painting The Rout of San Romano.
The décor, however, is a cubistic street scene in which part of the baraque,
the indoor space, is carried on the French Manager’s carcass. Until Parade,
inside and outside spaces and Renaissance and cubist styles have been separate
worlds for Picasso. How to marry them as one artistic experience is what would
occupy him over the next few years, the dichotomy being how to represent depth
whilst being faithful to the two-dimensionality explored in the cubist period.
Indeed, Open Window at St Raphael of 1919 shows the ‘consummation of a
marriage between the Cubist revolution and Renaissance perspective’.65 Picasso
anticipates this in Parade when he links the outside and inside spaces of the
décor and the Red Curtain by the same Uccello-like floorboards. He saw himself
as a modern Uccello, reinventing perspective. Uccello means bird in Italian and
Apollinaire’s nickname for Picasso was ‘oiseau de Bénin’ (‘Benin bird’).66 As
64
Moore, The Amazing Book of Tarot, p. 24.
65
Rosalind Krauss, The Picasso Papers (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998), p. 193.
66
Olga Koklova, in a letter to Picasso of 28 May 1917, writes ‘don’t forget Olga
who loves you dearly … “The Benin bird has flown from the zoo to the Russian Ballet”’
Satie’s short Prélude was played, the audience could fleetingly contemplate the
Renaissance-like indoor scene before being hurried to the cubist space outside
the baraque.
One of Massine’s foremost contributions to Parade was his talent for mime
and strong characterisation that he had learnt in Moscow at the Imperial Theatre
School, where students performed in both ballet and theatre. When Diaghilev
asked him to join the Ballets Russes at the end of 1913, Massine had an agonising
decision to make because his acting career had become so successful. Massine’s
first appearance for Diaghilev, in La Légende de Joseph (1914), was as a dancer
not a choreographer, and shows the influence of the Muscovite Stanislavsky:
There was no doubt that the dramatic and mimetic sequences in the production
were easier for me than the dancing … I seemed to project into my acting all my
own anguish and heartbreak at having left Russia.67
In Parade it was mime rather than classical dance that dominated the ballet, as
Massine’s description of the Chinese Conjuror’s movements shows:
I marched stiffly round the stage jerking my head at each step … With an
elaborate flourish I pretended to produce an egg from my sleeve and put it in
my mouth. When I had mimed the action of swallowing it, I stretched out my
arms, slid my left leg sidewards [sic] till I was almost sitting down, and with my
left hand pretended to pull the egg from the toe of my shoe. The whole thing
took only a few minutes, but it had to be done with the most clearly defined
movements and broad mime. When I had retrieved the egg I leaped round the
stage again, then paused, puckered up my lips and pretended to breathe out fire.68
The stiffness and jerkiness of the movements, the facial expressions and the fact
that the Conjuror stood still and mimed certain actions all went against classical
ballet conventions. In Part 2 of Parade, Marie Chabelska as the Little American
Girl:
did an imitation of the shuffling walk of Charlie Chaplin, followed by a sequence

of mimed actions reminiscent of The Perils of Pauline – jumping on to a moving
train, swimming across a river, having a running fight at pistol-point, and finally
finding herself lost at sea in the tragic sinking of the Titanic.69
(‘n’oubliez pas Olga qui t’aime [sic] bien ... “L’oiseau du Bénin s’est envolé du jardin
zoologique aux Ballets Russes”’). Cited in Jean Clair and Odile Michel (eds), Picasso, The
Italian Journey 1917–1924 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998), p. 97.
67
Vicente Gabriel García-Márquez, Massine (London: Nick Hern, 1996), p. 53.
68
Léonide Massine, My Life in Ballet (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 103.
69
Ibid., p. 104.
When Marie Chabelska crossed the stage ‘in a succession of convulsive

leaps, her arms swinging widely’,70 it seemed that Massine had abandoned the
traditional ballerina’s port de bras. Yet the Acrobats in Part 3, with their pas de
deux, pirouettes, arabesques and lifts, show how eclectic his work was.71 The
Managers proved more problematic due to the gigantic carcasses hindering their
movement, so that Massine was forced to reduce the choreography to its very
essence, pure footwork. Its rhythms, written out on p. 32 of the Koch score, were
to be heard in silence.
Massine worked hard to match the ballet’s design, a feature commented on
by Apollinaire in his programme notes for Parade when he referred to ‘this
new union – for up until now stage sets and costumes on the one hand and
choreography on the other were only superficially linked’.72 This visual awareness
was partly due to the artist Mikhail Larionov who, under Diaghilev’s instructions,
had overseen Massine’s first forays into choreography.73 And for Parade, Cocteau
helped Massine, as the letter to his mother of 22 February 1917 shows: ‘Massine
wants me to show him the smallest detail and I’m inventing the roles which he
transforms there and then into choreography.’74
Massine appeared to have little influence over Satie’s music, yet it is likely that
in January 1917 he had been the driving force behind the Suprême Effort et Chute
des Managers. We know from Satie’s letter of 11 January that Massine was in Paris
and it is probable that he was involved in the discussions between Diaghilev and
Satie about this section. Massine had already shown a preference in his ballets for
exciting finales, Soleil de Nuit (1915) and Kikimora (1916) being cases in point.
His handwritten instructions on p. 46 of the Koch score show frenetic activity
by the dancers Zverev and Lopokova, who, as the two Acrobats, take three bows
each, running to front-stage each time, and ending with a bow taken together. This
happens in the space of approximately 18 seconds. Cocteau’s additional handwritten
notes indicate a cacophony of shouts from the Managers onstage.
As we have seen, Parade cast ballet in a new light, with each individual art form
being subjected to an aesthetic of renewal. Cocteau had partly realised his dream of
returning to the values of real theatre, with its interaction between the performers
and the audience, and of course, its emphasis on play-acting, on artificiality, with
70
Ibid., 104.
71
Ibid., p. 105.
72
‘Cette alliance nouvelle, car jusqu’ici les décors et les costumes d’une part, la
chorégraphie d’autre part, n’avaient entre eux qu’un lien factice.’ Guillaume Apollinaire,
‘Les Spectacles modernistes des Ballets Russes, “Parade” et l’esprit nouveau’, Excelsior
(18 May 1917), p. 5.
73
Tatiana Loguine, Gontcharova et Larionov, cinquante ans à St Germain-des-Prés
(Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), p. 107.
74
‘Massine désire que je lui montre la moindre chose et j’invente les rôles qu’il
transforme séance tenante en chorégraphie.’ Cocteau, Lettres à sa mère, vol. I 1898–1918,
ed. P. Caizergues (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), p. 296.
each fictional character coming from the long tradition of the fête foraine or the
newly invented cinema. This was the genius of Parade: a choice of characters
who appeared to be real forced the audience to question reality, the fakery of
theatre and the role of the artist who hoodwinks them in the process. The puzzled
audience of 1917 watched the Ballets Russes dancers, normally so technically
proficient and graceful, mimic with grotesque movements a set of performers that
they would have seen dozens of times already. Yet as they watched one travelling
troupe create another, they must have realised that the characters they held dear
were also imitations: the Chinese Conjurors were played by a variety of lookalikes
and the Little American Girl was just a series of intangible images on a screen. As
the audience contemplated Marie Chabelska dressed as Pearl White, they saw her
imitating Charlie Chaplin who in turn had pretended to be the little tramp. Reality
was being turned on its head. As if this were not enough, Cocteau’s risky subtitle,
ballet réaliste, brought to the French mind the upheaval and social change that
the realist arts had depicted in the nineteenth century and continued to depict in
some of the contemporary plays about war. Yet Parade was certainly not a work
of social commentary. It was first and foremost a statement about the arts that
almost as an afterthought capitalised on the nationalist feeling of 1917 to signal
a new French approach. By choosing Satie as his composer, Cocteau trumpeted a
new French simplicity in which Parade was just the starting point. Les Six were
subsequently formed, echoing the Five in Russia. Like Diaghilev’s display of
Russianness during the first years of the Ballets Russes, Cocteau’s new realism
reflected an artistic pride in France rather than the commentary on French society
and politics of an outdated nineteenth-century realism.
Chapter 8
Collaborative Works in Satie’s Last Years
Pietro Dossena
On 3 June 1923, while having lunch with Sergei Diaghilev, Satie had a sudden and
painful colic episode that forced him to leave abruptly. His subsequent message,
sent to the famous impresario some hours later to explain and apologise, ended
with a cheerful: ‘See you soon for Gounod, right?’1 As a matter of fact, during that
same lunch, Diaghilev had offered Satie an important and well-paid job: setting
to music – in the form of recitatives – the spoken sections of Charles Gounod’s
opéra comique entitled Le Médecin malgré lui (1858) in order to transform it into
an entirely sung opera. Satie probably enjoyed this idea of a stylistic pastiche, as
he spent all of the second half of 1923 working on this project – the programmed
premiere being in Monte Carlo on 5 January 1924.2 But the first months were not
easy: on 26 July, Satie confided his problems to Diaghilev: ‘I’m working on the
“Doctor”, but it’s not happening. Yes. I am angry – with myself, of course.’3 On
the same day, in a letter to Milhaud, he confirmed that ‘It’s not working’, and on 3
August he repeated to Poulenc that ‘My “Gounod” isn’t “going” very well.’4
Satie’s dissatisfaction arguably derived from a crucial doubt of a stylistic kind:
should he write à la manière de Satie or à la manière de Gounod?5 On the one hand,
making a faithful reproduction of Gounod’s style would not have easily suited
Satie’s strong artistic personality. On the other hand, a resolute intervention on
Satie’s part would have certainly shifted the centre of the work towards the avant-
1
‘A bientôt pour Gounod, n’est-ce pas ?’ (Erik Satie, Correspondance presque
complète, ed. Ornella Volta (Paris: Fayard/IMEC, 2000), p. 540 – hereafter Volta,
Correspondance). The author wishes to thank the editor for her invaluable help with the
translations of Satie’s letters into English.
2
The recitatives for Le Médecin malgré lui were part of a larger project restaging some
Gounod opéras comiques within the Festival français in Monte Carlo organised by Diaghilev
(January 1924): Diaghilev also commissioned new recitatives for La Colombe (to Poulenc)
and for Philémon et Baucis (to Auric; see Steven Moore Whiting, Satie the Bohemian: From
Cabaret to Concert Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 520, note 24).
3
“Volta, Correspondance, p. 552; ‘Je travaille au “Docteur”, mais cela ne marche
pas. Oui. Je suis furieux – contre moi, bien entendu.’
4
Ibid., pp. 552–3; ‘Ça ne va pas’; ‘Mon “Gounod” ne “marche” pas très bien’.
5
Actually a ‘Satie way’ never existed, given his fierce determination to continuously
question his musical language – and even maturity did not weaken his drive for
experimentation.
garde – thus potentially putting it out of balance. However, no intent of mockery

was hidden in Diaghilev’s commission; on the contrary, the new recitatives would
highlight the dramatic qualities of Gounod’s music, as well as the light irony of
Molière’s lively dialogues (as he was the author of the original comedy), adapted
by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré for Gounod’s opéra comique.
In order to achieve such aims, Diaghilev could not have made a better choice:
Satie must have been delighted by the humour of the libretto, and the two parallel
mediations (from Molière to Barbier and Carré, and from Gounod to Satie
himself) probably reminded him of his masterpiece Socrate, where other textual
mediations (Satie set to music Victor Cousin’s translation of Plato’s text)6 led him
to compose very personal music. Moreover, on at least one earlier occasion, he had
proved receptive to Gounod’s expressive suggestions: in 1916, in the mélodie for
voice and piano Le Chapelier, he had quoted the Chanson de Magali, drawn from
Gounod’s opera Mireille (1864).7 This quotation, which for Satie is conceptually
significant, had the sentimental expansion of the original melody interact with the
Mad Hatter’s astonishment in ascertaining that his watch ‘retarde de trois jours’
(is late – three days late).
In Le Médecin malgré lui, Satie’s primary concern was, of course, to reconcile
the new recitatives with the pre-existing music. But how could this be done? Perhaps
the composer should find a stylistic middle ground between Satie and Gounod?
Barbier and Carré’s adaptation – which was very respectful of Molière’s original
text8 – invited a discreet approach on Satie’s part as well. By mid-August 1923,
Satie seemed to have found a solution to this problem, as he said he was busy with
composition: ‘I am working … in a torrential and even storm-like manner’ (13
August); ‘I am taken with this like a devil’ (19 August).9 Another letter of 19 August
helps us to understand his point of view on the whole issue: ‘I’m “doing” Gounod as
if it were falling from the sky.’10 In other words, Satie proved himself humble enough
to tip the scales in favour of Gounod – an attitude comparable to a contemporary
architect asked to add new parts to a 65-year-old building. Satie ‘makes’ Gounod,
but, as we shall soon see, he does not completely dismiss his own identity.
According to Robert Orledge, in Le Médecin malgré lui, Satie showed ‘how
proficient he was at writing functional chromatic harmony in a nineteenth-century
6
See Pietro Dossena, ‘A la recherche du vrai Socrate’, Journal of the Royal Musical
Association 133/1 (2008), p. 17.
7
See Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), pp. 21–4.
8
Molière’s dialogues were preserved (almost unchanged) for the spoken sections; the
verses to be set to music were also closely based on Molière’s words.
9
Volta, Correspondance, p. 555; ‘Je travaille … d’une façon torrentielle & même
diluvienne’; ‘je suis pris comme un diable’.
10
Ibid., p. 556; ‘Je “fais” du Gounod comme s’il en pleuvait’. On 15 September, he
wrote to Stravinsky: ‘Je fais du Gounod – ce qui n’est pas plus bête que de faire du Ravel’
(ibid., p. 560).
Collaborative Works in Satie’s Last Years 163
style’;11 nevertheless, I cannot agree with Steven Moore Whiting that Satie’s
intervention was simply an ‘extended exercise in stylistic imitation’.12 If this were
the case, Satie’s recitatives would sound similar to those composed by Gounod
himself for his operas (notably Faust, Mireille and Roméo et Juliette). Speaking of
recitatives, Steven Huebner explains that ‘Gounod often went considerably beyond
declamation accompanied by punctuating chords in such linking sections’13 and this
is applicable to Satie’s recitatives as well, which pursue textural and instrumental
variety. But the harmonic paths, smoothly consequential in Gounod’s recitatives,14
are more nervous and sharp-cornered in those of Satie. It is true that, as Orledge
writes, ‘Satie uses the full nineteenth-century vocabulary of chromatic chords
… with perfect ease’,15 but he often deliberately dodges round the resolutions
recommended (or even allowed) in functional harmony, thus creating musical
situations that are unmistakably personal.
Case Study: Le Médecin malgré lui (from Act III, Scene 7)
On 20 September, Satie wrote to Diaghilev saying ‘I have a lot to discuss with you’
and fixed a meeting for 22 September:16 as he had already completed the first two
acts of the opera, he was probably going to talk to Diaghilev about the third – and
last – act. On 28 September, a few days after this meeting, Satie indicated in a
more precise way the passage of the opera causing most of his troubles:
I need to talk to you about Scene vii (page 42 of the libretto & page 174 of the
score). What will we do with the Andantino? And how will we deal with the flute
and bassoon ‘things’? I would like to see you about this matter. Yes. Couldn’t the
‘speech over music’ go over the Andantino? Think about it, I beg you. I will be
at the Savoy on Monday morning [1 October] at 11 o’clock (eleven). This Scene
vii is bothering me a little. You will be able to enlighten me on this topic. Yes.17
11
Robert Orledge, ‘Gounod, Satie and Diaghilev (1923–24): Le Médecin [et le
Compositeur] malgré lui’, Muziek & Wetenschap 3 (1993), p. 115.
12
13
Steven Huebner, ‘Gounod, Charles-François’, Grove Music Online, http://www.
grovemusic.com.
14
Of course, as Gounod did not set to music the spoken dialogues of any of his opéras
comiques, these remarks are merely speculative, but they are still pertinent to Gounod’s
musical language.
15
16
Volta, Correspondance, p. 562; ‘J’ai beaucoup à causer avec vous.’
17
Ibid., p. 563; ‘J’ai à vous parler de la Scène VII (page 42 du livret & page 174 de
la partition). Que faire de l’Andantino ? et comment traitons-nous les “trucs” de flûte & de
basson ? J’aimerais vous voir à ce sujet. Oui. Le “parlé sur musique” ne pourrait-il aller sur
The page of the score to which Satie is referring is reproduced in Fig. 8.1. This
page is particularly dense in dramatic indications: the flute solo and the three
interventions of the bassoon (these to be synchronized with a quick exchange
between Sganarelle and Géronte) are mentioned in Satie’s letter as ‘les “trucs”
de flûte & de basson’, but from now on our attention will be focused on the
Andantino, orchestrated by Gounod for strings only (see the bracketed abbreviation
‘Quat[uor]’). This short piece, 16 bars long, is placed after Sganarelle’s cue (Fig.
8.1), which is followed in the libretto by Lucinde’s line ‘Non, je ne suis point du
tout capable de changer de sentiment’. Lucinde’s sentence, which is not found in
Gounod’s score, was most probably spoken – not sung – as a melodrama passage
over the Andantino.
Resorting to melodrama had an important dramatic function, linked to the
plot twists – which I will summarise briefly. Sganarelle, a simple woodcutter, is
mistaken for a doctor and is called upon to cure Lucinde (Géronte’s daughter) of
her mutism. But Lucinde, in love with Léandre, is actually feigning dumbness in
order to avoid an undesired arranged marriage to a man she does not love. In this
scene of Act III, Sganarelle flings himself into a delirious parascientific disquisition
with the sole aim of distracting Géronte from Léandre’s manoeuvres. Meanwhile,
Léandre (pretending to be an apothecary assisting the renowned physician)
approaches Lucinde. Most unexpectedly, the girl verbally voices her incapacity
to change her mind – implicitly referring to her sentimental preferences. Géronte,
visibly surprised of his daughter’s sudden recovery, warmly thanks Sganarelle for
his admirable job.
The Andantino is thus associated with a revelation of feelings. This piece,
imbued with a gentle expressiveness that is quite typical of Gounod’s musical
style, is actually an almost literal quotation of Léandre’s sérénade ‘Est-on sage
dans le bel âge ?’ from Act II, expressing the irresistible power of love; this
musical recollection is obviously meant to show the love between Lucinde and
Léandre, and functions as a genuinely lyrical interlude within a very comical scene.
While the original serenade is an archaising Allegretto in E flat, here Gounod
slightly decreases the tempo (Andantino) and transposes the piece to E – a more
convenient tonality for the strings. The piece is in fact lightly scored for strings
only,18 all pizzicato except for the solo violin that plays the main melody. The
smooth quaver descents – skilfully adorning the simple cadential scheme – add to
the calm fluency of the piece. Such a delicate background allows Lucinde’s sweet
declaration to be easily noticed, like embroidery on a velvet cloth.
Nevertheless, from Satie’s point of view, the Andantino is a problematic
moment: his duty consists in setting to music all the spoken dialogues, and
Lucinde’s statement is indeed spoken, but it is also placed over music by
l’Andantino ? Pensez-y, je vous en conjure. Je passerai au “Savoy” lundi matin à 11h (onze
heures). Cette Scène VII m’embarrasse un peu. Vous pouvez m’éclairer à ce sujet. Oui.’
18
The instrumentation indicated in Gounod’s orchestral score is as follows: solo
violin, violin I, violin II, viola, 2 cellos.
Figure 8.1 Gounod, vocal score of Le Médecin malgré lui, from Act III
Figure 8.2 Satie, Le Médecin malgré lui: BNF 9595(1), pp. 11–12: from Act
III, Scene 7
Gounod. I will now try to provide a plausible reconstruction of the stages that
resulted in the definitive version of Act III, Scene 7 in Satie’s score (No. 8 in
Satie’s numbering).19
19
Satie grouped his recitatives (‘scènes nouvelles’) in nine numbers.
The main working document at Satie’s disposal was the typed libretto BNF
9595(1),20 where all the dialogues to be set to music were copied. Here Satie
wrote various annotations, and a few cuts to the text were made (possibly by
Diaghilev himself), with the aim of increasing the swiftness and the incisiveness
of the exchanges.
In Fig. 8.2, I transcribed the relevant pages of BNF 9595(1); the crossings-out
and all the signs in bold italics were added in Satie’s hand (either in pencil or in ink)
to the typed text.21 As can be seen, no cuts were made to the assigned dialogues; on
the contrary, Satie added by hand a cue, present in the original libretto but not in
BNF 9595(1): ‘Les uns disent que oui, … etc.’22 In Fig. 8.2, there is also another
sentence that was absent in the original libretto: ‘Je vous prie d’écouter ceci, s’il
vous plait.’ The origin of this sentence is unclear (was it conceived by Diaghilev?)
as well as its function: was it meant to introduce Sganarelle’s cue ‘Les uns …’?
This question, together with many others in this case study, will remain
without a definite answer: the meaning of many corrections made in the surviving
documents is in fact hard to grasp to say the least. In Fig. 8.2, the indication ‘*
Reprendre le récit musical’ was traced in ink over pencil and was also crossed
out in both pencil and ink. Whenever so many layered corrections are present, it
is very difficult to reconstruct their exact chronological order. I will thus provide
just one of all the possible ‘solutions’ of this genetic puzzle – namely the one
that I find the most fitting not only to the marks on the paper, but also to the
dramatic meaning of the scene. Therefore, the whole explanation that follows is
dubious and most of my statements should be preceded by the adverb ‘perhaps’.
In the meeting of 22 September 1923 between Satie and Diaghilev, the latter
suggested that the passage from ‘Monsieur …’ to ‘… les hommes’ should be
set as a melodrama on newly composed music. In BNF 9595(1), Satie thus
wrote ‘* Parlé sur musique’ and, a little below, ‘* Reprendre le récit musical’,
which indicates the returning point of the ordinary recitative. In this way, the
ramshackle explanation of Sganarelle acquires a spoken preamble (which
lends itself to be interpreted with comical solemnity), and then continues as
a recitative – until the sentence ‘Les uns …’ inclusive. The line of Lucinde,
as in the original opéra comique, is placed upon the Andantino: in fact, Satie
writes ‘(sur Andantino) … P. 43 du livret’ next to Lucinde’s name. However,
this line is not intended as a melodrama (as no hints suggest this), but instead as
20
‘BNF’ is an abbreviation for ‘Bibliothèque nationale de France’ (F–Pn).
21
The bracketed caption in Sganarelle’s line was crossed out in pencil, and this
crossing was then erased. The words ‘Monsieur, c’est une grande et subtile question’,
which are at the end of a line in the original, were underlined in pencil, and this underlining
was then erased as well.
22
In the published libretto, the complete sentence is as follows: ‘Les uns disent que
non, les autres disent que oui ; et moi je dis que oui et non ; d’autant que l’incongruité des
humeurs opaques qui ne se rencontrent au tempérament naturel des femmes’ Jules Barbier
and Michel Carré, Le Médecin malgré lui (Paris: Billaudot, 1978), p. 103.
a recitative: as a consequence, Satie was supposed to add a vocal melody on top

of the Andantino.
At a later stage, Satie decided to incorporate ‘Les uns …’ in the Andantino as
well. This modification allowed the Andantino to function as a background for such
contrasting lines as Sganarelle’s (an ironical masterpiece of verbal acrobatics) and
Lucinde’s, thus assigning a twofold connotation to Gounod’s instrumental serenade
– parodistic at first, then emotionally involved. As a memo, Satie added ‘(sur
l’Andantino)’ right after ‘Les uns …’ and drew an arrow to show that the Andantino
started just before ‘Les uns …’. At this stage of the genetic process, the cue ‘Je vous
prie d’écouter ceci, s’il vous plaît’ triggers the beginning of the Andantino – quite
logically.
But such an ambiguous use of the Andantino must not have fully convinced
Satie, who on 28 September sent Diaghilev the above-mentioned letter where he
expressed his doubts about the Andantino and proposed to change its position to
have it coincide with the ‘Parlé sur musique’. One could imagine Satie explaining
his reasons and worries to Diaghilev during the meeting of 1 October that followed
the letter: the Andantino could have been employed to achieve humour through
estrangement, in association with the sentence ‘Monsieur, …’ of Sganarelle. The
comical effect would have been assured not only by Sganarelle’s words over such
a sweet music, but also by his gestures aiming at hiding Lucinde and Léandre from
Géronte (see the stage directions in brackets). In order to clearly visualize his most
recent choices, Satie added the words ‘(se servir … partition)’ next to ‘* Parlé sur
musique’. The recitative would start at ‘* Reprendre …’ anyway and would then
continue throughout the scene – the music being Satie’s, with no repetition of the
Andantino of course.
Diaghilev and Satie exchanged their opinions, looking for a dramatically
effective solution. Various crossing-outs and rewritings were scrawled on a few
square inches of paper – proposing, modifying, restoring, contradicting.23 Certainly,
the Andantino in that position could work, but maybe it would have been better if
Sganarelle had continued to sing while the Andantino began, thus avoiding a sharp
separation with the first part of his line (‘Cela … sa maladie’). Therefore, the ‘Parlé
sur musique’ was corrected into ‘Chanté’ – still over the Andantino. To separate the
end of the Andantino from the recommencement of Satie’s recitatives, the sentence
‘Je vous prie …’ was bracketed and indicated as ‘Parlé’. Thanks to this expedient,
the enchanting sound of the Andantino (accompanying the falsely erudite statement
of Sganarelle) is allowed to linger for a while in the auditive memory of the listener,
while the following line ‘Je vous prie …’ introduces the second (totally odd) part
of the speech of the supposed luminary. The restarting of the recitatives was then
moved a little forward, right before ‘Les uns …’, as the note ‘* ici, la reprise’ shows.
This disposition of the elements seemed well conceived. A step forward was
taken in the notebook BNF 9595(2), where Satie matched on facing pages the
23
See, for example, the contradictory corrections layered at the bottom of p. 11 in
BNF 9595(1).
lines of the characters and the rhythm of the recitatives. Finally, after so many
afterthoughts, the situation could be assessed.24
In this manuscript, after Jacqueline’s line, Sganarelle continues in recitative;
Satie, not completely convinced of the effectiveness of the sentence ‘Allez-vous-
en … maladie’, drafted the rhythm of the recitative, omitting the obsolete word
‘tantôt’.25 As expected, Sganarelle’s pretentious discourse starts as a recitative
over the Andantino. Meticulous as usual, Satie inserted bar numbers in the text
(see p. 55 in BNF 9595(2)) to clarify the relationship between rhythm and words,
and also indicated the tonalites used in each section. From these indications we
learn that the E major of the Andantino is to be preceded by the dominant B. After
the end of the Andantino comes the spoken sentence ‘Je vous prie …’, and after
this the recitative starts again in C-sharp minor – the relative of E. To prevent the
following line by Lucinde from going unnoticed, Satie decided to end Sganarelle’s
recitative on D major and to have Lucinde start in F major: the conventional shift
by a third would give a different ‘colour’ to the second tonality.
Looking back at what he had just written, Satie noticed a flaw during the
Andantino: he had Sganarelle stop singing five bars before the end of the piece,
which resulted in an unnecessarily long gap before the spoken line. On the contrary,
a greater fluency could be achieved by incorporating the ‘Parlé’ in the ending of
the Andantino – where the sentence ‘Je vous prie …’ could be recited in a solemn
tone over the final crescendo. Therefore, still in BNF 9595(2), Satie crossed out
the cue ‘Parlé’ and rewrote it above the ending measures of the Andantino.
The time had come for Satie to move to the actual composition of the
music. In BNF 9595(5), within the continuity draft of Act III, Satie drafted the
accompaniment for Scene 7, omitting for the time being the vocal melodies (whose
rhythm, however, he had already defined). Ex. 8.1 is an extract of this document.26
The bar numbering completely corresponds to that in BNF 9595(2), which means
that no apparent modifications of the form were made.
Bars 1–4 of section B represent a sort of ‘Mickey-Mousing’,27 as the staccato
chords of the progression imitate the steps that Lucinde is supposedly taking while
Jacqueline is talking. The shift to another character (Sganarelle) is emphasised
by an unusual cadence that plays around with listening expectations: the inverted
half-diminished seventh chord in bar 4 should normally resolve on the tonic A,
but Satie diverts it to C sharp, contradicting the earlier tonal plan. The bars that
24
On 1 October, after the morning meeting with Diaghilev, Satie wrote to him: ‘Je
suis en train (maintenant : il est 17 h 28) de préparer la Scène VII pour demain’ (Volta,
Correspondance, p. 564).
25
Equally possible, but less convincing in my opinion, would be to consider as
omitted the words ‘avec vous’ – ‘tantôt’ being preserved.
26
The smaller staves represent the first version of the relative bars.
27
In cinema (especially in animation films), ‘Mickey-Mousing’ means synchronising
the soundtrack with visible actions by linking music and images in a direct and indissoluble
way. In this case, the music mimics the act of walking.
Example 8.1 Satie, Le Médecin malgré lui: BNF 9595(5), pp. 16–17; ink
precede the Andantino indeed confirm the remarks made above about Satie’s partial
adaptation to the style of Gounod (or, more generally, of the nineteenth century):
they are in fact pure Satie, recognisable for example by the modal inflection of the
B natural in bar 7 or by the non-directional sway in bars 9–10. The lengthening
of rhythmic values at bars 11–14 of the voice (planned in BNF 9595(2))28 is here
slightly anticipated by crotchet chords in the accompaniment (bars 10–11), thus
making the transition smoother. The staccato chords at bars 13–14 give room to
28
The syllables ‘afin que je raison[ne]’ were planned as a series of six crotchets.
the laborious reasoning of the ‘médecin malgré lui’. The words ‘de sa maladie’,
associated with a rhythmic acceleration in the vocal melody, are accompanied by
triumphant rising octaves (bars 15–16): the dominant is reached and everything is
set for the Andantino.
After the Andantino, the recitative continues (as expected) in C-sharp minor,29
but the use of the harmonic minor scale makes the melodies slightly ‘wrong’ – just
like Sganarelle’s logic, only seemingly consequential. The clear cadences at bars
3–4 and 7–8 of this section are not over-emphasised by the vocal melody, as it
is kept rhythmically independent. The harmonically dense passage at bars 5–8,
which leads to a sharp cadence, is pseudo-eighteenth century in character, almost
recitativo accompagnato. Although the tonal plan for this section was partially
modified, Lucinde’s sentence was preserved in F major. The contrast between
the two characters Sganarelle and Lucinde was, however, assured by the sudden
change of the instrumental figures: Satie rendered the accompaniment to Lucinde’s
line with special delicacy, superposing a peaceful countermelody in crotchets on
soft oscillating chords.
After completing this continuity draft (and, together with this, all the drafts
of the new recitatives),30 Satie wrote the vocal score,31 which includes the vocal
melodies of course, and finally the orchestral score.32 On 12 December, the
orchestration was almost done, and Satie was proud of his work: ‘I’m finishing
the “Médecin malgré lui” (the orchestration). I plan to have it done in 3 or 4 days.
Nice! … I’m licking my fingers.’33
During the rehearsals in October 1923, Satie’s vocal score (and also a copy of
this for the use of Daniel Vigneau, the singer interpreting Sganarelle) underwent
many modifications, which included cuts made by Diaghilev in order to increase
the overall swiftness of the drama. One of these cuts applied to bars 7–16 of
29
The passage following the Andantino (pp. 17–18 of BNF 9595(5)) has not been
reported here, but it was transferred – virtually unchanged – into the orchestral score, which
is freely accessible online. See note 32 below for the complete reference.
30
Probably Satie was referring to these drafts when (on 8 October) he wrote to Paul
Collaer: ‘Je termine le troisième acte du “Médecin malgré lui”’ (Volta, Correspondance,
p. 565).
31
It was completed by 3 November, as on that day Satie wrote to Sybil Harris: ‘J’ai
terminé le 3e Acte du bon “Médecin malgré lui”’ (ibid., p. 570).
32
The autograph orchestral score, housed in Yale University Library (US–NH), can be
downloaded online at http://imslp.org/wiki/Scènes_Nouvelles_for_Gounod’s_Opera_’Le_
Medecin_Malgre_Lui’_(Satie,_Erik). The pages related to this case study are pp. 67–72.
Robert Orledge published a critical edition of the score (Liverpool: Aerial Kites Press,
2001) in 58 numbered copies. In the manuscript, the Andantino (in Gounod’s original
orchestration) is in the hand of a copyist, but the melodic line was written by Satie. This
alternation of hands explains the lack of a quaver rest right before the Andantino.
33
Volta, Correspondance, p. 575 (letter to Jacques Guérin): ‘Je termine le “Médecin
malgré lui” (l’orchestration). Je compte avoir fini dans 3 ou 4 jours. Veine ! … Je m’en
lèche les doigts.’
section B (Ex. 8.1), which thus did not find a place in the orchestral score: the
whole sentence ‘Allez-vous-en … maladie’ was completely removed. Verbosity
(even if coming from a master such as Molière) is often a bad ally for comedy,
and this case is no exception: in measures 5–6, Sganarelle approves Lucinde’s
desire to stretch her legs a bit, but the following sentence (when he addresses the
fake apothecary Léandre) is not really necessary to clarify the dramatic situation.
Léandre can approach Lucinde in a more spontaneous way, without needing
an explicit invitation. From the musical point of view, Sganarelle’s melody for
‘Cela lui fera du bien’ ends on D sharp, the leading note of E: the tonality of the
Andantino. Therefore, Gounod’s piece can start right after this short sentence, and
there is no need for the harmonic preparation (through a dominant seventh) found
in Ex. 8.1. Thanks to the sudden change of register, the start of the Andantino takes
the audience by surprise: it sounds as if it came from another world – Lucinde’s
inner dimension in Gounod’s view, elegant irony in Satie’s. The spoken sentence
‘Je vous prie …’ was not copied in the orchestral score (as happened to most of
the stage directions), but it is present in the vocal score, so it was surely told on
the stage at the premiere.34
At the beginning of January 1924, when he was in Monte Carlo for the
premiere, Satie attended the rehearsals and claimed he was satisfied with his
own orchestration: ‘Good orchestra. Very happy with my orchestration. It sounds
“chic”. Yes’ (5 January).35 Actually, the lightness and vivid brightness of sound
characterising Satie’s last orchestral works are perfectly displayed in the score of
Le Médecin malgré lui. The first bars of section B (pp. 67–8 of the score) clarify
that the orchestral timbre was typically constructed on the basis of the strings by
adding light wind touches (in this case, flutes and trumpets in octaves). While in
Parade Satie had proved able to compose for big orchestra with great skill and
ease, the orchestra for Le Médecin malgré lui is much smaller; however, Satie
could equally draw a very personal timbre from it.
An example of Satie’s fantasy as an orchestrator can be found at bars 9–14 of
section D (Lucinde). Here the tone oscillations moving the chords (bars 11–14) are
doubled in various octaves by the winds, used in different combinations in order
to obtain timbral variety. The main problem here would be to prevent such moving
figures from masking both the voice and the countermelody of the first violins
(especially when even the cellos start oscillating at bars 12–13): Satie’s solution
was sustained notes of the horns (used alternatively),36 functioning as elements
of harmonic cohesion that automatically re-qualify the swinging movements as
non-thematic background figures. The relative ‘weights’ of the oscillating parts
34
Detailed information about the discrepancies between the orchestral and the vocal
score can be found in Orledge’s critical edition (see p. XVIII in particular).
35
Volta, Correspondance, p. 581; ‘Bon orchestre. Très content de mon orchestration.
Elle sonne “chic”. Oui.’
36
The melodic continuity between the two horns, obtained with the octave leap F–F
(sounding pitches), is particularly elegant.
are ingeniously varied: at bar 11, the doubling is done on two octaves, with the
two oboes divisi; at bar 12, the figure is spread upon four octaves, though the two
lower ones (two clarinets in unison and cellos) are a bit ‘heavier’; at bar 13, the
doublings still occupy four octaves, but this time the instrumentation is balanced
thanks to the use of winds a due; at bar 14, the octaves become two again, but the
higher one is predominant.
What has just been presented is a still little-explored side of late Satie, where he
has been observed dealing with stylistic and dramatic problems. The chronological
reconstruction provided – although with some interpretative risk – looks like a
chess game: Satie, with the aid of Diaghilev, studied each move analytically and
forecast its possible consequences. On 14 December 1923, in a letter to Diaghilev,
Satie expressed his satisfaction and listed the qualities of his work, adopting a
hyperbolic style:
The third act is almost finished. I’m working on No. 9. Very happy with my
work. Attractive, fat, fine, delicate, superior, exquisite, varied, melancholy,
super … etc … thus it is, this fruit of my daily vigils, and even nocturnal ones
(though rarely).37
In Le Médecin malgré lui, Satie, with typical humility, renounced part of his
authorial personality, but this stylistic constraint did not prevent him from attaining
his aesthetic ideals: the adjectives listed in this letter effectively form a mock-
serious summary of Satie in the 1920s.
If Diaghilev proved to be a very helpful collaborator, Gounod had no other
choice than agreeing and nodding silently, though his shadow may well have
bothered Satie now and then. Satie acknowledged that his best artistic companion
ever was no less than the philosopher Plato, with whom he ‘worked’ on Socrate38
– a very discreet collaborator indeed. On the other hand, the most contrasted and
articulated artistic partnership was arguably the one for Parade, with Cocteau,
Massine and Picasso.
The Parade team, first reunited in 1923 by the Comte Etienne de Beaumont
for the short divertissement La Statue retrouvée, was recalled again by Beaumont
in 1924 for the new ballet Mercure (part of the Soirée de Paris series he was
organising), this time with the significant exclusion of Cocteau. The Count had
complete trust in the ideas of Picasso and Satie, as he wrote to Satie in laudatory
terms: ‘When one has the marvellous agreement of Satie and Picasso, one should
37
Volta, Correspondance, p. 575; ‘Le troisième acte est presque terminé. J’en
suis au n° 9. Très content de mon travail. Joli, gras, fin, délicat, supérieur, exquis, varié,
mélancolique, extra … etc. … tel est-il, ce travail fruit de mes veillées diurnes, & même
nocturnes (mais rarement).’
38
‘Platon est un collaborateur parfait, très doux & jamais importun’ (ibid., p. 277).
The implicit reference is to Cocteau’s intrusive behaviour.
not seek anything else.’39 In fact, the composer and the artist had been on the same
wavelength since the Parade experience – their perfect mutual understanding
causing Cocteau’s jealousy – and the very subject matter of Mercure may well
have been a mockery of Cocteau, who loved to disguise himself as Mercury in
masked balls.40
The Count himself wrote a three-page typescript scenario for the ballet,41 but
he was probably more interested in challenging Diaghilev’s supremacy as an
artistic impresario than in being acknowledged as an author himself; in fact, quite
surprisingly, the Soirée de Paris poster indicated Mercure as based on a theme
by the choreographer Massine.42 Satie, Picasso and Massine actually worked
quite independently, but since the first stages of the work, it became quite clear
that Picasso’s ideas showed the way: his subtitle ‘plastic poses’ pleased both
the Count – who initially wanted to call the ballet Mercure, Tableaux vivants43
– and the composer. Massine, who had to wait for the music in order to prepare
the choreography, constantly pressed Satie during the composition process –
something the composer did not like at all. Satie’s lack of sympathy for Massine
was hidden perhaps under the flattery ‘Cher Grand Artiste’ with which he
invariably addressed Massine in correspondence, and the definition ‘votre si riche
choréographie’ (in a letter of 4 May) does not sound like a compliment coming
from Satie. Nevertheless, the final stages of composition involved adding music
to numbers 4 and 11 of the ballet, precisely to fit Massine’s choreographic ideas.44
On the other hand, Satie definitely enjoyed working with Picasso – their
stubborn independence being one of the possible reasons for their sympathy since
their first meeting in 1916. Satie, who even declared himself a disciple of Picasso
in a letter he sent him on 10 October 1918,45 had always showed a deep interest
in cubism, and the ‘key passage’ composition logic he used from 1913 onwards
bears striking similarities with synthetic cubism collages.46 But in 1924, cubism
39
‘Lorsqu’on a l’accord merveilleux de Satie et de Picasso, on ne doit rien chercher
d’autre’ (ibid., p. 592).
40
Robert Orledge, ‘Erik Satie’s Ballet Mercure (1924): From Mount Etna to
Montmartre’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 123/2 (1998), p. 234.
41
Now held at the IMEC (Abbaye d’Ardenne, Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe,
France) together with all the documents of the Fondation Satie. See also ibid., pp. 229–49.
42
The poster presented the ballet as ‘Mercure / Poses plastiques / Thème et
Choréographie de Léonide Massine / Musique d’Erick [sic] Satie / Décor et Costumes de
Pablo Picasso’ (reproduced in Ornella Volta, Erik Satie: Del Chat Noir a Dadá, Catalogue
of the Exhibition at the Ivam Centre Julio González, Valencia, 1996, p. 164).
43
‘Le titre de cette œuvre pourrait donc être : Mercure, “Tableaux vivants”, si cela
vous convient’ (letter to Satie of 21 February 1924; Volta, Correspondance, p. 593).
44
See Orledge, ‘Erik Satie’s Ballet Mercure’, p. 245.
45
See Volta, Correspondance, p. 342.
46
See Chapter 4 of my doctoral thesis ‘Scrittura e riscrittura in Erik Satie’ (University
of Padua, 2010) and the conference paper ‘At the Intersection of Three Forms of Art: The
must have seemed a relic of the past, after Dada had appeared on the Parisian
artistic scene.
Actually, neither Picasso nor Satie was particularly interested in being
associated with Dada, but they soon became involved in post-war artistic struggles
for publicity. The names of Picasso and Satie appeared in Picabia’s 1919 drawing
Mouvement dada, near the top of the timeline of French artists leading to the Dada
movement,47 and also on a leaflet that Tzara distributed in Paris in January 1920,
among the personalities who had (allegedly) ‘adhered to the DaDa movement’.
Two years later, Breton started to consider Tzara as an opponent, and Satie was
delighted to preside over the 1922 public trial (following the ‘Congrès de Paris’
organised by Breton to take the leadership of the Dada movement) that eventually
‘condemned’ Breton. This episode surely alienated Breton’s sympathy for Satie,
while the latter got closer to Tzara. It is no surprise that on 15 June 1924, at the
Mercure premiere, the surrealist ‘commando’ led by Breton and Aragon cried ‘A
bas Satie’ and ‘Vive Picasso seul’. Incidentally, Breton’s definition of surrealism
(in his 1924 Manifeste du surréalisme) as a psychic automatism expressing the real
functioning of thought ‘in absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all
aesthetic and moral preoccupation’48 was indeed very far from Satie’s extremely
careful control of his creations. As for Picasso, apparently he had always been
ahead of his time, for his 1914 sculpture Le verre d’absinthe was chosen by Breton
for the Exposition surréaliste d’objets he organised in 1936.
In such a complex environment, what never changed was the admiration Satie
and Picasso had for each other. While trying to define a first structural plan for his
score, Satie added in pencil a few memos to a single-page typescript by Beaumont
that are clearly connected with Picasso’s views:49 ‘Poses Plastiques’ was written
twice in the document and ‘Cubisme’ appeared next to the typed title of the final
number ‘Rapt de Proserpine’. The influence of cubism on Satie’s thinking is also
evident in yet another memo, ‘Nocturne (cubisme)’, which apparently referred
to the second number La Nuit: this art movement therefore acted as an aesthetic
frame of the whole score. But when one actually looks at the score, cubism is not
the first tag that comes to mind: in Mercure we still find Satie’s lifelong trademark,
namely the jigsaw puzzle assembling logic, but collage-like procedures are not
as radical as in the 1914 kaleidoscopic series Sports et divertissements: they are
instead quite tamed, applied to regular four-bar phrases that are only occasionally
twisted. Such phrasal regularity was of course borrowed from popular music,
Genesis of Erik Satie’s Le Golf’ that I presented at the AMS 2010 meeting in Indianapolis.
47
Mouvement dada is a mechanical drawing that represents Dada as an alarm clock
which is supposed to awaken contemporary art. Picasso’s name is close to the ‘positive
pole’ (i.e. antitraditional) of the clock battery (i.e. French modernism), while Satie is closer
to the negative pole (see John Elderfield, The Modern Drawing: 100 Works on Paper from
the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1983), p. 116).
48
André Breton, Œuvres complètes, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), p. 328.
49
BNF 9596(2), pp. 1–2 (folded sheet pasted on the back of the front cover).
and in particular from the music hall,50 as Satie himself declared: ‘The spectacle
is related quite simply to the music hall, without stylization or any rapport with
things artistic.’51
There is, however, a more convincing way to associate cubism with Mercure
– and to distrust Satie’s declaration.52 Paraphrasing the aesthetic statement
that Satie wrote in 1917 on one of his sketchbooks,53 for him harmony was a
sort of camera filter through which an object (the melody) could be observed:
changing the filter produced iridescent effects. Far from being a recollection of
Monet’s Rouen cathedral series, this concept is much closer to cubism than to
impressionism: lines and colours should never blur together, but should instead
preserve their autonomy, so that the illusion of a superimposition of different
planes can be created. What Satie is essaying here is basically a multiplication of
(listening) perspectives. In Mercure this is achieved in various ways, including the
following three: first, through the numerous reharmonisations of melodic themes
(something Satie was fond of); second, through the choice of stylistic variability
within a consistent musical structure; and, third, through a sort of dramaturgical
counterpoint with the other forms of art.
One example of reharmonisation concerns the melody presented at bars 1–3 of
the Polka des Lettres, which is then seen through different harmonic filters at the
end of the number and later in Le Chaos (at the beginning and end). Satie’s musical
style in Mercure is eclectic: we hear popular tunes (e.g. Danse de tendresse), avant-
garde harmonies with nervous chromatic basses (e.g. Ouverture), oases of modal
elegance (e.g. Bain des Grâces) or inspired passages of a neoclassical clarity that
could well have sprung from the pen of an eighteenth-century composer (e.g.
Nouvelle Danse). The dramatic counterpoint was apparent in ‘plastic poses’ such
as the delicate Bain des Grâces accompanying the bath of… three transvestites.
Now the ‘Cubisme’ tag to the Rapt de Proserpine in the autograph plan seems
to make more sense,54 as Satie’s energetic music here resembles (in Steven Moore
Whiting’s words) ‘a romp in an operetta by Offenbach’,55 while Picasso’s scene
is much more restrained and abstract. The artist chose in fact to represent the
50
Mercure was premiered at the Cigale, a former music hall theatre in Montmartre.
51
‘Le spectacle s’apparente au music-hall tout bêtement, sans stylisation, et par
aucun côté n’a de rapport avec les choses de l’art’ (interview with Pierre de Massot, Paris-
Journal, 30 May 1924; translation by Robert Orledge, in ‘Erik Satie’s Ballet Mercure’, pp.
231–2). Music hall was a favourite Cocteau idée fixe, but ‘the qualifier ‘without stylization’
sets Mercure apart from Cocteau’s evocations of popular entertainment’ (Whiting, Satie the
Bohemian, p. 523).
52
What Satie called ‘art’ was, however, a complex concept: for further clarification,
see the complete aesthetic statement reported in Orledge, Satie the Composer, pp. 68–9.
53
See ibid.
54
It should be remembered that this plan was done at the very first stages of
composition.
55
chariot of Proserpine as a white wooden cut-out (praticable) functioning as a

background to black wickerwork linear shapes attached to it.56 The form of the
represented object was therefore the result of the superimposition of the two
elements, each on a distinct plane: the linear element, floating freely out of the
edges of the background shape, cast shadows that created the illusion of thickness.
This special technique (comparable to Satie’s definitions of melody and harmony)
is one of the most appealing features of Picasso’s scenes and makes one think of
pencil drawings made in space. Likewise, in the curtain for the Soirée de Paris
season, Picasso painted the two stock characters with free-flowing continuous
lines against coloured flat surfaces: such drawings made of a single unbroken
stroke must have been a constant in his visual imagination, as they can be found
both in his 1918 virtuosic illustrations (appropriately called ‘monogrammes’) for
Cocteau’s Le coq et l’arlequin and as late as 1949 in the fascinating light drawings
he made with the help of the Life photographer Gjon Mili.57 In any case, Picasso’s
mastery was above the ‘artistic’ fights between movements – and arguably Satie’s
was as well, despite his fondness for personal confrontation. In 1924, in fact, the
border separating Satie’s friends from his enemies was particularly porous: Auric,
Poulenc and Cocteau had just gone over to the enemy (at least in his own view,
since Cocteau still contributed to the homage to Satie in the March 1924 issue of
Revue musicale), thus joining the surrealists Breton and Aragon.
When Satie chose Picabia between the two candidates proposed by Blaise
Cendrars as a set designer for Après-Dîner (to be featured in the season of the
Ballets Suédois),58 he was consciously throwing himself into the Parisian fray at
the age of 58. Picabia – who back in 1921 had published two salacious pensées
by Satie in his journal 39159 – was easily convinced to leave his temporary artistic
retreat, also because he was allowed to mould Cendrars’ scenario to his own
(iconoclastic) design. This was done in February 1924 and led to the audacious
‘ballet instantanéiste’ Relâche, where the contribution of Cendrars was scarcely
noticeable.
On 2 May, an anonymous reporter wrote in Paris-Journal that a few days
earlier he had seen Picabia, Satie and Rolf de Maré (the director of the Ballets
Suédois) having lunch together. He (probably Pierre de Massot) described their
behaviour in a lively tone: they ‘were discussing animatedly and laughing loudly.
56
For a photograph of the scene, see Ornella Volta, L’Ymagier d’Erik Satie (Paris:
Van de Velde, 1979), p. 81.
57
Some of Mili’s photos were published in the 30 January 1950 issue of Life, on pp.
10–12.
58
See Volta, Correspondance, p. 1024.
59
The two aphorisms were published in Le Pilhaou-Thibaou, ‘supplément illustré’ of
391 (10 July 1921): ‘J’aimerais jouer avec un piano qui aurait une grosse queue’ (‘I’d like
to play with a piano that has a big knob’, a ‘piano à queue’ being a grand piano); ‘Ce n’est
pas beau de parler du nœud de la question’ (‘It isn’t the done thing to talk about the knot of
the question’ – though ‘le nœud’ can also mean the glans of the penis).
Erik Satie was whispering in the ear of the painter Francis Picabia, and the director
of the Ballets Suédois, Rolf de Maré, looked delighted. What is this trio preparing?
Mystery…’.60 Apparently Satie and Picabia got along really well, and this led to
Breton’s strong refusal (3 May) to Picabia’s offer to contribute to 391. Therefore,
Picabia started denigrating his former Dada companions, so that his enemies came
to coincide (at least partially) with Satie’s. Both being uncompromising artists
with a penchant for provocation, the enfants terribles Satie and Picabia prepared
to strike the Parisian artistic establishment at the premiere (which, after being
postponed twice, took place on 7 December).61
The title of the work, Relâche (meaning ‘no performance tonight’), was
a brilliant discovery which would guarantee that it would be ‘displayed in any
theatre at least once a week, and, during the summer, in all theatres at once’.62
In the advertisement for the ballet in the October 1924 (and last) issue of 391,
the audience was invited to bring dark glasses and something to block their ears.
As for brawlers, de Maré would have whistles distributed to the public at every
performance.63 The one and only product of the ‘instantanéisme’ movement,
Relâche was also advertised by Picabia in the November–December issue of La
Danse with a striking manifesto-like description that included puns, slogans and
more articulated thoughts like the following: ‘Relâche is life, life as I like it; life
without tomorrow, the life of today, everything for today, nothing for yesterday,
nothing for tomorrow … Relâche is movement without a goal, neither forward
nor backward, neither to the left nor to the right … Relâche is the happiness of
the moments without reflection; why reflect? why follow conventions of beauty
or joy? … Relâche advises you to be bon viveurs.’64 Other hyperbolic passages
of this text could well have been pronounced by Rodolphe Salis, the Master of
Ceremonies at the Chat Noir who Satie met in 1887: ‘Erik Satie, Börlin, Rolf de
Maré, René Clair, Prieur and me have created Relâche a bit as God created life.’65
60
‘… discutaient avec animation et riaient à tue-tête. Erik Satie chuchotait dans
l’oreille du peintre Francis Picabia et le directeur des Ballets suédois, Rolf de Maré,
semblait ravi. Que prépare donc ce trio? Mystère…’ (Volta, Correspondance, p. 959).
61
The evidence supporting this date has recently been found by Robert Orledge.
62
‘… nous serons sûrs de le voir afficher, au moins une fois par semaine, dans n’importe
quel théâtre, et, pendant l’été, dans tous les théâtres à la fois’ (Volta, Correspondance, p.
1024).
63
See Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, p. 535.
64
‘Relâche est la vie, la vie comme je l’aime ; la vie sans lendemain, la vie
d’aujourd’hui, tout pour aujourd’hui, rien pour hier, rien pour demain. … Relâche, c’est
le mouvement sans but, ni en avant ni en arrière, ni à gauche ni à droite. … Relâche est
le bonheur des instants sans réflexion ; pourquoi réfléchir, pourquoi avoir une convention
de beauté ou de joie ? … Relâche vous conseille d’être des viveurs’ (reproduced in Volta,
L’Ymagier d’Erik Satie, p. 83).
65
‘Erik Satie, Börlin, Rolf de Maré, René Clair, Prieur et moi avons créé Relâche un
peu comme Dieu créa la vie’ (ibid.). Salis used to say: ‘God created the world, Napoleon
Picabia’s ironically subversive ideas must have reminded Satie of the fumiste
experiences of his Montmartre years – the very title Relâche being an example of
mystification in the best fumiste tradition.66 Surely delighted to second Picabia’s
anti-bourgeois attitude, Satie in turn caught the pleasure-focused spirit of the
project and claimed to have written ‘amusing, pornographic music’,67 an ‘obscene
ballet’.68 Reviving the parodic techniques used in his so-called humoristic pieces,
in Relâche Satie indeed quoted various popular lewd songs that were supposed to
be recognised by the audience. Some of these were actually songs ‘with alternate
lyrics, both children’s rhymes and barracks songs’,69 like the harmless Cadet
Rousselle and the spicy Le Père Dupanloup sharing the same timbre. It seems that
Satie succeeded in his aim, as many in the audience felt compelled to sing along
when they recognised the song Le Navet (also known as Le marchand de navets).70
Any critical approach to Satie’s contribution to Relâche has to deal with
a curious contrast inherent in the work: despite all the explicit emphasis that
Picabia put on ephemeral and hedonistic aspects, Satie’s logical thinking became
activated (by default?) and led to a tightly crafted mirrored structure with
interlocking elements, represented by Orledge on p. 180 of Satie the Composer
and by Whiting on p. 553 of Satie the Bohemian. ‘Instantaneist’ music was
therefore supposed to outlive its performance time, at least in the analyses of
musicologists. Picabia’s trenchant statement ‘nothing for tomorrow’ was also
created the Legion of Honour. As for myself, I made Montmartre!’ (Whiting, Satie the
Bohemian, p. 52). Prieur was probably the French Revolution politician Pierre-Louis Prieur
from the Marne region, who was given the punning nickname ‘Crieur de la Marne’ because
of his eloquence (and stentorian voice).
66
For a study of the relationships between fumisme, Erik Satie and the avant-garde
(especially Dada), see Emilio Sala, ‘Dalla Bohème all’avant-garde: Ancora nel segno
dei fumisti’, in Gianmario Borio and Mauro Casadei Turroni Monti (eds), Erik Satie e la
Parigi del suo tempo (Lucca: LIM, 2001), pp. 29–44. On p. 44, the author compares the
accelerating hearse in Entr’acte with the galop refrain in the 1880s song L’enterrement (by
Aristide Bruant and Jules Jouy) and also with the lithograph Les morts vont vite by Charles
Leroy (presented at the Exposition des Arts incohérents in 1886).
67
‘… une musique amusante, pornographique’ (Volta, L’Ymagier d’Erik Satie, p. 85).
68
In a letter to Milhaud on 1 September 1924, he wrote ‘Le ballet obscène est terminé’
(Volta, Correspondance, p. 629).
69
70
Ibid., p. 538, note 71. The lyrics of this song (titled Les Navets) are found in
Anthologie Hospitalière et Latinesque, Tome II (Paris: Chez Bichat-Porte-a-Droite, 1913),
p. 336. It was recorded (with the title Le marchand de navets and slightly different lyrics)
in Anthologie des chansons de salle de garde, Collection ‘Plaisir des Dieux’, Tonus No. 13,
Diffudisc, Paris. Satie used it in the Entrée des Hommes and in the Rentrée des Hommes
– the turnip being an obvious reference to the penis. This melody must have been the ‘air
connu’ adapted by Xanrof for his song Flagrant délit (see Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, pp.
538, 543–5). However, Satie’s direct reference to Le Navet in an interview with W. Mayr
(Le Journal littéraire, 4 October 1924) clarifies the ultimate source of his quotation.
contradicted by Satie in a letter to Marcel Raval (21 October) where he declared

that: ‘It is in Relâche that the signal for departure will be given. With Relâche
we are entering into a new period. I say this immodestly, but I say it … Picabia is
cracking the egg, and we shall set out “forward”, leaving the Cocteaus and other
“blinkered” people behind us.’71 In reality, any attempt to define the essence of
Dada-inspired instantaneism seems to be inherently fruitless: in his 1926 portrait
of Erik Satie designed for the Relâche vocal score, Picabia inserted the sentence:
‘When will we get away from the habit of explaining everything?’72 Fortunately,
a slogan on the front cover of the October issue of 391 helps us get out of this
exegetical impasse: ‘Instantaneism is for those who have something to say’73 –
and Satie and Picabia surely did.
One of the most remarkable features of Relâche was its daring multimedia
nature, which involved music, dancing and film. As is well known, René Clair
contributed two films: one was very short, most probably projected over the
two initial pieces Ouverturette and Projectionette;74 the other was the famous
Entr’acte, about 18 minutes long, projected as an intermission. The insertion
of filmed images, although not a completely new experience for the audience,75
looked very far into the future of experimental theatre – and of cinema, for that
matter. Not only was Relâche a landmark of non-narrative cinema, it was also a
pioneering experiment in virtual reality. For example, Börlin was seen onstage as
a man of flesh and blood (‘l’Homme’) in the first act, then as a character (actually,
two different characters) in Entr’acte, then, at the end of the film, as the ‘virtual’
Börlin jumping through the screen onto the stage, and then again in flesh and
blood on the stage. Even the authors of the show, Picabia and Satie, appeared at
different ‘levels’ of reality: first as themselves in the introductory film (the famous
jumping-on-roof sequence), then in the most incorporeal possible form as the
minds behind the scenes and the music, and finally as the real authors driving a
Citroën car onstage.
The concept of multiplication not only referred to people and art forms, but also
to aesthetic categories. To put it better, the aesthetic core of Relâche was arguably
the subtle interpenetration of ‘high’ and ‘low’ artistic categories, where each could
be transformed into (or mistaken for) the other in a disorienting (and authentically
71
‘C’est de “Relâche” que sera donné le signal du départ. Nous commençons de
“Relâche” une nouvelle période. Je le dis immodestement, mais je le dis … Picabia crève
l’œuf, & nous partons en “avant”, laissant derrière nous les Cocteau & autres “bridés”’
(Volta, Correspondance, p. 638; starting from the second sentence, the translation is by
Robert Orledge, in Satie the Composer, pp. 2–3).
72
Volta, Correspondance, p. 1025; ‘Quand se déshabituera-t-on de l’habitude de tout
expliquer ?’ This sentence was written in 1920 by Picabia’s first wife Gabrielle Buffet in the
preface to her husband’s book Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère.
73
‘L’instantanéisme: est pour ceux qui ont quelque chose à dire.’
74
There are in fact issues related to the respective timings of the film and the music.
75
In early cinema, films were commonly projected during music hall shows.
Dada) aesthetic experience. A good example of inextricable high/low mixture is

the trivial lascivious tunes which were coated with elaborate harmonies, displayed
in rather conservative contrapuntal textures and finely orchestrated to achieve a
varied palette of timbres. In this respect, Satie’s last work (as Relâche turned to be)
allowed him to push his lifelong experiments with interfering aesthetic categories
to a previously unreached limit of higher complexity and greater strength. In the
kaleidoscopic and elusive network of Relâche, the absolute, nostalgic elegance of
the Rentrée de la Femme, the evoked lyrics ‘Mesdames, voilà l’navet’ (‘Ladies,
here’s the turnip’; Nos. 8 and 13), a fugal exposition (No. 17) and Chopin’s funeral
march (in Entr’acte) were all granted a similar status within a convincing dramatic
structure.
A parallel interest in contrasting concepts (that turn out to be mutually reversible)
is found in Picabia’s wild scenario, where men and women were presented in their
double dimension: as elegantly dressed bourgeois, but also as apparently naked
bodies (actually covered with body tights) deprived of any social characterisation.
As for Entr’acte, every single projection made nowadays confirms that its appeal
is still vivid and multi-targeted, because none of its elitist references to avant-
garde movements stop the general public enjoying its crazy freedom and genuine
comic scenes. All in all, such a multi-layered way of communicating would not
have been so effective without Satie’s music. In his last production, Satie seemed
to have successfully carried out Picasso’s celebrated motto: he did not have to look
for his music any more; he simply found it.76
In fact, both of Satie’s last ballets Mercure and Relâche were composed in a
hurry, mostly under the pressure of choreographers. Satie, typically reflective and
considered, was never a fast composer and detested time constraints. Nevertheless,
his recent experience with Le Médecin malgré lui certainly helped him to deal
with these two important (and well-paid) commissions by providing him with a
solid constructive frame to start with. As we have seen, Gounod’s opera, with its
traditional division into separate ‘numbers’, invited a very meticulous organisation
of the work on Satie’s part: he divided his ‘scènes nouvelles’ into nine numbers
and prepared preliminary rhythmic and tonal plans before drafting the score.
The ‘number opera’ form (which was indeed suggested by the detailed scenarios
provided by Beaumont and Picabia), the careful structural and tonal planning, and
the use of tonality itself are also common features of Mercure and Relâche: this
confirms the central role of Le Médecin malgré lui in the definition of Satie’s latest
working (and thinking) habits.
It should be noted that neither Parade (1916–17, 1919) nor Socrate (1917–
18) was planned as a series of short numbers, each set in a specific tonality: the
dramatic swiftness of Mercure and Relâche owes more to the lighthearted number
76
His compositional methods in 1924 in fact became very straightforward: he seemed
to have found an excellent balance between the relative simplicity of the compositional
processes and the never-ending experimentation in language (see Dossena, ‘Scrittura e
riscrittura in Erik Satie’, Chapter 6).
opera Geneviève de Brabant (1899–1900) or to Satie’s proto-surrealistic play Le

piège de Méduse (1913). But the concern for tonal centres and the neoclassical
lightness that shines in many pieces of the two ballets are likely to have been
directly suggested by the Gounod pastiche.77
77
The influence of the aborted opera Paul & Virginie (1920–1923) cannot be properly
estimated from the few surviving manuscripts. However, Robert Orledge guesses that this
opera could have been similar in style to Le Médecin malgré lui (see Orledge, Satie the
Composer, p. 323).
Chapter 9
History, Homeopathy and the
Spiritual Impulse in the Post-war Reception
of Satie: Cage, Higgins, Beuys
Matthew Mendez
Though Satie’s posthumous canonisation as precursor to and catalyst for a

number of key post-war experimental1 musical practices can be attributed to a
wide variety of factors, arguably none was as significant as his perceived position
with respect to history and tradition. The received wisdom on the topic would
have us believe that Satie successfully circumvented all influence from the
musical as well as the broader past, steadfastly cultivating an aesthetic marked
above all by the virtues of ‘timelessness’ and ‘anonymity’. The most noteworthy
backer of this position is surely Virgil Thomson, originator of the well-known
claim that among the important twentieth-century composers, ‘Satie is the only
one whose works can be enjoyed and appreciated without any knowledge of
the history of music’.2 Less frequently cited but of much the same cast is Louis
Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger’s straightfaced assertion that Satie ‘kept
making history by composing without history’.3 Of course, we know very well
that no artist works in a vacuum, le maître d’Arcueil – despite his best efforts –
included. As such, we would be wise to judge such cut-and-dried apologias with
1
I use the term ‘experimental’ in Michael Nyman’s now well-established sense,
which denotes those composers of the 1950s and 1960s generation who saw themselves
as working in contradistinction to the supposed ‘establishment’ avant-garde of Boulez,
Maderna, Nono et al.; see Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, 2nd
edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). The argument can be made that
the Satiean legacy was one of the primary causes for this bifurcation, for, as John Cage,
the most well-known and influential exponent of the ‘experimental’ camp, once insisted,
‘The principal problem the French [i.e. Boulez and co.] have with my music … circles
around my interest in Satie’; Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again: A Biography of John
Cage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), p. 84.
2
Richard Kostelanetz (ed.), Virgil Thomson: A Reader. Selected Writings, 1924–1984
(New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 108.
3
Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork: On Stravinsky
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam Academic Archive, 2006), p. 141.
a healthy dose of scepticism: as Robert Orledge has rightly argued, they are not
to be taken literally.4
Nevertheless, well-deserved revisionist moderation does not void the fact
that the Thomson position was held, if often implicitly, by most of the leading
players involved in the post-war recuperation of Satie. No doubt, outward
appearances indicate that strictly technical values – such as the all-pervading
fadeur of Satie’s musical surfaces, his insistence on the virtues of repetition
and the ostensible contingency of content vis-à-vis structure in some of his
works – were decisive in this reception. With Ravel’s early assessment of Satie
as ‘a great experimenter’ setting the tone,5 most accounts have focused upon the
aesthetic impact his musical innovations have had on subsequent generations,
at the expense of a serious discussion of his ambiguous philosophical legacy.
Yet, given that the revival of interest in Satie’s work among experimental
practitioners came precisely at a time when the catastrophe of Auschwitz (to
say nothing of the enduring spectre of global nuclear annihilation) rendered the
past profoundly compromised – in other words, at a time when forgetting was
the rule of the day – the centrality of the perception that the author of ‘Mémoires
d’un amnésique’ had discovered a means of composing ‘without history’ can
hardly be over-stated. In this sense, it is no coincidence that John Cage’s initial
impulse in the late 1940s was to link Satie directly to Webern: the Darmstadt
avant-garde deified Webern for much the same reason, as the only composer
whose work, as Richard Taruskin notes, was deemed appropriate to the amnesiac
tenor of the Stunde null and its injunction ‘to start from scratch, to reject the past
in its totality as tainted if not actually destroyed in the Holocaust’.6
Because they were not directly exposed to the horrors of the war, this subtext
is far from self-evident in the work of Satie’s two most important American
evangelists, Thomson and Cage. (Although Cage gave hundreds of interviews
during his long career, he virtually never addressed this issue publicly.)7 Instead,
4
1990), pp. 258–9.
5
Arbie Orenstein (ed.), A Ravel Reader: Correspondence, Articles, Interviews
(Mineola: Dover, 2003), p. 45.
6
Richard Taruskin, Music in the Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western
Music, Vol. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 18. This apparent equivalency
of function of Webern and Satie is yet another manifestation of the truism that the total
serialists and chance composers reached the same conclusions and produced compositions
that sounded effectively indistinguishable from one another, by the most radically divergent
of means.
7
But see Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge,
2003), p. 63 for one of the very rare exceptions to this rule: ‘When the Second World War
came along, I talked to myself, what do I think of the Second World War? Well, I think
it’s lousy. So I wrote a piece, Imaginary Landscape No. 3, which is perfectly hideous.
What I meant by that is that the Second World War is perfectly hideous.’ Also noteworthy
is the now-lost 1943 dance score Lidice, written to commemorate the victims of the Nazi
History, Homeopathy and the Spiritual Impulse 185
we must look to the post-Cage generation for an explicit formulation of Satie’s

relevance in light of the singular moral and historical exigencies of the extended
post-war period. In his manifesto ‘Boredom and Danger’, written during the
summer of 1966, the Fluxus composer and former Cage pupil Dick Higgins8
broached the topic through the lens of Satie’s repetitive works. Higgins was
certainly well prepared for the task, having established himself as one of the
New York underground’s foremost Satieans: for the 1965 New York Avant-Garde
Festival, he staged Relâche with his wife Alison Knowles, Meredith Monk and the
Japanese visual artist Ay-O, while on 18 June the following year he hosted a major
all-Satie marathon at his Chelsea, Manhattan gallery. Including contributions from
Yvonne Rainer of the Judson Dance Theater (already a longstanding Satie convert),
the concert featured the cabaret songs and a Cage-styled relay performance of
Vexations.9 It was the latter that helped alert Higgins to the positive virtues of
boredom – its ‘mysterious and profound’ properties, as Satie had it.10 In particular,
Higgins came to recognise boredom’s potential as a ‘technique’ ideally suited to
atrocities perpetrated in the eponymous Czech village the previous year. Similarly, Cage’s
1942 prepared piano composition In the Name of the Holocaust is often referenced in this
context. Though Cage’s biographer David Revill posits that the work was directly motivated
by his disgust at the conflict, given its date, the title almost certainly does not refer to the
Nazi genocide, but is rather an allusion to a passage from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Cage’s
favourite novel; David Revill, The Roaring Silence. John Cage: A Life (New York: Arcade
Publishing, 1992), p. 82. It is important to note that all three of these works are from Cage’s
youth and that he would renounce their overt topicality as soon as his mature aesthetic
coalesced in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
8
Higgins was a student in Cage’s now-legendary New School classes of 1957–9.
9
For Rainer’s landmark early 1960s Satie dances, see Sally Banes, Democracy’s
Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983). For
information on the two Higgins concerts, see Richard D. Freed, ‘Avant-Garde Festival
Reviews Erik Satie in Music and Dance’, New York Times, 27 August 1965, p. 16; Deborah
Jowitt, ‘Monk and King: The Sixties Kids’, in Sally Banes (ed.), Reinventing Dance in
the 1960s: Everything was Possible (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003),
p. 126; Edward Strickland, American Composers: Dialogues on Contemporary Music
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 91; and Stephen Varble, ‘Interview with
Charlotte Moorman on the Avant-Garde Festivals’, in Geoffrey Hendricks (ed.), Critical
Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia and Rutgers University, 1958–
1972 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 174. In addition to Higgins,
the pianists participating in the Vexations performance were John Bierhorst, Ferdinando
Buonanno, Philip Corner, George Flynn, Joseph Gurt, Miriam Kappell, John MacDowell,
Judy Speiser, James Tenney and Joan Wiesan; ‘Who Makes Music and Where’, New York
Times, 12 June 1966, p. 140; see also the advertisement ‘Concert: Piano Music of Erik
Satie’, Village Voice, 16 June 1966, p. 40.
10
Ornella Volta (ed.), A Mammal’s Notebook, trans. Antony Melville (London: Atlas
Press, 1996), p. 149.
the experiential, phenomenological concerns motivating the Fluxus movement.11

Taking Vexations, as well as ‘La défaite des Cimbres’ from Vieux sequins et vieilles
cuirasses, as antecedents of a putative ‘new mentality’, he draws attention in equal
measure to the ‘euphoric acceptance and enjoyment’ as well as the uncertainty and
disorientation – the ‘psychological difficulties’ – such works necessarily induce in
the listener.12
Though Higgins’ enthusiasm for these musical threshold states is highly
significant, for the moment I would like to draw attention to the ideological
associations he draws with Satie’s repetitive works. Higgins begins his argument
in a mock-Frankfurt School register, suggesting that ‘a work that is without these
possibilities [i.e. boredom and danger] only decorates life and so is merely a
commodity’.13 Departing from this common avant-gardist premise, he then asserts
that Fluxus should aim to broaden the perceptual horizons of its audiences by
any means necessary – hence the acceptance of emotional and physical ‘danger’,
violent spectacle and psychological abuse as legitimate compositional strategies.
And it is precisely at this point that Higgins recognises the dangerous game that
Fluxus artists are playing by experimenting with such tactics:
We only want to overwhelm when to do so seems a positive factor. There was

nothing more overwhelming than Hitler’s speeches as staged by Goebbels.
There has been a great deal of that in our world and one way to avoid it is to use
more sophisticated values in our own work, and the acceptance of boredom and
danger as valuable is indispensable to this end.14
11
For an exhaustive investigation of the centrality of ‘experiential’, perceptual
preoccupations to the Fluxus movement, see Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002). It should be noted that the word ‘movement’ is
something of a misnomer as far as Fluxus is concerned; it has often been asserted that the
terms ‘sensibility’ or ‘attitude’ would be more appropriate.
12
Dick Higgins, ‘Boredom and Danger’, in Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn (eds),
Source: Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966–1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2011), pp. 182, 178, 181. The reasons for Higgins’ interest in ‘La défaite des Cimbres’ are
obscure. Higgins is under the impression that the final eight beats of the movement are to be
repeated by the pianist 380 times, yet the work contains no such indication, nor is there any
known performing tradition to this effect. Alison Knowles remains convinced that Higgins
derived the number 380 from a specific source (which she can no longer recall); private
communication with Alison Knowles, 2 June 2012. Either way, it is unclear why Higgins
thought ‘La défaite des Cimbres’ was one of Satie’s ‘repetitive’ works in the first place. It
should be noted that a number of subsequent commentators, most notably Nyman, have
taken Higgins’ claim about ‘La défaite des Cimbres’ at face value and have disseminated it
further without inquiring into its accuracy; see, for example, Nyman, Experimental Music,
p. 36.
13
Higgins, ‘Boredom’, p. 182.
14
Ibid.
Higgins believes that, within certain bounds (when it ‘seems a positive factor’),
two wrongs do make a right – so to speak – and that the best means of healing
an illness is, paradoxically, through further exposure to the illness. Needless to
say, this line of reasoning practically guarantees misunderstanding: Higgins’
argument is by no means that the Nazi death camps should be reinstituted, the
better for us to be desensitised to the unspeakable fact that they ever existed in
the first place. Rather, his proposed method is a homeopathic one, founded upon
the formula of ‘heal like with like’. Significantly, homeopathy is a key doctrine of
Rosicrucianism, that esoteric movement with which Satie became involved during
the 1890s.15
Of course, Satie’s association with the Rosicrucian craze was notoriously
equivocal: though many have dismissed it as little more than an arch send-up
of fin-de-siècle Montmartre at its most decadent and self-important, the question
of the genuineness of Satie’s association with the movement remains a matter
of considerable debate.16 For our purposes, however, Satie’s motives are less
important than the fact that, taken together, the Rose-Croix pieces remain one of
the rare overt expressions of occult Christianity in the musical canon. Yet, as Noel
Verzosa observes, this reality has been consistently suppressed or downplayed
– with not a little embarrassment – by Satie’s closest defenders. This is the case
insofar as to admit that Sâr Péladan’s brand of over-ripe late romanticism had
any lasting impact on Satie would be to severely compromise his modernist
bona fides. As far as matters musical went, the late-nineteenth-century revival of
Rosicrucianism would have been unthinkable without the influence of that other
panegyric to homeopathic Christianity, Wagner’s Parsifal. Verzosa concludes that
entertaining the possibility that Satie’s ties to Rosicrucianism were earnest would
mean complicating his long-held reputation as the anti-Wagner par excellence,
the true originator of le style dépouillé.17 Therefore, if it cannot be denied that his
formative years were spent ‘in the very heart of Klingsor’s garden, in the very
15
Although to my knowledge Higgins never discussed the hermetic, alchemic
traditions of Rosicrucianism by name, he was long fascinated by the work of Giordano
Bruno (1548–1600) and Robert Fludd (1574–1637), both of whom were closely aligned
with the movement.
16
With respect to Satie’s true opinion of Rosicrucianism, William Austin helpfully
poses four potential scenarios: ‘1) Satie was cynically joking in a ponderous way; 2) he was
deeply committed to a fantastic ideal, which he abandoned by 1900; 3) he served a subtler
ideal, to which he remained faithful while protecting it with a shell of irony; 4) he was
uncertainly groping his lonely way amid conflicting ideals’; William Austin, ‘Satie Before
and After Cocteau’, Musical Quarterly 48/2 (1962), p. 224.
17
Noel Orillo Verzosa, Jr., ‘The Absolute Limits: Debussy, Satie, and the Culture
of French Modernism, ca. 1860–1920’, PhD dissertation, University of California, 2008,
pp. 94–104. Verzosa concludes at p. 103 that ‘the modernist values that Satie is thought to
embody today arose out of active participation in, and not simply an ironic critique of, the
culture of mysticism in fin-de-siècle Paris’.
depths of the Grail’s crypt’,18 those inclined to view Satie as having been at the
vanguard of the siege on Bayreuth cannot but justify his allegiance to Péladan,
Montmartre’s Fisher King, as the actions of a ‘double agent’, wielding the sword
of understated satire, safeguarded by the armour of soft-pedalled pudeur.
Unsurprisingly, these historiographical obstacles are further amplified in post-
war Satie reception. Though Vexations – and, to a lesser degree, compositions like
Messe des pauvres (1893–5) – were absolutely front and centre in this reception,
these works’ patent Rosicrucian and post-Wagnerian affinities were almost entirely
effaced in the course of the endeavour to install Satie as the forefather of the Cage-
Higgins experimental axis. Indeed, to the extent that the 1950s–1960s vanguard
did not favour the supposed anti-art ‘objectivity’ of Satie’s final period, Verzosa
correctly notes that commentators have tended to treat the Rose-Croix music as
little more than an embryonic, abortive attempt at ideas that Satie would more
successfully realise with musique d’ameublement.19 Yet it is also plain to see that
in the aesthetic atmosphere of the 1950s, in which the ‘perfect non-referential
purity’20 effected by both chance and total serialism was prized above all else,
the sublimated Catholicism and dissembled links to Wagnerian Kunst-religion
characteristic of the pre-Arcueil music would have been even more alien than they
were to Cocteau and the Les Six composers circa 1917.
Consequently, in assessing the post-war Satie reception, we are confronted
with two very different points of departure: on the one hand, the widely held
claim that Satie’s music served as an anti-idealist, demystifying stimulus for a
generation hoping to refute the fiction of the cult of the artist and artworks once
and for all; and, on the other hand, the rather more unorthodox suggestion that
the Cage-Higgins-centred Satie revival entailed a tacit ongoing dialogue with the
idea that music should be the handmaiden of spiritual impulses; that, as Wagner
asserted, it could even take over the role formerly played by religion. The choice
is one of emphasis: did Satie’s experimental heirs set such great store by his music
because, in the words of Vladimir Jankélévitch, it endeavours ‘to disenchant the
enchanted soul’?21 Or, rather, did they value it for opposite reasons, as it seems
to exercise such a potent ‘power of bewitchment’ over its listeners?22 No doubt,
Cage’s well-known defences of Satie – in particular, his assertion that to follow
in Satie’s footsteps, we must ‘give up … our inherited aesthetic claptrap’ – would
18
Jean Cocteau, quoted in ibid., p. 136.
19
Ibid., p. 99.
20
Kate van Orden, ‘On the Side of Poetry and Chaos: Mallarméan Hasard and
Twentieth-Century Music’, in Michael Temple (ed.), Meetings with Mallarmé in
Contemporary French Culture (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998), p. 167.
21
‘À désenchanter l’âme enchantée’; Vladimir Jankélévitch, La Musique et les heures
(Paris: Seuil, 1988), p. 9.
22
Vladimir Jankélévitch, Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 22.
appear to indicate it was the former that appealed far more strongly.23 Yet, as we
shall see, the ‘mystical’, post-romantic image of Satie played an equal, if more
furtive, role in shaping post-war sensibilities. Only Satie, it seemed, could address
the historical impasse then confronting not only artists but all of humanity. This
is particularly clear in the work of another of Satie’s most passionate mid-century
devotees, the controversial German sculptor and proto-performance artist Joseph
Beuys. A colleague of Cage and Higgins, Beuys mined the links between Satie
and Wagner to an unparalleled degree, finding particular inspiration in their shared
enthusiasm for the chivalric spirituality of the Middle Ages.24
Starting with the conceptual framework outlined in ‘Boredom and Danger’,
the following investigation will trace the divergent ways in which the homeopathic
impulse latent in Satie’s works operates in a trio of performances given within a
span of 18 months during 1963 and 1964: Cage’s presentation of the public world
premiere of Vexations – which Higgins suggested was a Fluxus performance in all
but name25 – and two of Beuys’ ‘actions’ (as he called his performance pieces),
the Sibirische Symphonie 1. Satz and Kukei, akopee-Nein!, Braunkreuz, Fettecken,
Modellfettecken. The comparison between Beuys and Cage is particularly salient
with respect to problems of historicity and the contemporary ‘loss of meaning’ (of
which the former is a subcomponent), both effects of an ever-more thoroughly
administered, instrumentalised (post)modernity. As the two great optimists of
post-war art, both played the role of religious healer as frequently as they played
the role of artist, engaging in practices that were as much anthropological as they
were art-historical in nature.26 It is therefore characteristic that both deploy Satie’s
works as spiritual, holistic remedies for the ‘crisis’ of meaning. Yet, while Beuys
23
John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown: Wesleyan University
Press, 1961), p. 82.
24
All the same, some critics have insinuated that Beuys found Satie’s work to be of
value as an instantiation of musical Dadaism, a position the following discussion will reveal
as being wide of the mark; for such a reading, see Mario Kramer, Klang und Skulptur: Der
musikalische Aspekt im Werk von Joseph Beuys (Darmstadt: Verlag Jürgen Häusser, 1995),
p. 13.
25
In spite of this, we should take care not to conflate Cage with Fluxus, for their
positions were by no means always synonymous.
26
As Claudia Mesch and Viola Michely intimate, for reasons of academic fashion
the strong religious orientation (predominantly Catholic, but by no means exclusively) of
Beuys’ work has been largely neglected by English-language art-historical scholarship:
‘Introduction’, in Claudia Mesch and Viola Michely (eds), Joseph Beuys: The Reader
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 4–6. For a recent sign that this may be changing,
see Chris Thompson, Felt: Fluxus, Joseph Beuys, and the Dalai Lama (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011). To an extent, a similar situation exists with respect
to Cage, though George Leonard is hardly alone in his conviction that Cage ‘becomes more
comprehensible when he is thought of not as a musician but as a religious figure’: George
J. Leonard, Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John
Cage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 120.
looks to restore absent, forgotten meanings to the experience of modernity, Cage

instead sees the ‘loss of meaning’ as empowering. As Robert Morgan has correctly
intimated, the two disagree most intractably on the problem of the psyche and
ego:27 in a word, Beuys practises egotic homeopathy, Cage egoless homeopathy.
Consequently, whereas Cage renounces the past by embracing the strategy of
forgetting suggested by Vexations, in his Satie-inspired actions, Beuys can only
resurrect historical consciousness by substituting an irretrievable – and hence
fraudulent – past for the present.
Beuys and the Ambivalence of the Past
Apart from its obvious historical-ideological implications, it is possible that

Higgins’ allusion to the unsavoury authoritarianism of ‘Hitler’s speeches as
staged by Goebbels’ in ‘Boredom and Danger’ has a second, rather more personal
meaning. Higgins had his first sustained contact with Beuys at one of the earliest
official Fluxus events, the ‘Festum Fluxorum Fluxus: Musik und Antimusik,
das Instrumentale Theater’, held on 2–3 February 1963 at the Staatliche
Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, where Beuys was then a professor.28 Though Beuys’
work is now widely read as a tacit commentary on German collective memory
and its failure to adequately address the legacy of the Holocaust, during the
late 1960s and 1970s, it was instead his vigorous efforts to construct a ‘larger-
than-life’ persona – the way in which Beuys imbued all of his activities with an
atavistic, ‘shamanistic’ aura – that received the most attention from colleagues.
In 1963, however, Beuys was still a relative unknown. No one, with the possible
exception of his closest associates, could have predicted what role he would play
in the Düsseldorf concerts.
Prominently featuring elements from Satie’s Messe des pauvres and Sonneries
de la Rose + Croix, Beuys’ main contribution to the ‘Festum’ was the Sibirische
Symphonie 1. Satz,29 given on the event’s first evening.30 Heiner Stachelhaus has
27
See Robert C. Morgan, The End of the Art World (New York: Allworth Press, 1998),
p. 107: ‘What Beuys’s teaching suggests, in contrast to that of John Cage, is that the denial
of the ego is less healthy and less beneficial than the rechanneling of the ego as a source
of energy.’
28
He also helped co-organise the soiree; Uwe M. Schneede, Joseph Beuys: Die
Aktionen. Kommentiertes Werkverzeichnis mit fotografischen Dokumentationen (Ostfildern-
Ruit bei Stuttgart: Verlag G. Hatje, 1994), p. 20.
29
For the sake of convenience, this work will henceforth be referred to as the
Symphonie. The abbreviation should not be confused for any of Beuys’ other ‘symphonic’
works, namely EURASIA. Sibirische Symphonie 1963. 32. Satz and 34. Satz (1966) and
Celtic + ~ (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony (1970).
30
There has been some confusion as to whether the action was given on the first
or the second evening of the ‘Festum’: following Beuys’ statements, most authoritative
rightly described the action – Beuys’ very first – as a deliberate ‘provocation’,31

for it served notice to Higgins and George Maciunas (the unofficial chairman
and ideologist of Fluxus) in no uncertain terms that Beuys’ vision for the nascent
Fluxus ‘tendency’ was already miles away from theirs – that, as Beuys later put
it, it was even ‘directly opposite’ of theirs.32 Indeed, the Düsseldorf audience was
shocked, taken aback by the unexpectedly visceral, incantatory intensity of the
Symphonie. Years later, Beuys could ‘still remember the surprise on Dick Higgins’
face’ after the conclusion of the action, which contrasted absolutely with the cool,
disinterested logic characteristic of the other performances.33 Higgins was not the
only one caught unawares: Emmet Williams recalled his Fluxus colleagues being
sources have previously indicated that the Symphonie was performed on 3 February, the
second evening, and that his other offering, the rather inconsequential Komposition für 2
Musikanten, was given the prior evening; see, for example, Götz Adriani, Winifried Konnertz
and Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys: Life and Works, trans. Patricia Lech (Woodbury: Barron’s
Educational Series, 1979), p. 91; Heiner Stachelhaus, Joseph Beuys, trans. David Britt (New
York: Abbeville Press, 1991), p. 129; Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (New York: Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, 1979), p. 87. Uwe Schneede, however, has convincingly argued
that the Symphonie had to have been given on the first evening (2 February) and that the
Komposition was carried out the following night; likewise, Beuys specialist Mario Kramer
seconds Schneede’s assessment: Schneede, Aktionen, p. 28 n. 2; and Kramer, Klang, p. 35.
31
Stachelhaus, Beuys, p. 129.
32
Joseph Beuys and Richard Hamilton, ‘Gespräch zwischen Joseph Beuys und
Richard Hamilton’, in Ewa Beuys, Wenzel Beuys and Jessyka Beuys (eds), Joseph Beuys.
Block Beuys: Der Block Beuys im Hessischen Landesmuseum Darmstadt (Munich:
Schirmer-Mosel, 1997), p. 10.
33
Tisdall, Beuys, p. 88; for another recollection of the response to the Symphonie,
see Jean Sellem, ‘The Fluxus Outpost in Sweden: An Interview with Bengt af Klintberg’,
Lund Art Press 2/2 (1991), p. 67. Though there is no reason to doubt the veracity of Beuys’
recollection, it does further muddy the waters with regard to the question of which evening
the Symphonie was performed. Maciunas’ correspondence with Beuys in preparation
for the ‘Festum’ indicates that Higgins was in Turkey in January 1963 and that it was
uncertain whether he would be able to attend: Adriani, Konnertz and Thomas, Beuys, p. 88.
According to Owen Smith, in the event, Higgins missed the first evening but was able to
attend and participate in the second night’s festivities; Owen F. Smith, Fluxus: The History
of an Attitude (San Diego: San Diego State University Press, 1998), p. 96. If this was indeed
the case, and if Beuys’ memory of Higgins’ reaction is accurate, this would cast doubt
on Schneede’s otherwise plausible attribution of the action to the first evening. Further
confusing matters, elsewhere Smith claims that the Symphonie was performed on the first
evening and implies that Higgins was not only present but contributed his Constellation Nos.
4 and 7 to the programme; Owen Smith, ‘Developing a Fluxable Forum: Early Performance
and Publishing’, in Ken Friedman (ed.), The Fluxus Reader (Chichester: Academy
Editions, 1998), p. 4. For her part, Alison Knowles recalls being present with Higgins for
both nights: private communication with Alison Knowles, 2 June 2012. Higgins’ own brief
commentary, written in the wake of the ‘Festum’, also seems to imply his having been there
both evenings: Dick Higgins, ‘Auszug aus Postface’, in Jürgen Becker and Wolf Vostell
‘astonished’ and in a state of ‘shock at finding themselves aligned with this kind
of activity’.34
Beuys most forcefully parted ways with the Fluxus mainstream with respect
to their proposition that authorship and narrative were no longer relevant to
contemporary artistic production. Maciunas was unequivocal on the issue: Fluxus
would ‘destroy the authorship of pieces & make them totally anonymous’.35 As
such, the cult of the artist (revived in the 1940s by the Abstract Expressionists)
and its attendant notions ‘genius’, ‘inspiration’ and even ‘originality’ were to be
wholly devalued. Sometime Fluxian Yoko Ono puts it plainly: ‘In Fluxus, it was
not “cool” to use anything that had to do with human psyche [sic].’36 Going one
better than Cage (though it leant heavily upon his precedent), Fluxus rejected
the grand imperatives of communication and self-expression in favour of what
Higgins termed ‘mini-realism’, immersive, quasi-scientific investigations of the
density of everyday experience.37 Ideally, the artist would even become superfluous
with respect to her works, an aspiration reflected in the general rule that Fluxus
compositions ‘could be performed by anyone, at any time, thereby divorcing the
ego of the artist from his or her creation’.38 In contrast, Beuys’ actions would
have been unthinkable without his physical presence: impossible for others to
interpret or even straightforwardly re-enact, their every detail bears his inimitable
signature.39
That said, to contend that Beuys had no stake in the conviction underlying
Fluxus’ post-Cagean rubric – that there is no hiatus between art and life – would be
to misrepresent his relationship with the movement. Arguably, without the benefit
of his experiences with Fluxus, Beuys would never have arrived at what became
(eds), Happenings, Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme: Eine Dokumentation (Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1965), p. 184.
34
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, ‘Joseph Beuys
at the Guggenheim’, October 12 (Spring 1980), p. 7.
35
George Maciunas, ‘Letter to Tomas Schmit (1964)’, in Jon Hendricks (ed.), Fluxus
Codex: The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (Detroit: Gilbert and Lila Silverman
Fluxus Collection, 1988), p. 37, emphasis in original.
36
Yoko Ono, quoted in Kristine Stiles, ‘Anomaly, Sky, Sex and Psi in Fluxus’, in
Geoffrey Hendricks (ed.), Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance, Intermedia
and Rutgers University, 1958–1972 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), p. 84.
37
Dick Higgins, Modernism since Postmodernism: Essays on Intermedia (San Diego:
San Diego State University Press, 1997), p. 176.
38
Joan Rothfuss, ‘Joseph Beuys: Echoes in America’, in Gene Ray (ed.), Joseph
Beuys: Mapping the Legacy (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001), p. 41.
39
See, for example, Ken Friedman, ‘Getting into Events’, in Ken Friedman (ed.),
Fluxus Performance Workbook [El Djarida, special issue] (1990), p. 5: ‘Only Beuys can
have done a Beuys performance.’ Also relevant is Bengt af Klintberg, ‘Fluxus Games and
Contemporary Folklore: On the Non-Individual Character of Fluxus Art’, Konsthistorisk
tidskrift 62/2 (1993), pp. 115, 120.
his signature slogan, ‘every human being is an artist’.40 Moreover, in later years
(and in a more conciliatory mood), Higgins was willing to admit that, at least
in principle, Beuys’ ‘expressionism’ represented a legitimate ‘side’ of Fluxus.41
Yet in 1963, Higgins and Maciunas were loath to concede this point. Conjuring
the repressed memory of archaic rituals, Beuys’ charisma-laden Symphonie was
an unsettling reminder of a not-so-distant past in which cults of personality and
blood and soil credos ruled the day. That Beuys’ action was given to a largely
international audience in a city that had been reduced to little more than a heap of
rubble less than two decades previously only added insult to injury.
Yet things are never quite so black and white with Beuys. While Higgins’
adoption of the homeopathic method was only hinted at in ‘Boredom and Danger’,
Beuys professed adherence to it throughout his career, openly claiming for his
artistic production the motto ‘similia similibus curantur’.42 Indeed, Beuys had long
seen himself as no less than a crusader for the good, one whose aim was to restore
the human race to ‘health’. Though he was far more flamboyantly pontifical in
approach, in this he was actually much like Cage. It could be argued, then, that
Beuys and Higgins disagree not on the strategy necessary to avoid a return to
‘Hitler’s speeches as staged by Goebbels’, but rather on the tactics required. If to
varying degrees both approach art as a homeopathic, quasi-alchemical remedy for
society’s ills, they disagree on the role subjectivity should play in their attempts to
‘heal like with like’.
In this, it is significant that Beuys appears to have been attracted solely to
Satie’s Rosicrucian works, whereas Cage and Higgins maintained an interest
in the entire oeuvre. As an adherent of the teachings of the Austrian esotericist
Rudolf Steiner, the tenets and imagery of Rosicrucianism had long appealed
to Beuys.43 Not only that: as a youth, he read Péladan’s writings with great
enthusiasm and continued to employ the Sâr’s ideas into his mature years.44
40
Joseph Beuys, Joseph Beuys in America: Energy Plan for the Western Man.
Writings by and Interviews with the Artist, ed. Carin Kuoni (New York: Four Walls Eight
Windows, 1990), p. 22. For a balanced summary of this point, see Thomas Crow, The
Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, 1955–69 (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), p. 136. For Higgins’ opinion of the situation, see Dick
Higgins and Nicholas Zurbrugg, ‘Looking Back: Dick Higgins Interviewed by Nicholas
Zurbrugg’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 21/2 (May 1999), p. 27.
41
Higgins, Modernism, p. 94. This suggests it was not the violence in Beuys’ action in
and of itself that Higgins objected to: after all, Higgins was the composer of Ten Thousand
Symphonies (1968), a work whose score is produced by shooting a machine gun at empty
staff paper.
42
Beuys, Energy Plan, p. 128: the Latin for ‘heal like with like’.
43
Steiner was a student of Rosicrucianism and devoted multiple lecture series to
the topic.
44
Stachelhaus, Beuys, p. 41; Ann Temkin and Bernice Rose, Thinking is Form: The
Drawings of Joseph Beuys (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1993), p. 123 n. 3.
Without question, the argument could be made that Beuys co-opted Satie’s works
not for their musical values, but rather as particularly vivid totems of an occultist
belief system to which he hoped to convert his audiences. Yet to do so would
be to overstate the case, for Beuys, who received musical training as a child
(he played cello and piano), first fell in love with Satie’s music as a teenager,
long before his mature aesthetico-philosophical loyalties were settled.45 Indeed,
considering how obscure a name Satie was in Germany during this period –
not to mention that Beuys’ adolescence coincided with the height of the Nazi
campaign against so-called entartete Kunst – it must be counted as a fairly
remarkable occurrence that he came into contact with Satie’s music at such an
early age.46 Beuys clearly had a close affinity for the music itself: according to
one of his closest friends, ‘he loved Satie and played his music exquisitely’.47
Satie was even played at Beuys’ funeral in 1986.48
Nevertheless, Beuys did later claim that ‘a Rosicrucian or at least a spiritual
intention’ was foremost in his mind during the performance of the Symphonie.49 The
action lasted only 10 minutes and featured two sites of activity: in close proximity,
a grand piano and a large portable blackboard.50 Beuys prefaced the action by
tying the body of a dead hare onto the latter, leaving it dangling upside down. Also
affixed to the blackboard was an electric power cord, which was extended to the
piano. After preparing the hare, Beuys sat down at the piano, where he began a
short improvisation. Gradually, he ‘blended in’ (Beuys’ words) excerpts from the
Messe and selected harmonies from the Sonneries.51 Rather than playing either of
the works in their entirety, Beuys only used them ‘suggestively’, as Uwe Schneede
notes.52 At certain intervals, he also stopped the music to write various sentences
45
One might speculate that as a child Beuys implicitly sensed a particular quality in
Satie’s Rosicrucian works that strongly appealed to him (for example, a feeling of austere,
inwardly-directed spirituality), but that he only later came to realise the direct conceptual
and aesthetic relevance of this early enthusiasm to his nascent visual style.
46
Although Beuys had a notorious mythomaniac streak, often exaggerating (or in certain
cases wholly omitting) certain episodes of his autobiography, there is no evidence to dispute
the contention that he first became acquainted with Satie’s music during the second half of the
1930s. Notwithstanding the fact that he was a member of the Hitler Youth, Beuys would later
account for the situation by claiming that at the time he aspired ‘to take in everything that was
forbidden during Hitler’s reign’; Adriani, Konnertz and Thomas, Beuys, p. 13.
47
‘Er liebte Satie und spielte ihn vorzüglich’; Franz Joseph van der Grinten, quoted in
Jürgen Geisenberger, Joseph Beuys und die Musik (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 1999), p. 40.
48
Dave Perez, ‘Exhibition Review: Snyder-Rogers Gallery, Kansas City’, New Art
Examiner 14/4 (December 1986), p. 49.
49
Tisdall, Beuys, p. 88.
50
Geisenberger, Beuys, p. 63; Schneede, Aktionen, p. 22. Notably, both items would
become omnipresent in Beuys’ later oeuvre.
51
Adriani, Konnertz and Thomas, Beuys, p. 91; Tisdall, Beuys, p. 88.
52
‘Andeutend’; Schneede, Aktionen, p. 23. Of course, given the instrumentation
(organ and chorus) of the Messe des pauvres, an unabridged, unreduced performance would
and notations on the blackboard, each time apparently resuming the music where
he left off.53 After completing the musical portion of the action, Beuys then placed
five large, roughly spherical lumps of brown clay (he referred to these as ‘little clay
mountains’) on the closed piano lid.54 Into each55 lump was inserted a large pine twig,
each approximately half a metre long and devoid of foliage. The branches, which
Beuys’ wife described as ‘telegraph wires’,56 were meant as a natural counterpart
to the power cord. This is why the cable was subsequently placed amongst the
miniature forest of branches, the result of which Beuys portrayed as resembling an
‘electric pylon system leading from the piano to the hare’.57
At this point, Beuys proceeded to the climax of the Symphonie. Brandishing
a knife, he punctured the dead hare’s skin and removed its heart, doing so with
such force and conviction that it reputedly ‘took some spectators’ breath away’.58
While for some the violence elicited ‘frightening and painful sensations’, Beuys
nevertheless performed the evisceration without a trace of sensationalism:
according to eyewitnesses, it was ‘a very quiet affair’, although Nam June Paik did
recall Beuys being ‘almost red-faced’ by the end.59 By way of a coda, Beuys’ final
gesture was to place the heart on the blackboard, connecting it to the electrical
wire and – by extension – to the piano.
What is perhaps most noteworthy about the commentary Beuys gave on the
Symphonie in the ensuing years is his reference to it as ‘a free composition for
piano’.60 This is peculiar for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it
was precisely the non-musical elements of the action – the removal of the hare’s
heart – that made it Beuys’ first succès de scandale. Indeed, most commentaries
on the work have paid little if any attention to its significant Satiean endowment.61
On the other hand, Beuys seems to have wanted to have his cake and eat it too, for
he also notes of this ostensible ‘composition for piano’ that ‘the piano was used as
a sculpture’.62 Perhaps he considered his performance, and by implication Satie’s
music, as consisting of static, plastic objets sonores (thereby corroborating Daniel
Albright’s shrewd claim that ‘Satie was the first great materialist of music’).63 No
have been impossible regardless of the circumstances.

53
54
Schneede, Aktionen, ‘kleinen Tonberge’, p. 23.
55
Ibid.
56
‘Telegraphenartige Draht’; Eva Beuys, quoted in ibid.
57
58
59
Schneede, Aktionen, p. 24; Nam June Paik, Beuys Vox: 1961–86 (Seoul: Won
Gallery, 1990), p. 19.
60
Tisdall, Beuys, p. 88
61
The exception is Geisenberger, Beuys, pp. 39–42, 61–7.
62
‘War … das Klavier als Skulptur benutzt’; quoted in ibid., p. 64.
63
Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and
Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 192.
doubt, the severe, utterly inert sonorities of the Messe and Sonneries would be
tailor-made to create such an impression. Nevertheless, we may rightly ask if the
Symphonie can truly be classified as both a musical composition and a sculpture.
Given that Beuys once went so far as to declare that the work ‘contained the essence
of all [his] future activities’,64 it is likely that he did not intend the terms ‘musical
composition’ and ‘sculpture’ in their traditional senses; instead, he is referring to his
so-called ‘expanded concept of art’ and the related notion of ‘social sculpture’ (or
‘social plastic’), both of which, as he claims, were present in the Düsseldorf action
in germinal form.
Viewed schematically, the ‘expanded concept of art’ can be boiled down to
Beuys’ conviction that ‘everyone is an artist’. This is not to say that, willy-nilly,
he believes ‘everyone is a good painter’; rather, the ‘expanded concept’ refers to
‘the talent involved in every job – a nurse’s talent or a farmer’s talent as creative
potential’.65 Beuys’ frequent use of the term ‘anthropological art’66 is helpful here,
for his aim was to teach individuals, regardless of their occupation or field of
specialisation, how better to unlock their creative potential during the course of
their daily lives – that is, in situations having nothing to do with ‘art’ as ordinarily
conceived. In this, Beuys follows Steiner, regarding creativity as the ground of
society, as the fundamental quality necessary for personal and political ‘self-
determination’ – hence Beuys’ equation, ‘Art=CAPITAL’.67 It follows that if a
nurse and a farmer are artists, their ‘medium’ – patients and crops, respectively – is
broadly speaking society, or ‘social sculpture’/‘social plastic’.68 The implication
is finally that society is an artwork on the broadest of scales, the culmination of
which is to be nothing less than the ‘total artwork of the future social order’.69
What does the Symphonie have to do with these grand visions of a social
Gesamtkunstwerk? After all, if everyone is an artist, what reason is there for a
‘professional’ artist to perform an ‘action’? Consider Beuys’ claim that his works
were composed with ‘materials that transform [themselves] into psychological
powers within those who are not aware of their creative potential’.70 For Beuys, art
as traditionally conceived is now a vehicle, a pedagogical mechanism or ‘productive
64
65
Joseph Beuys, ‘Talking about One’s Own Country: Germany’, in In Memoriam
Joseph Beuys: Obituaries, Essays, Speeches, [ed. unspec.], trans. Timothy Nevill (Bonn:
Inter Nationes, 1986), pp. 44–5.
66
Beuys, in William Furlong, Speaking of Art: Four Decades of Art in Conversation
(London: Phaidon, 2010), p. 81.
67
Beuys, Energy Plan, p. 22; Joseph Beuys, Joseph Beuys. The Multiples: Catalogue
Raisonné of Multiples and Prints, Jörg Schellmann (ed.), 8th edn (New York: Distributed
Art Publishers, 1997), pp. 248, 295.
68
See Beuys, in Joseph Beuys et al., What is Money? A Discussion, trans. Isabelle
Boccon-Gibod (Forest Row: Clairview Books, 2010), pp. 15–16.
69
‘Gesamtkunstwerk zukünftiger Gesellschaftsordnung’; Beuys, Energy Plan, p. 22.
70
Beuys, in Furlong, Speaking, p. 79.
moment of inquiry’71 in the service of a higher ‘art’: the art of museums and galleries
has been subsumed by life, which is in its turn only ever art (‘social plastic’).
Fostering an ‘aura of associative power’,72 Beuys’ actions trigger complex affects
and sensations so as to induce a renewed appreciation of the spectator’s own unique
creative abilities. Not only that: if only negatively, Beuys’ works provide a fleeting
glimpse, a glimmer of the social Gesamtkunstwerk (more on this point later).
This ‘associative power’ generally manifests itself through archetypal images
and the memory traces of the collective unconscious. In the Symphonie, this is
clearest in the case of the dead hare. Though Beuys originally intended to use the
corpse of a stag,73 he chose a hare in full knowledge of the wide array of meanings
attached to it by various strands of pre-modern European folklore. Two statements
he made on the topic are of particular significance: first, his claim that ‘even in
death the hare can understand more than man with his stubborn rationalism’; and,
second, his more allusive suggestion that the hare ‘is a symbol of incarnation. The
hare does in reality what man can only do mentally: he digs himself in, he digs
a construction’.74 The first claim is quintessential Beuys and challenges what he
views as the myopia and spiritual poverty of modern-day science and scholarship.75
Owing to its ‘superb sensory organs’, the Beuysian hare is sensitive to obscure
strata of knowledge, to those primeval facts of existence long since repressed in
the course of humanity’s development. A ‘nomad’, ‘migrant’ or ‘wanderer’ who
traverses the sweeping plains of Eurasia,76 it has a unique understanding of the
ways of matter, of the rules governing the metamorphoses of forms. This point
also helps to clarify Beuys’ second statement. As he sees it, the hare represents
an alchemical, and therefore Rosicrucian, potential in which material boundaries
are made fluid, in which cold is effortlessly transmuted into warmth, liquids into
solids and the dead back into the living.
71
Beuys, in Adriani, Gotz and Thomas, Beuys, p. 68.
72
Mark Rosenthal, Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments (Houston: De
Menil Collection, 2004), p. 26.
73
For whatever reason, Beuys could not obtain a dead stag in time for the Düsseldorf
concert; Stachelhaus, Beuys, p. 55. Nevertheless, he was extremely satisfied with the hare,
for he used it in subsequent works and came to identify strongly with the animal. According
to Heiner Stachelhaus, on one occasion he declared, ‘only half jokingly’: ‘I am not a human
being … I am a hare’; ibid., p. 59.
74
Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys: We Go This Way (London: Violette Editions, 1998),
p. 196; Adriani, Gotz and Thomas, Beuys, p. 132.
75
Georg Jappe, ‘Interview with Beuys about Key Experiences’ trans. Peter Nisbet, in
Ray (ed.), Mapping the Legacy, p. 186. See also Adriani, Gotz and Thomas, Beuys, pp. 63–8.
76
Hence the designation Siberische Symphonie; Tisdall, We Go, p. 19; Antje Von
Graevenitz, ‘Parsifal – Christoph Schlingensief’s Figure of Redemption, as Prefigured by
Richard Wagner and Joseph Beuys’, in Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes and Victoria Walters
(eds), Beuysian Legacies in Ireland and Beyond: Art, Culture and Politics (Berlin: LIT
Verlag, 2011), p. 174.
The last of these transformations was especially important in the Symphonie –

Schneede sees the dangling hare as an allusion to the Crucifixion77 – to the extent
that a spectator could easily take this to be the work’s dominant meaning. Beuys
essentially conceded as much years later when he observed that ‘the Christian
element played an absolutely central part [in the Symphonie]’.78 His free adaptation
of the Satie works was therefore intended to spark off a vital warming process, the
raison d’être of all of his numerous acoustical experiments. This is illustrated well
by his rather gnomic claim that ‘it’s important to hear images and sculptures with
the ear [because hearing can] set in motion a much more inward, deep-seated
machinery, which creates … evolutionary warmth, which enables us to become
beings capable of carrying evolution forward’.79 Beuysian ‘acoustical warmth’ acts
as a carrier of creative forces and potentials (though he also intends this literally, in
that the performance of any musical instrument requires kinetic or potential energy,
thus producing heat). True, man may no longer possess the necessary willingness
or ability to listen in this manner, but the same cannot be said for the Beuysian
hare, with its conspicuously over-sized ears.80 The half-natural, half-man-made
‘electric pylon system’ was envisaged as just such a leporine organ, an antenna
that would pick up the lingering physical traces (i.e. vibrations) of the completed
Satie performances. Therefore, by removing the heart of the hare – the most vital
among vital organs – and joining it to this system, Beuys ‘hoped’ to resurrect the
hare, with all its bygone sonic wisdom, via a transfusion of acoustico-spiritual
warmth. Viewed thus, the Fluxus milieu’s reaction to the Symphonie comes into
further focus: they could not buy into Beuys’ völkisch rituals of wish-fulfilment,
his faith in the transubstantiation of blood into wine.
Needless to say, Beuys did not actually revive the hare. Considering the
obvious, one could argue that, as with his later action How to Explain Pictures
to a Dead Hare (1965), Beuys was rather knowingly enacting an impossible,
deliberately futile mourning process.81 If this was the case, one might suspect that
he was not grieving solely for the dead hare. In a telling exchange, Beuys, again
suggesting humans have much to learn from animals, makes his programme as
explicit as can be: ‘Nowadays people know little about … the meaning of life and
77
Schneede, Aktionen, p. 27.
78
Beuys, ‘Talking about’, p. 30.
79
Beuys, in Joseph Beuys and Volker Harlan, What is Art?: In Conversation with
Joseph Beuys, Volker Harlan (ed.), trans. Matthew Barton and Shelley Sacks (Forest Row:
Clairview Books, 2004), p. 18. Note that Beuys is articulating the popular trope that hearing
is a particularly ‘primal’, passive sense, that there is no such thing as ‘earlids’. Also relevant
in this context are Beuys’ comments in Joseph Beuys, ‘Beuys Keep Swinging: “Gespräch
mit Beuys von Gottfried Tollman, in Spex 9/1982”’, in Ulrike Groos and Markus Müller
(eds), Make it Funky: Crossover zwischen Musik, Pop, Avantgarde und Kunst (Cologne:
Oktagon Verlag, 1998), p. 67
80
Kramer, Klang, p. 38.
81
Rosenthal, Beuys, p. 28.
the meaning of the whole interrelationships of the world. That’s why there are so
many people now who can find no meaning in life and who kill themselves. All
the connected meanings are missing.’82 Yet Beuys’ work is Janus-faced in this
regard: it seems to stoically grieve over this pervasive loss of existential meaning,
while at the same instant desperately attempting to restore these very meanings,
particularly those rooted in the ideologies of early Romanticism and the Middle
Ages.83 There is indeed much to say for the claim, articulated by Beuys’ most
strident critic Benjamin Buchloh, that critical ‘historical thought on any level
… is rejected by Beuys altogether’.84 In other words, the Symphonie would be
no more than a flamboyant game of make-believe: Beuys can only act out his
return to an idealised, Arcadian past by virtue of an enormous act of self-deception
(if not outright sophistry). Namely, Buchloh observes, he simply wishes away
the widespread problematisation of signifying processes (by the Duchampian
ready-made, by poststructuralism, by the culture industry) attributable to the
contemporary ‘crisis’ of meaning.85 In this, Satie unwittingly becomes one of
Beuys’ biggest accomplices. For him, the Messe and Sonneries are found objects,
holy relics without a past – or, rather, their past becomes whichever past he wishes
to arbitrarily bestow upon them.
If the message and contents of the Symphonie were deliberately contentious,
Kukei, akopee-Nein!, Braunkreuz, Fettecken, Modellfettecken86 would become
one of the most notorious works of post-war performance art due to circumstances
largely out of Beuys’ control. The action was given at the Technischen Hochschule
Aachen as part of a Festival der neuen Kunst on the evening of 20 July 1964,
the twentieth anniversary of the German Resistance’s unsuccessful assassination
82
See Beuys, Multiples, p. 24: ‘Using the example of an animal you can get to an
answer to the question: what is the human being, how is he meant?’
83
As Annette Michelson puts it, Beuys’ oeuvre ‘is a rehearsal of things very familiar
to us … an elaborate system of intellectual bricolage’; Buchloh, Krauss and Michelson,
‘Guggenheim’, p. 10. This is illustrated quite well in the Symphonie: though deceptively
simple in material and approach, Beuys actually succeeds in establishing a complex, opaque
web of significations. Access to the ‘meaning’ (or, better, intentionality) underwriting this
web requires ‘initiation’ into Beuysian mythology, with all of its autobiographically tinged
references to various hermetic traditions.
84
Ibid., p. 11.
85
See also Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Reconsidering Joseph Beuys: Once Again’,
in Ray (ed.), Mapping the Legacy, p. 88, where Buchloh addresses this problem in more
forgiving terms: ‘Even if I grant [the] point that it is more likely that Beuys wanted to
engage in a public discourse of mourning … Beuys [never] understood to what extent the
processes of mourning and memory with which [he] claimed to be deeply engaged would
be instantly transformed, and one can say, perverted into other forms of spectacularization,
which they would serve very well.’
86
For the sake of convenience, this work will henceforth be abbreviated as Kukei.
‘Kukei’ and ‘akopee’ are nonsense words coined by Beuys’ son, who was a toddler at the
time; Schneede, Aktionen, p. 45.
attempt on Hitler.87 Nearly cancelled at the last minute by the Hochschule

administration owing to fears that the performances would not be in the ‘proper
spirit’ of the occasion, the evening concert was re-branded as a ‘commemoration’
and went ahead as planned. The dispute only served to raise the event’s profile,
however, with an unruly, near-capacity crowd of more than 800 spectators (largely
engineering students with little previous exposure to contemporary art) packing
the auditorium, ready for controversy.88 Yet, whatever the audience’s expectations,
few could have predicted the circumstances under which the concert would
prematurely end: with Beuys, nose bloodied from a fistfight with an incensed
right-wing student, distributing chocolate to the chaotic throng and holding an
ersatz crucifix aloft in a gesture that was one part ardent sacramental benediction
and one part mock-Nazi salute.
The audience was deliberately provoked from the start: upon entering the hall,
they were immediately bombarded with the voice of Joseph Goebbels, in the guise
of one of his most notorious rabble-rousing soundbites – ‘Do you want total war?’
– loudly and incessantly pumped over the sound system. Setting the tone for the
rest of the evening, the result was an instant clamour, with the spectators loudly
ordering the performers to switch off the distasteful recording. In the midst of the
uproar, Bazon Brock, one of the evening’s prime movers, strode onstage to address
the audience. According to Richard Langston, he informed the crowd that the
Festival would be very different from the perfunctory memorials and observances
to which they were accustomed. Rather, ‘because barbarism and torture still exist
around the world, he explained, resistance is hardly a thing of the past’: most
commemorations of the 20 July anniversary had been no more than rituals of
forgetting, Brock insisted.89 The concert would therefore remind the audience that
the crimes of the past were by no means over and done with, that they instead
remained with each and every one of us as an unspoken wound. Beuys himself
would have gone even further, for he believed that in contemporary capitalism,
‘the human condition is Auschwitz’,90 something that obligated one and all, as he
87
Some uncertainty remains as to whether the date was deliberately chosen, but the
consensus seems to be that it was a happy act of providence and that it was only once the
artists became aware that the concert would occur on 20 July that they decided to address
the anniversary in their performances. See Adam Oellers, ‘Fluxus at the Border: Aachen,
July 20, 1964’, in Eckhart Gillen (ed.), German Art from Beckmann to Richter: Images of
a Divided Country (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1997), pp. 206–7; Schneede, Aktionen,
pp. 42–3.
88
Oellers, ‘Border’, pp. 206–7; Richard Langston, ‘The Art of Barbarism and
Suffering’, in Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (eds), Art of Two Germanys: Cold
War Cultures (New York: Abrams, 2009), p. 241.
89
Ibid.
90
Tisdall, Beuys, p. 23. For a discussion of this rather contentious comment, see Gene
Ray, ‘Joseph Beuys and the After-Auschwitz Sublime’, in Ray (ed.), Mapping the Legacy,
p. 71.
would later implore of his viewers, to ‘show your wound’.91 Whatever the case,
as Brock continued to give his speech, Beuys sat at a run-down upright piano: as
decided in advance, the accompaniment to the talk would be Satie’s Sonneries,
once again in what Beuys described as ‘modified form’.92
At this point, the concert proper got under way. Though each work did not
necessarily commence at the start of the concert, all of the performances were
given simultaneously with others from various positions on the stage.93 For much
of the concert, Beuys’ ‘station’ was extreme stage right: though visible to the
audience, he was at times virtually in the wing and, as witnesses later recalled,
actually remained a ‘background’ presence for the majority of the proceedings.94
With the Satie performance being the first component of the work, Kukei was
one of the pieces to start (or, in Beuys’ case, to continue) in the midst of Brock’s
lengthy talk. Though he did not get the opportunity to complete the entire action as
intended – only a third of the scheduled Festival programme was given before the
police were called in to terminate the concert – Beuys remained at his ‘station’, if
not performing at all times, for the full 98 minutes of uninterrupted activity before
the audience stormed onstage.95
After Beuys concluded the ‘accompaniment’ to Brock’s speech, he set out
to make his ‘Rosicrucian intention’ plain in a manner that the Symphonie had
only intimated. Using the simplest of means – a stack of cardboard boxes used
to conceal a light source and a large sheet of white cardboard used as a backdrop
– Beuys illuminated a bouquet of roses he had positioned upright in a tall glass
vase, creating a static shadow play of roses.96 Content with the symbolic set-
up, he then turned his attention back to the piano. With the narrow lid opened,
he proceeded to insert a variety of items into the piano: among other things,
dried oak leaves, bonbons, marjoram and a postcard of Aachen Cathedral (the
mediaeval coronation site for German kings).97 Next he poured in Omo brand
laundry detergent. According to one eyewitness, however, the result proved
wanting: Beuys tested the timbre and volume of his crude ‘prepared piano’ and,
finding it inadequate, took a nearby trashcan and dumped in the contents. Now
91
92
‘Veränderter Form’; Beuys, quoted in Geisenberger, Beuys, p. 71; see also Adam
C. Oellers and Sibille Spiegel, ‘Wollt ihr das totale Leben?’: Fluxus und Agit-Pop der 60er
Jahre in Aachen (Aachen: Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, 1995), p. 34.
93
For a reproduction of the proposed schedule of the various simultaneous
performances, as well as of a diagram of the various positions each artist was to occupy
onstage, see ibid., pp. 40–42.
94
‘Überhaupt nicht in Vordergrund’: Henning Christiansen, quoted in Schneede,
Aktionen, p. 46.
95
Adriani, Konnertz and Thomas, Beuys, p. 105; Langston, ‘Barbarism’, p. 242.
96
97
he was pleased and could begin to coax a variety of sounds and noises out of the
instrument.98
It is not insignificant that following a performance of the Sonneries, Beuys
would fill the piano with the detritus of everyday life, taken from both the rustic,
völkisch past as well as the affluent, post-war consumer society. As he saw it,
Satie’s aim as a composer was no less than ‘to build a mythos of the common
man’.99 (Nor is he the only one to have held such a view: for Slavoj Žižek, Satie
represents ‘egalitarian communism in music’.)100 In his visual work, Beuys always
opted for the most ordinary, artisanal, fetid materials he could find, his favourite
colours being the rust-red of dried blood, the dark brown of chocolate and dirt,
and the grey of felt and rotten bratwurst. In this, he could have found no greater
musical ally than Satie, the master of the sonically flavourless, pallid and flinty.101
Beuys’ next step was to bore holes into the piano, the positions of the holes being
determined according to a piece of sheet music covered with brown blotches and
smudges he had lying next to the score of the Sonneries.102 Though the audience,
most of whom were some distance away from him, were under the impression
that he was wielding an electric drill and would thus damage the piano, he was
in actuality only using an electric chisel.103 Accordingly, as Brock recalled, rather
than having a violent connotation, the vibrations produced by the chisel were
meant as a means of ‘sound production, a musical activity’.104 Beuys later made
the intent behind both the ‘drilling’ and the piano ‘preparation’ clear: the aim was
to bring about ‘healing chaos, amorphous healing’, whereby ‘the frozen and rigid
forms of … social convention are dissolved and warmed, and future form becomes
possible’.105 A comparison with Beuys’ earlier Piano-Aktion (1963), in which he
literally destroyed a piano, is pertinent: ‘I played the piano all over – not just the
98
Adriani, Konnertz and Thomas, Beuys, p. 108.
99
‘Einen Mythos aufzubauen, der sich bezieht auf den einfachen Mann’: Beuys,
in Mario Kramer, Joseph Beuys: “Das Kapital Raum”, 1970–1977 (Heidelberg: Edition
Staeck, 1991), p. 10.
100
Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, revised edn (London: Verso, 2011), p. 381.
101
The colours and symbols Beuys typically relied on (including in Kukei) are also, of
course, those of the discredited German nationalist past. Caroline Tisdall explains the logic
behind this best: ‘Beuys always said, it is terrible to deny the “oakness” of your countryside
just because of the Nazis … He actually dared to take materials like that and use them, and
he reinstalled them in the canon of their “Germanness” [even though] for a German they
are dangerously close to Blut und Boden’; Caroline Tisdall, in Scott Rainbird, Joseph Beuys
and the Celtic World: Scotland, Ireland, and England, 1970–85 (London: Tate Publishing,
2005), p. 80.
102
Adriani, Konnertz and Thomas, Beuys, p. 108.
103
Oellers, ‘Border’, p. 203.
104
‘Um eine Lauterzeugung, eine musikalische Aktivität’: Bazon Brock, quoted in
105
Beuys, quoted in Tisdall, Beuys, p. 90.
keys – with many pairs of old shoes until it disintegrated. My intention was neither
destructive nor nihilistic: “Heal like with like”.’106 For Beuys, the Aachen piano
had already been mistreated, not only by the negligent school custodians but also
by way of the activities of the thoughtless, politically unconscious pianists – the
‘shit-artists, criminals, assholes, impotent dogs’ – who had previously performed
on it.107 By carrying out what appeared by all accounts to be acts of destruction
on the piano, he was therefore repeating what he considered to be the dangerous,
sham-creative performances inflicted upon the instrument by the representatives
of ‘dirty concert hall shit’.108 Yet in true homeopathic manner, fighting fire with fire
produced more than ashes and cinders. Thawing through the reifying imperatives
of tradition, Beuys’ ‘destructive’ acts generated novel, hitherto unheard sounds
and tones: ‘warmth’. As in the Symphonie, a resurrection of sorts was in operation,
or as Langston synopsises it, Beuys’ conduct ‘demonstrated how to resuscitate life
back into something dead, like an old scraped musical instrument’.109 At the same
time, having just performed the Sonneries, it must be admitted that his behaviour
towards the piano could also be taken as an implicit critique of Satie. Beuys, who
once protested that Satie’s aesthetic was lacking in a discernible political praxis,
may have believed the Frenchman was wrong to have been satisfied with ‘merely’
subverting the conventions of music from within.110
The performance sequence that came after this is the least significant in this
context, so it will not be discussed here.111 More pertinent, given Beuys’ comments
about the role ‘warmth’ played in the manipulation of the piano, is the third
sequence of Kukei. Beuys had a two-burner mini-stove heating up on a nearby
table, which he used to slowly melt blocks of fat.112 He then poured the melted fat
into a box, into which he deposited a further packet of Rama-brand margarine.113 As
106
Ibid., p. 86.
107
Adriani, Konnertz and Thomas, Beuys, p. 107. ‘Scheiß-Künstler zurück, diesen
Verbrecher, dieses Arschloch, diesen impotenten Hund’: Beuys, quoted in Geisenberger,
Beuys, p. 27. See also Joseph Beuys, ‘Interview des Magazins “Kunst” mit Joseph Beuys’,
in Becker and Vostell (eds), Happenings, p. 327: ‘The piano was ruined not by me, but
by its previous owners’; ‘Das Klavier ist nicht von mir, sondern von seinen vorherigen
Besitzern ruiniert worden.’
108
‘Dreckiger Konzerthausscheiß’: Geisenberger, Beuys, p. 28. This accounts for
Beuys’ bizarre claims that the piano ‘was happy to have experienced for once in its life what
it did in Aachen’ and that ‘it subsequently thanked [him] expressly [for the performance]’;
‘war glücklich, noch einmal in seinem Leben eine Sache wie Aachen erlebt zu haben. Es hat
sich nachher noch mal ausdrücklich bei mir bedankt’: Beuys, ‘Interview’, p. 327.
109
Langston, ‘Barbarism’, pp. 246–8.
110
See Kramer, Kapital, pp. 10–11.
111
Among other things, it involved Beuys dissolving rose petals in acid, spinning a
top and producing an invisible ‘sculpture’ with ultraviolet light.
112
113
Oellers, ‘Border’, p. 203.
Gene Ray notes, Beuys’ decision to include the hot plate and fat in his subsequent
Auschwitz Demonstration (1968), a vitrine containing various artefacts from old
completed actions, made the intention behind the fat sequence blatant – namely,
it confirmed that this section of Kukei, beyond being a mere didactic illustration
of Beuys’ sculptural theory (in which solids transmute into liquids and so forth),
was a ‘blunt allusion to the crematoria of the Holocaust’ and ‘the body of the
holocaustal sacrifice’.114 Of course, this would have been clear even had Beuys
not included the stove in the Demonstration. Given the date, Brock’s remarks and
the iconography of some of the other Aachen performances (a gas mask, an attack
dog, blood-covered bones), the audience was perfectly aware of what Beuys was
up to. They reacted accordingly, with escalating hostility and remonstration.
What happened next, however, transformed the furore into an all-out free-for-
all. Beuys took a felt-covered copper staff he had to hand and emphatically raised
it over his head. The result, as he later put it, was that ‘the whole place exploded’,
the charismatic conviction of the gesture ‘working like a catalyst … an electric
current’.115 At this point, some of the students rushed onstage; the acid Beuys
used earlier in the action was inadvertently spilled; one student’s clothing was
damaged in the spill; Beuys claimed he was not at fault; the student, screaming
‘The terror has only just really begun!’,116 proceeded to welt Beuys in the face;
Beuys defended himself in kind, and the rest was history.
The result was what Matthew Biro terms ‘hermeneutic undecidability’,117
for spectators were unclear whether the motives underlying Kukei were critical
(a denunciation of political indifference), acritical (an enactment of political
indifference), reactionary (a renewed embrace of the tenets of fascism) or a more
complex admixture of the three. Much like irony, the critical valence implied by
the selective appropriation of discredited or dubious iconography is left almost
entirely to the eye of the beholder. Kim Levin poses the problem well, in terms that
may remind us of Higgins’ dilemma: ‘Like may cure like, but likeness can also be
mistaken for emulation. And homeopathic remedies … work only in small doses.
Otherwise they can cause the symptoms they were meant to cure.’118
An especially troubling example of this problem revolves around the role
played by Satie’s music in Beuys’ action. This is manifest if we consider the
parallel that Langston draws between the piano segment of Kukei and Beuys’
fat-melting sequence by suggesting there was a ‘physical and conceptual
114
Ray, ‘Sublime’, pp. 62–3. Not only that – the use of the Rama margarine brings
to mind the historical complicity of German as well as international industrial firms in the
Nazi genocide.
115
116
Langston, ‘Barbarism’, p. 242.
117
Matthew Biro, ‘Representation and Event: Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, and the
Memory of the Holocaust’, Yale Journal of Criticism 16/1 (2003), p. 117.
118
Kim Levin, Beyond Modernism: Essays on Art from the ’70s and ’80s (New York:
Harper & Row, 1988), p. 181.
“liquefaction” at work in his piano [sequence]’.119 There are a number of mutually

exclusive ways of reading this analogy. The crudest and most inadequate of these
would involve equating Satie’s music with the victims of the death camps, with
the gradual undermining of the piano’s capacity to perform the Sonneries in the
manner intended by the composer being a symbolic re-enactment of the murders
committed in the Nazi extermination camps. If the vandalism of the piano was
comparable to the melting of the fat, and the melting of the fat was comparable
to the crimes of Auschwitz, then the latter was likewise comparable with the
vandalism of the piano. Given, however, that Beuys claimed that his efforts to
deface the piano had healing associations, such an interpretation would seem to
be off the mark. (Furthermore, it is unclear for what reasons Satie – beyond his
distaste for musical ‘Sauerkraut’ – would be an apt representative of the European
Jewry.) Otherwise, one would be forced to conclude that the fat-melting sequence
was also meant to have an affirmative connotation.
Herein lies the paradox of Beuys’ performance: if the ‘liquefaction’ of the
piano’s productive capacity was indeed envisioned as being emancipatory and
therapeutic, the same must have been the case with the fat. This would necessarily
imply that in Beuys’ eyes some good finally came of the Nazi genocide, if only in
the form of an ethical injunction or memento mori of sorts for future generations.
Yet Beuys’ own theories compel us to go further than this. If his metonyms for
the atrocities perpetuated by his German peers were ‘creative’ and gainful, so, he
indicates, were the atrocities themselves. If his use of the piano at the one moment
suggests a metaphorical means for ‘fighting against the forces of silence’,120 it
insinuates at the very same moment the troubling suggestion that the worst crime
in human history was an act of rare creative potential, that, as Gustav Metzger
once put it (only half-jokingly), for Beuys, Himmler must also have been an artist
worthy of praise.121
In this connection, it seems far from coincidental that it was Beuys’ gesture
with the spear, and not his melting of the fat, that proved to be the last straw for
the incensed Aachen audience. After Aachen, Beuys used a spear in a number of
his actions, always with reference to Wagner’s Parsifal, as well as to the lance of
Longinus.122 For Beuys, the ‘wanderer’ (Parsifal, Wotan, the Flying Dutchman),
leaning upon his walking stick as he traverses a wilderness both exterior and interior,
played a role analogous to that of the hare in the Symphonie, ‘always becoming a
new person’ and ‘never coming to the end of his development’. As he saw it, this
119
Langston, ‘Barbarism’, p. 248.
120
Rosenthal, Beuys, p. 36.
121
Gustav Metzger, quoted in John A. Walker, Left Shift: Radical Art in 1970s Britain
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), p. 70.
122
Beuys was long an admirer of Wagner, having learnt Lohengrin, Das Rheingold
and Tannhäuser as a schoolboy. Indeed, he grew up on the border of the historical Duchy
of Brabant, surrounded by the iconography of the legends that inspired Lohengrin and
Parsifal: Geisenberger, Beuys, p. 50; Stachelhaus, Beuys, p. 11.
spiritual itinerary is ‘the true Holy Grail’.123 Indeed, Parsifal and its iconography of
the Chalice became something of an obsession for Beuys: not only did he maintain
a lifelong (but ultimately unrealised) ambition of staging Wagner’s final opera, but
he also once made a pilgrimage of sorts to Montsalvat and later fashioned an action
(1966’s MANRESA) based on the experience.124 Nor was Kukei the only occasion on
which Beuys would mine the link between Satie and Parsifal. In Celtic + ~ (Kinloch
Rannoch) Scottish Symphony, he used Satie’s music as the partial soundtrack to an
even more intensive exploration of the mediaeval Christian imagery of the Parsifal
legend.125 Here, Beuys equates his vision of Christianity – ‘Everyone is an artist’
– with the eschatology of Marxism, situating the Jedermensch he saw pictured in
Satie’s music as the endgame of Parsifal’s grail quest.126
Viewed through this prism, Beuys’ intent in wielding the spear in Kukei becomes
clearer: the goal, as Jürgen Geisenberger observes, was to invoke a veritable
Ragnarök, to point towards a tabula rasa in the true Wagnerian tradition.127 This
is why Pierre Guillet de Monthoux could claim that Kassel (the centre for Beuys’
activities after the Düsseldorf years) ‘was to Joseph Beuys what Bayreuth was to
Richard Wagner, a place radiating the aura of a new era’.128 Guillet de Monthoux’s
use of the term ‘aura’ is significant here, bringing us back not only to one of the
key arguments of Buchloh’s Beuys critique, but to Adorno’s mot that in Parsifal,
Wagner ‘sought not merely to represent musical ideas, but to compose their aura
as well’.129 For Beuys, the ritualistic gestures of his actions were addressed to the
so-called ‘loss of aura’ – in essence, no more than a deficit of meaning – attributed
to artworks by Walter Benjamin in the era of mass reproduction. Whether Beuys
credulously believed this ‘aura’ could be restored merely by appealing to the
123
‘Im Wanderer steckt stets ein neuer Mensch … nie ans Ende seiner Entwicklung
kommt. Das ist ja eigentlich der Gral’: Joseph Beuys and Antje Graevenitz, ‘Joseph Beuys
im Gespräch mit Antje Graevenitz: “Im Wanderer steckt stets ein neuer Mensch”’, in
Wolfgang Storch (ed.), Der Raum Bayreuth: Ein Auftrag aus der Zukunft (Frankfurt am
Main: Edition Suhrkamp, 2002), p. 208.
124
Von Graevenitz, ‘Parsifal’, p. 165; Stachelhaus, Beuys, pp. 75–6.
125
As in 1963, Beuys employed the Messe des pauvres; also a significant component
of Celtic + ~ (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony, however, was a series of Satie-
inspired piano miniatures written by Beuys’ frequent collaborator Henning Christiansen;
Geisenberger, Beuys, p. 40. For a reproduction of Christiansen’s scores (replete with
fanciful Satiean titles), see Kramer, Kapital, pp. 233–9.
126
Beuys, in ibid., pp. 23–4.
127
Geisenberger, Beuys, p. 53.
128
Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, The Art Firm: Aesthetic Management and Metaphysical
Marketing from Wagner to Wilson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 260.
129
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Score of “Parsifal”’ (trans. Anthony Barone), Music &
Letters 76/3 (1995), p. 384. Buchloh was one of the first, and certainly the most noteworthy,
to link Beuys’ artistic production to the problematics of the Benjaminian ‘aura’, doing so
as early as 1980; see Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol’, in Mesch and
Michely (eds), The Reader, p. 124.
imagery of Parsifal, one of the first and arguably most salient attempts to address
this most quintessential problem of modernity, remains a vexed question. As we
saw upon considering the Symphonie as a ‘mourning’ ritual, one should take care
not to confuse sanguineness in Beuys with naiveté.
Therefore, it is uncertain that if in juxtaposing the Wagnerian themes of the
Grail quest with the scenes of ‘liquefaction’ played out in the Nazi extermination
camps, Beuys is simply refusing to allow that the former were compromised by
virtue of having been co-opted by Hitler and Goebbels. It may or may not be
accurate to suggest, as Jan Verwoert does, that Beuys’ homeopathic, paratactic
strategies meant that he never deigned to examine the historical genealogies
undergirding the images and beliefs upon which he most frequently relied.130
Likewise, the passing decades may lead us to qualify Marcel Broodthaers’
Nietzsche-inspired attack on Beuys and his alleged Wagnerian tendency to
conflate ‘politics’ and ‘magic’ as something of an over-simplification.131 Beuys
once described his ‘homeopathic process’ as one in which ‘this world can be
“shaken away”, transformed, dematerialised’:
The homeopathic process, in which one reconstitutes therapeutic substances

through potentisation, is one where the physical part of materiality gets
completely eliminated and only the formative principle is retained … The notion
of force remains … but all physical elements become so diluted that they are not
actually in the substance anymore. And therefore one can rightly say: everything
that is ultimately not satisfactory to us anymore, we can throw away again.132
The presence of this eminently pragmatic procedure is plain to see in Kukei:

Beuys reduces the sinister, reprehensible or suspect in the recent German past
to harmless traces, to the empty shells of symbolic signifiers, taking what are
otherwise unutterable traumas and enabling the spectator to occupy them – to
remember them – in a manner that would otherwise be extraordinarily disturbing.
Yet, as Buchloh rightly implies, this task was one the Aachen audience remained
unwilling to carry out, surely because, as Levin notes, Beuys’ ‘art pill’ was a most
bitter one.133
Even so, this interpretation of Kukei is complicated by the presence of the
Sonneries. As far as it goes, Satie’s Montmartre works are indirectly implicated
130
Jan Verwoert, ‘The Boss: On the Unresolved Question of Authority in Joseph
Beuys’ Oeuvre and Public Image’, e-flux journal 1 (December 2008), http://www.e-flux.
com/journal/the-boss-on-the-unresolved-question-of-authority-in-joseph-beuys’-oeuvre-
and-public-image.
131
Marcel Broodthaers, Magie: Art et Politique (Paris: Multiplicata, 1973), p. 13.
132
Beuys, Art, p. 59; translation modified.
133
Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘1964a’, in Hal Foster et al. (eds), Art Since 1900:
Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Volume 2 (1945 to the Present) (New York:
Thames & Hudson, 2004), p. 483; Levin, Beyond, p. 181.
in the irrational, esoteric ambience that helped pave the way for Hitler’s rise, just
as is Parsifal. Indeed, the tendency to ignore intellectual histories arising from
homeopathic practices was itself a contributing factor to the tragedy of National
Socialism, for as Levin has astutely indicated, the proto-fascist occult circles of
Weimar Germany (such as the mysterious ‘Vril Society’) were heavily indebted to
Rosicrucian ideals.134 Just like the projected rose shadows, Beuys’ performance of
the Sonneries could be read as no more than an identifying icon or emblem of his
personal spiritual alignment. Yet it could just as easily have sent a very different
message. As Andreas Huyssen has pointed out, music was at the very heart of
West Germany’s post-war cultural reconstruction project precisely because it was
perceived as ‘an inherently non-representational medium’ that was not, and could
never be, compromised by the crimes of the past.135 Given its relative isolation
from tradition, Satie’s oeuvre, as we have already seen, has struck many as an
extreme example – perhaps even the apex – of this supposed ahistorical tendency.
In this guise, Satie’s work lends support to a highly ambivalent project. At its
best, Beuys’ deployment of the Sonneries seems to act as a hypnotic cleansing
mechanism, a tool of forgetting that actually enables us to remember; after all, we
can only ‘remember’ that which has been forbidden by ‘forgetting’ the interdiction
that has been imposed against ‘remembering’ it. At its most dangerous, however,
Beuys’ use of Satie’s music comes across as part of something like a complacent
confidence trick. For Peter Chametzky, ‘Beuys appropriates the aura of suffering
and authenticity associated with [Holocaust objects] and imports that aura into the
art museum’, with the result being that ‘historical authenticity … is lost, and only
the aura of history remains’.136 In this case, the Satiean ‘holy relics’ Beuys uses to
accompany his actions would furnish a false aura of historical meaning, part of an
attempt to bewitch audiences into thinking that forgetting itself – amnesia – would
be enough to establish a clean slate and to return the world to an Elysian past.
Cage and the Present of Forgetting
It is telling that in spite of the substantial aesthetic differences separating the two
men, Beuys and Cage were warm acquaintances who shared a mutual and deep-
seated bond of respect.137 Beuys’ intense enthusiasm for Cage’s work is easily
134
Levin, Beyond, p. 177.
135
Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia
(New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 202.
136
Peter Chametzky, Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art: Beckmann
to Beuys (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), p. 180, emphasis added.
137
They even collaborated on two occasions in 1983 and 1984, and at various
points in their careers both produced tributes or homages to the other; for these latter, see
Geisenberger, Beuys, pp. 36, 189–92; John Cage, X: Writings, ’79-’82 (Hanover, NH:
Wesleyan University Press, 1983), pp. 76–8; and Thompson, Felt, pp. 124–9.
accounted for. He admired Cage’s attempts to elide art into life and among living
artists cited him as being ‘at the point of origin … beyond [which] everything is
derivative’.138 Likewise, Cage found analogues to his own anarchist leanings in
Beuys’ theories and claimed to ‘agree with his optimism and utopia [sic]’.139 There
is, however, another potential hypothesis: according to Gerhard Richter, Cage was
present for the Düsseldorf performance of the Symphonie.140 If this is true, perhaps
Cage saw past the religiose self-aggrandisement so problematic for Higgins and
Maciunas to an artist who had a deep, if selective, understanding of the Satie
aesthetic. Perhaps the two were linked above all by their love of the music of the
Velvet Gentleman.141 Whatever the case, later that same year Cage would present
the celebrated public premiere of Vexations, which through his advocacy would
become music’s best-known study in boredom.
Quickly canonised as a seminal moment in the history of the American
experimental vanguard, the 18-hour, 40-minute-long premiere was given on
8–9 September 1963 at New York City’s Pocket Theater, a seedy ex-vaudeville
138
Beuys, Energy Plan, p. 87.
139
Francesco Bonami, ‘Interview with John Cage’, Flash Art International 24/160
(1991), p. 95.
140
Gerhard Richter, in Robert Storr, The Cage Paintings: Gerhard Richter (London:
Tate Publishing, 2009), pp. 50–51. While Richter’s story appears plausible, no other
account has Cage present for the ‘Festum’ (though Jon Hendricks and Mario Kramer both
claim that one of Cage’s tape pieces was played on the programme: Jon Hendricks, ‘Fluxus:
Kleines Sommerfest/Neo-Dada in der Musik/Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester
Musik/Festum Fluxorum Fluxus’, in Eberhard Roters (ed.), Stationen der Moderne: die
bedeutenden Kunstausstellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, 2nd edn (Berlin:
Berlinische Galerie, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Photographie und Architektur, 1988),
p. 498; Kramer, Klang, p. 34). Cage was listed on the advertisement poster along with
the names of a number of other creative figures who were not present (and never intended
to be). Yet Robert Storr, Richter’s interviewer when he made the recollection that Cage
attended (and performed), makes the mistake of claiming these individuals were present
solely on the basis of the poster; Storr, Cage Paintings, p. 44. Though this does not
necessarily call Richter’s claims into question, it is possible that he misremembered or
accidentally conflated two separate concerts. Then again, Richter also vividly references
Paik’s Fluxus Champion Contest, which was indeed performed at the ‘Festum’; this would
seem to argue in favour of the veracity of his report: ibid., p. 48. Either way, Cage had been
in West Berlin at the end of January for a performance with David Tudor and could have
easily made his way to Düsseldorf in time for the soiree; see Otto Köhler, ‘Klamauk im
technischen Zeitalter’, Die Zeit, 25 January 1963, p. 9.
141
After all, this was Cage, who, speaking of Cheap Imitation and his ‘devotion’ to
Satie, admitted that ‘if my ideas sink into confusion, I owe that confusion to love’: John
Cage, For the Birds: In Conversation with Daniel Charles (London: Marion Boyars, 1981),
p. 177. If anyone could induce Cage to make aesthetic ‘exceptions’, it would be Satie, for the
mythomaniac posturing on display in Beuys’ oeuvre was otherwise quite foreign to Cage.
house on the outskirts of the East Village.142 Attended at various points by a

variety of underground figures including – allegedly – Andy Warhol, the work’s
840 repetitions were performed by a relay team of 10 pianists.143 Beginning at 6
pm, the concert received an extraordinary amount of coverage from both national
and international media outlets,144 and the following week it was even the subject
of an episode of the popular American television game show I’ve Got a Secret.
According to Carolyn Brown, Cage, ever the shrewd self-promoter, positively
‘delighted in the publicity’.145 Of course, since then much ink has been spilt over
Cage’s interpretation of the infamous note written on the Vexations manuscript.146
For our purposes, however, it is unimportant whether, as Ned Rorem believes,
Cage took ‘Satie literally where he was being merely whimsical’.147 More prudent
is Jann Pasler’s suggestion that ‘the point is not what Satie did, but how Cage uses
the Satie example to help him[self]’.148
As is well known, Cage first ‘discovered’ the Vexations manuscript in Paris
in 1949 on the initiative of Virgil Thomson. What is less well known is that he
142
Silverman, Begin Again, p. 99; Sue Solet, ‘7 Outlast Music Marathon, Get Back
$3’, New York Herald Tribune, 11 September 1963, p. 23.
143
Branden W. Joseph, ‘Andy Warhol’s Sleep: The Play of Repetition’, in Ted Perry
(ed.), Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006),
pp. 179–80. Besides Cage, the pianists were John Cale, MacRae Cook, Philip Corner, David
Del Tredici, Viola Farber, James Tenney, David Tudor, Christian Wolff and Robert Wood,
with Joshua Rifkin and Howard Klein substituting for an unspecified performer who failed
to appear; Harold C. Schonberg et al., ‘A Long, Long, Long Night (and Day) at the Piano’,
New York Times, 11 September 1963, p. 45. Of these, Corner and Tenney subsequently
participated in Higgins’ Vexations performance.
144
See Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-
garde, new edn (New York: Penguin, 1968), pp. 138–9. The New York Times led the way
with nine reporters; Tomkins also makes particular mention of coverage by Movietone
News and Radio Free Europe ‘for transmission behind the Iron Curtain’.
145
Carolyn Brown, Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and
Cunningham (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), p. 369. Brown likewise recalled the
premiere as ‘a sensational press affair – UPI, AP, radio people with microphones, phone
calls from London – all in an uproar, and of course treating it as a joke’.
146
The best English-language discussion of Satie’s note and possible intentions is
Christopher Dawson, ‘Erik Satie’s Vexations – An Exercise in Immobility’, Canadian
Music Review 21/2 (2001), pp. 29–40.
147
Ned Rorem, Knowing When to Stop: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1994), p. 232.
148
Jann Pasler, ‘Inventing a Tradition: Cage’s “Composition in Retrospect”’, in
Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman (eds), John Cage: Composed in America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 129. Also relevant is Kyle Gann, Music Downtown:
Writings from the Village Voice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 176:
‘through the [performing] tradition he started, Cage is as much the author of what we know
as Vexations as Satie is’.
originally planned to stage the work as early as 1951, as a joint venture with the
Living Theatre’s Judith Malina and Julian Beck.149 Though logistical difficulties
ultimately derailed the project (local tenants refused to consent to the idea of
an all-night concert),150 it is arguable that had the performance gone ahead as
intended, Cage’s understanding of Vexations would have been very different
than the one he ultimately arrived at. Discussing his discovery with Thomson in
June 1949, Cage boasted that he ‘loved’ repetition, a claim borne out by his early
vernacular-inspired percussion and prepared piano scores.151 Yet in 1949, Cage
was also on the cusp of an entirely new way of thinking about music. With it
would come – slowly but surely – a wholly unconventional conception of musical
repetition. Consequently, when in 1958 Cage made the seemingly incongruous
claim that ‘one could not endure a performance of Vexations’, his mature notion
of repetition had not yet entirely crystallised.152 By this time, he had turned against
the repetition of Stravinsky and of popular music, viewing them as regressive as
well as oppressive, but he had not yet found a way to ‘endure’ them.
The long incubation period for Cage’s new repetition concept helps account
for an obscure footnote to the Vexations performance. Two weeks before the
Pocket Theater premiere, the New York Times published an enthusiastic account
of one of Cage’s ‘ideas for Dadaist concerts that somehow never materialized’. It
was described thus: ‘Cage was going to locate an old, cracked, scratchy acoustic
record of Mischa Elman playing the Dvořák “Humoresque”. The concert would
have nothing but that record played incessantly from 11 A.M. to midnight.’153
One immediately asks the following question: why Dvořák? Why Dvořák, why
the Humoresque and why Mischa Elman? David Revill, the only writer to have
previously drawn attention to the idea, suggests that it prefigured the works (the
Europeras) Cage would produce using nostalgic media – Victrolas and old 78s of
nineteenth-century grand opera arias – more than 25 years later.154 Cage’s specified
choice of Elman and the Humoresque likely derived from a similar impulse:
Elman, a contemporary of Jascha Heifetz, was a violin virtuoso renowned for
his interpretations of showpieces by Mendelssohn, Sarasate and Wieniawski. He
was a model specimen of ‘classical pops’, as was the Dvořák Humoresque, which
149
Silverman, Begin Again, p. 98.
150
John Gruen, ‘18 Hours, Over & Over, Same Music 840 Times’, New York Herald
Tribune, 10 September 1963, p. 21.
151
152
Cage, Silence, p. 78. Cage also mentions Vexations in his well-known polemic on
Satie’s behalf from 1950–1951. However, he expresses no reservations about the feasibility
of a performance at this time; presumably, he was still operating under his old repetition-
concept; see John Cage and Abraham Skulsky, ‘Satie Controversy’, in Richard Kostelanetz
(ed.), John Cage (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 90.
153
Harold C. Schonberg, ‘Dada, Dada: Avant-Garde Doings to Pepper Up the Town’,
New York Times, 25 August 1963, s. 2, p. 9.
154
Revill, Roaring, p. 205.
had been over-exposed to saturation in the first half of the century through its
numerous adaptations by artists in the vein of what would later become known
as Easy Listening.155 The choice, motivated by autobiographical as well as
sociological considerations (both unusual for Cage), suggests that Cage’s aim was
to find a musical object with very broad affective connotations, the most widely
known, banally heartstring-tugging product of the middlebrow culture industry
that he could procure.156
Why, however, was it so important that the object be familiar? Cage once
described his ‘strategy’ for withstanding Muzak: ‘if you pay attention carefully
enough, I think you can put up with the Muzak – if you pay attention, I mean, to
the things that are not Muzak’.157 This is so, he asserts, because the volume level
of Muzak is uniform; this enables us to hear ‘through’ the Muzak to the sounds of
the environment. This affirmation of the pre-eminence of the faculty of attention
thus provides the answer: if the listener did not already know the musical ‘found
object’ (the Humoresque’s wistful phrasing, Elman’s antediluvian portamentos,
the air of ‘canned’ nostalgia pervading the enterprise), he or she would have
been able to derive auditory interest from previously ignored aspects of structure
and interpretation. Yet the Humoresque diverges slightly from Muzak, which is
designed to disarm active, detail-oriented listening. While it had become a staple
of middlebrow music, it was also simultaneously a ‘high art’ product that, were it
not so familiar, would indeed have stimulated close listening. It was not merely, as
Cage noted of Muzak, an ‘attempt to distract us’, and thus posed an even tougher
test for the faculty of attention.158
Consequently, we can see that the goal of the Humoresque experiment would
have been to take a cherished objet trouvé and relentlessly bombard the listener
with it until its initial connotations simply fell away. This would enable the listener
155
Not for nothing did Dvořák’s son describe it as ‘perhaps the most famous small
composition in the world’: Otakar Dvořák, Antonin Dvořák, My Father, Paul J. Polansky
(ed.), trans. Miroslav Nemec (Spillville, IA: Czech Historical Research Center, 1993), p. 26.
156
See, for example, Frank Waugh’s rather mawkish description from as early as
1917: ‘[when] one listens to Mischa Elman play the Dvořák Humoresque … one feels
the homesick longing expressed by Tom Sawyer who sat on the hills in springtime and
looked across the valleys and yearned and yearned and wanted to cry’. Frank A. Waugh,
The Natural Style in Landscape Gardening (Boston: R.G. Badger, 1917), p. 57.
157
Ev Grimes and John Cage, ‘Conversations with American Composers: Ev Grimes
Interviews John Cage’, Music Educators Journal 73/3 (1986), p. 48.
158
John Cage, Roger Shattuck and Alan Gillmor, ‘Erik Satie: A Conversation’,
Contact: A Journal of Contemporary Music 25 (Autumn 1982), p. 22. The one complication
for this theory is the specification that the Elman record was to be ‘old, cracked, scratchy’.
One could argue that this would have hardly changed matters and that the same distortions
and ‘noise’ would have been reproduced with each spin of the record, such that the listener
would quickly become inured to them. It is also possible, however, that Cage meant to add
some ‘indeterminacy’ into the equation by using a defective disc, assuming such a disc
would not play the same way twice.
to hear ‘past’ the music to the noises of one’s surroundings and the unforeseeable
acoustical phenomena that occur when music is coupled with ambient sounds.
Why, then, did Cage ultimately reject the idea? Though he does not address this
project, Branden W. Joseph pinpoints the cause: for Cage, ‘mechanical repetition
… annulled performative differentiations … and defeated even [the] most
experimental work’.159 In other words, the repetition that arises by playing a record
over and over would seem to provide none of the variety one finds between multiple
live performances – this variety being produced by virtue of human fallibility, by
our inability to ever precisely reproduce a previous performance in every possible
detail. Perhaps Cage recognised that the Humoresque concert would have been a
bridge too far, fearing that even his own well-nigh-superhuman powers of musical
attention would have been defeated by repetition of this sort.160
Joseph compares Cage to Warhol in this regard: while Cage was still mulling
these ideas, Warhol was already living repetitive ‘fixation’.161 As Warhol later
recalled, he had a ‘routine of painting with rock and roll blasting the same song,
a 45 rpm, over and over all day long’.162 It is not by chance that Cage, speaking
of what would become the eventual Vexations premiere, once made the telling
admission that he initially ‘thought it’ll just be this thing like what I think a Warhol
film is, you see, just going over and over’.163 Likewise, it is revealing that Cage
associates Warholian repetition with physical danger and mental decay, as in the
following stream-of-consciousness reflection: ‘Boredom. Fascination … / People
in the audience losing their / minds. Dogs searching for bombs. / Precedents: … the
/ Warhol movies.’164 Undoubtedly, a part of him was afraid that the experience of
Vexations would prove little different than the projected Humoresque experiment.
And yet, to Cage’s great surprise, the Pocket Theater performance turned out to
159
Joseph, ‘Sleep’, p. 196.
160
That said, Joseph believes Cage under-estimated the imagination’s ability to extract
difference from experiences of all stripes, even parades of mechanically uniform objects.
He also locates a possible source of difference-through-iteration that Cage overlooked at
the material level: ‘given the physical wear of the needle, a record could be understood as
being different each time it is played’ (ibid.). It is unclear, however, how perceptible this
effect would have been over the span of a 13-hour concert.
161
Ibid., p. 198.
162
Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s (San Diego: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 7. ‘It wasn’t only rock and roll that I used that way – I’d also
have the radio blasting opera’: ibid. In a letter to the editor of the New York Herald Tribune
written in the wake of the Vexations premiere, Thaddeus Golas, author of The Lazy Man’s
Guide to Enlightenment, recounts doing the same thing in 1945 with a recording of the first
two Gymnopédies, ‘sometimes all day long, often hours at a time’; Tad Golas, ‘Satie is
Perfect’, New York Herald Tribune, 14 September 1963, p. 10.
163
David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2001), p. 125. Cage’s interpretation of the Warhol films is an over-simplification, but
that is another matter entirely.
164
Cage, X, p. 157.
be nothing of the sort. Instead, as he averred afterwards, ‘something had been

set in motion that went far beyond what any of us had anticipated’.165 Indeed, the
concert was so transformative that he later claimed Vexations as ‘equal in terms of
experience with any religious work of any culture, any of the Bach Passions and
so forth’.166 The result, he recalled with a convert’s zeal, was not only ‘a moment
of enlightenment [that] came for each one of [the performers]’, but the sensation,
upon waking the following morning, that he ‘had changed and the world had
changed’.167
More so than the Humoresque concert could have, Cage’s performance of
Vexations explored an arena in which memory and forgetting seemed to become
fundamentally unhinged. A number of factors contributed to this impression. As
has been previously noted, with its quizzical atmosphere and intentionally fussy
use of accidentals, Vexations is first of all ‘as puzzling to the eye as it is to the
ear’.168 Likewise is the composition’s bizarre tonal instability: as Orledge asserts, it
is the earliest acknowledged specimen of uninterrupted free chromaticism. Having
no recourse to harmonic resolution, it seems to sidestep teleology entirely.169 For
this reason, the inert, grey, ‘barren’ and ‘undernourished’170 envelope of sound
that Vexations produces disturbs – often profoundly – the perception of clock
time among listeners and executants.171 Indeed, as Thom Holmes puts it, it is most
‘perplexing and defies a performer’s normal instincts. It is not easy to play even
165
Cage, in Tomkins, Bride, p. 104. See also Cage, Shattuck and Gillmor,
‘Conversation’, p. 24: ‘the experience over the 18 hours and 40 minutes of those repetitions
was very different from the thought of them … For them to actually happen, to actually live
through it, was a different thing’.
166
Sylvester, Interviews, p. 125. Paik, further developing the theme, ‘compared
[Cage’s] reclamation of Satie’s Vexations to Mendelssohn’s discovery of Bach’s St. Matthew
Passion’: Silverman, Begin Again, p. 198.
167
Cage, quoted in Jean Stein and George Plimpton, Edie: An American Biography
(New York: Knopf, 1982), p. 235; Cage, Shattuck and Gillmor, ‘Conversation’, p. 24. Cage’s
descriptions of the performance remained remarkably consistent over the years. Compare
this remark on the performance’s transcendent effect from 1966 – ‘I remember, after it was
all over, going home at noon and sleeping for a long time. When I woke up after that sleep,
the world was really new. I remember Philip Corner … looking absolutely transformed’ –
with this one from his 1988–9 Norton Lectures: ‘life so to speak changed … i got up the
next morning the world seemed really new something had happened and i remember i think
philip corner was part of it he remarked about that [sic]’; Sylvester, Interviews, p. 125; John
Cage, I–VI (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), pp. 82–3.
168
Stephen Whittington, ‘Serious Immobilities: On the Centenary of Erik Satie’s
Vexations’, 1999, http://www.satie-archives.com/web/article3.html.
169
Robert Orledge, ‘Understanding Satie’s “Vexations”’, Music & Letters 79/3
(1998), p. 386.
170
Michael Nyman, ‘Cage and Satie’, Musical Times 114/1570 (1973), p. 1229.
171
See Jonathan D. Kramer, The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities,
New Listening Strategies (New York: Schirmer, 1988), p. 381.
once, let alone 840 times’.172 This is why players have so frequently confirmed
that even after 840 repetitions, they still could not recall what Vexations sounded
like. Richard Toop’s experience of being incapable of reproducing any more than
a tiny fraction of the piece following a complete performance is by no means
unusual.173 Stephen Whittington sums the effect up well: this ‘obfuscation compels
the performer to confront the piece anew with each repetition’.174
This corroborates Cage’s contention that the Vexations performance
established a situation in which ‘each act is virgin, even the repeated one’.175 Thus,
comparing this effect with something like the uniform mechanical repetitions that
would have arisen from the Humoresque experiment, Cage argued that ‘a proper
performance of [Vexations] will bring about subtle oscillations simply because
it would be intolerable to have that music, with its more or less regular beats,
kept extremely regular’.176 Cage’s wording here should not be taken to imply that
such ‘oscillations’ would be intentional; rather, his point is that variations will
necessarily arise on their own, given the impossibility of ‘true’ repetition among
human executants.177 The use of multiple pianists, if partly motivated by the
pragmatic concern of stamina among the executants, was therefore also justified
ex post facto as a deliberate strategy for amplifying these effects. Cage stated
that ‘when you have many pianists … that leads to an experience with so many
variations that the dimension of resemblance disappears’.178
172
Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music, 2nd edn (New York:
Routledge, 2002), p. 34.
173
See Richard Toop, quoted in Gavin Bryars, ‘“Vexations” and its Performers’,
Contact: A Journal of Contemporary Music 26 (Spring 1983), p. 14. As his appearance
on I’ve Got a Secret demonstrates, the work had much the same effect on John Cale in
1963; see ‘16 September 1963’, I’ve Got a Secret, by Allan Sherman, CBS, first aired 16
September 1963.
174
Whittington, ‘Immobilities’.
175
Cage, Birds, p. 48. Cage claims to have borrowed this insight from René Char.
176
Cage, Shattuck and Gillmor, ‘Conversation’, p. 22.
177
As Joseph puts it, Cage instead ‘redefines repetition as merely the production of
unintentional differences’: Joseph, ‘Sleep’, p. 181.
178
Cage, Birds, p. 48. According to Cage, ‘the musicians were always slightly
different with their versions – their strengths fluctuated’: Cage, quoted in Stein, Edie,
p. 235. Christian Wolff, on the other hand, challenged this observation, claiming of the
Pocket Theater performance that ‘by the third round or so the personalities and playing
techniques of the pianists had been almost completely subsumed by the music’: Bryars,
‘“Vexations”’, p. 14. David Del Tredici corroborated Wolff’s claim, noting that he
initially ‘started to try to do everything possible to the piece’, but that ‘after three hours,
you just play’: Solet, ‘7 Outlast’, p. 23. Relevant here is the infrequently cited fact that
before the concert, Cage organised a rehearsal in order to ‘establish’ the duration (here, 80
seconds) the performers were to spend on each repetition; see John Cage, ‘Brief über die
Uraufführung von Vexations’, in Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (eds), Erik Satie
[Musik-Konzepte vol. 11] (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1980), p. 47. Leighton Kerner’s
The implication is clear: the category of repetition, as it is commonly

understood, is liquidated and in its place is a conception as ‘not at all … something
periodic and repetitive’, but rather ‘the fact that something happens, something
unexpected, something, irrelevant’.179 Here, Cage returns to the problem of
attention, suggesting that when conceived in this manner, repetition actually
sharpens our sensitivity to the minutest of differences, rather than dulling it (as is
often thought).180 This is why Cage contends that his objective is to ‘deconcentrate
attention, to distract it’: the point becomes not listening to the music as such,
but rather ‘between’ it, attending moment-to-moment to the variety within the
seemingly uniform.181 Given its self-similarity at a number of structural levels,
Vexations is eminently well suited for this task, for, as Cage claims, there are ‘two
ways to unfocus attention: symmetry is one of them; the other is the over-all where
each small part is a sample of what you find elsewhere’.182
Viewed thus, Vexations stands in direct contrast to the ‘conventional’ definition
of repetition as the unchanging same. Here, repetition is a font of perpetual novelty,
an engine for the production of difference. Accordingly, Vexations becomes an
exercise in unshackling repetition from the conceptual reification of identity. A
reflection of Cage’s desire ‘to reduce any concept that one may have to such a
state of pulverization that it doesn’t exist’, the implication, at least, is no less than
the dissolution of all stable identities.183 After all, there can be no concept, idea or
subject formation without the retention and concretisation of memory. Vexations
therefore becomes a test case for Cage’s conviction that every individual event
in the flux of existence must be privileged equally and discretely – in all its
immediate, inexpressible singularity (Cage’s ‘sounds in themselves’) – without
the intrusion of ‘taste’, ‘ideas’ and pre-established significations and meanings of
any kind.
review of the concert in the Village Voice also makes mention of the rehearsal, indicating
that Cage previously under-estimated the amount of time the performance would take and
that he only came to the belated realisation that the proceedings would occupy nearly 20
hours at the run-through; Leighton Kerner, ‘Vexations and a Pleasure’, Village Voice, 12
September 1963, pp. 14, 19. Confirmation of this observation can be found by way of an
advertisement in the Village Voice for the premiere four weeks earlier, where the projected
concert duration is listed as a mere 12 hours; ‘New Music at the Pocket Theatre’, Village
Voice, 15 August 1963, p. 7.
179
Cage, Birds, p. 222, emphasis in original. Although Cage refers to ‘rhythm’ here,
he is really describing repetition.
180
As Cage asks: ‘What happens when something so simple is repeated for such a
long time? What actually happens is the subtle falling away from the norm, a constant flux
with regard to such things as speed and accent, all the things in fact which we could connect
with rhythm. The most subtle things become evident that would not be evident in a more
complex rhythmic situation.’ Cage, Shattuck and Gillmor, ‘Conversation’, p. 22.
181
Cage, Birds, p. 154.
182
Cage, Silence, p. 100.
183
Cage, in Kostelanetz, Conversing, p. 55.
Like all of Cage’s works, Vexations would act as something akin to Yogic
meditation, teaching us how to truly ‘approach our experience’.184 Presuming
that being experienced is not at all the same thing as experiencing, Cage finds
common cause with Satie: ‘Satie was / right: experience is a form of paralysis’.185
Yet, taking Satie and Cage literally, this means we can only truly act by forgetting,
by deactivating our capacity to remember and conceptualise through exercises like
Vexations. This is precisely why Holmes argues that Vexations à la Cage was not
only ‘the first calculated example of a western composition made to create a new
state of listening’. Insofar as it works at rewiring our sensitivity to the difference at
the heart of repetition, Vexations’ effect – no matter how fleetingly it may last – is
truly that of ‘reprogramming the consciousness of those who perform and listen
to it’.186 Cage puts it best: ‘The whole point is to forget in the space between an
object and its duplication.’187
As Joseph argues, Cage was strongly influenced in this line of thinking by
Marcel Duchamp; that he did not substantively engage with the elder Frenchman’s
ideas until the 1960s would explain why his new repetition-concept was slow in
coming to fruition. It also accounts for his reservations about performing Vexations
in 1958.188 Joseph similarly credits the example of La Monte Young’s reductio ad
absurdum of repetition, arabic numeral [any integer] to Henry Flint (1960), for
providing Cage with the impetus to move in this direction. Cage professed his
interest in Young’s work in a 1962 interview, where he claimed that ‘through the
repetition of a single sound’, Young enabled him to ‘discover that what I have all
along been thinking was the same thing is not the same thing after all, but full of
variety’.189 This adds a curious historical wrinkle to the Vexations premiere: at
least in part, it took the example of a 28-year-old Fluxus composer to ‘authorise’
the first public performance of a work then 70 years old.
One of the most idiosyncratic and rarely addressed aspects of the Pocket
Theater staging of Vexations is the unconventional ticket pricing scheme employed
by Cage and the organisers. According to the New York Times, audience members
were charged ‘$5 for first admission’ and, having been given a card noting the
time of their entry, were subsequently furnished with a ‘refund of 5 cents for
each 20 minutes [they stayed], and a 20-cent bonus to anybody who stayed the
184
John Cage and Jonathan Cott, ‘An Interview with John Cage, 1963’, radiOM.org,
http://radiom.org/detail.php?omid=C.1963.XX.XX.
185
Cage, X, p. 160.
186
Holmes, Electronic, p. 34.
187
Cage, Birds, p. 80.
188
Joseph, ‘Sleep’, p. 197. Joseph draws particular attention to Cage’s citation of
Duchamp’s formula of the ‘impossibility of sufficient auditory memory to transfer from one
like event to another the memory imprint’: John Cage, A Year From Monday: New Lectures
and Writings (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), p. 22.
189
John Cage, John Cage: A Catalogue, Robert Dunn (ed.) (New York: Henmar
Press, 1962), p. 52.
entire program’.190 At the time, the arrangement was viewed with considerable
bemusement by the media, dismissed as merely the icing on the cake of this most
outlandish of jejune Dada pranks. (Indeed, word of the scheme even spread to
the former Soviet Union, where it was promptly denounced as so much capitalist
opportunism.)191 Yet if the aura of circus-like notoriety surrounding the premiere
largely faded in the succeeding decades, a correspondingly serious reappraisal of
the implications of this ticketing practice has not followed. No fanciful add-on
or mere publicity stunt, this was an absolutely essential component of this most
characteristic of Cagean performance events. Not only was it also to be a feature
of the Humoresque experiment, the idea was present when Cage made his first
attempt to stage Vexations in 1951.192
The scheme was in essence an unspoken dare: ‘How far can you hold out?
How long until you can take no more?’ Or, as Garry Moore, the host of I’ve Got
a Secret, described it, ‘the audience was rewarded on the basis of their patience’
(Moore may well have borrowed this witticism directly from Cage and co., who
wryly noted in the Village Voice advertisement for the premiere that listeners
would be recompensed for their ‘tenacity’).193 Significantly, the scheme would
have been the first thing audience members attended to as they entered the hall.
Insofar as Cage claimed to be interested in stretching the boundaries of where
a performance began and ended, it in some sense served as the ‘overture’ to the
imminent performance.194 Listeners were therefore explicitly encouraged to view
Vexations in terms of this framing device, one implicitly valorising stamina in
190
Schonberg et al., ‘Long, Long, Long’, p. 45. According to the New York Times,
only one person lasted the full concert, whereas the New York Herald Tribune has seven
individuals staying until the end; Solet, ‘7 Outlast’, p. 23.
191
The paper Sovetskaya Kultura referred to the scheme as an ‘inventive business
stunt’ and, evoking the ‘half-conscious state of a single listener who held out to receive
the full $3 refund’, perversely accused the ‘concert organizers’ of ‘happily rubbing their
hands, counting their profit. For them the subjected [sic] “Vexations” produced substantial
satisfaction’: ‘Unseeing Red’, New York Times, 20 January 1964, p. 12.
192
Though the graduated ticketing system was to be part of the Humoresque
experiment, the planned payment method was different: ‘The audience would enter without
an admission charge. But it would have to pay on the way out and those who left first
would pay the most. Those who could stand the entire 13 hours would pay little or nothing.’
Schonberg, ‘Dada, Dada’, p. 9. Curiously, the prices for the 1951 concert were set far higher
than they eventually were in 1963: ‘No admission would be charged upon entry. Instead, an
audience member’s entrance time would be punched on a round clocklike ticket, to be paid
for when he or she left. The longer one stayed the less one paid: for ten minutes, $14.40;
for twenty minutes, $7.20; for half an hour, $3.60 – down to five cents for twelve hours’:
193
Secret; ‘New Music’, p. 7.
194
Cage, I–VI, p. 427. See, for instance, Cage, in Sylvester, Interviews, p. 120: ‘I like
… to start a piece without the audience knowing it has started … and to conclude it without
their knowing it has stopped.’
the face of ‘extreme’ repetition. Cage, deliberate, finicky and even calculating in
so many other respects, cannot have been unaware that this was the horizon of
expectations he was establishing. And if free admission was out of the question for
practical reasons, that the ‘dare’ was nevertheless conducted through the medium
of monetary exchange (‘shades of a stockholders meeting’, as one reporter put
it)195 is far from inconsequential. After all, just a few years after the Pocket
Theater performance, Cage mused: ‘Why are people so stingy about their time?
… Why are they so ungenerous? What in heaven’s name is so valuable about thirty
minutes? Or forty-five minutes? Or an hour and a half?’196 This political import
of this statement is clear: contemporary capitalism’s mad rush for efficiency
and ‘results’ has made ‘approaching our experience’ – a necessarily protracted,
uncertain, ‘unproductive’ enterprise – ever more difficult. Railing against time
treated as a commodity to be doled out conservatively, the Cagean ‘aesthetic of
wastefulness’197 works to sever the bond between time and capital. Jacques Attali
is perhaps the only commentator to have acknowledged this, arguing that for Cage,
‘to compose is to take pleasure in … use-time and exchange-time as lived and no
longer as stockpiled’.198
The point is that a consideration of the ‘wager’ significantly qualifies the
implications of Cage’s staging of Vexations. Writing from a rigorously philosophical
position, Daniel Herwitz has made the claim that Cage’s experiments with ‘totally
nonstructural hearing’ effectively ‘ask us to imagine a person who is not a person’
and that ‘Cage’s radicalism does not represent a coherent human possibility’.199
His argument is that Cage’s ideal listener – the amnesiac, the person who (to use
a much over-used phrase) perpetually ‘lives in the moment’ and therefore has
no history, no identity, no concept of musical organisation – is not empirically
practicable unless, as Herwitz contends, we literally undergo a ‘lobotomy’.200
The mature Cage’s assertion that ‘you can’t repeat anything exactly – even
195
William Bender, ‘A Composition That Lasts All Night’, New York Herald Tribune,
8 September 1963, s. 4, p. 10.
196
Sylvester, Interviews, p. 121.
197
James Pritchett, The Music of John Cage (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), p. 157.
198
Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 135.
199
Daniel Herwitz, Making Theory, Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant-
Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 161. Fredric Jameson has also
argued this point with regard to Cage’s artistic practice, though he poses the question in
terms of the ‘unreality’ of the schizophrenic and (apropos of Vexations) the tendency of
children to ‘repeat a word over and over again until its sense is lost and it becomes an
incomprehensible incantation’: Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’,
in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: New
Press, 1998), p. 138.
200
Herwitz, Theory, p. 161.
yourself’ may certainly be true in the realm of theory.201 In practice, however,

the renunciation of personal identity appears to lead inexorably to madness.
As a lifestyle, the pure monism that Cage sees Vexations as encapsulating is a
dangerously slippery slope. The sensationalistic experiences of one of the few
practising musicians to have contested Cage’s reading of Vexations illustrate
this plainly. Disaster struck on 21–22 February 1970 when pianist Peter Evans
attempted to carry out the Cagean interpretation of Vexations to the letter (and then
some), performing all 840 repetitions without assistance. Managing to do so for
15 hours and 595 da capos, Evans soon ‘felt each repetition wearing [his] mind
away’. Evans stated that: ‘I had to stop. If I hadn’t stopped I’d be a very different
person today.’202 An eyewitness put it in even more vivid terms, claiming Evans’
‘mind became full of evil thoughts, animals and “things” started peering out at him
from the score’. Without the slightest trace of irony, Evans declared that ‘people
who play [Vexations] do so at their own great peril’.203 Nor is Evans the only
individual to have had such an experience: an audience member at the original
Pocket Theater performance had to leave after 10 minutes, claiming the music
immediately induced feelings of ‘anxiety, fear and apprehension’.204
In a way, the Evans performance was the negative mirror image of Cage’s. Like
Cage, Evans recognised that Vexations was ‘reprogramming his consciousness’,
but whereas Evans experienced the process as a malediction, Cage viewed it as
transfiguring. How else to account for Cage’s missionary declaration that Vexations
measures the ego’s capacity for ‘emptiness as receptivity’, that a ‘performance
of this piece would be a measure – accurate as a mirror – of one’s “poverty of
spirit”, without which … one loses the kingdom of heaven’?205 The use of the
word ‘poverty’ is significant here: Vexations, with its near-total lack of thematic,
harmonic and timbral differentiation, in its own way proves that the music of
Monsieur le pauvre is ‘too simple for ears accustomed to highly spiced sounds’.206
This is significant insofar as blandness is highly prized in Eastern thought. As in
Cage, in these traditions blandness does not represent lack or absence, but rather
discloses the highest forms of plenitude and excess – hence Cage’s unresolved
attribution of the ‘interior immobilities’ specified in the Vexations performance
note to Zen Buddhism.207 Yet, as François Jullien tells us, the transcendent ideal of
201
Cage, Birds, p. 48.
202
Peter Evans, quoted in Bryars, ‘“Vexations”’, p. 15.
203
Ibid., pp. 16, 15.
204
Solet, ‘7 Outlast’, p. 23
205
John Cage, MUSICAGE: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music, Joan Retallack
(ed.) (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), p. 134; Cage and Skulsky, ‘Satie
Controversy’, p. 90. Cage takes care to note that the notion of ‘emptiness as receptivity’ is
fundamental to both Eastern and Western spirituality.
206
Jean Cocteau, Cocteau’s World: An Anthology of Writings, ed. and trans. Margaret
Crosland (London: Owen, 1972), p. 219.
207
Cage, Shattuck and Gillmor, ‘Conversation’, p. 24.
‘blandness-detachment’ eagerly sought after in the East ‘can only exist in a state
prior to all differentiation’. Just as Evans discovered, Jullien concludes that for
Western sensibilities, ‘blandness-detachment’ can lead only to a state in which ‘the
very notion of reality ends up lost’.208
Cage, on the other hand, refused to concede this possibility. For him, ‘poverty’
and ‘blandness’ represented self-discipline and openness without preconception to
new experiences (a discipline Cage also associated with Christianity).209 As a result,
he argued that listeners resistant to the idea of hearing 840 repetitions of Vexations
might eventually find the performance to be curative: ‘if one began such a listening
period in a state of nondiscipline, one could move into a state of discipline simply
by remaining in the room and being subjected to this activity, which eventually
one finds interesting’.210 By these lights, Vexations becomes a conditioning routine
to build the willpower to resist – or, better, annul – boredom’s crippling numbness.
Still, for all that, Cage’s use of the unusually pushy word ‘subjected’ in the above
statement is not to be glossed over. As we have seen, in order to take the measure
of Vexations à la Cage, the listener must accede to the uncomfortable situation of
simulating and courting potentially dangerous mental states. Cage, as we have also
observed, argues that there is a positive, therapeutic benefit to unreservedly ‘giving
[one]self to the composer’s [Satie’s] work’ (to use the words of an individual who
stayed for the entire Pocket Theater performance).211 Richard Taruskin alleges
Cage of trading in ‘virtual sensory deprivation, a discipline that, inflicted on
an audience of nonadepts, can seem an act of puritanical aggression’.212 Cage,
however, washed his hands of responsibility: ‘I try to get it so that people realize
that they themselves are doing their experience and that it’s not being done to
them.’213 Yet surely the Pocket Theater admission ‘wager’ tells a different tale,
involuntarily confronting audiences with the impossible either/or choice between
the quicksand of amnesia and the terra firma of personal identity.
Cage also ignores the role played by personal temperament in the perception of
boredom. As long as a century ago, psychologist Hugo Münsterberg characterised
the link between reiterative processes and industrial morale, writing that ‘those
who grasp equal impressions easily, and who are prepared beforehand for every
new repetition by their inner dispositions … experience the repetition itself with
true satisfaction’. If the terms used to describe those inclined towards repetition
208
François Jullien, In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and
Aesthetics, trans. Paula M. Varsano (New York: Zone Books, 2004), pp. 72, 143.
209
See Cage, in Richard Kostelanetz, ‘Conversation with John Cage’, in Kostelanetz
(ed.), John Cage, p. 13: ‘[Discipline] is precisely what the Lord meant when he said, give
up your father and mother and follow me.’
210
Sylvester, Interviews, p. 124, emphasis added.
211
Karl Schenzer, in Secret.
212
Richard Taruskin, ‘No Ear for Music: The Scary Purity of John Cage’, New
Republic, 15 March 1993, p. 26.
213
Cage, quoted in Kostelanetz, Conversing, p. 109.
– ‘grasp equal impressions easily’ and ‘experience the repetition itself’ – are
remarkably close to Cagean parlance, the flipside likewise echoes detractors like
Taruskin: ‘those in whom every impression inhibits the readiness to receive a
repetition … feel it as a painful and fatiguing effort if they are obliged to turn their
attention to one member after another in a uniform series. This mental torture is
evidently the displeasure which such individuals call the dislike of monotony’.214
Münsterberg concludes that ‘the feeling of monotony depends much less upon
the particular kind of work than upon the special disposition of the individual’.215
Cage rejects this logic, instead unilaterally embracing ‘our current ability to listen
to things for a long time’, an aptitude that he believes is ‘becoming a general
practice in society’.216 The mature Cage truly considers an individual’s tolerance
for boredom and repetition as infinitely malleable, hence his defensive claim that
‘boredom is not perpetrated upon you; it’s you who create the boredom. So my
music isn’t boring. The person who said it is has just found a way to be bored’.217
Indeed, perhaps Cage even hoped that listeners would finally become so attached
to Vexations that, in a Stockholm syndrome of sorts, they would feel what Roger
Reynolds once felt upon the music’s conclusion, ‘a unique sensation of loss, a kind
of grief’.218
214
Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (Boston, MA: Mifflin,
1913), p. 204, emphasis added.
215
Ibid., p. 198.
216
Sylvester, Interviews, p. 119. Cage made much the same argument to one of the
reporters covering the Pocket Theater premiere, noting that ‘our time consciousness has
changed. People are no longer afraid of time. It becomes a discipline to enter into a work of
such length, and the spiritual rewards are infinite’: Gruen, ‘18 Hours’, p. 21.
217
Cage, in Kostelanetz, Conversing, p. 252. Earlier in his career, however, Cage
evinced somewhat more respect for the disparities in individual temperament. He recalls
teaching a class with a record of Buddhist ceremonial music that ‘settled into a single loud
reiterated percussive beat’. According to Cage, ‘this noise continued relentlessly for about
fifteen minutes with no perceptible variation. A lady got up and screamed, and then yelled,
“Take it off. I can’t bear it any longer.” I took it off. A man in the class then said angrily,
“Why’d you take it off? I was just getting interested”’; Cage, Silence, p. 93. When it comes
to repetition, it seems you cannot please everyone.
218
Roger Reynolds, ‘Ideals and Realities: A Composer in America’, American Music
25/1 (Spring 2007), p. 35. For a more theoretically minded account that corroborates
Reynolds’ experience, equating extreme boredom and ‘shock’ in Fluxus and Vexations, see
Dorothée Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth
College Press, 2010), p. 147. Also relevant here is a conversation Cage had with Warhol
associate Henry Geldzahler after a Young performance: ‘In the lobby after La / Monte
Young’s music stopped, / Geldzahler said: It’s like being in a / womb; now that I’m out,
I want to get back in. I felt differently and so did / Jasper Johns: we were relieved to be
/ released’; Cage, Monday, p. 16. Assuming the lengthy works of Young and Cage are in
some sense comparable, not only does it confirm Reynolds’ impression, but it also provides
a rare exception to the rule that Cage, to put it whimsically, ‘never met a sound he didn’t
Even so, to equate the Pocket Theater with Abu Ghraib, as Taruskin’s most
meretricious arguments do (there is no mistaking the intimation of torture in a
phrase like ‘virtual sensory deprivation’) is to wilfully overlook the facts. Cage
never impelled anyone into listening against his or her will. Quite the opposite is
true, for, as Richard Kostelanetz recalls, he made a point of ensuring that every
performance space he used had easily accessible exits, so that audience members
could comfortably depart at any time of their choosing.219 Compare this with
Beuys, who once invited Cage to give a concert in Düsseldorf during which he had
all of the auditorium exits locked, confining one and all inside. As a measure of just
how disconcerting such an experience could be, we need only consider that one
spectator, who grew up during the war, found the ‘physical sense of being locked
in a space full of people and forced to undergo an event of an utterly unpredictable
nature … as the closest she ever came to reliving the nights she spent in a bomb
shelter during air raids’.220 Cage’s ‘wager’ may have provoked, but the Pocket
Theater performance nevertheless remained a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. No
doubt, his Zen mantra, ‘if something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If
still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers
that it’s not boring at all but very interesting’,221 was meant in an earnest spirit
of self-empowerment. Still, this does not preclude the possibility that for some
listeners, the side-effects of the attempt at self-empowerment would prove worse
than the original symptoms.
In the end, then, it is characteristic that, just like Beuys, the pill Cage provided
to audiences – Vexations, this ‘sort of self-flagellation reminiscent of the medieval
monk’s penances’, as Ornella Volta has so memorably put it – was a most bitter,
uncompromising one.222 During the premiere, Cage told reporters that the concert
was designed to ‘introduce people to their daily lives’, the implication being that
a homeopathic intention was animating the proceedings. After all, he reasoned,
‘there are a lot more than 840 repetitions in life – like paying the telephone bill,
for instance!’223 Indeed, the claim that Cage used Vexations to ‘heal like with like’
gains further credibility when we consider the hitherto-overlooked fact that the
like’. That he found the music oppressive suggests that even Cage did not always conform
to his dictum that we alone are responsible for our experiences. It is noteworthy that this
incident likely took place after the Vexations premiere. If so, it is curious that Cage would
have this reaction to Young’s music, which he previously claimed to admire. Young was
approached to perform in the Vexations premiere, but turned down the offer. He did attend
part of the performance, but was unimpressed, finding it ‘boring’: Joseph, ‘Sleep’, p. 195.
219
Richard Kostelanetz, John Cage (Ex)plain(ed) (New York: Schirmer, 1996), p. 42.
220
Jan Verwoert, ‘Class Action’, Frieze 101 (September 2006), http://www.frieze.
com/issue/article/class_action.
221
Cage, Silence, p. 93.
222
Ornella Volta, liner notes (trans. Elizabeth Carroll) to Aldo Ciccolini, Erik Satie:
L’Œuvre pour Piano, Vol. II: Œuvres mystiques (EMI 7497032, 1987), p. 6.
223
Solet, ‘7 Outlast’, p. 23.
programmes printed for the premiere apparently made explicit note of Satie’s
Rosicrucianism, a truth Cage never otherwise appealed to when discussing the
composer.224 Using the very contagion he was intent on fighting, albeit in diluted,
highly controlled form, Cage was inoculating listeners against the boredom
pervasive in modern life, providing them with the skills – the ‘antibodies’ –
necessary to resist it. Witness his plaintive cri de cœur against the contemporary
culture industry: ‘if art today didn’t help us to forget, we would be submerged,
drowned under those avalanches of rigorously identical objects’.225 Of course, this
is also a double-edged sword: in the attempt to save it, Cage loses precisely what
he hopes to save, for only by relinquishing history can he neutralise the amnesia
proper to the culture industry.226 This accounts for the paradox Michael Nyman
diagnoses at work in Vexations. Cage believes boredom will dissipate once we
will it to, by abandoning structural hearing and the search for relational meaning.
Yet, as Nyman points out, ‘for most listeners boredom began when climaxes
disappeared and they lost most of their signposts’.227
It is also significant that as we have been discovering, boredom, whether
musical or existential, is not simply boredom: as philosopher Lars Svendsen tells
us, ‘boredom involves a loss of meaning … a meaning withdrawal’.228 He also
argues that the only surefire antidote to boredom is to deny meaning altogether.229
Therefore, if Cage fights boredom with boredom, he is also obligated to fight
meaninglessness with meaninglessness. Yet Svendsen’s point is ultimately that
the lack of meaning causes the boredom. If it is just such a lack of meaning that
makes audiences so resistant to Cage’s experiments, then surely the apparent lack
of meaning (as in Vexations) breeds the boredom, and not the other way around.
Though he does not discuss Cage, Svendsen does touch on Warhol, who, like
Cage, ‘believed that forgetting [would] eradicate boredom, because forgetting will
make everything new’.230 For some (like Taruskin), however, taking this attitude
is tantamount to waving the white flag of surrender. Yvonne Rainer expresses this
position most eloquently: ‘Cage’s solution was to throw out the baby with the
bathwater. … Cage’s refusal of meaning is an abandonment, an appeal to a Higher
224
See Gary Comenas, ‘Notes on John Cage, Erik Satie’s Vexations and Andy
Warhol’s Sleep’, Warholstars.org, 2011, http://www.warholstars.org/news/johncage.html.
225
Cage, Birds, p. 80.
226
Wim Mertens characterises this well, asserting that Cage can only act out ‘the
renunciation of the consumer society’ by ‘anticipating the end of history’, which ‘is blamed
as being an infringement of the natural order’: Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music: La
Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, trans. J. Hautekiet (London: Kahn &
Averill, 1983), p. 116.
227
Nyman, ‘Cage and Satie’, p. 1229, emphasis in original.
228
Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, trans. John Irons (London: Reaktion
Books, 2005), pp. 17, 30.
229
Ibid., p. 100.
230
Ibid., p. 105.
Authority.’231 Even so, it must be admitted that what looks like capitulation in
one case can very easily appear under very different circumstances to be a noble,
timely renunciation. It says much that after the Holocaust, young German artists
like Beuys embraced Cage’s work for precisely this reason: for them, the amnesia
of meaninglessness was a reprieve.232
This brings us, finally, to the question of Cage’s relationship to Wagner.
Vexations has often been described in overtly Wagnerian terms – as ‘a veritable
Ring cycle totally devoid of any but accidental variation’ (Nyman) and as ‘a sort of
“Ring des Nibelungen des pauvres”’ (Gavin Bryars).233 Such comparisons would
be easily dismissed as superficial were it not for the fact that another of Satie’s
works – Sports et divertissements – has so often been referred to as a pseudo-
Gesamtkunstwerk.234 Indeed, at least one author believes Cage’s performance
of Vexations ‘achieved a totality not dissimilar to the Gesamtkunstwerk, though
one less steeped in epic and pomp’, and if we follow Brecht’s well-known
critique of the Gesamtkunstwerk as inducing an alarming degree of passivity
and bewitchment among spectators, we might be inclined to agree with such
a sentiment.235 From this standpoint, Cage comes across much like Beuys:
for his detractors, Cage’s Satiean Gesamtkunstwerk embraced forgetting in a
negative sense, being representative of the belief that the accumulated meanings
of the past could be shorn off once and for all, that one could ‘simply ignore
231
Yvonne Rainer, A Woman Who –: Essays, Interviews, Scripts (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 90, 97, emphasis in original.
232
See Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in
Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006), p. 115.
233
Nyman, ‘Cage and Satie’, p. 1229; Bryars, ‘“Vexations”’, p. 12.
234
See, for example, Alan M. Gillmor, Erik Satie (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1988),
p. 182: ‘tiny Gesamtkunstwerk’; Robert Orledge, ‘Rethinking the Relationship between
Words and Music for the Twentieth Century: The Strange Case of Erik Satie’, in John
Williamson (ed.), Words and Music (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), p. 173:
‘a Gesamtkunstwerk in cameo’; and Verzosa, ‘Limits’, p. 129: ‘a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk
of fumisme’.
235
Christof Migone, ‘Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body’, PhD
dissertation, New York, 2007; subsequently published as a book – Berlin: Errant Bodies, 2011),
p. 196; Bertolt Brecht, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, trans. Steve Giles (London:
Methuen, 2007), p. 69. Simon Shaw-Miller, however, exercising more circumspection, rightly
warns us against such rash comparisons. Where the aim of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk
was the fusion of the arts into a higher, synergetic totality, the Cage aesthetic – as well as
Higgins’ concept of ‘intermedia’, which it directly influenced – explored the complex
situations that arise when media are superimposed independently of one another and when the
boundaries between the media themselves become fluid and uncertain; Simon Shaw-Miller,
Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2002), p. 211. Also relevant is Sara Heimbecker, ‘HPSCHD, Gesamtkunstwerk, and
Utopia’, American Music 26/4 (Winter 2008), pp. 474–98.
the political and communal common reservoir of concepts and symbols’.236 Yet
whether or not we concur with the claim that Cage was after the ‘totality’ of the
Gesamtkunstwerk, there is one sure sense in which Cage – again just like Beuys
– was one of Wagner’s best and most successful pupils. Kyle Gann writes that
Cage ‘put his message across during his life better than any other composer since
Wagner’.237 As prophets of a new spiritual age, both were concerned to address
humanity in the broadest possible terms. No matter that their philosophies appear
to have been polar opposites: they are the two most distinguished representatives
of musical Kunst-religion.238
Satie, the great apostate of romantic obfuscation, the epitome of musical
agnosticism, the mortal enemy of all empty grandeur and false transcendence –
surely this portrait requires qualification if we are to take the true measure of
the artistic production of Cage and Beuys. The long-held view of Satie’s work
as having been the product of a ‘completely unreligious’ sensibility – or, to use
Constant Lambert’s rather more florid, nuanced description, that of ‘an Italian
priest [who] could allow himself an occasional bottle of wine or a risqué story
which the English convert would regard as a lapse from devoutness’ – may well
remain valid as far as it goes.239 Yet when one focuses upon the reception of
Satie’s oeuvre and, in particular, the ways in which his music has been put to
work posthumously, it is clearly not enough to call L’Eglise Métropolitaine d’Art
de Jésus Conducteur a ‘parodistic religion’ and leave it at that.240 For Cage and
Beuys, at least, Satie’s call for ‘the Regeneration of western society’ was no mere
fumiste mocking.241 In their eyes, the chaste ‘timelessness’ of his work made it an
eminent salve for the harrowing void left by the withdrawal of religious belief,
their first port of call when addressing modernity’s most serious spiritual ailments.
236
Sytze Steenstra, Song and Circumstance: The Work of David Byrne from Talking
Heads to the Present (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 127.
237
Gann, Downtown, p. 125.
238
Indeed, this is what most emphatically separated Cage from his Fluxus acolytes.
For Higgins, the ideal of an art that traded in spiritual content was objectionable in the
extreme, requiring iconoclasm in the true sense of the word. Written in the summer of 1966
alongside ‘Boredom and Danger’, his Anger Song #6 (‘Smash’), which asks the audience to
destroy ‘religious sculptures’ and ‘busts of Wagner’ alike, thoroughly exemplifies the point.
Dick Higgins, ‘Anger Song #6 (“Smash”)’, in Ken Friedman, Owen Smith and Lauren
Sawchyn (eds), The Fluxus Performance Workbook, revised edn (2002), p. 51, available at:
http://www.deluxxe.com/beat/fluxusworkbook.pdf.
239
W.H. Mellers, ‘Erik Satie and the “Problem” of Contemporary Music’, Music &
Letters 23/3 (1942), p. 211; Constant Lambert, Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline
(London: Hogarth Press, 1985), p. 117.
240
Alan M. Gillmor, ‘Erik Satie and the Concept of the Avant-Garde’, Musical Times
69/1 (Winter 1983), p. 117.
241
Erik Satie, The Writings of Erik Satie, ed. and trans. Nigel Wilkins (London:
Eulenberg, 1980), p. 46.
On the contrary, they did not regard Satie as music’s most ‘inveterate debunker of
artistic pretension in the name of mental health’.242
To be sure, this means that both Cage and Beuys turned a deaf ear to a number
of significant facets of the Satie aesthetic, the most important of which was
unquestionably its omnipresent humour. No doubt, there is much that is comical
and absurd in the work of both men, yet ultimately what Alain Borer, referencing
novelist Milan Kundera, claims to be true for Beuys is equally accurate for
Cage: ‘in becoming a saviour the saver neglected the unbearable lightness of
being’.243 Similarly striking is Cage’s questionable conviction that Satie was not
‘known to have had any sexual connection with anyone or anything’: the ‘deeply
satisfying’ purity of symmetry was enough for the vestal Satie, Cage avers.244
This is particularly ironic coming from Cage, considering how greatly he valued
Vexations, the one work of Satie’s that likely was autobiographical, written with an
eye to his painful romantic infatuation with Suzanne Valadon.245
In the final scheme of things, however, more significant than the supposed
accuracy of the Cagean-Beuysian interpretation of Satie’s aesthetic is the question
of its efficacy. From the vantage point of intellectual history, Higgins’ stance that
‘the catharsis of Wagner’s Götterdammerung leads inexorably to Buchenwald’
is surely a crude over-simplification.246 Yet, insofar as Beuys and Cage felt the
need to address this impression (directly or indirectly, whatever the case may have
been), both found Satie’s oeuvre to speak uniquely and urgently to their aesthetico-
ideological concerns. Both men used Satie’s work as an ‘art pill’; for both, his
music had a cleansing, therapeutic influence on the memory, one that could – just
maybe – restore us to a past prior to its corruption (Beuys) or grant us an eternal
present unburdened by the weight of the past (Cage). Both use Satie’s music in
service of the broadest possible social aims, searching for a reprieve from the great
traumas of modernity. For them, this is where Satie’s true lightness lay.
If, as Beuys and Cage seem to have believed (in their own very different
ways), the Satie aesthetic was the true parallax of Wagner’s, perhaps it is fitting,
then, that the last word should be left to Nietzsche. After all, it was Nietzsche
who, as an amateur composer, provided what is – ironically – the only known
242
Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 167.
243
Alain Borer, The Essential Joseph Beuys, Lothar Schirmer (ed.) (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1997), p. 34, emphasis in original. Correspondingly appropriate to Beuys is
Calvin Tomkins’ suggestion that if one of Cage’s works by chance establishes humorous
circumstances, ‘he accepts it with equanimity, just as he accepts everything else that can
enter into the work’: Tomkins, Bride, p. 105.
244
Cage, in Steve Schlegel, ‘John Cage at June in Buffalo, 1975’, Master’s thesis,
Buffalo, 2008, p. 31.
245
See Whittington, ‘Immobilities’ for a reading of Vexations along these lines.
246
Dick Higgins, Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 65.
musical precedent for Vexations.247 Nietzsche once wrote that ‘the unhistorical and
the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a
people and of a culture’.248 Nietzsche’s insight, arrived at just as he was beginning
to part company with Wagner, is that an excess of historical consciousness can
prove just as deleterious in effect as a deficit of collective memory; that when it
comes to the mental archive, hypertrophy and atrophy, far from being antipodes,
are symptoms of the same affliction. Consequently, if it has become something of
a cliché to say that the technological prostheses of memory proper to the modern
world have had the unforeseen effect of fostering a culture of ever-more pervasive
amnesia and short-sightedness, perhaps Satie’s prophetic lesson for us today is
that only if we begin to treat ‘forgetting’ as no less healthy than ‘remembering’
will we find the balance necessary to once again find meaning in the interplay
between past, present and future.249
247
The Vexations precedent is a piano composition entitled Das Fragment an sich
[The Fragment in Itself] which contains neither a concluding double bar line nor a fine
indication. Rather, it bears the caustic instruction ‘da capo con malinconia’. Given that
Nietzsche does not specify how many da capos are to be performed, in theory the piece
could go on forever. To the best of my knowledge, the secondary literature on Vexations has
never made reference to Das Fragment an Sich. For information on the composition as well
as a reproduction of the score, see Jos de Mul, Romantic Desire in (Post)modern Art and
Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 129–31. For perhaps
the first attempt to link Satie to Nietzsche’s well-known ideal of musical ‘levity’, see Jean
Cocteau, A Call to Order, trans. Rollo H. Myers (New York: Holt, 1926), p. 18.
248
Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 63.
249
I am indebted to Hannah Higgins and Alison Knowles for their generosity in
answering my numerous questions about Dick Higgins and his relationship to Satie. I am
also extremely grateful to Nora Bartosik and Leonardo Liccini for their assistance with
German translations and sources. Finally, my thanks go to Professor Peter Dayan for his
wisdom and practical assistance.
Chapter 10
After Satie: Howard Skempton in
Conversation with Caroline Potter
CP: Do you remember how you first came across Satie’s music?
HS: I think I must have heard the Gymnopédies on the radio, because I knew of
Satie when I went to London in 1967 – I went, really, to study with Cardew, but I
was also a student in Ealing doing a general degree. Music was one of the subjects
and I remember we looked at Satie then, but I already knew the Gymnopédies. I
was already interested in Satie.
I also knew of Satie through Cage. When I was in the sixth form I’d read an
essay on Cage by Calvin Tomkins which was printed in a book called The Bride
and the Bachelors, later published in paperback as ‘Ahead of the Game’.1 It was a
wonderful essay and he mentions a performance of Vexations, but of course Cage
also mentions Satie because he refers to him in the Black Mountain lecture much
earlier on,2 where he notoriously said that Satie was right and Beethoven was
wrong.
So, I was aware of Satie through Cage, but otherwise it’s difficult to know
precisely where one might have heard the music. My guess is that I heard
broadcasts: I know that one or two people like Peter Dickinson were promoting
him at that time. But the interest seemed to develop much more once I became
involved with Cardew and Cardew’s students, some of whom like Christopher
Hobbs were very interested in Satie.
CP: Were they performing the music?
HS: Well, I think Christopher was finding the music and playing it in Morley
College when we met, occasionally, and of course John White was around and
John would have been interested in Satie as well. So somehow Satie, as one would
expect, infiltrated the Cardew circle, the experimental music circle at that time.
CP: Was Cardew himself interested in Satie?
1
Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: The Heretical Courtship in Modern
Art (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965; reprinted Penguin, 1976).
2
Cage’s lecture ‘Defence of Satie’ was delivered at the Black Mountain Satie Festival
in 1948. See Michael Nyman, ‘Cage and Satie’, Musical Times 114/1570 (1973), pp. 1227–9.
HS: I have no evidence that he was. It’s interesting; I wouldn’t associate Cardew
with Satie. I think Satie probably came in through John [White] and through some
of Cardew’s own pupils like Christopher Hobbs who would have been interested
in Vexations, again through his interest in Cage. But the fact is that Vexations was
an intriguing piece for us because it was a minimalist piece.
CP: Do you think it was known for its notorious reputation rather than as an
actual piece of music?
HS: Yes, and in fact it was some time before I heard the piece. I know that Gavin
Bryars and Christopher Hobbs did a performance in 1971, and of course there is
documentation about that performance in Contact, including about the little notes
they wrote to each other while performing.3 I’m not aware of much interest in
Satie in the UK before Hobbs and Bryars – I don’t think even John White was
promoting the music very actively. In fact, before Hobbs and Bryars’ performance
of Vexations there had been a performance by Richard Toop – he performed the
piece solo at the Arts Lab in London in 1967. So I think it was seen as a great
predecessor of minimalism.
CP: Why would Satie be of interest to experimentalists?
HS: He’s enigmatic, he’s contradictory – there are several things that would have
appealed to the experimentalists. Considering the English experimentalists first,
what might have appealed to them? Obviously I can talk about myself – although I
said I wasn’t consciously aware of being influenced by Satie, as I was for example
by Morton Feldman – my first piano music obviously owes a lot to Feldman.
But I wrote a piece called Waltz, which Michael Nyman mentioned in his book
Experimental Music, which was taken up. It was even broadcast just a few months
after it was composed in 1970, and that piece is very Satie-esque. In fact, the
composer Brian Dennis – we both lived in Ealing at the time and we were having
tea, and he played me some Satie and he said ‘now I know where you got Waltz’.
Even though I can’t remember what Satie piece it was, it was alarmingly close
to Waltz – the melodic ideas, the material was very similar, and also the deadpan
nature of it, the short-circuiting aspect of it, little bits of looped, cyclic material.
But the wonderful thing about Satie is that the music seems simple enough, but
he’s an extremely complex man and the music’s extremely complex – he is his
music, and this is what one has to say when people describe that his music is
simple – the composer isn’t simple. So there’s something else going on here, and
of course when people start working on the music they realise that it isn’t so easy
once they understand what’s needed.
3
Bryars’ article ‘Vexations and its Performers’ was originally printed in Contact 26
(Spring 1983), pp. 12–20 and is now available at JEMS: An Online Journal of Experimental
Music: http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk/emc/Jems.html.
After Satie: Howard Skempton in Conversation with Caroline Potter 231
But one thing that’s clear is that Satie’s music is understated. He’s an anti-hero;
he’s not one of these grand composers, so I think he was an antidote to the great
stars, and I think for people who were promoting an alternative tradition to the
mainstream avant-garde, this rather softly spoken, tactful, sweetly reasonable man
was a perfect anti-hero, a perfect model.
CP: Did you think you needed that in the 1960s, early 1970s?
HS: Well, I think there was disquiet… we didn’t think of Stockhausen as an

imperialist as Cornelius [Cardew] did, but certainly the big figures – Stockhausen,
Boulez – they seemed to be powerful but quite wilful, overbearing figures, and
I think a lot of us were drawn to experimental music because of its homespun
quality. Certainly American experimental music is homespun; a lot of composers
wrote for piano, partly so they could hear the music themselves. It was a sort of
do-it-yourself music.
CP: And the brevity of Satie…
HS: And the brevity of course suggests communication on an intimate level –

that’s the way I see it. These aren’t grand, pretentious statements – he’s very quick
to prick that particular bubble, and I think that if you’re looking for something
really central about Satie, I think it’s the intimacy of the music.
CP: So it was the piano music that appealed to you rather than the later ballets?
HS: Oh yes, absolutely. I’m aware now and to be fair, I would have read David
Drew’s wonderful essay in European Music in the Twentieth Century which came
out around 1957, I would have seen it in the 1960s; there are half a dozen pages
about Satie in there which are quite favourable.4 Obviously David thought Parade
was a wonderful piece – Parade is a masterpiece, and other people think that
Socrate says it all. So it was so interesting to read Robin Holloway on Socrate in
his first book of essays, on Hugues Cuénod’s performance with Geoffrey Parsons
in 1977 – the idea that one needs to project the music to some extent, but even then
it’s too much.5 It’s the impossibility of getting it absolutely right.
CP: He does make specific demands on performers, doesn’t he? It’s music that
almost seems to work better on CD or on the radio.
4
Drew’s chapter ‘Modern French Music’ was published in Howard Hartog (ed.),
European Music in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957;
reprinted Penguin, 1961), pp. 232–95.
5
Robin Holloway, On Music: Essays and Diversions 1963–2003 (Brinkworth:
Claridge Press, 2003). Chapter 48, on Socrate, is at pp. 277–8.
HS: Well, this is very interesting. I would say that it’s difficult in performance
and this is where the complexity lies. Performance is always a balancing act, but
I think the balancing act with Satie’s music is a subtle one: it’s always a balance
between regularity and flexibility, or a deadpan approach, a knowing approach
[and] how much one projects. Some of the pieces are really quite playful, like Le
Piccadilly, which is a ragtime – you can imagine doing it in quite a lively way,
and other pieces clearly have to be deadpan, but what about the Gymnopédies for
example? It’s a matter of tempo – I remember Stephen Pruslin playing it in the
late 1960s extremely slowly, and I thought, what on earth is this? – again, you’ve
got to make a decision about that. And there are problems with the Gnossiennes
because it looks unusual.
CP: Without bar lines.
HS: So you’ve actually got to approach it very intelligently. And it’s difficult to
ignore the fact that nowadays, the music has become better known as a result of
recordings. Now, why would that be the case? I think one of the reasons is because
of this intimate quality. This music is for the listener at home, perhaps listening on
headphones … it is a very personal exchange, like letters. I think the idea of a piece
of music as a letter, a lyric, not a great public statement; it’s something that has a
sort of tenderness or wit, and certainly is as tactful as you would hope friends to be,
not hectoring or browbeating. And of course it’s a tenderness which one finds also
in Chopin, who is a key figure for Satie, I think. Also, the harmonic ambiguity in
the music, I think, is better grasped through recordings because one can listen again
and again, so one can become familiar with it. Or through playing it yourself, and I
think the music needs that – the familiarising process is part of that intimate, private
aspect of the music. I don’t think I’m overselling this – it’s a key element, and
certainly I think the intimate character of the music is what appealed to the English
experimentalists. And of course there’s also the humour, which was something new
in music – it is humour, not wit, because wit is more commonly found, but there is
real humour in the titles. We understood Cage’s humour through Satie as well, and
Satie was a sort of father figure as far as humour was concerned.
CP: Do you find this humour in the music itself, or is it purely verbal humour?
HS: There’s wit, I think – there’s humour in the titles, and there is wit in the music –
there is a sort of wittily truncated, wittily short-circuited quality. It’s extraordinary
how the pieces sometimes end, as if they skidded into a snowdrift or something,
and that’s it – the end of the piece! And so of course the humour is another source
of appeal for any young composer seeking an alternative tradition to the post-war
avant-garde. The latter was very powerful, very good, very inspiring – but also
restricting and quite dogmatic.
Probably the crucial aspect of Satie’s music which attracted some of us was
its spaciousness and its uncluttered character. There was complexity but no
complication, in other words. It was the right sort of complexity: it was ambiguity,
elusiveness, all these things, but there was no obfuscation, except maybe in
the titles – but no. It was absolutely the complete clarity of the music and the
efficiency of the music, one might say – you can find that in other composers,
but I’m sure one of the things that attracted me to American music was a sort of
clarity, and I’m not just talking about American music. Maybe a composer like
Peter Dickinson, or Wilfred Mellers who admired Satie as well – they would have
admired Copland and there’s a French connection there, with Boulanger. So those
who were attracted to the musical ascetic – it is a classic asceticism, it’s classicism
and it’s a reaction to Romanticism, and I think to some extent that asceticism, that
classicism was evident in experimental music but not in the European avant-garde
necessarily. Although they’d wiped the slate clean, as it were, very quickly they
seemed to complicate things. So we’re going back to a sort of clarity, and I think
particularly American experimental music had that clarity.
Now one of the reasons American music had that clarity is because of the art –
because of the Abstract Expressionists, and even before that Mondrian. So it’s the
extreme rigour and transparency of that work which is what inspired the American
experimentalists. And of course there is that appeal to the visual intelligence as
well in Satie’s music – this is another crucial factor. One can see it in the scores,
of course, but the fact is if you have that visual awareness – which is something
that is particularly true of experimental composers, these are people who don’t
embrace everything, they sort of work between categories…
CP: To use a Feldman-esque expression…
HS: To use a Feldman-esque expression!6 But there’s very much an awareness

of painting, of art; experimental composers such as the Americans – Feldman,
Cage, Christian Wolff wrote piano music and were also friends with painters, and
exactly the same happened in England at the end of the 1960s with experimental
composers writing piano music. John White used to have soirées on a Sunday and
a number of us would gather and play our latest piano music. So again, the piano
was central, but also we were interested in artists as well, and they were interested
in music – there was a lot of common ground.
CP: Which artists in particular?
HS: The constructivists. Gavin Bryars worked at the Portsmouth College of

Art, which was where the Portsmouth Sinfonia was founded, Michael Parsons
worked there as well, and some of the artists who were based there belonged to
a British constructivist movement. These figures are not well known. The small
6
Feldman’s composition Between Categories, for two pianos, two chimes, two
violins and two cellos, was composed in 1969; in the same year he wrote an essay of this
title for The Composer 1/2 (Fall 1969), p. 76.
circle included Jeffrey Steele, Malcolm Hughes, Jean Spencer, Peter Lowe, David
Saunders and Michael Kidner, and the artist Kenneth Martin was a father figure
of the group. So it’s this aspect of experimental work in New York in the 1950s,
in London in the late 1960s/early 1970s that looked beyond music to art and to
theatre, but in a funny sort of way not working in either. Certainly the English
composers were taking a cue from Fluxus, you see, which was again ‘between
categories’ as Feldman would have said.
So Satie was a figure who resonated with that interest in the visual. I feel
there’s a sense of creating space in music, and of course Cage picked up on that
through his concern with duration. This sense of spaciousness and this sense of
freedom from congestion is something one associates very much with visual art.
I suppose what I want to say more than anything is that the key figure for me, and
I guess a crucial influence in the twentieth century on artists, was Brancusi, who
was a friend of Satie’s. If one wants to find a very simple way to explain Satie, one
only has to think of Brancusi, because as Henry Moore said about Brancusi, he
got rid of all that clutter, all that extraneous stuff and made us once more ‘shape-
conscious’, as he put it. So it’s the way in which Brancusi promoted shape, so all
the foliage, all the unnecessary decoration is removed, and I think that it’s the way
Satie is able to focus so clearly on form.
CP: There’s that famous remark about the Gymnopédies being like walking round
a sculpture, viewing it from three different angles…
HS: Well, exactly. That of course suggests that we’re dealing with a very complex
composer because now we’re talking about harmony as well, and harmonic
ambiguity. Of course this music isn’t going anywhere – it’s going back and forth
and turning round, and it’s turning in a very agile way, very quickly, and this is no
doubt what interested Debussy, I think. I’m sure it was Satie’s harmonic – albeit
innocent! – harmonic manoeuvring, harmonic instability in the music – harmonic
changeability in the sense that it’s emotionally very rich but it’s not steering us
in a particular direction. It’s not pointing very clearly in a particular direction,
heralding something and bludgeoning us – it’s not, as I say, a guided tour, or if it is
a guided tour it’s a playful one, a mystery tour – a mystery tour in a maze. So in a
way I’m trying to analyse this friendship with Brancusi, because I think it helps to
explain Satie’s influence and importance during the 1920s. He was really the first
modern composer, and Debussy would have picked up on that. Morton Feldman
said that the problem with composers is that they have a vested interest in their
technique, Satie didn’t have a vested interest in his technique; he didn’t feel that
proud of his technique to have a vested interest in it.
I have a very interesting thought, something that a friend said. She was
fascinated by the title, Trois morceaux en forme de poire – what’s interesting about
those pieces is that they date from a time when he was at a very low point. He’d
just moved out of Montmartre – that was a bad time. It might account for the
fact that he felt that he had to go back to school; there was a crisis of confidence.
What’s so interesting about those Morceaux en forme de poire is that it’s a riposte
to Debussy – they were very good friends, but it’s always said he’s putting Debussy
in his place by using this title. But I think it’s actually a rather self-critical title,
and it hadn’t occurred to me that it was a ruefully self-critical title until my friend
Alison Golding said ‘Pieces in the form of a pear’ – because his life had gone
pear-shaped.
CP: Everything’s gone pear-shaped!
HS: And it never occurred to me that the ‘Pieces in the form of a pear’ were pieces
that had gone pear-shaped – it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?!
CP: Yes, a lot of Satie’s humour is texts which can be taken literally.
HS: They’re not just ‘in the form of a pear’ – it might have been a banana, that
would have been just as funny – no, it’s the idea that they had gone pear-shaped.
The phrase may relate to the shape of collapsing balloons…7
CP: And they’re based on his cabaret pieces, taking bits from here, bits from there
– ‘What do I do with this stuff, where am I going, who am I?’
HS: Well, knowing Satie there were these two aspects – there may be a lack of
confidence, a defensiveness, but one reason why he’s so influential now and such
an inspiration to the young is because of his integrity, which is the integrity of a
child. I always say that children have integrity, but that’s the only thing they’ve
got – they don’t have any sort of power, but they have this wonderful sense of
fair play – ‘Why can he have it, it’s not fair!’ Saying ‘life isn’t always fair’ is an
infuriating response to a child. And of course you can see this in Satie’s rather
petulant reactions, the way he would cut people off if they disappointed him –that
childlike integrity, those high standards which nobody else can quite reach. I don’t
know whether that’s fanciful, but I think that’s part of his character. There are these
two things: his strength, his self-possession, that extraordinary resilience, but at
the same time his petulance. The relationship to Debussy is interesting because
I think he would have been quite happy in Debussy’s company, quite aware that
7
Alison Golding has provided the following note: ‘The expression may have
originated in Victorian Britain describing what happened to spherical gas balloons before
they plunged to the ground. It seems to have been an English language expression so Satie
may have learnt it from his Scottish mother – and he may have enjoyed mystifying his
French audience by the reference’ (private communication, 3 August 2012). The origins
of Satie’s title are probably multiple: there is a French slang expression where poire = the
face (avoir une balle en pleine poire = getting a ball in the face); as Satie was obsessed with
heads, that may have been in his mind. ‘Poire’ can also mean ‘idiot’ (il m’a pris pour une
bonne poire = he thought I was a right idiot).
his talent was his talent and nobody else’s talent, and his technique was his own
technique and nobody else’s technique, and really you can’t ask for any more than
that – having a voice.
The thing is, technique is precisely that – it’s what you do, technique is what
you use to make a piece, and Satie had his own technique and he tried to develop
it, he went back to school and built on it and came back with new resources. So
he was mindful of the need to explore new things. But on the other hand, he is a
contradictory figure, a complex figure, and I think there was a genuine sense of
inferiority vis-à-vis Debussy. Also I don’t think he ever got over certain traumas,
like his affair with Suzanne Valadon. There’s a sense that it would have been so
interesting if he had, or if he’d allowed ambition to influence him. He might have
written a few large orchestral works, but it didn’t happen – it might have been nice
if it had, perhaps.
I’ve talked about the do-it-yourself aspect of the music and here is a composer
who was forced to do it himself, to write for himself, and I think that’s why there is
so much Satie piano music – here is a composer who wrote almost exclusively for
the piano, and that made him interesting for later generations of pianist-composers.
CP: Of course that’s how he earned his money – as a pianist, a performing

musician, teaching children piano. How about Satie’s approach to structure – is
that something that’s interested you as a composer?
HS: Well, only in the sense that he had an approach to structure: that structure is
important, that there’s a clarity, and that the interest in structure replaces structural
tonality, in a sense, so what we have is a different sort of structure and that’s what’s
appealing. In the same way I think that Cage was initially interested in Satie,
before he discovered Vexations, because his own rhythmic structures resembled
the structure he’d found in Socrate. Certainly there’s no development, that’s the
key thing. It’s such an obvious thing to say, isn’t it? But the point is we have a
composer who doesn’t do development, so we have something else – we think of
painting, we think of Brancusi, we think of walking round things, but also there’s
film. Here is a composer who was very much in tune with a new way of structuring
things, with new forms: structures which emerged through the use of film, which
was already emerging when Satie was developing as a composer, but particularly
at the beginning of the twentieth century and of course he was involved in it. When
I think of development, I don’t think of classicism, I think of Romantic music,
really. But those classical forms, like the rondo, where one has little boxes, little
parcels of material and sort of mobile forms – this is steady state music, rather than
music that is moving from, developing from one state to another and evolving.
CP: And it’s very compact music too – it doesn’t overstay its welcome. It’s precisely
as long as it needs to be.
HS: And this is crucially important to me. You find that in other composers – an
awful lot of what I said about non-development and this sort of patchwork form,
with great economy and great efficiency, could be said about Stravinsky. It’s very
interesting to think of the influence there.
CP: I think Satie had a lot of insight into Stravinsky.
HS: Yes, and of course things were in the air, but I would give Satie credit for
influencing Debussy in terms of harmony, the elliptical, rather ambiguous use of
harmony – again, a non-developmental use of harmony and again by default. Satie
had extraordinary tact with which he kept things brief – nothing was longer than it
had to be. He was very clear about what he was doing in that sense – if the music
wasn’t developing, it should just stop. Revisiting the music, this becomes clearer
than ever; perhaps one is distracted by the humour to begin with, and then one
appreciates other things about the pieces later on – the efficiency. The structure
is interesting because it’s very clear, it’s articulated clearly, but it does relate in a
funny sort of way to film technique.
CP: You mean the cutting from one scene to another?
HS: Yes, the cutting, the montage – that’s right. It’s his happiness to cut, and to cut
from one type of music to another very quickly. It’s the hard line of modernism: it
doesn’t go in for the dissolves of transitions and bridge passages and things like that
– there’s none of that subtle refinement. There is refinement, but again the refinement
is built into the music in a funny sort of way – it’s not foisted on the music.
I can think of no other composer who had a readier access at that time to
modernism – because he didn’t have that baggage, he didn’t have the vested interest
in a technique that had developed over about 150 years from the breakdown of
the baroque. Even Debussy would have come out of Wagner, out of Liszt – you
can see where Debussy’s coming from. If you can imagine a modern world as
we might have imagined it at the start of the twentieth century, as Le Corbusier
might have imagined a modern world, with all the light and spaciousness that one
associates with modernism, Satie would have had no difficulty imagining that,
because he would just have gone straight for it, and in a way there was a directness
to that approach which one might recognise in a pop composer.
CP: Of course, that’s where he was coming from – in the cabaret songs.
HS: Yes. There’s always a conflict in Satie, a contradiction – and it’s a conflict
between this ecstatic style which seems to anticipate Messiaen – the religious
pieces, part of the Fils des étoiles, that very formal type of music, statuesque music
– and this really playful cabaret music – even the waltz Je te veux, which is a great
song. It’s the freshness, it’s pure inspiration: these are ideas with great character,
they’re very memorable musical ideas.
CP: And again with popular music, we think of simple verse-chorus forms.
HS: It’s the efficiency of the music – we’ve forgotten this, but in the days of
jukebox records, songs were very short – one minute 40 seconds – we’re down to a
Satie‑esque length with pop songs of a certain time. I think that what is interesting
is this blend of the inspired but untrained composer and the very sophisticated
composer. You sense that he was a very sophisticated composer, but somehow had
managed to elude a conventional training. Now again, there are all sorts of possibly
family reasons for that – here is a composer with an interesting psychological
profile…
CP: With his stepmother, perhaps she was the one who encouraged him to go to
the Conservatoire and he didn’t get on with that…
HS: Yes, and why does this seem so modern? There’s something very up-to-date
about this, and I do think that when we’re talking about modernism we can see
structural concerns, we can see a lack of development, we can see an interest in
immediacy or new materials, new sounds and so on, but I think the key thing is
sensibility and a sense of uncertainty. A key element of modern work or modern
thinking is uncertainty – we live in uncertain times. Now, you would not regard the
nineteenth-century composer as an uncertain figure – you know, the Romantic artist
was not uncertain. And I think it’s that uncertainty – that sort of tentative, provisional
character of the work… he’s fighting, the word is transcending that and he’s finding a
sort of clarity. There is a sort of Utopian vision of something, so that’s the modernist
thing, and he had direct access to this because he didn’t have to come to terms with
his achievements – he didn’t have any as an academic or in a conventional sense.
But I think that uncertainty is very interesting, because that is something that
would mean something to modern composers – and not just to composers, in the
second half of the twentieth century. Take Samuel Beckett for example, who wrote
the text of Feldman’s Neither, which is all about being ‘to and fro in shadow
from inner to outer shadow’, ‘by way of neither as between two lit refuges’,
‘unspeakable home’ are the last words of that text. It’s that uncertainty, almost
what psychologists would call ‘avoidance avoidance’ – someone not wanting to
do A and not wanting to do B and ending up by doing nothing or steering that
awkward path between the two, so wanting to stay on as a student to avoid military
service or something, or wanting to be a student but not wanting to…
CP: …take on anything that involves!
HS: But what could be more modern than that dilemma? Which is a perfectly
honest one… how do we account for that? Here is a man who is just too honest to
take either one dishonest course or another – he probably saw both courses of action
as being questionable. I don’t think it was laziness – you could put down Satie’s
lack of achievement or lack of ambition or whatever, but it wouldn’t have been
that. Why the restricted life? I mean, there was great generosity in certain aspects
of him – when he did have money, he gave it away. There was great extravagance
– come on, seven identical velvet suits?! Four would have done! When he did have
money he couldn’t get rid of it quickly enough, is the impression one gets.
CP: It’s certainly not the sensible middle-class approach, putting some aside…
HS: I think it’s part of that bohemian life – definitely that’s what he wanted, but
then you have to ask, why did he opt for that? It was definitely to avoid that
sensible road, wasn’t it – the happy medium – everything my mother always told
me about balance being the answer to everything! But in a funny sort of way he
found his own balance, and what he’s doing in his music is proposing a type of
balance – this is his own view of what balance might be. I think he probably, like
all of us, wanted to achieve some sort of balance in his life and he found a rather
extraordinary kind of balance – Cage was aiming for that sort of balance by using
chance.
Here is somebody who opted out, chose to follow neither of the possible
paths: either becoming a conventional musician or doing something completely
different. He was, in his own way, passionately committed to being a composer –
Cage quotes this idea that everything that happened to him happened to him as a
result of that.
CP: Satie must have been so well read and was so well informed about the other
arts – that’s also very modern, isn’t it?
HS: Again, that’s the point I was making earlier about this interest in poetry
and poets’ interest in him, and of course artists like Cocteau, that’s always very
appealing. But in the general sense it is the integrity and originality of the man
which is always going to be of influence, as with Webern to some extent – the
devotion to a particular calling. When everything else falls away, these figures
remain… Webern was obviously a key figure in a way if you’re picking up the
pieces again – you go back to that sort of single-minded dedication and pick up
on that, and so it’s almost an attitude that is influential. But there’s obviously
something too about Satie’s commitment, about his underlying seriousness. We’ve
talked about the humour – there’s humour and seriousness, the balance between
the two – the way that he’s able to achieve a sort of classical poise.
But this is the problem with Satie: there are so many different aspects that
one can light on and talk about, but you can’t really talk about a school of Satie.
And I think this has always been a problem, when people have spoken about
Satie’s influence in the past – clearly he was influential in France as a father
figure to Les Six.
CP: Yes, musicologists often like to pigeonhole composers, put them in a lineage…
HS: But it doesn’t quite ring true, does it? I think maybe we have our own image
of Satie, because I feel definitely a direct descendant of Satie, in certain key ways,
and possibly I would say that the members of what we would have to call the wider
experimental family in England also owe a great deal to Satie. In the end, it’s partly
a technical thing; it’s the possibility of doing something which is sidestepping
technique. It’s this feeling that, as Morton Feldman said when it was pointed out
to him that other people wrote more notes than he did, he just said ‘Oh, that’s just
colouring book stuff!’ And it’s partly that – the feeling that Satie just goes straight
to the heart of the matter, and when you say the heart of the matter you’re talking
about a purity of utterance. And it’s the ability to produce something which is very
pure and… irresistible and charming, quite irresistibly touching and eloquent in
a way, with a minimum of means, without any fuss or bother, reminding me of
Feldman’s remark that everything you use to make art is precisely what kills it –
this idea of non-interference.
I can’t really relate Feldman and Satie: I don’t know what Feldman thought
about Satie, probably not very much, but what they do have in common is that
sense of being self-taught, crucially – that they don’t use their skill to express
something, the expression and the skill are sort of bound up with each other, so
they discover the means to say what they need to say as they say it. Which I
suppose is where we come back to the pop composer, it’s that sort of freshness and
directness of expression…
CP: And this is something you try to do in your own work.
HS: Well yes, obviously I would identify with that. I would say that’s certainly
true in my case – what I recognise is, I mean I have used what gifts I have to
produce something and in the end I’m bringing everything into play and then
something is happening. I just recognise that what is extraordinary about Satie is
you feel that he’s bringing everything into play – he’s pushing himself to the limit
in a way, but in a rather wonderful way because he’s exploiting all his strengths.
His strengths are limited, but they’re related to his knowledge of other things. So
there’s a great richness, an imaginative world that’s being brought to bear – it’s
not a small thing; there is something heroic in his surmounting the obstacle of
his own limited skill. I’m not going to say ‘limited technique’ because as I said,
technique in the conventional sense… but it’s the way in which he surmounts that,
but of course one might then say that it’s in the process of trying to overcome these
limitations that he reveals his individuality – which is not so easy. If you have all
the skill, then in a way you haven’t had to draw on your own resources enough to
reveal what is perhaps most valuable, which is your character, and those aspects of
your character which are going to inspire. It’s a very subtle point, perhaps.
But one might ask, why is the music a beacon at this time? And I would have
to say it’s because Satie is that rarest of composers: he’s a melodist. He’s the most
wonderful melodist – think of his contemporaries, people like Chausson or even
Fauré – in that sense he is rather like a popular composer [if not a commercial
composer], he has this gift for striking melody. This is one thing – the unschooled
composers, the pop composers, the Tin Pan Alley composers had this great gift for
striking melody. Maybe again it’s that purity of view – they’re just going straight
for the heart of the matter as it were, which is the tune, the melody, which makes
the music so strong and so memorable, and that’s what Satie has.
So I think it’s that instinctive gift for melody, which he has again by default
possibly, which makes the music so memorable, and in the end this is something,
as with the pop composer, that happens almost by default, because as a dictionary
will tell you, melody is the one thing that can’t be taught – I’ve got a dictionary
at home that tells me that. I won it as a music prize when I was at school! It says
melody is the one thing that can’t be taught, and I think that Satie, partly because
of that, perhaps understood when he was young that he was being deflected. I
mean, maybe for all sorts of reasons he was negligent, for better or worse – I don’t
believe in laziness, but maybe for all sorts of reasons he failed to achieve what he
might have achieved. I think it’s a fear of failure in the end, which is why he didn’t
get married, isn’t it?
CP: The fear of being cuckolded, as he told his brother…
HS: There you are. Well, in a professional sense, you might say that his choices seem
to have been made as a way of avoiding failure. A man called Max Hammerton,
in the 1960s, came up with the phrase ‘defence by infinite retreat’. I love that
phrase ‘defence by infinite retreat’, there’s that element in Satie, isn’t there?
Again, there’s uncertainty… And for those of us who perhaps were outsiders, it’s
crucial. The outsider is a familiar figure in the twentieth century: the person who is
an outsider – through lack of training, lack of opportunity, or has chosen to be an
outsider. To some extent Cardew chose to be an outsider – the alienated individual
would find a hero in Satie.
CP: It’s a very modern figure.
HS: It’s a very modern idea, the idea of alienation and the way that is expressed
in music. In other words you don’t confidently march through the keys, and
confidently accelerate into an interrupted cadence – you know, you don’t do that!
CP: Thinking of something like Socrate, where the dynamic level is uniformly low:
it doesn’t impose itself in volume either…
HS: I was reading recently about the low dynamic for example in Pelléas – Debussy
would have picked up on that reticence, that understatement. He would have not
necessarily been influenced by that, but there would have been an agreement, a
commonality. But I think in the end we have to come down to the fact that Satie
was an outsider. Here is a man of great integrity, who created his own world;
someone who through his experiences of childhood, perhaps, but also through
choice, someone who alienated himself from more conventional possibilities,

more traditional ways of functioning as a composer or as a human being. And I
think that sense of alienation or sense of being an outsider is something that we
can only too easily pick up.
And of course it’s the uncertainty or anxiety that goes with that which might lead
one to conjure some sort of modernist vision, to imagine something perfectly
balanced, perfectly structured, as Cage did later, something that’s less corrupt,
less complicated in a bad sense… Satie’s example is always going to be inspiring,
but what is interesting then is going back to the work. We might talk about Satie
the man, but then you go back to the music… I wish I could listen to the music
without knowing about Satie the man, but in the end one might, I suppose, if one
could hear Satie with an innocent ear, without knowing who the composer was – if
one can imagine anyone, someone perhaps from Mars who wouldn’t recognise the
music as Satie, would they think ‘this is a bit odd, this is eccentric’? I mean, would
you think that, or would you think ‘this is very witty, very direct’ – this is very
subtle, very rich in its changeability, its variety, its ability to slip through the gap
in a hedge, as I would say, harmonically speaking.
But in all the music, back in the early pieces, there’s this extraordinary strangeness
which is perhaps the most precious thing of all. It’s in a lot of twentieth-century
music – again the word is ambiguity, this sense of the familiar and the strange
being in such close proximity, so that one is constantly disturbed by something
turbulent and strange and in the next moment reassured. It’s that sort of dialogue
which again you find later on in the twentieth century, and that’s a very modern
thing which you find I suppose in Britten, in Berg – that’s a very much wider thing.
Appendix
Chronological Catalogue of
Satie’s Compositions and Research Guide
to the Manuscripts
Robert Orledge
The following catalogue first appeared in Satie the Composer (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 266–335) and in its subsequent reprintings
in 1995 and 2009. Since the late 1980s, when it was compiled, many discoveries
have been made as to dating, sources, manuscripts, editions and premieres, and
quite a few of the manuscripts have also changed ownership or collection. Those
in Harvard University (Houghton Library) have now received their third, and
I hope final, reclassification, and therefore the Ho numbers of 1990 have been
replaced by a number within b MS Mus 193 (thus Ho 1 is now 193: 14). Most of
the projected, unfinished, unpublished and lost compositions that were titled by
Satie are still included, but his Schola Cantorum exercises from 1905–12 remain
excluded, unless they contributed to a titled composition. They can be consulted
in BNF 9577, 9579, 9591(1–3), 9601(1), 9613, 9617(1–2), 9620, 9634, 9636–59,
9661–5, 9667–8, 9670, 9675–6, 9677(2), 10033(1–12), and Houghton b MS Mus
193: 14, 16–20, 22, 37–8, 50, 94 and 97.
Subsequent arrangements by others are mostly omitted: for these (and a
comprehensive discography), see Alan Gillmor, Erik Satie (Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1988), pp. 325–70. Fuller, detailed descriptions of first and subsequent
editions of Satie’s music and writings can be found in Ornella Volta’s Erik Satie:
bibliographie raisonnée (Paris: Mairie d’Arcueil/Fondation Erik Satie, 1995).
Works with titles added by others, such as the Salabert publications of 1968 by
Robert Caby, are grouped together at the end. Many of these are again works from
the Schola Cantorum period.
A particular problem arises in relation to Satie’s numerous cabaret songs from
1897–1909 because none of them are dated, few include a text and some are
arrangements of popular works by Satie’s contemporaries for cabaret use, usually
with the topical entertainer and ‘pince-sans-rire’ parodist Vincent Hyspa. Only
songs authenticated and dated by Steven Moore Whiting in Satie the Bohemian
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) are included here, and in some cases the dating
is still approximate.
Otherwise, this catalogue is arranged chronologically by the date when Satie
began each work, and where this date is given in inverted commas, it comes from
a manuscript. If it is in square brackets, it signifies a lost or merely projected
composition. A subsequent date in round brackets gives the date of the complete
duration of the project into which the actual composition date fits. When a
distinction can usefully be made, details of the full scores and final printer’s
copies (usually in black ink) are given first, followed by the locations of the drafts
and sketches (usually in pencil). Satie’s original capitalisation is preserved in the
titles, and the other library sigla for manuscript sources follow those of The New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 2001), as do the
abbreviations for instruments (which are not reproduced here).
The catalogue gives the following information: title, date of composition and
orchestration (when appropriate), then description and author of the text (where
appropriate), description of the music, dedication (if applicable), present location
and details of the manuscripts, publication details of the music, and details of the
first performance (where known). The place of first performance and publication
is Paris, unless otherwise stated, and a complete list of the Parisian venues where
Satie’s music was heard appears below, rather than repeating these details with
each premiere.
Only a few early works have opus numbers, and these were mostly added by
Satie’s father, Alfred, on publication, undoubtedly in collusion with his son, as it
was in both their interests to make him seem more prolific and experienced than
he really was. Equally, they may have been a joke by Satie at the expense of the
salon music of his prolific stepmother, Eugénie, in which his father colluded. A
comprehensive list of Alfred Satie’s publications from 1883–91 can be found in
Orledge, ‘The Musical Activities of Alfred Satie and Eugénie Satie-Barnetche, and
their Effect on the Career of Erik Satie’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association
117/2 (1992), pp. 270–97. As many of Satie’s compositions are modal or lack key
signatures, information as to tonality is not given.
Abbreviations
arr. arrangement, arranged by

c. circa, around
coll. collection, collection of
cond. conductor, conducted by
corr. corrected
ded. dedication, dedicated to
diss. dissertation, thesis
f., ff., folio, folios
facs. facsimile
inc. incomplete
incl. includes, including
MS, MSS manuscript, manuscripts
orch orchestra
orch. orchestrated, orchestration
Appendix 245
OS orchestral score
perf. performance, performed by
PLU present location unknown
prem. premiere, first performance
pubd published, published by
pubn publication
r recto
red. (piano) reduction
repr. reprinted
rev. revised
SACEM Société d’Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de Musique [Paris]
sc. scene
SIM Société Internationale de Musique
SMI Société Musical Indépendante [founded 1909]
SN Société Nationale (de Musique) [founded 1871]
trans. translated, translated by
transcr. transcribed, transcription by
unacc. unaccompanied
unperf. unperformed
unpubd unpublished
v verso
VS vocal score
Library Sigla
CH: Switzerland
BS Basle, Fondation Paul Sacher (Grumbacher coll.)
F: France
BNF Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de la Musique, 2 rue
Louvois, 75002 Paris (referred to as F-Pn in The New Grove)
FES Archives de France: archives de la Fondation Erik Satie déposées à
l’IMEC [Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine], Abbaye
d’Ardenne, 14280 St-Germaine-la-Blanche-Herbe, near Caen,
Normandy
Hon Satie birthplace Museum Archive, 88 rue Haute, Honfleur, Normandy
Pbd Paris, Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, 10 place du Panthéon,
75005 Paris
Pca Paris, private coll. of the late Robert Caby (now dispersed)
Pfs Paris, Archives of the Fondation Erik Satie, 56 rue des Tournelles,
75003 Paris [mostly now in FES above]
Pmmm Paris, Médiathèque Musical Mahler, 11bis rue de Vézelay, 75008 Paris
Po Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, 2 rue Auber, 75009 Paris
Ppc Paris, private coll. (not identified on the wishes of the owner)
Psa Paris, private coll. of the late Henri Sauguet (now dispersed)
Psalabert Paris, Archives of Salabert et Cie, 22 rue Chauchat, 75009 Paris (now
mostly in BNF above)
Ptb Paris, private collection of Thierry Bodin
US: United States of America

AUS Austin, Texas, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
Eu Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Music Library
Ho 193 Houghton Library, University of Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts
These are followed by their classification number within b MS Mus 193
NH New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library Rare Book and
Manuscript coll.
NYpm New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, 29 East 36th Street, NY
10016-3403
Wc Washington DC, Library of Congress, Music Division
Other private collections outside Paris are described in full, when permitted by the
owners of the manuscripts concerned.
Addresses of Parisian Concert Venues
Agriculteurs, Salle des, 8 rue d’Athènes, 9e

Auberge du Clou, L’ (cabaret of Miguel Utrillo), 30 avenue Trudaine, 9e
Bal Bullier (formerly Jardin Bullier), Closerie des Lilas, Carrefour de l’Observatoire
à l’issue du Luxembourg, 6e (open for dancing throughout the year, with Bals
champêtres held on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays and on public holidays
between April and September)
Barbazanges, Galerie, rue du Faubourg St-Honoré, 8e
Bouffes-Parisiens, Théâtre des, 4 rue Monsigny, 2e
Capucines, Théâtre des, 39 boulevard des Capucines, 2e
Conservatoire, Salle du (after 1911: Salle de l’Ancien Conservatoire), 2bis rue du
Conservatoire, 9e
Champs-Elysées, Théâtre des, 13 avenue Montaigne, 8e
Châtelet, Théâtre du, 1 place du Châtelet, 1er
Chat Noir, Le (cabaret of Rodolphe Salis), 84 boulevard Rochechouart, 9e
Cigale, Théâtre de la, 120 boulevard Rochechouart, 9e
Cirque d’Hiver, Le, place Pasdeloup, 110 rue Amelot, 11e
Cirque Médrano, 65 boulevard Rochechouart, 9e
Colisée, Théâtre du, 38 avenue des Champs-Elysées, 8e
Comédie des Champs-Elysées, 15 avenue Montaigne, 8e
Comédie-Royale, 25 rue de Caumartin, 9e
Durand-Ruel, Galeries [Paul], 16 rue Laffitte, 9e
Erard, Salle, 13 rue du Mail, 2e
Appendix 247
Gaîté-Lyrique, Théâtre de la, 3-5 rue Papin, 3e

Gaveau, Salle, 45 rue La Boétie, 8e
Huyghens, Salle (Société Lyre et Palette: Emile Lejeune), 6 rue Huyghens, 14e
Impérial, Théâtre, 5 rue du Colisée, 8e
Lune Rousse, La (cabaret: Dominique Bonnaud, Numa Blès), 58 rue Pigalle, 9e
Michel, Théâtre, 38 rue des Mathurins, 8e
Opéra (Palais Garnier), place de l’Opéra, 9e
Opéra-Comique (1898f), place Boieldieu, 2e
Pleyel, Salle, 22 rue de Rochechouart, 9e (1839-1927)
Quat’z’Arts, Les (cabaret), 62 boulevard de Clichy, 9e
Sarah Bernhardt, Théâtre, place du Châtelet, 1er
Scala, La (Music Hall), 13 boulevard de Strasbourg, 10e
Vieux-Colombier, Théâtre du, 21 rue du Vieux-Colombier, 6e
Ville de l’Evêque, Salle de la, 18 rue de la Ville l’Evêque, 8e
Bibliography for Recurring Sources in the Catalogue
(e.g. Orledge, Robert: Satie the Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1990) = Orledge, 1990)
Clair, René (trans. Jacques, R. and Hayden, N.), A Nous La Liberté and Entr’acte,
(London: Lorrimer Publishing, 1970), 115–40
Gillmor, Alan, ‘Erik Satie and the Concept of the Avant-Garde’ (PhD dissertation,
University of Toronto, 1972)
Erik Satie (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988)
Gowers, Patrick, ‘Erik Satie: His Studies, Notebooks and Critics’ (PhD dissertation,
Nos. 5374–76, University of Cambridge, 1966)
Orledge, Robert, ‘Satie’s Approach to Composition in His Later Years (1913–24)’,
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 111 (1984–5): 155–79
Satie the Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
‘Satie at Sea, and the Mystery of La “Belle Cubaine”’, Music & Letters 71/3
(1990): 361–72
‘The Musical Activities of Alfred Satie and Eugénie Satie-Barnetche, and their
Effect on the Career of Erik Satie’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association
117/2 (1992): 270–97
(trans. Nichols, R.), Satie Remembered (London: Faber, 1995)
‘Erik Satie’s Ballet Mercure (1924): From Mount Etna to Montmartre’, Journal of
the Royal Musical Association 123/2 (1998): 229–49
‘Understanding Satie’s Vexations’, Music & Letters 79/3 (1998): 386–95
‘Erik Satie’s Ballet Uspud: The Creation of a New Language with Only Half
the Alphabet’, Musical Times 150/1908 (Autumn 2009): 31–41
Potter, Caroline, ‘Erik Satie’s Obstacles venimeux’, Ars Lyrica 20 (2011): 101–14
Rey, Anne, Erik Satie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974)
Roland-Manuel, Alexis, Erik Satie: Causerie faite à la Société Lyre et Palette, 18

Avril 1916 (Paris: H. Roberge Imprimeur, 1916)
Sanouillet, Michel, Francis Picabia et ‘391’, vol. II (Paris: Eric Losfeld, 1966)
Templier, Pierre-Daniel, Erik Satie (Paris: Editions Rieder, 1932); trans. E. and D.
French (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969)
Volta, Ornella (ed.), Ecrits (Paris: Editions Champ Libre, revised edn 1981)
L’Ymagier d’Erik Satie (Paris: Editions Van de Velde, 1979; reprinted 1990)
‘Dossier Erik Satie: L’os à moëlle’, Revue Internationale de Musique Française
8/23 (1987): 5–98
Erik Satie & la Tradition Populaire (Exhibition catalogue) (Paris: Fondation
Satie, 1988)
‘A la recherche d’un fantôme: Paul & Virginie d’Erik Satie’, RIMF 10/29
(1989): 47–70
Satie et la danse (Paris: Editions Plume, 1992)
(trans. Melville, A.), Erik Satie: A Mammal’s Notebook (London: Atlas Press,
1996)
Satie sur scène (Exhibition catalogue) (Honfleur: Musée Eugène Boudin,
2000)
Erik Satie: Correspondance presque complète (Paris: Fayard/IMEC, 2000;
revised edn 2003)
Wehmeyer, Grete, Erik Satie (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1974)
Whiting, Steven Moore, Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999)
Wilkins, Nigel, The Writings of Erik Satie (London: Eulenburg, 1980)
1884
Allegro
composed: ‘Honfleur. 9 Sept 1884’

music: 9 bars for pf (using refrain of ‘J’irai revoir ma Normandie’, pubd by
Frédéric Barat in 1850 as ‘Ma Normandie’)
MS: BNF 10052(2), 1f.
pubn: Salabert, 1995 (EAS 19351, pp. 4–5 in EAS 19354)
prem.: 12 April 1980 by Giancarlo Carlini (pf). Teatro di Porto Romana, Milan
1885–6
Valse-ballet
composed: ? 1885–7
music: salon piece for pf
ded.: à Madame Clément Le Breton
Appendix 249
MS: PLU
pubn: musical supplement to La Musique des familles VI/283 (17 March 1887),
pp. 174–6 (as ‘Op. 62’); as No. 1 of Deux Œuvres de jeunesse, Salabert, 1975
(EAS 17200)
prem.: Opéra-Comique, 7 May 1979 by Anne-Marie Fontaine (pf)
Fantaisie-valse
music: salon piece for pf
ded.: à mon ami J.P. Contamine de Latour
MS: PLU
pubn: musical supplement to La Musique des familles VI/302 (28 July 1887),
pp. 361–5; as No. 2 of Deux Œuvres de jeunesse, Salabert, 1975 (EAS 17201)
prem.: Opéra-Comique, 7 May 1979 by Anne-Marie Fontaine (pf)
1887
Elégie
composed: ? early 1887

music: setting for v, pf of poem by Contamine de Latour
ded.: à Mademoiselle Céleste Le Prédour
MS: PLU
pubn: Alfred Satie, April 1887 (AS 61, as ‘Op. 19’); as No. 2 of Trois Mélodies de
1886, Salabert, 1968 (MC 295)
Trois Mélodies
composed: ? April–May 1887

music: 3 settings for v, pf of poems by Contamine de Latour (no. 3 is Satie’s first
barless composition)
1 Les Anges
2 Les Fleurs
3 Sylvie
ded.: 1 à notre ami Charles Levadé
2 à Madame la Comtesse Gérald de Marguenat
3 à Mademoiselle Olga Satie
MSS: PLU
pubn: All 3: Alfred Satie, June–July 1887 (AS 74–6, as ‘Op. 20’); Nos. 1, 3 in
Trois Mélodies de 1886, Salabert, 1968 (MC 296, 294); No. 2 in Trois Autres
Mélodies (No. 3), Salabert, 1968 (MC 298)
1er Quatuor; 2d Quatuor
composed: ? 1887
music: 2 sketches for str quartet (unscored)
MSS: BNF 10049, 1f.
unpubd
Trois Sarabandes (orig. Sarabandes vives)
composed: ‘1–18 Sept 1887’

music: 3 dances for pf. The first is prefaced in the MS by an extract from Contamine
de Latour’s La perdition
ded.: 1 à Monsieur Conrad Satie (MS only)
2 à mon ami Arthur Dodement (MS altered in another hand to ‘à Mademoiselle
Jeanne de Bret’). In 1911 ed. ‘à Maurice Ravel’
3 no dedication
MSS: F-Hon: Nos. 1, 2 (first versions, 6, 6pp, originally titled ‘Sarabande vive’.
No. 1 dated ‘1 Sept 1887: Paris’)
BNF 14457(1–3), 3, 3, 2ff. No. 3 dated ‘18 Sept 1887’, the others ‘Sept 1887’
F-Hon: Neat copies of all 3 for Rouart-Lerolle ed., 1911
pubn: No. 1 in Revue musicale SIM 7/3 (15 March 1911), pp. 33–4. As in BNF
14457 (without bars 53–5, 73–5 found in Rouart-Lerolle ed.
No. 2 in supplement to Musica (Album Musica) 103 (April 1911), pp. 89–90
All 3: Rouart-Lerolle, Nov 1911 (RL 9800-02). (No. 2 lacks the repeat of bars
82–6 as 87–91 found in the Musica ed., but Satie told Lerolle on 10 May 1911 that
he preferred this shorter version)
prem.: No. 2 by Maurice Ravel (pf), SMI, Salle Gaveau, 16 Jan 1911
Chanson
composed: ? Dec 1887

music: setting for v, pf of poem by Contamine de Latour
ded.: à Mademoiselle Valentine de Bret
MS: PLU
pubn: Alfred Satie, Jan 1888 (AS 84[bis], as ‘Op. 52’); as No. 1 of Trois Autres
Mélodies, Salabert, 1968 (MC 342)
Appendix 251
1888
Trois Gymnopédies
composed: ‘Feb–2 April 1888’ (or earlier and postdated)

music: 3 restrained, modal dances for pf, inspired by an extract from Les
Antiques by Contamine de Latour: ‘Slicing obliquely through the shadows a
raging torrent rushed in waves of gold over the polished flagstone, where atoms
of amber, glistening in the firelight, joined their sarabande to the naked dance
[gymnopédie]’ (trans. Roger Nichols, Peters ed., 1988)
Nos. 3, 1 orch. Debussy, Feb 1896, for 2 fl, ob, 4 hn, str (No. 3), plus 2 hp, cymb
(No. 1)
ded.: 1 à Mademoiselle Jeanne de Bret
2 à Conrad Satie (1895 ed. In MS ‘à mon ami Arthur Dodement’)
3 à Charles Levadé (orig. in MS ‘à Monsieur Georges Mathias’, Satie’s pf
teacher at Paris Conservatoire)
MSS: BNF 8537(1–3). No. 1: ‘Feb [orig. ‘April’] 1888’ (3pp.); No. 2: ‘March
1888’ (3pp.): No. 3: ‘2 April 1888’ (3pp.)
CH-BS: OS by Debussy, and copy by Satie with additions by Debussy, 3, 3pp.
Order: 1, 3; BNF 25400-01: OS and parts copied by Satie in 1897 for Baudoux
ed. Order: 3, 1 (5, 9 pp.); BNF 10046: Additional str and ob parts by Satie
BNF 9597(2), p. 1. Trial scoring of No. 3 by Satie (c.1894) for ob, 2 cl, hps, str,
voice (bars 1–3 only)
pubn: No. 1 as musical supplement to La Musique des familles VII/357 (18 Aug
1888), no p. nos (as ‘Gymnopédie (Danse antique)’ with Latour’s poem). Then
by Imprimerie Dupré (private ed.), April 1895
No. 2: Imprimerie Dupré (private ed.), April 1895 (incl. bars 1–4 [introduction]
missing in BNF 8537(2))
No. 3: Imprimerie Dupré (private ed.), Nov 1888
All 3: Baudoux, 1898; Rouart-Lerolle, Nov 1912 (RL 9838–40)
Nos. 3, 1 orch. Debussy, Baudoux, Oct 1897 (EB 403), parts Sept 1897 (also EB
403); rev. ed. by Robert Orledge in Œuvres complètes de Claude Debussy V/11
(Paris: Durand, 2013)
prem.: No. 3 by Maurice Ravel, SMI, Salle Gaveau, 16 Jan 1911
Nos. 3, 1 orch. Debussy, Exposition de Genève, cond. Gustave Doret, June
1896; Salle Erard, cond. Doret, 20 Feb 1897; Cercle Musical, cond. Debussy,
25 March 1911
Ogives
composed: ? late 1888

music: 4 pieces for pf inspired by plainchant and the Gothic architecture of Notre
Dame cathedral. Perhaps also inspired by the ogival windows in the church of St
Laurent, near Satie’s parents’ home at 66 blvd de Magenta and the Gare de l’Est
ded.: 1 à J.P. Contamine de Latour
2 à Charles Levadé
3 à Madame Clément Le Breton
4 à Conrad Satie
MSS: PLU. 1889 ed. with red ink corrections by Satie, coll. R. Orledge, Brighton
pubn: Imprimerie Dupré (private ed.), Jan 1889 (advertised in Le Chat noir,
VIII/369 on 9 Feb 1889); Le Chant du Monde/Sikorski (Hamburg), 1965; rev.
ed. using corrected copy above by Jamie Crofts, SOUNDkiosk, Brighton, 2009
(SKPE 01); Barenreiter, 2012
1889
Gnossienne [No. 5]
composed: ‘8 July 1889’

music: dance for pf
MSS: BNF 10054(1), f. 1r and v, f. 2r
pubn: Salabert 1968 (MC 288, as ‘No. 5’)
Chanson Hongroise
composed: ? July 1889

music: 4 bars for pf inspired by Romanian folk music at the Exposition Universelle,
1889
MS: BNF 10054(1), f. 2v
pubn: in Wehmeyer, 1974, p. 32
1890
Trois Gnossiennes [Nos. 1–3]
composed: ‘1890’ (1890–1893?)

music: 3 dances for pf
ded.: 1 à Roland-Manuel (1913 ed.)
2 à Antoine de La Rochefoucauld (1893 facs.)
3 No dedication
MSS: PLU. A facs. of No. 2 dated ‘April 1893’ appeared in Le Cœur in 1893 as
the ‘6e Gnossienne’
Appendix 253
BNF 10053, f. 2v. Sketch for end of No. 2

BNF Rés. Vma 163. First proofs (1912)
Ho 193: 92. Start of No. 3 for small orch (2 bars only for ob, hp)
pubn: Nos. 1, 3 in Le Figaro musical 24 (Sept 1893), pp. 300–303 as ‘No. 1’ and
‘No. 2’; No. 2 in Le Cœur 1/6–7 (Sept–Oct 1893), p. 12 as ‘6e Gnossienne’ (facs.
reproduced in Volta, 1987, p. 32). All 3: Rouart-Lerolle, Jan 1913 (RL 9884–6).
Here Nos. 2 and 3 are dated ‘1890’ by Satie (in the 1912 proofs). No. 1 was dated
‘1890’ between the first proof stage and publication.
The complete collection of 6 Gnossiennes was pubd by Salabert in 1989 as EAS
18790
Danse
composed: ‘5 Dec 1890’

music: Satie’s first completed piece for small orchestra (2 fl, ob, 2 cl (B flat, A),
bn, timp, hp). Used as No. 6: ‘En plus’ in Trois morceaux en forme de poire (1903)
MS: Ho 193: 92. 14pp. music.
pubn: in Gowers, 1966, PhD 5375, pp. 32–40. Bars 1–10 in Gillmor, 1988, pp.
128–9
1891
[Modéré]
composed: ‘20 Jan 1891’

music: short march-like piece for pf
MS: BNF 10051(1), 1f.
pubn: Salabert, 1968 (MC 303, ed. Robert Caby, as Première Pensée Rose+Croix)
[Gnossienne] [No. 4]

music: slow dance for pf
MS: BNF 10051(2), 2ff.
pubn: Salabert, 1968 (MC 281, as ‘Gnossienne No. 4’)
Leit-motiv du ‘Panthée’
composed: ‘28 Oct’ 1891

music: Satie’s only monodic composition (no forces specified)
ded.: au Sâr Joséphin Péladan

MS: PLU
pubn: as frontispiece in Péladan: Le Panthée. La Décadence latine, Ethopée, No.
10 (Paris, E. Dentu, 1892 [Dec 1891])
Prélude du ‘Prince de Byzance’
composed: [? Nov 1891]

music: lost or never started. Announced in Joséphin Péladan: Le Panthée (1892),
pp. 299–300, and intended as incidental music for his play Le Prince du Byzance
(title as on first ed. of 1896)
Salut Drapeau!
composed: ‘2 Nov 1891’

text: Giorgio Cavalcanti’s speech in Act 2 sc. 9 of Péladan’s 5-act ‘romanesque
drama’ Le Prince du Byzance (Paris: Chamuel, 1896). Here (p. 54), Cavalcanti
seizes the flag and proclaims Tonio to the people as the [androgynous] hereditary
prince of the title
music: hymn for v (or vv in unison), pf (or harmonium)
MSS: BNF 10053 (5ff., r only), plus 2pp. by Péladan converting the prose speech
into 3 unequal verses
pubn: Salabert, 1968 (MC 328, ed. Robert Caby as Hymne. Pour le ‘Salut
Drapeau’. The orig. MS has no bar lines and each vocal phrase should end with
a minim and a crotchet rest. Publication as Salut au Drapeau was announced by
Satie in the small uspud brochure of 1895, but no copy has yet been found)
[Trois] Sonneries de la Rose + Croix
composed: Nov 1891 (SACEM, ‘14 Nov 1891’)

music: 3 fanfares for tpts and hps (or orch?)
1 Air de l’Ordre
2 Air du Grand Maître (Sâr Joséphin Péladan)
3 Air du Grand Prieur (Comte Antoine de La Rochefoucauld)
MSS: BNF 10040, 3ff., probably parts for tpts in F, as the MS contains only the
passages in octaves in the 3 Sonneries, a perfect fourth lower
F-Ppc: 1892 ed. corrected by Satie ‘to conform with the orchestral parts’
pubn: Imprimerie Dupré, 5 March 1892 (‘publié par les soins de la Rose+Croix’).
The wrapper, with red Gothic lettering by Satie, shows 3 trumpeting horsemen
from ‘La Guerre’ by Puvis de Chavannes. 500 copies, 450 of which were returned
to Rouart-Lerolle by Satie on 29 April 1910. These were then over-stamped by
Appendix 255
the publishers and put on sale at ‘Net. 4 fr[ancs]’ in ? 1911. Presumably when
stocks ran low, around 1922, Rouart-Lerolle issued their own first, larger edition
on ‘Normandy Vellum’ paper, still at 4 francs, printed by A. Mounot (10, rather
than 12pp. music)
Nos. 1, 3 only, Baudoux, May 1896 (EB 221. No. 2 was omitted after Satie’s break
with Péladan in Aug 1892)
prem.: 10 March 1892, Eglise Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, Place du Louvre, Paris
1e, as ‘Premier Geste esthétique de l’Ordre Rose+Croix Catholique’. Repeated
at the first Rose+Croix Soirée on 22 March, Galeries Durand-Ruel, when No. 3
appears as the Sonnerie de l’Archonte
Le Fils des étoiles
composed: ? Dec 1891

music: incidental music for fls and hps for Joséphin Péladan’s 3-act ‘Pastorale
Kaldéenne’ Le Fils des étoiles (Beauvais, Imprimerie professionnelle, 1895). A
Gnossienne in Act 1 (BNF 10052(1), ff. 9v–12r) was reused as the ‘Manière de
commencement’ in the Trois Morceaux en forme de poire in 1903
MSS: BNF 10052(1). Short score, 68pp. music
US-Nypm: Short score, preludes only, 12ff.
BNF 10052(2). Scenario by Péladan, 5ff.
pubn: 3 act-preludes only (Act 1: La Vocation; Act 2: L’Initiation; Act 3:
L’Incantation), Baudoux, Jan 1896 (EB 220, 200 copies in red ink, with
‘Dédicatoire’ by Satie, and the imprint of the Église Métropolitaine d’Art de Jésus
Conducteur)
Rouart-Lerolle, 1911 (RL 5220, in black ink, except ‘Dédicatoire’); Salabert, 1973,
with added dynamics (only these printed scores bear the misleading description
‘Wagnérie Kaldéenne’)
Complete ed. for pf, 2003 by Christopher Hobbs, Experimental Music Catalogue
(www.experimentalmusic.co.uk), 53pp.
prem.: 3 act-preludes at public dress rehearsal for the first Soirée Rose+Croix,
Galeries Durand-Ruel, 19 March 1892 (for fls and hps?). Public prem. 22 March
1892.
Prelude to Act 1 by Maurice Ravel (pf), SMI, Salle Gaveau, 16 Jan 1911
Complete score by Christopher Hobbs (pf), Pfarrkirche, Neu-Rum, Innsbruck, 22
Oct 1989
1892
Danses Romaines; Danses Byzantines; Kharaseos
composed: [1892]
music: dances for orch. and a 1-act opera listed among Satie’s compositions in
his application for election to the Académie de Beaux-Arts in May 1892 (after the
death of Ernest Guiraud). These works were probably never started
Fête donnée par des Chevaliers Normands en l’honneur d’une jeune

Demoiselle (XIe Siècle)
composed: Summer 1892

music: prelude for pf based on Satie’s first known compositional system, using
interlocking chord progressions (see Orledge, 1990, pp. 187–9)
MSS: Ho 193: 64, f. 2r and v (chordal cells), f. 3v (draft of central chordal passage
on which prelude is based. Earlier discarded versions using the same cells can be
found in Ho 193: 64, ff. 3r, 10v)
BNF 10050(1), draft of prelude on verso of Sept 1884 Allegro. The style and
calligraphy of the prelude both belong to the early 1890s, however, and other
passages using the same progressions can be found in uspud and the Danses
Gothiques of 1892–3)
pubn: Rouart-Lerolle, 1929 (RL 11689, as the first of 4 Préludes)
Prélude du Nazaréen
composed: ‘12 June 1892’

music: incidental music for Le Nazaréen, a 3-act esoteric play by Henri Mazel
(Paris, A. Savin, 1892). Page 5 is marked ‘Décors à rêver.– Musique à faire’. Satie
composed one sub-divided prelude, which he signed and dated at the end. This
was erroneously pubd as 2 separate preludes in 1929
MSS: Part 1: BNF 10037(1), 4pp.; adorned with Gothic castles and other drawings
(see Orledge, 1990, pp. 43, 151)
Part 2: BNF 10037bis, 3pp.
pubn: Rouart-Lerolle, 1929 (RL 11689, as nos. 3, 4 of 4 Préludes). In No. 4,
chords 5–6 and 10–12 on p. 8 system 4 should be repeated between chords 12 and
13, as in Satie’s MS; as one sub-divided prelude: SOUNDkiosk, Brighton (ed. R.
Orledge), 2013
Le Bâtard de Tristan
composed: [1892]
music: announced as an opera in 3 Acts to a libretto by Albert Tinchant in Le
Courrier du soir on 22 July 1892, to be performed at the Grand Théâtre in
Bordeaux. Satie’s Wagnerian hoax was probably never started
Appendix 257
uspud
composed: ? Sept–17 Dec 1892

text: ‘Ballet chrétien’ in 3 Acts by Contamine de Latour and Satie. First version
(finished ‘17 Nov 1892’) – with one desert setting for all 3 Acts (see Volta, 1987,
pp. 71–9). All in Satie’s hand, apart from two interspersed letters by Latour. Second
version (recopied overnight on 16–17 Dec 1892 to show to Eugène Bertrand at the
Paris Opéra on the 17th) in BNF 9631. This is all by Satie, with different stage
settings for each Act
Pubd (all in lower case) in the large uspud brochure (with only minor changes)
(Paris, Imprimerie Artistique, April 1893). uspud may have been intended for the
shadow theatre at the Auberge du Clou as a parody of Flaubert’s La Tentation de
saint Antoine
music: short sections for fls, hps, str with text read in between, even if there sees
to be no links between the two. The short score would, however, be more practical
on harmonium
MSS: F-Hon, first version for fls, hps only (as in Le Fils des étoiles). Carnet of
46pp. (incl. first version of text). Dated ‘17 Nov 1892’
BNF 9631, second version for fls, hps, str (‘quatuor’), 48pp. Music is the same
with a few extra dynamics and pause bars added. Dated ‘Novembre de 92’ but
actually copied on 16–17 Dec
F-Pbd, text (A.II.2)
pubn: text and extracts from each Act in large uspud brochure, 16pp. (1893); 4
music extracts only in small uspud brochure, 8 oblong pp. (April 1895) and with
the signature of Suzanne Valadon on the medallion of Satie and Latour deliberately
erased by Satie after the break-up of his only known affair on 20 June 1893. Copy
no. 16 (of 100) of the 1893 brochure, in the coll. of Johny Fritz, Luxembourg,
shows that the clef displacements were made to ‘distance Stupid people’ from the
music. Satie made his own woodcuts for both brochures (now in F-Pfs)
Short score (as in BNF MS 9631): Salabert, 1970 (MC 445); SOUNDkiosk,
Brighton, 2013
prem.: Opéra-Comique, 9 May 1979 by Michel Tranchant (pf), Hubert Camerlo
(narrator), with slide projections by Robert Doisneau
Noël
composed: [? Dec 1892]

text: shadow play by Vincent Hyspa (lost)
music: lost, but score may have been compiled from existing pf pieces, like the
Gnossiennes
MS: PLU
prem.: ? 24 Dec 1892, as first shadow play in the Auberge du Clou (together with
La Styliste by Henri de Wendel). Scenery by Miguel Utrillo
1893
Eginhard. Prélude
composed: ? 1893
music: short piece for pf, possibly incidental music for a play (author unknown)
MS: BNF 10038, 2ff.
pubn: Rouart-Lerolle, 1929 (RL 11689, as the second of 4 Préludes)
Danses Gothiques (Cultifiements et Coadunations Choristiques. Neuvaine pour

le plus grand calme et la forte tranquillité de mon âme)
composed: ‘21–23 March 1893’

music: a continuous piece of motivically interrelated music, split up into 9 dances
by the insertion of titles (which sometimes appear in mid-motif). Composed in the
midst of Satie’s tempestuous affair with the artist Suzanne Valadon
1 À l’occasion d’une grand peine
2 Dans laquelle les Pères de la Très Véritable et Très Sainte Église sont invoqués
3 En faveur d’un malheureux
4 A propos de Saint Bernard et de Sainte Lucie
5 Pour les pauvres trépassés
6 Où il est question du pardon des injures reçues
7 Par pitié pour les ivrognes, honteux, debauches, imparfaits, désagréables, et
faussaires en tous genres
8 En le haut honneur du vénéré Saint Michel, le gracieux Archange
9 Après avoir obtenu la remise de ses fautes
ded.: à la Transcendante, Solennelle et Représentative Extase de Saint Benoît,
Préparatoire et Méthodique du Très Puissant Ordre des Bénédictins. Le 21 Mars
de 93 à Paris, le soleil étant sur la terre
MS: BNF 10048, 13ff. Dated at the end ‘23 Mars de 93. Paris. 6 rue Cortot’ and
registered with SACEM on 24 March. 5 of the 10 motifs use cells found in the
Fête donnée of ? 1892
pubn: No. 1 in Revue musicale SIM, 7/3 (15 March 1911), pp. 39–40
All 9: Rouart-Lerolle, 1929 (RL 11685): SOUNDkiosk, Brighton, 2011 (SKPE
17)
Bonjour Biqui, Bonjour!
composed: ‘2 April 1893’

music: brief musical greeting for v, pf. Text (as title) by Satie, accompanied by his
portrait of Valadon
ded.: à Suzanne Valadon [Biqui]
Appendix 259
MS: FES, 1f. (SAT 192.5)

pubn: facs. in Templier, 1932, Plate XII and 1969, plate 32; Wilkins, 1980, p. 136
Vexations
composed: April 1893

music: short self-repeating passage for pf, which is itself repeated 840 times, after
a period of silent meditation (see Orledge, 1998, pp. 386–95). The 840 also derives
from adding the first 12 numbers in the Lucas summation series (1, 4, 7, 11 to 322)
together, as discovered by Marcus Williamson. Vexations uses the same chordal
types as Bonjour Biqui, Bonjour!, hence its dating, and it may well reflect Satie’s
own ‘vexations’ with Suzanne Valadon
MS: FES, 1f (SAT 2.4)
pubn: facs. in Contrepoints, 6 (1949), opposite p. 8; Eschig, 1969, as second of
Pages Mystiques (ME 7714)
prem.: Richard David Hames (aged 13), Lewes Grammar School, Sussex, 1958
(inc.?)
Pocket Theatre, New York, 9–10 Sept 1963, organised by John Cage (complete:
18 hours 40 minutes). Pianists: John Cage, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Philip
Corner, Viola Farber, Robert Wood, MacRae Cook, John Cale, David Del Tredici,
James Tenney, Howard Klein (substitute), Joshua Rifkin (substitute)
Ontrotance; Corcleru; Irnebizolle; Tumisrudebude
composed: [1893]
music: ballets in 1, 3, 2, and 3 Acts respectively, planned with Contamine de Latour
as offshoots to uspud featuring members of the uspud clan (see Orledge, 2009).
Announced in the large uspud brochure of April 1893, where Ontrotance is reported
as being ‘in preparation’. No other trace of these ballets has survived
Roxane
composed: [? mid-1893]
music: setting for v, orch (or pf) of poem by Contamine de Latour, listed in letter
to Conrad Satie on 28 June 1893 (see Volta, 2000, p. 44). Music and text lost
1894
Prélude de La Porte héroïque du ciel
composed: ? Feb 1894

music: incidental music for esoteric drama in 1 Act by Jules Bois (Paris, Librairie
de l’Art Indépendant, March 1894). Orch. by Roland-Manuel in 1912. For Satie’s
programme note, see Le Guide du Concert, III (1 June 1912), p. 35
ded.: ‘Je me dédie cette œuvre. E.S.’
MSS: Draft, PLU. BNF 9597(1bis), f. 3v (sketches); BNF Rés. Vma 170. Corr.
proof, 1912
pubn: facs. in Le Cœur, 2/8 (March 1894), pp. 4–5. Also pubd on pp. 20–21 of
Bois’ drama; Rouart-Lerolle, Jan 1913 (RL 9875); Salabert, 1968
prem.: ? With Bois’ play, 29 May 1894 (play reviewed in L’Observateur Français
on 30 May)
In orch. by Roland-Manuel, SMI, Salle Gaveau, 17 June 1912. Cond. Désiré-
Emile Inghelbrecht
Messe de la foi
composed: [c.1894]
music: mentioned in applications for election to the Académie des Beaux-Arts on
30 April 1894 and 14 April 1896. A drawing of an organ survives inscribed ‘Messe
de la foi de Erik Satie’ (facs. in Volta, 1979, p. 100). Music lost or never started
Messe des pauvres (Grande Messe de l’Église Métropolitaine d’Art)
composed: June 1893–1895

music: Mass for org. with small choir of children and men (SB) specified in Kyrie
eleison. In Le Cœur 2/10 (June 1895), p. 3 Conrad Satie says that the work ‘begins
with a very characteristic prelude that forms the basis of the Mass’. This is the
passage before the voices enter on p. 2 system 2 of the Salabert ed. Conrad also
says that the Prière des orgues comes between ‘the Kyrie and the Gloria’, so the
lost Gloria must have been the fifth movement (see list below). In p. 9 of the pubd
ed., the Chant Ecclésiastique should end with the second system. It is followed
by two harmonisations of the Prière pour les voyageurs (systems 3–4 and 5–6).
Satie intended the second, less chromatic (titled) version in contrary motion to
be his final version, so p. 9 systems 3–4 can be omitted in performance. Satie
almost certainly intended to write additional movements for this Mass, but those
he composed were organised as follows:
1. Prélude [? 1893]
2. Kyrie eleison (? 1893, ? inc.)
Appendix 261
3. Dixit Dominus [1894]

4. Prière des Orgues [1895]
5. Gloria [? 1895, lost]
6. Commune qui mundi nefas [Jan 1895]
7. Chant Ecclésiastique [? 1894–5]
8. Prière pour les voyageurs et les marins en danger de mort, à la très bonne
et très auguste Vierge Marie, mere de Jésus [? 1894–5]
9. Prière pour le salut de mon âme [? 1893]
MSS: Nos. 1 and 2 (1929 ed. pp. 1–2 system 1; p. 2 system 2–p. 5 system 3): BNF
9597(2), pp. 11–25 (draft)
Sketches (in compositional order, as far as can be ascertained, with note values
half those of the 1929 ed.): BNF 9597(2), p. 40 (inverted); 9597(1), pp. 1, 5–10;
Ho 193:64, f. 4r–v; BNF 9597(2), pp. 7–9; 9597(1bis), ff. 6r–7r; 9597(1), pp.
28–22 (inverted); 9597(2), pp. 11–25.
Repositories of motifs (written separately): Ho 193, f. 6r–v; BNF 9597(1), pp.
11–14; 9597(1bis), f.9r–v. The original pagination of BNF 9597(1) was: BNF
9597(1), p. 10; Ho 193:64, f. 6r (‘Seuls motifs pour la Messe’); Ho 193: 64, f. 6v;
BNF 9597(1), p. 11 (‘Motifs et notes’).
Note: Ho 193:64 includes several pages torn by Satie from BNF 9597(1). It also
contains other sketches which may have been intended for the Mass: Spiritus
sancte deus miserere nobis, f. 11r; Modéré (for org?, dated ‘15 July 1893’), f. 7r
(with a first version in Ho 193: 65); Harmonies de Saint-Jean, Ho 193: 64, f. 10r. I
am grateful to Steven Moore Whiting and Pietro Dossena for their assistance with
this problem.
No. 3: BNF 9597(1bis), f. 10 (with 3 different versions of the text. This first verse
of Psalm 109, set to the Primus Tonus chant in Gregorian notation, can be
found in Ho 193: 71, p. 1 (cf. Paroissien Romain, p. 218), though this melodic
line was not preserved in any of the harmonised settings).
F-Ptb, first draft for org. in fake Gregorian notation, ‘1894’
No. 4: Complete draft assembled from BNF 9597(2), p. 6, 9597(1bis), f. 9v and
9597(2), pp. 26–30. Earlier sketches: Ho 193: 64, f. 5v; BNF 9597(1bis), f. 9r
No. 5: PLU
No. 6: Ho 193: 64, f. 5r, v (central part only)
No. 7: BN 9597(1bis), f. 1r
No. 8: First version (1929 ed., p. 9 systems 3–4): BNF 9597(1bis), f. 5r
Second version (1929 ed., p. 9 systems 5–6): BNF 9597(1bis), f. 3r
No. 9: BNF 9597(1bis), f. 2r,v
pubn: No. 3, second draft, disguised in fake Gregorian notation, for org in brochure
Intende votis supplicum (Paris, Librairie de l’Art Indépendant, March 1895); facs.
in Wilkins, 1980, p. 42. Another setting of the same text can be found in a similar
Gregorian fake in La revue musicale, 214 (June 1952), facing p. 80
No. 4: Le Cœur 2/10 (June 1895), p. 2
No. 6: extract in brochure Commune qui mundi nefas (private ed., Jan 1895); facs.
in Wilkins, 1980, pp. 38–9
Complete Mass (without Gloria): Rouart-Lerolle, 1929 (RL 11686). The text of
No. 3 [‘Dixit domine’] should read ‘Dixit Dominus Domino meo/ Sede a dextris
meis’ (Psalm 109, verse 1)
Modéré (‘15 July 1893’): Salabert, 1995 (EAS 19352, pp. 6–7 in EAS 19354)
prem.: Concerts Pro Arte, Brussels, 3 May 1926 by Paul de Maleingrau (org)
1895
Psaumes
composed: [1895]
music: announced as forthcoming in small uspud brochure (April 1895), p. 4.
Music lost or never started
1897
Gnossienne [No. 6]
composed: ‘Jan 1897’

music: dance for pf
MS: BNF 10054(2), ff. 1r, 2v
pubn: Salabert, 1968 (MC 289, as ‘6e Gnossienne’). All 6 Gnossiennes: Salabert,
1989
Pièces froides
composed: March 1897

music: 6 pieces for pf in 2 sets. These marked a move away from the slow, hieratic,
chordal music of the Rose+Croix period towards greater rhythmic fluidity. Satie
began to orch. several of them but never progressed beyond the first few bars
1 Airs à faire fuir (3)
2 Danses de travers (3)
ded.: 1 à Ricardo Viñes
2 à Madame J[ules] Ecorcheville
MSS: 1 and 2: Archives Jules Ecorcheville, Paris; BNF 10047(1–2), 6, 6 pp.,
copies for printer; Rés Vma 166, corr. proofs (1912)
Air No. 1: BNF 9575(1), pp. 27–9 (draft); Ho 193: 68; BNF 9575(2), pp. 3–5, 25,
29–31 (incl. small orch. trials); 9575(1), p. 24 (ending, for pf)
Appendix 263
Air No. 2: BNF 9575(1), p. 29 (inc. draft); Ho 193: 69; BNF 9575(1), p. 24 (inc.
draft); 9575(2), p. 6 (inc. scoring); US-WC, sketch, 1f. The origins of No. 2 can
be seen in Satie’s harmonisations of the Northumbrian folksong The Keel Row in
BNF 10054(2), ff. 1v, 2v (see Orledge, 1990, pp. 190–191)
Air No. 3: Ho 193: 69; BNF 9575(1), pp. 23–4 (sketches); BNF 9575(1), pp. 9–12
(draft of all 3 dances)
Danse No. 1: Ho 193: 91 (incl. sketches in 10 numbered cells, f. 7r, v)
Danse No. 2: BNF 9575(1), pp. 7–9 (inc. scorings)
pubn: Rouart-Lerolle, Jan 1913 (RL 9871–2); Salabert, 1973. A complete, rejected
version of the second Danse de travers was pubd by Salabert, 1970 (ed. Robert
Caby). Its sources are BNF 9575(2), p. 13 and Ho 193: 91 (final version, ff. 5r, 6r,
with sketches on f. 9)
Je te veux
composed: 1897 or ? 1901

text: sentimental song by Henry Pacory. A more daring first version of this can be
found in BNF 10057, and Satie may have assisted with the watered-down pubd
version, as popularised by Paulette Darty in 1904
music: waltz song for v, pf with 2 verses and repeated chorus. Satie also scored
it for brasserie orch (fl, cl in A, bn, hn, 2 cornets in A, str), and for full orch (pic,
fl, ob, 2 cl in B flat, bn or tuba, 2 hn, 2 cornets in B flat, 3 trbn, perc, str), adding
a new trio in the process. The 1897 dating comes from Roland-Manuel’s lecture
on Satie (1916, p. 11), using information that was almost certainly supplied by
the composer. However, the song was not registered with SACEM until 26 Nov
1902
MSS: BNF 10056, OS in D (brasserie orch), 4ff.
BNF 10057, VS in C, 2pp.
BNF 10058, OS in C (full orch with added Trio), 8ff.
BNF 10059, orch parts (vn 2, va, vc, cornet 2), mostly for BNF 10058
Sketches: BNF 9599, pp. 12, 16, 23–4; 9600, pp. 14r, 20; 9614, p. 20
F-Ppc, pic part corr. by Satie; corr. proofs of VS
pubn: VS: Baudoux, Dec 1902 (EB 773); Bellon Ponscarme, 1903 (BP 773, using
Baudoux plates); simplified version, March 1904 (BP 868)
Pf solo version, April 1904 (BP 875); Rouart-Lerolle; Salabert
OS: Brasserie version, Bellon Ponscarme, 1904 (BP 884); full orch, Salabert, 1978
(EAS 17352)
1899
Jack in the Box
composed: May–July 1899

text: pantomime or ‘clownerie’ in 2 Acts by Jules Dépaquit
music: incidental music planned for a production at the Comédie Parisienne in
Oct 1899 (letter to Conrad Satie, 15 May 1899). Satie also referred to his score
as a ‘suite anglaise’ and described the project as ‘more of a “clooonerie” than a
pantomime’ to Conrad on 4 July (see Volta, 2000, pp. 91–2). Only a short score in
3 movements has survived, which was later orch. by Darius Milhaud:
1 Prélude [registered as ‘Gigue’ at SACEM on 14 Jan 1905]
2 Entr’acte
3 Final
MSS: Ho 193: 28 (short score, 15ff., versos only).
Sketches: Ho 193: 23, ff. 2r, 5v–6v, 8r, 11r; 193: 24, ff. 1–3r, 4r–11r; 193: 25,
p. 30; 193: 58 (1p.: No. 1 titled Gigue); 193: 59 5ff.: No. 2 orig. titled Marche
sourde des Repasseurs de couteaux, des Tireurs de chenilles, et des Casseurs de
briques on f.2r, and constructed from 16 numbered cells found on f. 1r – which
also contains the theme of No. 1, bars 46–56, accompanied by a long heroic text.
See also Ho 193:91, p. 11 (No. 2); BNF 9600, f. 6v (No. 3)
Pf score (by Milhaud, c.1925): BNF 17677(10), 5pp.
OS: US-Wc
pubn: Universal Edition, 1929, short score (UE 9914) and OS by Milhaud
prem.: 3 May 1926, Concerts Pro Arte, Brussels by Paul Collaer (pf)
17 May 1926, Festival Erik Satie, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris by Marcelle
Meyer (pf)
3 June 1926, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt (in orch. by
Milhaud) with sets and costumes by André Derain and choreography by Georges
Balanchine
29 Nov 1937, in orig. version with Dépaquit’s play, Salle d’Iéna, in soirée
‘L’Humour d’Erik Satie’
Un Dîner à l’Elysée
composed: Aug 1899

text: cabaret song by Vincent Hyspa (after 12 Aug 1899). Also known as Peintres
français, and registered thus at SACEM on 2 Sept 1899
music: song for v, pf, 4 verses (‘Le Présidente, d’une façon fort civile’)
MSS: Ho 193: 25, pp. 24–5; 193: 64, f. 1v; 193: 52, titled Peintres français.
Sketches in Ho. 193: 23, ff. 1–2r; 193: 24, ff. 12v–13r
Appendix 265
pubn: in Vincent Hyspa: Chansons d’humour (Paris, Enoch, 1903), pp. 107–13
(with drawings by Jules Dépaquit); Salabert, 1995, Neuf chansons de cabaret et de
caf’conc (ed. Whiting), pp. 8–9 (EAS 19340)
Le Veuf
composed: 1899–1903
text: cabaret song by Vincent Hyspa (‘Elle avait des cils noirs comme toutes les
blondes’)
music: song for v, pf in 2 versions (A flat and D major). The first returns as the
central section of No. 4 of the Trois morceaux en forme de poire (1903)
MSS: First version: Ho 193: 2, ff. 1v–2r (neat copy); 193: 23, ff. 9v–10r; 193: 24,
ff. 15v–16r (drafts); BNF 9599, pp. 14–16 (pf score, 1903 – see Whiting, 1999, p.
266 n.43); 9598, p. 20 (v part, 1903); Ho 193: 23, f. 10v; 193: 24, ff. 14v–15r and
16v–17r (sketches)
Second version: Ho 193: 24, ff. 11v–12r (neat copy); 193: 23, ff. 8v–9r (draft);
193: 24, ff. 13v–14r (sketches)
pubn: Salabert, 1995, Neuf chansons (ed. Whiting), pp. 14–15 (1st version), 16–
17 (2nd version) (EAS 19341)
Aline-Polka (Pacory arr. Satie)
composed: [? 1899–1900]
music: short polka by Henry Pacory transcr. for pf by Satie
MS: Ho 193: 43 (1f., inc., 21 bars only)
unpubd
Geneviève de Brabant
composed: ? July 1899–April 1900

text: 3-act play in prose and verse by Lord Cheminot (Contamine de Latour), 32ff.
MS in archives of Comte Etienne de Beaumont (see Volta, 1987, pp. 16–31)
music: short score for solo vv, chorus, pf (probably for marionette theatre). Orch.
by Roger Désormière in 1926 for fl, ob, 2 cl in B flat, bn, 2 hn, cornet, trbn, perc,
str
1 Prélude
ACT 1
2 Chœur: ‘Nous sommes la foule compacte’
3 Entrée des soldats
ACT 2
4 Entr’acte
5 Air de Geneviève (‘Innocente d’un crime que je n’ai pas commis’)

6 Sonnerie de cor
ACT 3
8 Entr’acte
9 Chœur (repeat of No. 2)
10 Air de Golo (‘Non, Sifroy n’est pas mort’)
12 Cortège/Marche
14 Petit air de Geneviève (‘Ah! Le ciel recompense ma vertu, ma constance’)
15 Chœur final (‘L’affaire est bien passée’)
Note: Nos. 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, 13 all use the same material, with slight variations. No.
14 was revised during the composition of The Dreamy Fish (1901). See BNF MS
15333, ff. 7v, 8v; 9587, ff. 3v, 4r, 5r
MSS: VS: BNF 15333, 8ff.; FES (SAT 7.5), VS copied by Milhaud, 13pp., n.d.
Sketches: Ho 193: 23, ff. 13v–16v; 193: 24, ff. 20–22; 193: 57, (1f.); 193: 56, ff.
2r, 3r
pubn: Universal Edition, 1930 (VS and OS: UE 9386 and 9956). New ed. of VS
and Latour’s libretto (ed. Ornella Volta), Universal Edition, 1989 (UE 19131 and
19052)
prem.: 17 May 1926 (in Désormière’s orch.), Théâtre des Champs-Élysées,
produced by Manuel Ortiz in Satie festival organised by Comte Etienne de
Beaumont
1 Feb 1929, with marionettes, Concerts Pro Arte, Brussels, cond. R. Désormière
13 April 1983, with Latour’s libretto, Compagnie Carlo Colla & Figli, Gran Teatro
la Fenice, Venice
1900
Prélude de ‘La Mort de Monsieur Mouche’
composed: ‘18 April 1900’

text: play in 3 Acts by ‘Lord Cheminot’ (Contamine de Latour). Lost
Ho 193: 23, f. 13v states that Acts 1 and 3 take place ‘in a restaurant’, with Act 2
‘chez Monsieur Mouche’
music: prelude for pf. Registered at SACEM on 18 April 1900. This includes
Satie’s first known use of ragtime syncopation (see Whiting, 1999, pp. 256–9)
MSS: BNF 9600, pp. 13, 15, 17 (neat copy registered with SACEM on18 April
1900)
Sketches in Ho 193: 23, ff. 13v, 17r and v
Appendix 267
pubn: in Carnets d’esquisses et de croquis (ed. Robert Caby), Salabert, 1968, pp.
13–14 (MC 363)
Verset laïque & somptueux
composed: ‘5 Aug 1900’

music: piece for pf
MS: BNF 9600, p. 22 (? sketch); MS in Autographes de Musiciens Contemporaines
1900, vol. 8, p. 255 (for Exposition Universelle: see F-Po 1900  XIV (255))
pubn: Salabert, 1995 as third of Trois pièces pour piano (ed. R. Orledge), p. 9
(with MS facs. on p. 8), (EAS 19353); SOUNDkiosk, Brighton, 2010 (SKPE 16)
Poudre d’or
composed: ? 1900–1901
music: 2 separate waltzes for pf or orch (see Whiting, 1999, pp. 272–7), with the
opening melody common to both. No. 2 below probably predates No. 1
1 As pubd waltz and trio (beginning in D major) with 4 repeating strains. For Bal
Bullier, ? 1901, orch for pic, fl, ob, 2 cl in A, bn or tuba, 2 hn, 2 cornets in A, 3 trbn,
perc, str
ded.: à Mademoiselle Stéphanie Nantas
MSS: OS: BNF 10061, final version, 8ff. (when BNF 10060, ff. 7–8 are added).
Registered with SACEM on 11 March 1902
F-Psa, pf solo version, 2pp.; BNF Rés. Vma 169 (corr. proofs)
Sketches: BNF 9600, ff. 17v–18v; 9614, pp. 3–8 (titled Pluie d’or)
pubn: for pf solo: Baudoux, Nov 1902 (EB 770); OS: Salabert, 1978 (EAS 18568)
2 As suite of 3 waltzes (7 strains, beginning in C major, later transposed to D major).
Structure: ‘Introduction. Temps de marche’; Nos. 1–3, No. 4 (= No. 2); ‘Coda’ (=
No. 1 plus actual coda)
MSS: BNF 9600, ff. 14v–17r; 9614, p. 19
Parts: Ho 193: 72, 3ff.; Drouot Richelieu sale, 10 May 1995, lot 165, 4ff. (PLU)
unpubd
1901
The Dreamy Fish (Le Poisson rêveur)
composed: ‘March 1901’

text: tale by Lord Cheminot (Contamine de Latour). Lost
music: extended pf piece (188 bars) to accompany above story. The theme in bars
17ff shows affinities with the prelude to Jack in the Box. Bars 89–90, 94–108, 111
of the central section are taken from Geneviève de Brabant (1899), No. 14
MSS: BNF 9587, 14pp. (with many corrections)
Sketches: BNF 9600, ff. 2v, 3r (numbered 16–17), 6r, 7r; 15333, f. 8v; Ho 193: 23,
ff. 17r–18v; 193: 24, ff. 19r, 22–3 (also titled Rêverie burlesque); 193: 53 (4pp.)
Note: BNF 9600, f. 7r is a sketch using the whole-tone scale, which is modified in
BNF 9587, f. 4v (see Orledge, 1990, pp. 53–5). This is the nearest Satie came to
imitating Debussy and to thinking for orchestra as he did so
pubn: Salabert, 1970 (ed. Caby: MC 516); 1997 (ed. and rev. Orledge, 1995: pp.
9–17, with facs. on p. 4) (also MC 516)
The Angora Ox (Le Boeuf Angora)
text: tale by Lord Cheminot (Contamine de Latour). Lost
music: inc. score for large orch (pic, 2fl, ob, eng hn, 2 cl in A, bn, 2 hn in F, 2 tpt
in C, 3 trbn, tuba, timp, perc, str).
Bars 66–73 recur in ‘Redite’ in the Trois Morceaux en forme de poire (1903)
MSS: BNF 10062, 9pp., inc. OS with some corr. (? by Charles Koechlin); 9598,
pp. 7–8 (inc. short score). Transcr. in Gowers, 1966, PhD 5376, 173–90 (Exx. 57,
short score; 58, OS)
Sketches: BNF 9598, pp. 4, 6–8, 10–11; 9629, pp. 6–7, 14–16, 19 (see Whiting,
1999, p. 266 n. 42)
pubn: Salabert, 1997 (ed. and completed J. Fritz for pf solo, 1995: pp. 21–6, with
facs. on p. 18) (EAS 19355: with The Dreamy Fish above)
1902
Chanson barbare
composed: ? 1902
music: inc. piece for pf, material used in The Angora Ox above)
MS: BNF 9598, p. 4
unpubd
Tendrement [also known as Illusion]
composed: 1902
Appendix 269
music: 2 separate pieces whose complex and overlapping genesis is fully traced in
Whiting, 1999, pp. 219–24
1 Tendrement, registered with SACEM on 29 March 1902 as a ‘Valse piano et
orchestre’ in C major
MSS: BNF 10073 (draft for SACEM)
US-Redmond, WA (coll. Jeff Sanderson): pf score, 2pp. with title Tendrement
crossed out by Satie. Also 1p. VS of third piece titled ‘Tendrement’, with 1p. by
Vincent Hyspa adding the text for what became the ‘De Féraudy Valse’ in the
operetta Pousse l’amour (see 1905–6 below).
Drafts and sketches in compositional order: BNF 9629, pp. 2–3, 9; 9614, pp. 18,
20; 9599, p. 5; Ho 193: 27, 2ff.
2 Illusion, also registered as ‘Valse piano et orchestre’ in B flat major with SACEM
on 19 June 1902. Scored for pic, fl, ob, 2 cl in B flat, bn or tuba, 2 hn, 2 cornets
in B flat, 3 trbn, perc, str. This is the waltz song pubd as Tendrement in 1902, but
without its text by Vincent Hyspa
MSS: Ho 193: 83. Draft, 7pp. and pf solo version, 1p.
Sketches and various transpositions to suit Hyspa’s voice: BNF 9614, pp. 12–13,
16; Ho 193: 23, ff. 19v–20v; 193: 72, f.1v; 193: 84, f. 1r; BNF 9599, p. 3; 9629, p.
13 (inc. accompaniment in B flat). Hyspa’s text was added later (see BNF 9629, p.
11) and registered with SACEM on 9 April 1903
pubn: 2 as Tendrement (VS), Baudoux, Nov 1902 (EB 772); Bellon Ponscarme,
March 1904 (simplified version, BP 868); for brasserie orch, ? May 1904 (BP 884)
Illusion (OS), Salabert, 1979 (EAS 17371)
prem.: by Hyspa (or Paulette Darty), date unknown, but probably between Dec
1902 and March 1903
1903
Petit Recueil des fêtes
composed: 1903
music: cycle of 4 cabaret songs for v, pf with texts by Vincent Hyspa. Registered
with SACEM on 16 Jan 1904
1 Le Picador est mort (‘Le Picador est mort/C’est un triste sort’)
MSS: Ho 193: 24, f.18; 193: 67 (drafts); 193: 23, f. 11v (sketch)
pubn: Salabert, 1995 in Neuf chansons de cabaret (ed. S.M. Whiting), pp. 22–3
(EAS 19342)
2 Sorcière (‘Incantations, évocations’)
MSS: Ho 193: 23, ff. 12v, 13r; 193: 67 (drafts); 193: 23, f. 11r, 13r (sketches)
pubn: as 1 above, p. 24 (EAS 19343)
3 Enfant-martyre [text lost]
MSS: Ho 193: 23, f. 12r; 193: 24, f. 19v; 193: 67 (drafts); 193: 23, ff. 11v–12r
(sketches)
pubn: as 1 above, p. 25 (EAS 19344)

4 Air fantôme (‘Voici Messire Printemps’)
MSS: Ho 193: 15, f. 13v; 193: 24, f. 17v; 193: 25, p. 13; 193: 67; BNF 9599, p. 22
(drafts); Ho 193: 23, f. 11r; 193: 25, f. 13r (sketches)
pubn: as 1 above, pp. 26–7 (EAS 19345)
prem. as cycle: 15 Nov 1904, Cabaret des Quat’z’Arts, by Vincent Hyspa and ?
Satie
Trois Morceaux en forme de poire
composed: Aug–Nov 1903 (using material from 1890–1891; c.1899–1903)

music: 7 pieces for pf duet
1 Manière de commencement [a Gnossienne from Act 1 of Le Fils des étoiles,
1891]
2 Prolongation du même [uses inc. caf’conc song Le Roi soleil de plomb, c.1901]
3 Morceau I: Lentement (1903)
4 Morceau II: Enlevé [uses cabaret song Impérial-Napoléon, c.1902, with first
version of Le Veuf, c.1899 in the centre]
5 Morceau III: Brutal (1903)
6 En plus [uses Danse for orch, ‘5 Dec 1890’]
7 Redite [based on bars 66–73 of The Angora Ox, ? 1902: see Gillmor, 1988, pp.
131–2 for a comparison]
MSS: F-Po Nouveaux Fonds Rés. 218. Final copy of all 7, incl. letter of intent
dated ‘6 Nov 1903’
No. 1: BNF 10052(1), ff. 9v–12r (1891, with harmonic corrections, probably from
1903); 10045, ff. 2r–4v (sketches, 1903)
No. 2: BNF 9600, f. 7v (Le Roi soleil de plomb); 9600, ff. 8, 9r, 11r, 12v; 9614, pp.
29, 28, 32, 31 [in order] (sketches and drafts)
No. 3: BNF 9599, pp. 19–21 (draft)
No. 4: BNF 9598, p. 5 (Impérial-Napoléon: listed as the ‘Romanian song “Impérial
César”’ in the MS). First version of Le Veuf (see 1899 above). Arr. of Le Veuf for
pf duet: BNF 9598, pp. 14–15, 20; 9599, pp. 14–15, 17; Ho 193: 21, ff. 1v–2r (see
Whiting, 1999, p. 266 n.43); BNF 10045, ff. 1v, 5r, 6r; 9629, pp. 17–19 (draft,
1903)
No. 5: BNF 9614, p. 27 (bars 5–20); Ho 193: 90 (central section before letter
C. This also appears earlier in 193: 91, f. 6r as part of the piece titled Danse de
travers II, a rejected version pubd by Salabert in 1970); BNF 10044 (draft, 5pp.,
with 2pp. sketches)
No. 6: Ho 193: 92 (14pp., 1890); BNF 10045, f. 4r (sketches, 1903)
No. 7: BNF 10062 (? 1902); 9629, pp. 6–7; 9614, pp. 33–4 (drafts, 1903)
Corr. proofs: BNF Rés. Vma 164 (1911)
pubn: Nos. 3, 4 (bars 1–32) in Revue musicale SIM 7/3 (15 Mar 1911), pp. 35–8
All 7: Rouart-Lerolle, Nov 1911 (RL 9799)
Appendix 271
prem. (private): 16 Jan 1904, chez Paul Sordeo by Ravel and Ricardo Viñes (pf
duet)
(public): 18 April 1916, Société Lyre et Palette by Satie and Viñes
1904
Le Piccadilly. Marche
composed: 1904. Orch. ? 1907

music: March for pf (orig. titled La Transatlantique), perhaps arr. from song by
Bonnaud and Blès (see Whiting, 1999, pp. 309–12). Registered with SACEM
on 19 Oct 1904. Also arr. with str orch and registered as ‘Le Piccadilly. Marche
orchestrale’ on 7 Oct 1907. Pubn plates prepared by Alexis Rouart as AR 4553, but
probably never put on public sale. The melody is modelled on Hello! Ma Baby!
by Howard and Emerson, an early American song about the telephone from 1899
MSS: BNF 9629, pp. 30–31 (draft for pf solo), 28–9, 32–3; 9598, pp. 47, 50
(sketches); 10070 (draft for pf solo, title altered from ‘La Transatlantique’ to ‘Le
Piccadilly’); 10069 (text)
BNF 10771 (OS with str, printer’s copy)
pubn: Pf solo and str orch, Alexis Rouart, ? Oct 1907 (AR 4553);
Pf solo: Salabert, 1975 (EAS 17236); OS: Salabert, 1979 (EAS 17370)
Douceur d’oublier (Darty arr. Satie)
composed: [1904]
text: song by Maurice de Féraudy
music: melody by Paulette Darty, harmonised/arr. Satie
ded.: à Monsieur F. de P. Alvarez
MS: BNF 9598, pp. 27–30 (draft)
pubn: G. Ricordi & Cie, Paris, 1904 (pl. no. 109561)
prem.: ? 31 March 1904, Paulette Darty and ? Satie (see Whiting, 1990, pp. 287–91)
La Diva de l’‘Empire’
composed: Feb–March 1904

text: cabaret song by Dominique Bonnaud and Numa Blès (referring to Music
Hall at 41 avenue de Wagram, Paris 8e)
music: ‘Marche chantée’ with 2 verses and recurring chorus for v, pf. Also exists
as pf solo (referred to by Satie as the Stand-Walk March [registered with SACEM
on 20 May 1904 and sold to Bellon Ponscarme for 200 francs on 4 Aug] or the
Little Girl March), and in a version for brasserie orch (pic, fl, cl in A, bn, hn, cornet
in A, trbn, perc, str)
ded.: à Paulette Darty
MSS: BNF 10064, VS in G major for printer, 1904, 1f.; 10065, OS in G, 4ff., no
voice part; 10066, pf solo in D major, 2pp., titled ‘Stand-Walk’; 10063 (copy);
9598, pp., 18–19 (draft) and 20–21, 43; 9629, p. 38 (sketches); 10067, vocal part
only, in D, 2pp.; 10068, orch parts for fl, bn, cornet in A, trbn (from BNF 10065)
pubn: VS: Bellon Ponscarme, ? Sept 1904 (BP 901); in journal Paris qui chante,
4/155 (7 Jan 1906), pp. 12–15; Rouart-Lerolle, 1919 (subtitled ‘Intermezzo
Américain’, RL 11045); Salabert, 1976
OS: Rouart-Lerolle, April 1918 (arr. Hans Ourdine [Stéphane Chapelier] for
brasserie orch, pf conducteur, RL 10423); Salabert, 1959 (for small orch., EAS
10423); for orig. orch, 1978 (EAS 17354)
prem.: 26 July 1904 in revue Dévidons la bobine by Bonnaud and Blès at Berck
(Pas-de-Calais), sung by Paulette Darty
In concert: 8 April 1905 by Darty and Satie, Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens (45e
Samedi Populaire, featuring ‘Les Danses d’Erik Satie’ pubd by Bellon Ponscarme,
organised by Louis Payen and Emile Vuillermoz)
[J’avais un ami]
composed: ? Spring 1904

text: author unidentified
music: cabaret song for Paulette Darty, v, pf with 3 verses
MSS: F-Hon, score, 6pp.; BNF 9598, pp. 22–5, 32 (sketches)
pubn: Salabert, 1995 in Neuf chansons de cabaret (ed. Whiting), pp. 38–41 (EAS
19347)
prem.: ? 31 March 1904 in revue Paris-Potins
1905
Les Bons mouvements
composed: ? 1905
text: cabaret song by Vincent Hyspa
music: song for v, pf in 4 verses
MSS: F-Hon, 4pp. ‘écrit pour Vincent Hyspa’ and text; Ho 193: 21, ff. 13v–14r
(verse), 12v (refrain), see Whiting, 1990, pp. 234–5
unpubd
Appendix 273
Impérial-Oxford
composed: ? 1905
text: ? song by Contamine de Latour. Lost
music: cabaret song for v, pf. Registered with SACEM on 18 Aug 1905 as ‘chanson
sans paroles’
MSS: Coll. Oliver Neighbour, London (neat copy as VS); Ho 193: 21, ff. 1v–4r
(draft and sketches)
pubn: Salabert, 1975 in Neuf chansons de cabaret (ed. Whiting), pp. 32–3 (EAS
19348)
Légende Californienne
composed: ? 1905
text: ? song by Contamine de Latour. Lost
music: as Impérial-Oxford above. Later orch. as ‘Grande Ritournelle’ in La Belle
Excentrique (1920)
MSS: Ho 193: 60 (short score with orch indications); BNF 9629, pp. 26–7
(sketches)
pubn: extract in Wilkins, 1980, p. 155; in La Belle Excentrique, see July–Oct 1920
below
L’Omnibus automobile
composed: ? Sept 1905

text: humorous song by Vincent Hyspa with 6 verses
music: cabaret song for v, pf
MSS: Ho 193: 21, f. 9 (draft), 8v (sketch)
pubn: in L’Album musical 4/33 (Enoch, March 1906), 6–7 (song 3); Salabert,
1976 (EAS 17210)
prem.: Oct 1905, Cabaret Les Quat’z’Arts, Hyspa and Satie (listed on 15 Oct
1905 and 27 Jan 1906: see Whiting, 1999, pp. 314–15)
Chez le docteur
composed: Dec 1905

text: humorous song by Vincent Hyspa with 11 verses
music: cabaret song for v, pf
MSS: BNF 10074, neat copy, 1p. No text; Ho 193: 15, ff. 15v–16r; 193: 47; BNF
9652, p. 4 (drafts); Ho 193: 21, ff. 10v–11r (sketches)
pubn: in L’Album musical, 4/33 (Enoch, March 1906), pp. 1–3 (song 1); Salabert,
1976 (EAS 17200)
prem.: Jan 1906, Les Quat’z’Arts, Hyspa and Satie (listed on 27 Jan, see Whiting,
1999, pp. 235–7)
Allons-y Chochotte
composed: Dec 1905–Jan 1906

text: song by D. Durante (? pseudonym) with 5 verses
music: caf’conc song for v, pf. Registered with SACEM on 11 Jan 1906
MSS: Ho 193: 44 (neat copy with text, 2pp); BNF 9617(2), pp. 20–21 (neat copy
in A major); Ho 193: 15, ff. 17v–19r, 20v–21r; BNF 9637, p. 35 (sketches)
pubn: Salabert, 1978 (EAS 17350); extract in Wilkins, 1980, p. 154
prem.: ? 19 March 1906 in one-act operetta La leçon d’amour by de Thuisy and
Mathé at Théâtre-Royal, Paris, with Paulette Darty as ‘Madame la Flirt’ (see
Whiting, 1999, pp. 319–21)
Pousse l’amour
composed: late 1905–April 1906

text: comedy (or fantaisie) in 1 Act by Maurice de Féraudy (of Comédie-Française)
and Jean Kolb. Libretto lost (see Whiting, 1999, pp. 316–24, 330)
music: only sketches of 3 numbers of this operetta survive, as far as is known. Ho
193: 16 may be a rehearsal score
MSS: 1 ‘De Féraudy. Valse’: Ho 193: 15, ff. 16v–17, 19v–20; 193:16, ff. 1r–
2r; BNF 9642, pp. 45–8; US-Redmond, WA, coll. Jeff Sanderson, draft titled
‘Tendrement’
2 ‘Le Champagne. Valse’: Ho 193: 15, f. 5v (neat copy); 193: 21, f. 15v (draft);
BNF 9642, p. 49, where the valse is titled ‘Aimé-Chéri’, the name of the music-
hall singer in Pousse l’amour, as performed by M. Bressol
3 ‘Chanson Andalouse’: Ho 193: 16, ff. 2v–5r; BNF 9577, pp. 9–11 (drafts)
unpubd, though Satie signed a contract with A. Ponscarme et Cie. on 26 April
1906, and received 100 francs for ‘deux manuscrits de musique intercalée dans
Pousse l’amour’, which was then destined for the Théâtre des Capucines in Paris.
This production was cancelled due to an argument between Féraudy and the
director, as reported to Paulette Darty by Satie on 8 Jan 1907
prem: 22 Nov 1907 (until 8 Feb 1908), Comédie-Royale, Paris, probably with pf
accompaniment.
20 Jan–2 Feb 1908, Théâtre des Capucins Niçois, Nice
27 Nov–22 Dec 1912, Théâtre Impérial, Paris
28 Feb 1913, revival as Coco-chéri, Théâtre des Beaux-Arts, Monaco
Appendix 275
1906
Fugue-Valse
composed: c.1906
music: extended piece for pf, later adapted as the ‘Danse de tendresse’ in Mercure
MSS: BNF 9635, pp. 4–9 (draft); pp. 2–3 (sketches)
pubn: see Mercure (1924)
Chanson médiévale
composed: 1906
text: chivalric poem by Catulle Mendès
music: song for v, pf. Written as exercise at the Schola Cantorum
MSS: BNF 9617(1), pp. 3–5 (draft); Ho 193: 46 (melody only, 1f, with comments
by Vincent d’Indy)
pubn: Salabert 1968 (as second of Trois Autres Mélodies, MC 297); facs. of Ho
193: 46 in Wilkins, 1980, p. 124
Passacaille
composed: ‘July 1906’

music: piece for pf
MSS: BNF 10039 (copy for printer, 2pp.); Ho 193: 21, ff. 17v–19r (sketches)
pubn: Rouart-Lerolle, 1929 (RL 11688)
Prélude en tapisserie
composed: ‘21 Oct 1906’

music: piece for pf
MSS: BNF 9617(1), pp. 12–15 (neat copy, dated ‘Arcueil, le 21 octobre 1906’);
BNF 9617(2), pp. 26–30 (sketches in numbered cells)
pubn: Rouart-Lerolle, 1929 (RL 11690)
1907
[Nouvelles] Pièces froides [pour un chien]
composed: April 1907

music: 3 pieces for pf. According to a letter to Florent Schmitt, Nos. 1–2 were
completed by 22 April 1907
1 Sur un mur
2 Sur un arbre
3 Sur un pont
MSS: BNF 9613, pp. 14–25 (neat copies of all 3); Ho 193: 66, 2 ff., r only (first
version of No. 1 titled Sérénade Sépulcrale-Prélude. This shows bars 3–21 of No.
1 as a complete piece in C major, with the recurring melody outlined like a ‘chant
donné’ in red ink. Sketches for the remaining bars (1–2, 22–4) can be found on f.
2v, also in C, together with a transposition of bar 19 as it appears in No. 1 above.
A melodic draft (in C) appears in Ho: 193: 20, f. 10r)
BNF 9653, pp. 4–5 (first version of No. 1); 6–8 (sketches for No. 2 entitled ‘Suite
pour un chien’ – cf. Préludes flasques, 1912)
pubn: Salabert, 1968 (MC 290)
Rambouillet
composed: Sept–Nov 1907

text: song ‘sans paroles’ by Vincent Hyspa (see Whiting, 1999, pp. 238–9)
music: song for v, pf
MSS: Ho 193: 87, 1p.; BNF 9579, pp. 32–3 (draft, no text)
pubn: Salabert, 1978 (as first of Trois Mélodies sans paroles, EAS 17350)
prem.: 4 Jan 1908, Les Quat’z’Arts by Hyspa and Satie (as ‘Une réception à
Rambouillet’)
Les Oiseaux

text: ? song by Vincent Hyspa
music: song for v, pf (‘Il nous prêtent leurs noms’). See Whiting, 1999, pp. 241–4
MSS: Ho 193, 88, 1p.; BNF 9579, pp. 30, 38, 40–45 (drafts and sketches)
pubn: Salabert, 1978 (as second of Trois Mélodies sans paroles, EAS 17350)
Marienbad

text: song by Vincent Hyspa
music: song for v, pf (‘Il portait un gilet’). See Whiting, 1999, pp. 238–41
MSS: Ho 193: 89, 1p.; BNF 9579, pp. 16–19 (first version in 6/8: abandoned);
20–29 (second version in 2/4)
Appendix 277
pubn: Salabert, 1978 (second version) as third of Trois Mélodies sans paroles,
EAS 17350)
prem.: 4 Jan 1908, Les Quat’z’Arts by Hyspa and Satie (as ‘Clemenceau à
Marienbad’)
Psitt! Psitt!
composed: late Nov 1907

text: comedy song by Ernest Depré and/or Jacques Bousquet. See Whiting, 1999,
pp. 324–9
music: caf’conc chansonnette for v, pf (‘Les homm’se donn’nt vraiment trop
d’mal pour apprend’un tas d’langues’)
MSS: Ho 193: 22, ff. 7v–15v (drafts and sketches)
pubn: extracts in Whiting, 1999, pp. 326–8
prem.: ? 23 Dec 1907 by Paulette Darty and M. Estéban-Marti (pf) in revue
Chapeau! Chapeau! at Comédie-Royale, Paris
1908
Fâcheux exemple

music: inc. Schola Cantorum counterpoint exercise in 3 parts
MS: BNF 9641, pp. 4–5
pubn: Salabert, 1968 (as third of Musiques intimes et secrètes, MC 377, with the
last 5 bars completed by the editor, Robert Caby)
Désespoir agréable
composed: ‘12 Feb 1908’

music: Schola Cantorum exercise in 3 parts
MS: BNF 9641, pp. 8–9
pubn: Salabert, 1968 (as first of Six pièces de la période 1906–13, ed. Caby,
MC 308)
Aperçus désagréables
composed: Aug 1908–Nov 1912

music: 3 pieces for pf duet
1 Pastorale (Oct 1912)
2 Choral (Aug 1908)

3 Fugue (Aug 1908)
No. 3, with its dialogue between the duet partners, was designed for Satie to
play with Debussy. They first did this early in Sept 1908, as a description of
the piece has survived in a letter from Debussy to Francisco de Lacerda on 5
Sept (Correspondance, ed. Denis Herlin (Paris, Gallimard, 2005), p. 1112). The
other two duets may have been similarly conceived. Satie also planned a set of 4
Impressions Parisiennes about this time (BNF 9579, p. 1), whose titles were Le
Réveil de Paris; L’Autobus; L’Avenue du Bois [chez Debussy]; Les Courses (cf.
Sports et divertissements, 1914, no. 13)
MSS: F-Papillon archives (copy in F-Pfs). First draft of Nos. 2–3 (1908), 6ff.,
which Satie left on a train from Honfleur to the Gare St Lazare on 19 Sept 1912,
where it was found by a curate named Papillon. It contains no directions for the
performer and many contrasting dynamics to the later MSS. Here the Choral is
crotchet = 50, and the Fugue is crotchet = 72
Spain-Seville. Archives Rodrigo de Zayas. Sketchbook, 24pp. (No. 2: pp. 1–3; No.
3: pp. 4–22). Satie’s reconstruction from memory of his lost MS 1 in Sept 1912,
with different performance indications to the pubd version below
BNF 10041 (neat copies of all 3 for the printer), 21pp. Late 1912
Sketches: BNF 9577, pp. 12–13 (first version of No. 1, inc.)
BNF 9577, pp. 2–5 (arr. of No. 2 for str quartet, made on the advice of Robert
Montfort in Aug 1912. Satie intended to arr. the Fugue too, but never did)
pubn: Demets, June 1913, 300 copies (E.1740.D); Eschig, 1967 (ME 7761); rev.
ed. 2007 by Ornella Volta and Gérald Hugon (DF 15787) with preface and facs.
Petite Sonate
composed: 1908–9
music: 82-bar movement written in the class of Vincent d’Indy at the Schola
Cantorum (part of the ‘IIIe Cours’). A possible second movement can be found
in Ho 193: 17
MSS: BNF 10033(11), (neat copy, 5pp.)
BNF 9643, pp. 22–3, 34–6, 44–6; 9649, pp. 4–6, 14, 20–22; 9650, pp. 4–9, 10–11,
31, 35, 49–50 (sketches); Ho 193: 17, ff. 1v–3v (a complete 71-bar movement in
C marked ‘Lent’ may well be the slow movement of this Sonata, though it has no
title)
pubn: Bars 1–10 as ‘Choral No. 12’ in Douze petits chorals (ed. R. Caby),
Salabert, 1968 (MC 356)
Chœur d’adolescents
composed: 1908–9
Appendix 279
music: inc. piece for ? vv, pf, perhaps for performance in Arcueil in Matinée
Artistique on 24 Oct 1909 (marked ‘Salvatet’ in top right-hand corner)
MS: Ho 193: 18, ff. 14v–15r
unpubd
Dieu Credo rouge
composed: 1908–9
music: inc. piece for ? vv, pf, perhaps for use as above
MS: Ho 193: 18, ff. 15v–16r
unpubd
1909
Deux Choses
composed: c.1909
music: 2 pieces for pf
1 Effronterie
2 Poésie
MSS: No. 1: BNF 9589(1), pp. 14–15, 18–19, 22–3, 26–9 (draft); 9589(2), pp.
4–11, 22–3, 25, 27 (sketches). Also titled Elégie commerciale on p. 22
No. 2: BNF 9589(2), pp. 16–17. Titled Deux Choses: Poésie
(A third inc. Chose for pf titled Tohu-bohu can be found in BNF 9589(2), p. 26.
Later in this notebook there are sketches for a set of ? 3 Pensées mécaniques)
pubn: Salabert, 1968 (as Nos. 2–3 of Six pièces de la période 1906–13, ed. R.
Caby (MC 306, 341)
Profondeur
composed: c.1909
music: piece for pf, one of many short minuets in G major written during the
Schola Cantorum years. Other untitled minuets can be found in BNF 9658, 9661,
9662, and Ho 193: 18
MSS: BNF 9621, pp. 8–9, 12–13 (neat copy as Profondeur); BNF 9658, pp. 12–
15 (sketches, incl. other titles for this piece: Bévue indiscrète (p. 12); Le Vizir
autrichien (p. 13))
pubn: Salabert, 1968 (as No. 5 of Six pièces de la période 1906–13, ed. R. Caby
(MC 305)
Menuet lent
composed: c.1909
music: inc. minuet for pf
MS: BNF 9658, p. 4
Unpubd
Menuet basque
composed: c.1909
MS: BNF 9658, pp. 8–9
unpubd
Le Conteur magique
composed: c.1909
MS: BNF 9662, p. 4
unpubd
Songe-creux
composed: c.1909
music: minuet for pf, with numerous acciaccaturas, arpeggiations, anticipations
and other melodic decoration typical of this period
MS: BNF 9655, pp. 26–7 (draft: the sketches for Songe-creux on pp. 28–9 are
crossed out)
pubn: Salabert, 1968 (as the last of Six piéces de la période 1906–13, ed. R. Caby
(MC 304))
Le Prisonnier maussade
composed: c.1909
music: minuet for pf
MS: BNF 9620, pp. 10–11
pubn: Salabert, 1968 (in Carnet d’esquisses et de croquis, p. 4, ed. R. Caby (MC
363)
Appendix 281
Le Grand Singe
composed: c.1909
music: minuet for pf
MS: BNF 9658, p. 6
pubn: Salabert, 1968 (in Carnet d’esquisses et de croquis, p. 4, ed. R. Caby (MC
363))
Le Dîner de Pierrot
composed: ? Sept 1909

music: probably a coll. of cabaret songs arr. around a ‘fantasy’ by Jules Dépaquit,
or a play by Bertrand Millanvoye
MSS: PLU or lost
unpubd
prem.: 17 Sept 1909 by pupils of the Patronage Laïque, Ecole Maternelle
d’Arcueil-Cachan
La Chemise
composed: Sept–Oct 1909

text: comic song by Jules Dépaquit (‘Chemise du bébé rieur’)
music: comic chansonnette with 2 verses and refrains for Paulette Darty, pf or
orch (incl. fl, ob, cl, bn, hn, cornet, trbn, str). Satie made 3 drafts of the music: (1)
as a patter song in 6/8; (2) as a polka song in 2/4; and (3) as a Waltz song in 3/4.
He chose draft 2 to score for the prem. in 1909 (see Whiting, 1999, pp. 338–41)
MSS: Draft 1: BNF 9651, pp. 12–13 (in. C); BNF 9651, pp. 8, 10 (sketches)
Draft 2: Ho 193: 18, ff. 12v–13r (in B flat); F-Hon, neat copy, 6pp., for pf
conducteur with orch. indications; Ho 193: 17, ff. 15r–18r (sketches)
Draft 3: Ho 193: 17, ff, 20v–21r (in G)
pubn: Draft 2: Salabert, 1997 in Neuf chansons de cabaret (ed. S.M. Whiting,
1995), pp. 46–7 (EAS 19349) with preface and facs. on pp. 44–5
prem (Draft 2 in B flat): ? 24 Oct 1909, by Paulette Darty and Satie (pf) at annual
Matinée Artistique, Salle du Gymnase Municipal, 1 rue des Ecoles, Arcueil-
Cachan (as a dress rehearsal for Darty’s performances at La Scala (Music Hall),
Paris, 6 Nov–11 Dec 1909)
1911
En Habit de cheval (orig. Divertissement)
composed: June–6 Sept 1911 (orch. Sept–Oct 1911, parts copied Nov 1911–12)
music: 4 pieces for pf duet, later orch. for 2 fl, ob, eng hn, 2 cl in B flat, 2 bn,
sarrusophone, 2 hn, 2 tpt in C, 3 trbn, tuba, contrabass tuba, str. The title refers to
what the horse is wearing, not its rider
1 Choral
2 Fugue litanique
3 Autre choral
4 Fugue de papier
MSS: F-Psalabert [now in BNF], OS, 32pp.; BNF 10043, pf duet (copy for printer,
16ff.); BNF Rés. Vma 162 (proofs of duet version, with numerous corrections, ?
early 1912); BNF 9591(4), pp. 2–37, pf duet (neat copies); BNF 9591(5), pp.
12–13, pf solo or short score version of No. 1 (‘June 1911’); BNF 9591(5), pp.
16–29, pf solo or short score version of No. 2 (‘July 1911’: the difficulty of these
early solo versions probably led Satie to decide on an arr. for pf duet)
Sketches: No. 1: Ho 193: 54 (orch draft)
No. 2: BNF 9656, pp. 12–13; 9661, pp. 3, 6–10, 12–21; 9665, pp. 20–23; Ho 193:
55 (orch draft)
No. 3: BNF 9591(3), pp. 20–21; Ho 193; 55 (orch draft)
No. 4: BNF 9591(1), pp. 4–11; 9591(2), pp. 2–13; 9592, pp. 13–15, 18–24; Ho
193: 55 (inc. orch draft)
pubn: Pf duet: Rouart-Lerolle, March 1912 (RL 9823); Salabert
OS: Rouart-Lerolle, ? 1912; Salabert
prem.: as yet unidentified. The advertised prem. by the SMI at the Salle Gaveau
on 17 June 1912 never took place, as Satie had not yet finished the orch parts. He
approached the Concerts Lamoureux about a prem. in the winter of 1912, but was
not successful (see Volta, 2000, pp. 169, 1119)
1912
Deux Préludes pour un chien
composed: 1912
MSS: BNF 9619, p. 4 (No. 1 inc.); 9619, pp. 6–7 (No. 2)
pubn: No. 2 as Prélude canin, No. 4 of Six pièces de la période 1906–13, ed. R.
Caby, Salabert 1968 (MC 307)
Appendix 283
Préludes flasques (pour un chien)
composed: July 1912

music: 4 pieces for pf. The fourth was added later and orig. titled Sous la futaille
[Under the barrel]. Debussy was annoyed by this title, so Satie changed it to Avec
camaraderie, keeping the music the same
1 Voix d’intérieure (‘11 July’)
2 Idylle cynique (‘21 July’)
3 Chanson canine (‘23 July’)
4 [Avec camaraderie], (n.d.)
MSS: BNF 10035. Printer’s copies of all 4. At one stage No. 4 was intended as No.
2. ‘Avec camaraderie’ appears to be a performance indication, rather than a title
Sketches: No. 1: BNF 9673, pp. 4–5; No. 2: BNF 9674, pp. 6, 8–9; No. 3: BNF
9610, pp. 1–20; 9660, pp. 2–3. The final version, with its distinctive notation,
emerges on BNF 9610, pp. 17–20; No. 4: BNF 9632, pp. 2–3 (as Sous la futaille,
but almost identical to Avec camaraderie. Together with this draft appear the
words ‘Trop gratter, cuit/ Remue désagréable’)
pubn: Eschig, 1967 (ME 7714)
Note: BNF 9674, the notebook labelled Préludes flasques pour un chien contains
2 further complete preludes on pp. 2–5, 12–13. These were pubd as the Deux
Rêveries nocturnes by Salabert, 1968, ed. R. Caby (MC 309). Satie also wrote the
titles for another set of pieces, the Répliques hivernales in BNF 9674, p. 21. The
second of these, La Lanterne, may have been carried forward to the Descriptions
automatiques in 1913
Véritables Préludes flasques (pour un chien)
composed: ‘12–23 Aug 1912’

music: 3 preludes for pf
1 Sévère réprimande (‘12 Aug’)
2 Seul à la maison (‘17 Aug’)
3 On joue (‘23 Aug’)
ded.: the preludes carry the inscription: ‘Très “neuf heures du matin” – Ricardo
Viñes’
MSS: F-Ptb, neat copies for printer in a separate notebook, 14pp.
Sketches: No. 1: BNF 9618, pp. 4–5; Ho 193: 37, f. 2v (Latin texts); No. 2: BNF
9618, pp. 7–11 (with rejected first version on p. 6); No. 3: BNF 9618, pp. 12–16
pubn: Demets, Dec 1912, 300 copies, black on grey wrapper, with flying bat on p.
6 (E.1725.D); Eschig. (Satie orig. approached Jacques Durand to publish this set,
but he was rejected ‘like an old glove’ by Debussy’s publisher)
prem.: 5 April 1913 by Ricardo Viñes, SN, Salle Pleyel. Satie’s programme note
can be found in Le Guide du Concert, IV, 25 (29 March 1913). His correction of
an error in the first ed. at the start of No. 3 can be seen in Volta, 2000, pp. 181–3
Note: An extra Véritable Prélude flasque appears on BNF 9618, p. 19, entitled
Arrière-propos. This was pubd in Carnet d’esquisses et de croquis, p. 16, ed. R.
Caby, Salabert, 1968 (MC 363)
1913
Le Piège de Méduse
composed/written: Feb–28 March 1913 (play). By late June 1913 (7 dances for
pf). Orch. ? early 1921
text: ‘lyric comedy in 1 Act by M. Erik Satie with dance music by the same
gentleman’. This surrealist play in 9 scenes with 7 interspersed dances was pubd
in a de luxe ed. (114 copies) with 3 cubist woodcut engravings by Georges Braque
(his first such engravings) in June 1921 by Daniel Henry Kahnweiler (Paris,
Editions de la Galerie Simon). An English trans. can be found in Volta, 1996, pp.
73–94 (by Antony Melville). This play may owe something to a lost collaborative
venture for a 5-Act play with Jules Dépaquit in 1898 (see Volta, 1988, p. 62).
It is also prefigured in Satie’s bizarre theatrical vision which appeared in Revue
musicale SIM on 15 Jan 1913 as part of his surreal Mémoires d’un amnésique
music: 7 ‘toutes petites danses’ for Jonas the monkey following sc. 1, 2, 4, 6–9.
For pf solo (1913) or small orch (cl, tpt, trbn, perc, vn, vc, cb, probably orch. for
the public prem. in 1921)
1 Quadrille
2 Valse
3 Pas vite
4 Mazurka
5 Un peu vif
6 Polka
7 Quadrille
MSS: FES: Text (complete) and draft in green ink of Polycarpe (the butler’s) part
(with relevant replies) in sc. 1, 6 and 7 (4pp.); BNF 9586, p. 2, orig. plan in 7
scenes on cover
music: BNF 10036, pf solo (copy for printer, as Toutes petites danses pour le
Piège de Méduse), 7ff. (rectos only); Ho 193, unnumbered MS (OS, 8pp.)
pubn: With play, 1921 (see above)
Without play, March 1939, Editions de la Vipère, Tangiers (ed. Paul Bowles), 100
copies with frontispiece illustration of jellyfish by Kristians Tonny (Copy no. 40
of this legendary rarity can be found in the University of Delaware Library Special
Collections, Newark, Del., (ref. M25.S35.P62 In Process). The cover is printed in
black on coral-coloured paper); Salabert, 1954 (EAS 15802 RL)
OS: Salabert, 1968. See also the package of text, music and recording, presented
by Ornella Volta (Paris, Le Castor Astral, 1988)
prem. (private): salon of M. et Mme Fernand Dreyfus (parents of the composer
Appendix 285
Roland-Manuel), 1 rue de Chazelles, Paris 17e early in 1914. The cast (Volta,
1988, p. 67) consisted of:
Baron Méduse: Roland-Manuel
Polycarpe (his butler): Marcel Ormoy
Jonas the monkey: Jean Dreyfus
Astolfo (Frisette’s suitor): André Biguet
Frisette (Medusa’s foster-daughter): Suzanne Roux
Visitors at end of play: M. et Mme Dreyfus, M. Roux
Jonas’ dances perf. on pf by Satie (who ‘prepared’ the pf by sliding sheets of paper
between the strings and the dampers to give a muted, mechanistic effect)
prem. (public): 24 May 1921, Théâtre Michel, 38 rue des Mathurins, produced by
Pierre Bertin. The cast (from the Théâtre de l’Odéon) consisted of:
Baron Méduse [with unwelcome imitations of Satie himself]: Pierre Bertin
Polycarpe: André Berley
Jonas the monkey: M. Blancard
Astolfo: M. Vinck
Frisette: Mlle Martal
Orch cond. by Darius Milhaud
Descriptions automatiques (also referred to as Vocations éléctriques in June

1913)
composed: ‘21–26 April 1913’

1 Sur un vaisseau (‘21 April’)
2 Sur une lanterne (‘22 April’)
3 Sur un casque (‘26 April’)
ded.: 1 à Madame Fernand Dreyfus
2 à Madame Joseph Ravel
3 à Madame Paulette Darty
MSS: BNF 9586(1), pp. 10–15, 20–24; 9630, pp. 4–8 (neat drafts of Nos. 1–3)
Sketches: No. 1: BNF 9586(1), pp. 2–3, 5–7 (5 genetic variants of song ‘Maman,
les p’tits bateaux’); 9586(2), pp. 4–5; Ho 193: 37 (which shows that the orig. title
of the set was Descriptions hypocrites, and that No. 1 was titled Sur un loup, then
Sur un thon, before Satie decided on Sur un vaisseau)
No. 2: BNF 9586(1), p. 24; 9586(2), p. 9; Ho 193:37
No. 3: BNF 9586(1), pp. 16–19; 9586(2), pp. 6–7; Ho 193: 37; BNF 9630, p. 8
pubn: Demets, June 1913, 300 copies with modern art wrapper, black on pale
green, with 3 other spatter colours (E.1788.D); Eschig
prem.: 5 June 1913 by Ricardo Viñes, SMI, Salle de la Société des Concerts
(Ancien Conservatoire)
Croquis et agaceries d’un gros bonhomme en bois
composed: ‘2 June–25 Aug 1913’

music: 3 pieces for pf. Satie as the ‘composer with the wooden head’ recurs on
various occasions from the Ogives (? 1888) onwards. It became a standing joke
between Satie and Debussy. The rue de l’Homme de Bois was near to Satie’s
birthplace in Honfleur, and sculpted wooden heads were the forerunners of modern
waxworks (see Le Livre des Têtes de Bois (Paris: Charpentier, 1883))
1 Tyrolienne Turque (‘28 July’)
2 Danse maigre (à la manière de ces messieurs) (‘2 June’)
3 Españaña (‘25 Aug’)
ded.: 1 à Mademoiselle Elvira Viñes Soto
2 à Monsieur Hernando Viñes Soto
3 à Mademoiselle Claude Emma Debussy [Chouchou]
MSS: Neat copies of Nos. 1–2, PLU; BNF 9582, pp. 16–21, neat copy of No. 3
Sketches: No. 1: BNF 9619, pp. 22–5; No. 2: PLU; No. 3: BNF 9580, pp. 2–9;
9619, pp. 5, 11, 16–21. For the first version of this, see San Bernardo below
pubn: Demets, Nov 1913, 300 copies, orange-red on green-black wrapper
(E.1789.1-3.D); Eschig
prem.: 28 March 1914 by Ricardo Viñes, SN, Salle Pleyel
Embryons desséchés
composed: ‘30 June–4 July 1913’

music: 3 pieces for pf (titles probably from Satie’s copy of the illustrated Larousse)
1 d’Holothurie (‘30 June’)
2 d’Edriophthalma (‘1 July’)
3 de Podophthalma (‘4 July’)
ded.: 1 à Mademoiselle Suzanne Roux
2 à Monsieur Edouard Dreyfus
3 à Madame Jane Mortier
MSS: Neat copies, PLU; BNF Rés. Vma 161, corr. proofs
Sketches: No. 1: BNF 9590, pp. 1–7; No. 2: BNF 9590, pp. 8–10; No. 3: BNF
9590, pp. 12–21. The cover of this notebook contains 2 versions of a preface for
this set, which were never used. For the second, see Whiting, 1999, pp. 367–8
pubn: Demets, Oct 1913, 300 copies, wrapper shows Japanese fish swimming
through decorative weed, dark blue on blue-green with red lettering and a picture
of a crab on p. 11 (E.1795.1–3.D)
prem.: 5 Dec 1913, Jane Mortier, Salle Pleyel
Appendix 287
San Bernardo

music: piece for pf, first version of Españaña (Croquis No. 3)
MSS: coll. Robert Orledge, Brighton, final page dated ‘2 Aug 1913’ and titled San
Bernardo; BNF 9619, pp. 25, 27–30, draft of complete piece
pubn: Aerial Kites Press, Liverpool, 2002, 50 copies, 5ff., with facs.
prem.: 16 May 2002, Eve Egoyan, Glenn Gould Studio, Toronto
Chapitres tournés en tous sens
composed: ‘23 Aug–5 Sept 1913’

1 Celle qui parle trop (‘23 Aug’)
2 Le Porteur de grosses pierres (‘25 Aug’)
3 Regrets des Enfermés (Jonas et Latude) (‘5 Sept’)
ded.: 1 à Robert Manuel
2 à Monsieur Fernand Dreyfus
3 à Madame Claude Debussy
MSS: BNF 9580, pp. 10–15, 16–19; 9583, pp. 2–5, neat drafts of Nos. 1–3. See
also BNF 9580, p. 22; 9582, pp. 28–9 (No. 3)
Sketches: No. 1: BNF 9580, pp. 2–3; No. 2: BNF 9580, pp. 16–19 (around above
draft); No. 3: BNF 9580, pp. 20–23; 9582, pp. 22–9 (ibid.)
pubn: Demets, Nov 1913, 300 copies, wrapper black on light brown, title page
red-brown on white (E.1113.D); Eschig, 1972 (ME 8055)
prem.: 14 Jan 1914, Ricardo Viñes, SMI, Salle Erard. Satie’s programme note
appears in Le Guide du Concert, V, 14 (10 Jan 1914), p. 204
Vieux sequins et vieilles cuirasses

1 Chez le Marchand d’Or (Venise XIIIe siècle) (‘9 Sept’)
2 Danse cuirassée (Période grecque) (‘17 Sept’)
3 La Défaite des Cimbres (Cauchemar) (‘14 Sept’)
ded.: 1 à Ricardo Viñes
2 à M[ichel]-D[imitri] Calvocoressi
3 à Emile Vuillermoz
MSS: BNF 9583, pp. 8–11; 9633, pp. 16–17; 9583, pp. 18–21, neat drafts of Nos.
1–3, with ending of No. 3 on BNF 9633, p. 14
Sketches: No. 1: BNF 9582, p. 32 (‘Le Veau d’or’); 9583, pp. 6–7; No. 2: BNF
9605(3), p. 13 (sketch of song As-tu vu la casquette? in D major); 9582, p. 32;
9583, p. 12; 9633, pp. 22–4; No. 3: BNF 9633, pp. 1–3, 6–15
pubn: Demets, Nov 1913, 300 copies, wrapper orange on purple, title page purple
on white (E.1135.1–3.D)
prem.: 11 December 1917, ‘Musique d’“Avant-garde”’, Théâtre du Vieux-
Colombier, Paris 6e, Marcelle Meyer
L’Enfance de Ko-Quo (Recommandations maternelles)

music: 3 pieces for pf ‘written with the aim of preparing children for the sound
patterns of modern music. They have won me congratulations from the Shah of
Persia and the King of Yvetot.’
1 Ne bois pas ton chocolat avec tes doigts (‘27 Sept’)
2 Ne souffle pas dans tes oreilles (‘28 Sept’)
3 Ne mets pas la tête sous ton bras (‘28 Sept’)
MSS: FES (SAT 2.1). Drafts in separate sketchbook, 6pp. music
Sketches: Ho 193: 32, pp. 9–10 (No. 2); 11–12 (No. 3), with texts on cover
pubn: Peters Edition, 1999, ed. Ornella Volta (No. 7358)
[Trois Nouvelles Enfantines]
composed: early Oct 1913

music: 3 easy 2-part pieces for pf
1 Le Vilain petit Vaurien
2 [Berceuse]
3 La Gentille toute petite fille
MSS: BNF 9612, pp. 1, 2–3, 6–7, neat copies of Nos. 1–3. Other unpubd Enfantines
appear on pp. 4–5, 8–9
pubn: Eschig, 1972, ed. Nigel Wilkins (ME 8037)
Menus propos enfantins (Enfantines I)

music: 3 beginners’ pieces for pf, all using the same 5-finger scale
1 Le Chant guerrier du Roi des Haricots
2 Ce qui dit la petite Princesse de Tulipes
3 Valse du Chocolat aux amandes
ded.: à Mademoiselle Valentine Gross
MSS: Draft of No. 1: PLU; BNF 9612, pp. 10–11, 16–18 (drafts of Nos. 2–3).
Other rejected Menus appear in BNF 9612, pp. 12–13, 14–15, 19. A list of
composition dates for all the Enfantines occurs in BNF 9593(1), p. 24, and other
Appendix 289
rejected pieces in this style can be found in BNF 9576, pp. 1–4. Fingering trials
(possibly for the Enfantines) appear in BNF 9578(2), p. 16; 9592, pp. 2–5; 9674,
p. 22. For Satie’s chosen fingering system and the organisation of the 3 sets, see
Orledge, 1990, p. 193
pubn: Demets, July 1916 [©1914], 600 copies, wrapper black on brown with
same red on white illustrated title page in all 3 sets (E.1818.D); Eschig
prem.: 18 Dec 1919, concert ‘Pour les Jeunes’, Ecole de musique Jeanne Alvin
[Salle de l’Etoile], 17 rue Chateaubriand, Paris 8e, Marcelle Meyer
Enfantillages pittoresques (Enfantines II)

music: 3 beginners’ pieces for pf, using 3 different 5-finger scales
1 Petite Prélude à la journée
2 Berceuse
3 Marche du Grand Escalier
ded.: à Madame Léon Verneuil
MSS: PLU
pubn: Demets, July 1916, 800 copies, wrapper black on dark green (E.1819.D);
Eschig
prem.: ? 18 Dec 1919, Marcelle Meyer
Peccadilles importunes (Enfantines III)

music: 3 beginners’ pieces for pf, using 3 different 5-finger scales
1 Etre jaloux de son camarade qui a une grosse tête
2 Lui manger sa tartine
3 Profiter de ce qu’il a des cors aux pieds pour lui prendre son cerceau
ded.: à Madame Marguerite Long
MSS: PLU
pubn: Demets, July 1916, 800 copies (E.1820.D)
prem.: 18 Dec 1919, Marcelle Meyer
Les Pantins dansent
composed: early Nov–‘16 Nov 1913’

text: poem in 6 verses by Valentine de Saint-Point, the second of her Poèmes
ironiques, pubd in small volume of Poèmes drames idéistes du premier Festival de
la Métachorie, New York, 3 April 1917 (information kindly supplied by Ornella
Volta, text in Orledge, 1990, pp. 349–50)
music: ‘poème dansé’ for pf or small orch (fl, ob, cl in B flat, bn, hn, tpt, str) to
accompany the reading of the poem and a dance arr. by Valentine de Saint-Point.
2 versions exist. The first, rejected version of early Nov 1913 is scored for 2fl, cl
in B flat, bn, hn, 2 tpt, hp, str
MSS: First version: BNF 9604, pp. 18–23 (pf score with orch indications)
Second version: BNF 9588, pp. 6–9 (pf score with orch indications).
Sketches: BNF 9588, pp. 2–5; 9604, p. 24
OS: PLU (copy at F-Psalabert)
pubn: Version 2 for pf in Montjoie! II, 1–2 (Jan–Feb 1914); Rouart-Lerolle, 1929
(RL 11687); Salabert
OS: bars 31–8 (facs.) in Montjoie! I, 11–12 (Nov–Dec 1913), p. 12; complete:
Salabert, 1975 (MC 339)
Versions 1 and 2 for pf, ed. R. Orledge, SOUNDkiosk, Brighton, 2010 (SKPE10)
prem.: Version 2: 18 Dec 1913, Festival de la Métachorie, Salle Léon-Poirier.
Orch cond. Maurice Droeghmans, poem read by Edouard de Max. Dance by
Valentine de Saint-Point
Version 1: 17 June 1990, Robert Orledge (pf), Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead,
UK
1914
Choses vues à droite et à gauche (sans lunettes)
composed: ‘17–30 Jan 1914’

music: 3 pieces for vn, pf
1 Choral hypocrite (‘17 Jan’)
2 Fugue à tâtons (‘21 Jan’)
3 Fantaisie musculaire (‘30 Jan’)
ded.: à Marcel Chailley
MSS: F-Po Nouveaux Fonds Rés. 219, copies for printer of all 3, 14pp.
Sketches: No. 1: BNF 9573(1), p. 19; 9573(2), pp. 14–15; No. 2: BNF 9573(1),
pp. 6–15, 19–24; 9573(2), pp. 4–11. The draft of a first version appears in BNF
9573(2), pp. 1–3, with sketches for this in BNF 9573(1), pp. 1–5 and 9573(2), p.
24. Another (untitled) early draft (in G) lasting 32 bars can be found in Ho 193: 31,
pp. 2–5, with other early episodic sketches in 2 parts on pp. 6–7. The cover of Ho
193: 31 lists the orig. order as 3, 1, 2 (in terms of the pubd version). No. 3: BNF
9573(2), pp. 12–13, 16–23
An extra unused movement, another chorale (perhaps intended to come between
Nos. 2 and 3) exists complete in BNF 9573(1), pp. 16–18
pubn: Rouart-Lerolle, July 1916 (RL 10074); Salabert, 1995 (including Autre
choral as movement 3, ed. R. Orledge, RL 10074p)
prem.: 2 April 1916 by Marcel Chailley (vn) and Ricardo Viñes (pf). École Lucien
de Flagny, 25 rue de la Tour, Paris 16e (during ‘14e Examen Musical de quelques
Appendix 291
élèves du Professeur Lucien de Flagny, sous la Présidence de M. Ricardo Viñes)

With extra chorale: 29 May 1987 by Helen Sanderson (vn) and Robert Orledge
(pf). Northcott Theatre, Exeter
Sports et divertissements
composed: ‘14 March–20 May 1914’

music: 21 pieces for pf which inspired a set of drawings by Charles Martin in
1914. Satie provided humorous prose poems to accompany each piece, turning it
into a complete artistic experience for the performer. Most of the 1923 and more
recently pubd scores show a second (more cubist) set of 20 illustrations made by
Martin in 1922, and only 10 orig. copies with both sets of drawings exist. The
pubd order, chosen by their editor Lucien Vogel in 1923, is as follows:
1 Choral inappétissant (‘15 May’)
2 La balançoire (‘31 March’)
3 La Chasse (‘7 April’)
4 La Comédie italienne (‘29 April’)
5 Le Réveil de la Mariée (‘16 May’)
6 Colin-Maillard (‘27 April’)
7 La Pêche (‘14 March’)
8 Le Yachting (‘22 March’)
9 Le Bain de mer (‘11 April’)
10 Le Carnaval (‘3 April’)
11 Le Golf (‘20 May’)
12 La Pieuvre (‘17 March’)
13 Les Courses (‘26 March’)
14 Les Quatre-coins (‘24 April’)
15 Le Pique-nique (‘19 April’)
16 Le Water-chute (‘14 April’)
17 Le Tango-perpétuel (‘5 May’)
18 Le Traîneau (‘2 May’)
19 Le Flirt (‘29 March’)
20 Le Feu d’Artifice (‘6 April’)
21 Le Tennis (‘21 April’)
Satie’s chosen order in 1914 was (in terms of the above): 1, 8, 18, 17, 10, 5, 11, 7,
12, 21, 15, 13, 9, 3, 2, 16, 6, 14, 4, 20, 19. To complicate matters further, Satie also
authorised Marcelle Meyer to give the 1922 public prem. in the following order:
1, 9, 16, 12, 6, 11, 19, 10, 21, 17, 5, 8, 18, 3, 13–15, 7, 20, 2, 4. Thus, apart from
the opening chorale, there is nothing consistent or final as regards the ordering of
the 21 pieces. But the second or third orders (chosen by Satie) are preferable to
the order chosen by his publisher in 1923, and to the chronological order below
MSS: Apart from the plate for No. 1 (sold by Sotheby’s, London, with 3 trial
pages, on 23 May 2007, lot 136), the orig. plates prepared for Lucien Vogel in
1914 have disappeared. The drafts and sketches in the BNF notebooks are listed
below in chronological order of composition. All drafts are accompanied by their
texts, and most have regular barlines:
14 March, No. 7: La Pêche: BNF 9627(2), pp. 4–5 (draft); 9627(1), pp. 2–3; 9604,
pp. 1–4, 12–13; 9627(3), p. 15 (sketches)
17 March, No. 12: La Pieuvre: BNF 9627(2), pp. 8–9 (draft); 9627(1), pp. 4–7;
9604, pp. 12–13 (sketches)
22 March, No. 8: Le Yachting: BNF 9627(1), pp. 8–9 (draft); 9627(2), p. 12 (sketch
of text)
26 March, No. 13: Les Courses: BNF 9627(3), pp. 6–7 (draft)
29 March, No. 19: Le Flirt: BNF 9627(3), pp. 4–5 (draft)
31 March, No. 2: La Balançoire: BNF 9627(3), pp. 2–3 (draft); 9627(3), p. 1
(sketch)
3 April, No. 10: Le Carnaval: BNF 9627(4), pp. 2–3 (draft)
6 April, No. 20: Le Feu d’Artifice: BNF 9627(4), pp. 4–5 (draft); 9627(4), p. 1
(sketch)
7 April, No. 3: La Chasse: BNF 9627(4), pp. 6–7 (draft); p. 1 (sketches)
11 April, No. 9: Le Bain de mer: BNF 9627(5), pp. 2–3 (draft); p. 9 (rev. ending)
14 April, No. 16: Le Water-chute: BNF 9627(5), pp. 4–5 (draft, with 5 different
versions of the semiquaver descent of the water-chute, see Orledge, 1984–5, pp.
166–8)
19 April, No. 15: Le Pique-nique: BNF 9727(6), pp. 1–2 (draft, orig.titled Le pick-
nick, with a longer first version of the text (which preceded the music) on p. 1)
21 April, No. 21: Le Tennis: BNF 9627(6), pp. 6–7 (draft, plus a complete rejected
first version on p. 3)
24 April, No. 14: Les Quatre-coins: BNF 9627(7), p. 1 (draft)
27 April, No. 6: Colin-Maillard: BNF 9627(7), pp. 2–3 (draft)
29 April, No. 4: La Comédie italienne: BNF 9627(7), pp. 4–5 (draft)
2 May, No. 18: Le Traîneau: BNF 9627(8), pp. 6–7 (draft, with the start of a
rejected version on p. 1)
5 May, No. 17: Le Tango: BNF 9627(8), pp. 16–17 (draft); pp. 8–15 (sketches for
5 earlier versions)
15 May, No. 1: Choral inappétissant: BNF 9627(9), p. 9 (draft, with draft of
Préface on p. 8); 9627(5), p. 1 (sketch)
16 May, No. 5: Le Réveil de la Mariée: BNF 9627(9), pp. 6–7 (draft, subtitled
Sérénade); 9627(8), pp. 2–4, 18–19; 9627(9), pp. 1–5 (sketches. Those on p. 1 are
tiled Sérénade matinale à la mariée)
20 May, No. 11: Le Golf: 10 genetic variants (in order): BNF 9627(9), p. 12;
14–15; 16–17 (see Orledge, 1990, pp. 216–17); 18–19; 20–21; 20–21 (again, with
bars 9–16 on pp. 16–17); 9627 (10) pp. 1; 2; 6; draft of final version on pp. 4–5,
8–9. Other musical sketches can be found in BNF 9627(9), pp. 13, 19
6 variants of text (in order); BNF 9627(6), pp. 4–5; 9627(9), p. 10; p. 11 (3
variants); 9627(10), pp. 4–5, 8–9 (with tenth and final musical version above)
pubn: With both sets of drawings by Charles Martin (1914 and 1922), Editions
Appendix 293
Lucien Vogel, 1923 (10 copies numbered only, reserved for the Librairie Meynial.
Some contain alternative 1914 plates as well, notably for Le Pique-nique)
With 20 drawings from 1922 only, coloured by Jules Saudé, Vogel, 1923 (215
copies, numbered 11–225)
With 1 drawing from 1922 (La Comédie italienne), Vogel, 1923 (675 copies. Only
those sold by Vogel were numbered, from 226 onwards)
With Satie’s music and texts only, plus his cameos preceding each piece (all in
facs.), Rouart-Lerolle, 1926; Salabert, 1964 (MC 194)
Facs. of music and 20 drawings of 1922 (with Eng. trans. of texts by Stanley
Applebaum), Dover Publications, 1982 (Satie’s cameos are missing in this ed.)
prem. (private): 14 December 1919 by Satie, chez Mme Vogel, 18 rue Bonaparte,
Paris 6e
(public): 31 Jan 1922 by Marcelle Meyer, Salle de La Ville l’Evêque
Un Acte
composed/written: ? June 1914

text: inc. scenario for a 1-Act ballet or opera with 11 numbers, set in a village
square. No characters are named by Satie
MS: BNF 9593(3), p. 10
pubn: Volta, 1992, p. 97
Obstacles venimeux
composed: ? late June 1914

music: inc. set of 3 pieces for pf, probably replaced by the first of the Heures
séculaires below. Mostly simple 2-part music, similar to the 1913 Enfantines
MSS: BNF 9604, pp. 5–8. Sketches for all 3 pieces:
1 Le Résident Général sommeille doucement, étendu sur un paquet de hamac. 1er
obstacle: un scorpion/ 2me obstacle: un boa/ 3me obstacle: son concierge
2 Untitled
3 Le chaleur est diluvienne
unpubd
Note: Satie planned 8 further sets of pf pieces with humorous titles in May–Nov
1914, but none proceeded even as far as the Obstacles venimeux. They are as
follows (in chronological order, as far as can be ascertained):
Les Globules ennuyeux (May 1914)
1 Regard
2 Superficie
3 Canalisation
MS: BNF 9627(10), cover (with texts for Nos. 1 and 3 on p. 3. No music)
Les Etapes monotones (May 1914)
1 Curiosité visqueuse
2 Frisson impoli
3 Tentacules chevalines
MS: BNF 9627(10), cover (no texts or music)
La Chimère désolée (? May 1914)
1 Kiosque
2 Moisissures
3 Estafilade
MS: Ho 193: 35, cover (no texts or music)
Œuvres ennuyeuses (June 1914)
1 Les Catafalques endormis
2 Les Poussières peureuses (orig. sombres or honteuses)
3 Vasques chancelantes (orig. Les mots suspendus)
MS: BNF 9588, cover (no texts or music)
Sous les catalpas (Trois belles Mazourques) (July 1914)
1 Ce qui dit le hibou
2 Après le bon déjeuner
3 Le joli bal de coton
Le Cheval est un animal hippique, équestre & domestique (July 1914. Satie
mentioned these pieces in conversation with his brother Conrad during this month.
Notes in US-AUS)
1 Equestre – Un général sur le dos
2 Domestique – Une charrue derrière lui
3 Hippique – Un rival à vaincre
Soupirs fanés (Nov 1914)
MSS: BNF 9615(3), pp. 6–7, brief musical sketches marked Grand Sommeil
nocturne; Familial désespoir [? No. 1], with more sketches on p. 12 (no specific
titles or texts)
Souvenirs fadasses (Nov 1914)
1 Barbouillage
2 Poil
3 Recrudescence
MS: BNF 9615(3), pp. 8, 7 (texts for Nos. 1, 2. No identifiable music)
Heures séculaires et instantanées
composed: ‘25 June’–early July 1914

music: 3 pieces for pf, with apparently surreal accompanying stories which Satie
forbade to be read aloud during performance. That of No. 1 suggests comparisons
with Douanier Rousseau’s painting The Snake Charmer, exhibited in the 5th Salon
d’Automne at the Grand Palais in Sept–Oct 1907, as well as with the flag of the
Appendix 295
French colony of Martinique (see Potter, 2011, pp. 101–14)

1 Obstacles venimeux (‘25 June’)
2 Crépuscule matinale (de midi) (‘3 July’)
3 Affolements granitiques (undated)
ded.: ‘A sir William Grant-Plumot, je dédie agréablement ce recueil. Jusqu’ici,
deux figures m’ont surpris: Louis XI & sir William: le premier, par l’étrangeté de
sa bonhomie; le second, par sa continuelle immobilité. Ce m’est un honneur de
prononcer, ici, les noms de Louis XI & de sir William Grant-Plumot’ (Sir William
may have been Satie’s alias for his critical enemy Willy (Henry Gauthier-Villars))
MSS: BNF 9593(3), pp. 2–3, 6–7; 9593(1), pp. 5, 4, 6–7; Ho 193: 39, pp. 2–5 (drafts
of Nos. 1–3. In No. 3, the complex enharmonic notation of simple chords and scales
(printed ed. p. 8) was added later, when the barlines were removed); BNF 9593(1), p.
1; 9593(3), p. 1 (drafts of accompanying texts. Plans for the titles can be found on the
cover of BNF 9588, and 9593(1), p. 4 above is headed Suite Indo-Montmartroise)
Sketches: No. 1: BNF 9593(3), p. 1; No. 2: BNF 9593(3), p. 8; No. 3: BNF 9593(3),
pp. 8–11, 14, 20, with pencil draft of start on pp. 18–19. The sketches in Ho 193:
39 show that No. 3 orig. had a different text (beginning ‘Il a une taille de guêpe &,
en même temps, de taureau’). This may have given Satie the idea for his next set
of pieces, the Trois Valses, sketches for which are included in the same notebook
pubn: Demets, Jan 1917 (E.1870.D). It is still uncertain which of the two musically
identical editions is the first as the BNF copyright copy has lost its wrapper. I
favour the scarlet wrapper, but the violet wrapper edition on cheaper paper might
be more typical of a wartime edition
prem.: 11 March 1917, Ricardo Viñes, Galerie Barbazanges
Les Trois Valses distinguées du précieux dégoûté
composed: ‘21–23 July 1914’

music: 3 waltzes for pf, prefaced with quotations from La Bruyère (1688), Cicero
and Cato
1 Sa taille (‘21 July’)
2 Son binocle (‘22 July’)
3 Ses jambes (‘23 July’)
ded.: 1 à Roland-Manuel
2 à Mademoiselle Linette Chalupt
3 à René Chalupt
MSS: BNF 9628(1), pp. 2–7, 8–11, 14–19. Neat copies for printer, with texts, of
all 3. BNF Rés. Vma 173. Corr. proofs, 1916
Sketches: No. 1: BNF 9628(2), pp. 2–5, 6–9; No. 2: BNF 9626, pp. 2–5; 9628(2),
pp. 2–5; Ho 193: 39, pp. 9–13 (first version); No. 3: BNF 9628(2), pp. 10–11; Ho
193: 39, pp. 16–19, 21–2 (emergence of final version, minus p. 7, systems 1–2 of
printed ed., with different text); pp. 14–15 (first version, melody only)
pubn: Rouart-Lerolle, Nov 1916 (RL 10066); Salabert
prem.: 19 Nov 1916 by Satie, Société Lyre et Palette. With first exhibition of
Negro sculptures in Paris and an exhibition of modern art (35 paintings by Kisling,
Matisse, Ortiz de Zarate, Modigliani and Picasso)
Trois poèmes d’amour
composed: ‘26 Nov–2 Dec 1914’

text: 3 short poems by Satie; modern equivalents of thirteenth-century French
troubadour poetry
music: 3 songs for v, pf – ‘Musique de M. Erik Satie (sur des paroles magiques
de lui-même)’
1 Ne suis que grain de sable (‘20 Nov’)
2 Suis chauve de naissance (‘25 Nov’)
3 Ta parure est secrete (‘2 Dec’)
ded.: à Henri Fabert
MSS: BNF 9615(1), pp. 4–7, 10–13, 16–19. Neat copies of Nos. 1–3 with humorous
texts. The preface (BNF 9615(1), p. 1), the commentary for the performers, and an
introductory ‘ritournelle’ to No. 1 (p. 3) were all removed before publication. Satie
also deliberately numbered the songs ‘1-3-2’ at this stage (as with the 3 parts of
Parade in 1916), but thought better of it before publication (see Orledge, 1984–5,
pp. 158–63 for further details of the compositional process)
BNF 9615(5). Copy for printer of Nos. 1–3 in elaborate Gothic calligraphy. As
printed, the decorative anacruses in No. 3 were added at this stage
BNF 20314(1–3). Neat copies made for Jane Bathori, as in printed ed.
BNF 9615(2), pp. 12–14, 18–20, 24–6. Transpositions for tenor, pf of Nos. 1–3,
made for M. Fabert of the Paris Opéra
BNF Rés. Vma 168. Corrected proofs
Sketches: No. 1: BNF 9593(2), pp. 1–7 (with draft on pp. 4–7); No. 2: BNF
9593(2), pp. 8–9, 12–13, 16–17; BNF 9615(3), pp. 2–3; No. 3: BNF 9593(2), pp.
8–10, 14–15, 18–23; BNF 9615(4), pp. 1–9
pubn: Rouart-Lerolle, Nov 1916, oblong format (RL 10168)
prem.: 2 April 1916 by Henri Fabert and Satie, Ecole Lucien de Flagny, 25 rue de
la Tour, Paris 16e
1915
Rêverie sur un plat
composed: ? 1915
music: inc. piece for pf
MS: BNF 9625(1), pp. 6–7
unpubd
Appendix 297
La Mer est pleine d’eau: c’est à n’y rien comprendre
composed: ? 1915
music: inc. piece for pf with orch indications for 2 cl, eng hn, str. Perhaps Satie’s
delayed reaction to Debussy’s La Mer?
MS: BNF 9625(2), pp. 6–9
pubn: pf version (completed Orledge), SOUNDkiosk, Brighton, 2010 (SKPE
07). The completed orch version remains unpubd but is available from 6 Dorset
Gardens, Brighton BN2 1RL
prem.: 16 April 2010, Robert Orledge (pf), Gresham College, London
Cinq Grimaces pour ‘Le Songe d’une nuit d’été’
composed: ? March–‘2 April 1915’

music: incidental music for Jean Cocteau’s unrealised production of Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (adapted text lost). Planned for the Cirque Médrano
with scenery and costumes by the cubist painters Albert Gleizes and André Lhote.
Rehearsals (involving the ‘Clowns Fratellini’) were terminated during July 1915.
The idea for the production came from Edgard Varèse, who planned a ‘pot-pourri
de musiques françaises’ with 9 pieces by Florent Schmitt, Ravel, Stravinsky, Satie
and himself (see Volta, 1992, pp. 131–8). Only Satie’s 5 Grimaces for orch (pic,
fl, ob, eng hn, cl, bn, dbn, hn, 2 tpt, 2 trbn, tuba, timp, perc, str) were composed
(somehow without Satie ever meeting Cocteau in the process)
1 Préambule
2 Coquecigrue [portrait of Ravel]
3 Chasse
4 Fanfaronnade [portrait of Varèse]
5 Pour sortir [Retraite]
MSS: Ho 193: 48. OS, 24pp. No. 5 completed by Milhaud (1 Nov 1925) from
Satie’s inc. draft dated ‘2 April 1915’
Ho 193: 40. Orig. plans for the Grimaces: ‘Prologue.
1 Fanfare de cirque burlesque: 20 mesures ignoblement bêtes.
2 Chants de coqs et cocassesseries diverses: 16 mesures.
3 Stupide fanfare de chasse. Cuivres, puis bois: deux reprises de 8 mesures.
4 Sonnerie abjecte jouée par tout l’orchestre: Polka militaire et grossière, fortement
idiote: 16 mesures.
5 Retraite ridicule et saugrenue rendue par tout l’orchestre: 12 mesures, reprisés
200 fois.’ (Ho 193: 40, pp. 16–19 may be Satie’s first sketches for these)
BNF 9625(2), p. 3. Plans for titles, as in printed version, but with project described
as Grimaces, Pataqués & Interstices pour le ‘Songe d’une Nuit d’Eté’
Sketches and orch preparations: No. 1: BNF 9625(2), pp. 16–19; 9625(4), pp.
2–3. No. 2: BNF 9625(2), p. 14; 9625(4), pp. 2–3, 10–14. No. 3: BNF 9625(3),
pp. 2–7. No. 4: BNF 9625(4), pp. 6–7. No. 5: Ho 193: 49 (‘Thème de la retraite’);
BNF 9625(1), pp. 2–3; 9625(3), pp. 8–9; 9625(5), pp. 1–13, with short score on
pp. 14–17
pubn: Pf red. by Milhaud (1925): Universal Edition, Nov 1929 (UE 9915)
OS by Satie (No. 5 completed by Milhaud), Universal Edition, March 1929 (UE
9967)
prem.: 17 May 1926, Festival Erik Satie, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Orch
cond. Roger Désormière
Avant-dernières pensées (orig. Etranges rumeurs)
composed: ‘23 Aug–6 Oct 1915’

1 Idylle (‘23 Aug’) [‘Un poète aime la Nature, & la dit’]
2 Aubade (‘6 Oct’) [‘Un fiancé sous le balcon de sa fiancée’]
3 Méditation (‘3 Oct’)
ded.: 1 à Debussy
2 à Paul Dukas
3 à Albert Roussel
MSS: BNF 9578(1), pp. 2–5, 8–11, 14–19. Neat copies for printer of all 3;
F-Hon: Sketchbook with 19pp. music, 4pp. text. Neat first drafts of Nos. 1–3 with
additional (unpubd) texts relating to ‘these observations of myself’. The orig. title
of the set was Etranges rumeurs, and the orig. order was 1-3-2, then 2-1-3, before
Satie decided on 1–3 above; BNF Rés. Vma 158. Corr. proofs, 1916
Sketches: No. 1: F-Ppc. No. 2: BNF 9578(2), pp. 3–11 (also titled Etranges
rumeurs). No. 3: BNF 9578(2), pp. 12–15
pubn: Rouart-Lerolle, Nov 1916 (RL 10167); Salabert
prem.: 30 May 1916 by Satie chez Mme Germaine Bongard, 5 rue de Penthièvre,
Paris 8e in an ‘Audition Satie-Granados’, in conjunction with an exhibition of
modern art. (The programme in F-Pfs states that this was the premiere. The second
performance was given during an ‘Instant Musical’ at the Société Lyre et Palette
on 19 Nov 1916)
1916
L’Aurore aux doigts de rose (Verley arr. Satie)
composed: [Jan–6 Feb 1916]

music: the second of 2 Pastels sonores for pf by Satie’s wealthy pupil Albert
Verley, which Satie orchestrated and then arr. for pf duet. Scored for pic, 2 fl, ob,
eng hn, 2 cl in B flat, 2 bn, 2 hn, 2 tpt in C, 2 trbn, tuba, timp, perc, hp, str. Intended
for an American ballet with a scenario trans. by Henri-Pierre Roché which Satie
hoped Varèse would perform when he sent him a copy on 6 Feb 1916
MS: BNF 10034. OS by copyist, 11pp.
Appendix 299
pubn: Satie’s arr. for pf duet pubd privately by Verley, 1916 (A2V) (copy in BNF
Fol. Vm12a. 471)
Trois Mélodies
composed: ‘14 April–26 May 1916’

music: 3 songs for v, pf. The poem of No. 1 was only requested from Fargue on 16
May – ‘something very short & terribly cynical’ (see Volta, 2000, pp. 242, 836–7)
1 La Statue de bronze (Léon-Paul Fargue) (‘26 May’)
2 Daphénéo (Mimi Godebska) (‘14 April’)
3 Le Chapelier (René Chalupt, based on Chapter 7: ‘A Mad Tea-Party’ in Lewis
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The music is itself a parody of the ‘Chanson de
Magali’ from Act 2 sc. 3 of Gounod’s opera Mireille (1864) (‘14 April’)
ded.: 1 à Madame Jane Bathori
2 à Emile Engel
3 à Igor Strawinsky
MSS: Ho 193: 85–6. Neat drafts of Nos. 1, 3; BNF Rés. Vma 172, 159, 160. Corr.
proofs of Nos. 1–3, 1916
Sketches: No. 1: BNF 9585, pp. 8–15 (incl. rejected first version of vocal line on p.
10). No. 2: BNF 9584, pp. 2–13 (3 different versions with final version on pp.
10–13). No. 3: BNF 9581, pp. 16–18 (first version); pp. 18–21 (final version)
pubn: Rouart-Lerolle, Feb 1917 (RL 10170-2); Salabert
prem.: Nos. 2, 3: 18 April 1916 by Jane Bathori and Ricardo Viñes. Société Lyre
et Palette in Festival Satie-Ravel
All 3 (order 2-1-3): 30 May 1916 by Jane Bathori and Satie in ‘Audition Satie-
Granados’ chez Mme Germaine Bongard, 5 rue de Penthièvre, Paris 8e in conjunction
with an exhibition of modern art (programme illustrated by Matisse and Picasso)
Fables de La Fontaine
composed: [May–July 1916]

text: scenario by René Chalupt for ballet (planned for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes),
with designs by Charles Stern
music: lost or never started. Satie told his patroness Misia Sert on 9 July 1916 that
it was to be ‘very modern’ and absolutely ‘without pastiche’, perhaps intending it
to be an escape from Cocteau (see Volta, 1992, pp. 110–13)
Parade
composed: May 1916–April 1917. Opening Choral and Final added April–5 May
1919
music: ‘Ballet réaliste sur un thème de Jean Cocteau’. Satie only began to make
headway on his score after Picasso joined the team on 24 Aug 1916. He introduced
the Cubist Managers, designed the sets and costumes, and opposed Cocteau’s
ideas for choral and spoken effects. Satie completed most of the initial music
(Parts 1–3) by 1 Jan 1917 and arranged it for pf duet between 2 and 9 Jan, adding
the ‘Suprême effort et chûte des Managers’ last, probably on 9 Jan. He completed
the orch by 2 April 1917 (for pic, 2 fl, ob, eng hn, cl in E flat, 2 cl in B flat, 2
bn, 2 hn, cornet in B flat, 2 tpt in C, 3 trbn, tuba, timp, org, hp, perc (and other
‘noise-making’ instruments), str). Then in 1919 he added the opening Choral and
the Final for Diaghilev’s revival at the Salle Gaveau on 11 May. There is no one
definitive form of Parade, as Satie also specified different endings for theatrical
and concert performance
Introduction: Choral [April–5 May 1919]; Prélude du Rideau rouge [by 12 Dec
1916]
Part 1: Prestidigitateur Chinois [May–1 Sept 1916]
Part 2: Petite Fille Américaine [Oct 1916; Ragtime and Titanic sections by 19 Oct]
Part 3: Acrobates [Nov–Dec 1916]
Part 4: Final [April–5 May 1919]; Suite au ‘Prélude du Rideau rouge’ [Dec 1916]
ded.: on pf duet version: à Madame Edwards (née M[imi] Godebska)
MSS: F-Psalabert. OS, with 1919 additions, 93pp. (now in BNF)
F-Po Rés. G. f2383. Pf duet, 42pp. (MS for printer, Jan 1917, but with each part
separated by ‘Grand Silence’)
BNF 17677(5), Choral and Final. 7pp. for pf duet, copy for printer. These pp.
were only added to the pubd version in 2000 (see below), and they show that the
Suite au ‘Prélude du Rideau rouge’ was to be used in concert performance only.
This MS represents the ‘three minutes’ of music Satie somewhat reluctantly added
at Diaghilev’s request in 1919
BNF Rés. Vma 165. Corr. second proofs for pf duet, 1917
Orchestral drafts: BNF 9602(1), pp. 2–20. Part 1 complete (printed OS pp. 9–36.
Note: the pagination is the same in the Salabert scores pubd in 1979 and 2000)
BNF 9602(2), pp. 2–20. Part 2 to the sinking of the Titanic (OS, pp. 37–63 bar 4)
BNF 9602(3), pp. 4–15. Rest of Part 2-middle of Part 3 (OS, pp. 63 bar 5-82 bar
7. The rest of Part 3 is missing)
Short scores with orch indications (for rest of ballet):
BNF 9602(4), pp. 18–21. Opening Choral (OS, pp. 2–4. Bars 1–8 were added last)
BNF 9603(1), pp. 2–4. Prélude du Rideau rouge (OS, pp. 5–8)
BNF 9602(4), pp. 10–17. Part 4: Final (OS, pp. 98–end of 114)
BNF 9603(1), p. 5. Suite au ‘Prélude du Rideau rouge’ (OS, p. 115)
Preliminary sketches: Introduction and Part 1:
BNF 9603(4), p. 11. First version of Prélude du Rideau rouge
BNF 9585, pp. 2–3. Orch layouts for Part 1
BNF 9585, pp. 6–7. Titled ‘Prestidigitateur Chinois’ (text: ‘Le Prestidigitateur met
un oeuf sous une cloche d’argent’)
BNF 9603(3), pp. 1–14. Sketches for repetitive Managers’ theme found in OS, pp.
Appendix 301
9–16 [? May 1916]

BNF 9603(5), p. 11. Unused theme for ‘Roue de la loterie’ (OS, p. 17)
BNF 9603(5), p. 18. Sketches for OS pp. 32 bar 3–33 bar 3, with cl/cornet line set
to words: ‘Il lui crevèrent les yeux, lui arrachèrent la langue’
Part 2 sketches:
BNF 9603(5), p. 19. Sketches for start (OS, pp. 37–38 bar 2)
BNF 9672, pp. 1–5, 14–15. Sketches for OS, pp. 40 bar 4–end of 45
BNF 9603(4), pp. 4–5. Sketches for OS, pp. 48 bar 3–49 bar 4
BNF 9603(4), pp. 8–10. ‘Ragtime’ theme (modelled on That Mysterious Rag by
Irving Berlin and Ted Snyder (New York, Ted Snyder & Co., 1911))
BNF 9603(2), pp. 1–7. ‘Ragtime du Paquebot’ section (OS, pp. 49 bar 5–57 bar 2)
BNF 9672, pp. 6–12. 6 versions of music for giant wave that engulfs the Titanic,
leading to BNF 9603(4), p. 2 – the 7th version, still in triplet quavers – and BNF
9602(2), pp. 18–19, the final version, as in OS, pp. 61–2 (see Orledge, 1990, pp.
130–131)
BNF 9603(4), pp. 1–3, 7. ‘Titanic’ section (OS, p. 59 bar 3–end of 66, with pic/
fl theme (pp. 64–6) set to words: ‘Tic! Tic! Tic! Le “Titanic” s’enfonce, allumé
dans la mer’)
Part 3 sketches:
BNF 9603(4), pp. 16–21. Sketches for start (OS, pp. 69–end of 80)
BNF 9603(1), pp. 6–15. Sketches for OS, pp. 73–88
BNF 9603(1), pp. 18–19. Sketches for OS, pp. 93 bar 3–end of 95 (Suprême effort
et chûte des Managers)
Part 4 sketches:
BNF 9602(4), pp. 5–12, 22–4. Return of ‘Ragtime’ section (OS, pp. 101–3)
BNF 9602(4), p. 8. Return of Managers’ theme (OS, pp. 111 bars 5ff)
Also: BNF 9677(5). List of instruments and ‘noise-makers’, with ranges of
xylophone and bouteillophone, 2pp.
pubn: extract in facs. of ‘Entrée des Managers (pour le bon vieux Kisling). Erik
Satie. 31 Mai 1917’ on p. 3 of programme for premiere of duet version on 6 June
1917
Pf duet version (without Choral and Final): Rouart-Lerolle, Oct 1917 (with
preface by Auric and scenario by Cocteau) (RL 10431. There are 2 eds of this, of
which the unpriced ed. with red on rose-pink wrappers seems to be the earliest.
The second issue is priced at ‘5 fr[ancs]’ with a red on dark brown wrapper and
inferior paper); complete rev. ed. by Gilbert Delor and Ornella Volta, Salabert,
2000, showing different theatre and concert endings on pp. 33–5 (RL 10431N)
OS: Salabert, ? 1920 (facs. of orig. MS in mauve cover, 90pp., no plate no.,
‘Editions Salabert à Paris et à New-York’); Salabert, 1979 (EAS 16425); rev. ed.
by Delor and Volta, Salabert, 2000 (EAS 16425N)
prem.: For pf duet, 19 November 1916 (inc.), 6 June 1917 (complete) by Satie and
Mlle Juliette Méerovitch, Société Lyre et Palette
As ballet: 18 May 1917 (also 21, 23 May) by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Théâtre
du Châtelet. Orch cond. Ernest Ansermet. Choreography by Léonide Massine.

Perf. as second ballet, with Les Sylphides, Le Soleil de nuit and Petrushka. Cast:
Le Prestidigitateur Chinois: Léonide Massine
La Petite Fille Américaine: Mlle Maria Shabelska
Les Acrobates: Mlle Lopokova, M. Zverew
Le Manager en frac: M. Wozikovski
Le Manager de New-York: M. Statkevitch
Le Manager à cheval: MM. Oumanski and Nova
Concert prem. (complete): 11 May 1919, Salle Gaveau. Orch cond. Félix Delgrange
Revivals by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes during Satie’s lifetime: 14 Nov 1919,
Empire Theatre, Leicester Square, London (Stage prem. with added outer
movements). Repeated at same venue in Dec 1920; 19 and 21 May 1921, Théâtre
Lyrique Municipal de la Gaîté, Paris; 21 June 1923, Gaîté Lyrique. Cond. Ernest
Ansermet (when Satie complained to Diaghilev about his sluggish interpretation
and about Cocteau’s stage noises); 27 June 1924, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées
Note: Diaghilev only mounted 10 stage performances of Parade
1917
Trois farces de tabarin
composed: [early 1917]

text: Léon-Paul Fargue. ? Lost
music: intended for ballet (style Munichois) at Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier with
scenery by Charles Stern. Lost or never started
Embarquement pour Cythère
composed: March 1917

music: inc. piece for vn, pf inspired by Watteau’s painting. This work is mentioned
in letters to the violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange on 23–24 March 1917 and
may have been intended as a companion piece to the Choses vues à droite et à
gauche (1914). The prem. was planned for 17 May 1917 at the Salle Huyghens
with Pierre Lucas (pf) but Satie was too preoccupied with Parade to complete it
ded.: à Hélène Jourdan-Morhange
MSS: BNF 9623(1), pp. 22–31. Sketches for a piece for vn, pf in G major in 12/8
time, contemporary with Portrait de Socrate. ? BNF 9624, pp. 32–3 (sketch in B
flat)
pubn: Salabert, 1995 (completed and ed. R. Orledge) (EAS 19338p)
prem.: 22 July 1995 by George Ewart (vn) and Roger Nichols (pf), Bishop’s
Palace, Hereford, UK
Appendix 303
Sonatine bureaucratique
composed: July 1917

music: neo-classical sonatine for pf, modelled on Clementi’s Sonatina in C (the
first of his 6 Progressive Pianoforte Sonatinas, Op. 36 (1797, rev. ed. c.1820))
1 Allegro
2 Andante
3 Vivache [sic]
ded.: à Juliette Méerovitch, amicalement
MSS: BNF 9624, pp. 16–21, 22–5, 28–31. Drafts for movements 1–3. 1 has
different text to pubd ed.; 2 is inc., again with a different text; 3 is also inc.)
Sketches: 1 BNF 9624, pp. 5, 10–13; 2 BNF 9624, pp. 7, 22–3, 32–3; 3 BNF 9624,
pp. 6, 8–9, 15, 24–5, 40
pubn: Stéphane Chapelier, Sept 1917 (SC 209); Philippo, Dec 1917 (P669);
Editions Combre, 1974
prem.: 1 Dec 1917, Juliette Méerovitch, Salle Huyghens
Musique d’ameublement
composed: 1917
music: 2 ‘furnishing’ pieces for small ensemble
1 Tapisserie en fer forgé. 4 bars for fl, cl, tpt, str ‘pour l’arrivée des invités (grande
réception). A jouer dans un vestibule. Mouvement: Très riche.’
2 Carrelage phonique (orig. Teinture sonore). 4 bars for fl, cl, str. ‘Peut se jouer à
un lunch où à un contrat de mariage. Mouvement: Ordinaire.’
MSS: US-Eu. Neat copies of both; BNF 9623(2), pp. 36–7. Plans and sketches
pubn: No. 2 in facs. in John Cage: Notations (New York, Something Else Press,
1969). Nos. 1, 2 in Musique d’ameublement, Salabert, 1973, p. 4 (EAS 17141);
rev. ed. by Ornella Volta, 1998 (score: EAS 17141p; parts EAS 17141m)
La Veille du combat
composed: ? 1917
music: inc. song for v, pf
MS: BNF 9623(4), pp. 2–4 (pf part inc.)
unpubd
Socrate (referred to in 1917 as Vie de Socrate)
composed: 6 Jan 1917–‘Aug 1918’. Orch. rev. up to 10 Oct 1918

text: extracts from the Dialogues de Platon (trans. Victor Cousin).
Satie chose this in preference to the more modern trans. by Mario Meunier for its
clarity, simplicity and beauty, and he found Plato to be ‘a perfect collaborator’.
From the 39 chapters in Le Banquet, Satie set 4 passages from chapter 32, and
1 passage from each of chapters 33 and 35 as Part 1. From the 64 chapters of
Phèdre, he set 2 passages from chapter 4, and 1 from chapter 5 as Part 2. From
the 67 chapters of Phédon, he set 4 passages from chapter 3, 1 from chapter 33, 2
from chapter 35, 3 from chapter 38, 2 from chapter 65, and 1 from chapter 67 as
Part 3. He made no additions or changes of order to the 20 paragraphs he selected
(information from Volta, 1987, pp. 59–60, n. 19)
music: ‘Symphonic drama in 3 parts’ for 4 sopranos (2 high, 2 mezzo) and small
orch (fl, ob, eng hn, cl, bn, hn, tpt, hp, timp, str)
1 Portrait de Socrate (Alcibiade, Socrate)
2 Bords de l’Ilissus (Socrate, Phèdre)
3 Mort de Socrate (Phédon)
ded.: à Madame la Princesse Edmond de Polignac [who commissioned Socrate in
Oct 1916] et à la Mémoire du Prince Edmond de Polignac
MSS: Fondation Polignac, Ker-Jean, Domaine de Kerbastic, 56520 Guidel,
Brittany. VS, 53pp. (‘Aug 1918’); OS, 98pp. (Parts 1: pp. 1–20; 2: pp. 21–47; 3:
pp. 49–98); BNF Rés. Vma 171. Corr. proofs of VS, 1919
Orchestral drafts:
BNF 9623(5), pp. 1–17 (Part 1)
BNF 9623(5), pp. 18–24; 9623(6), pp. 13–17 (Part 2, material found in VS pp.
15–20 bar 3 and 20 bar 4–23 bar 5. The rest of the orch draft is missing)
Sketches and drafts for v, pf:
Part 1: BNF 9623(1), pp. 21–2, 32–40 (VS, p. 4 bar 8–11 bar 1)
BNF 9623(4), pp. 1, 4–9, 12–17 (VS, pp. 1–6 bar 10; pp. 15–17 are a neat copy of
BNF 9623(1), pp. 32–5)
BNF 9623(2), pp. 1–7 (VS 11 bar 2–14 bar 9; the last 2 bars of Part 1 are missing),
40 (rhythmic sketch for death of Socrates)
Part 2: BNF 9623(2), pp. 8–31 (VS, pp. 15–34)
Part 3: BNF 9623(1), pp. 1–20 (VS, pp. 35–55 bar 8; earliest draft)
BNF 9611, pp. 1–3 (sketches), 4–24 (VS, p. 35– end 61; second draft)
BNF 9623(3), pp. 4–19, 2–3, 20 (VS, p. 62 bar 1–end; though the end is different
from VS, p. 71)
BNF 9677(1), sketchbook marked ‘“Socrate”. Brouillon’ on cover, which is all
that has survived
pubn: VS (with preface by René Chalupt): Editions de La Sirène, 31 Jan 1920
(but © 1919 on title page and p. 1) (ED2LS, 15 francs); rev. ed. by Satie, dated ‘le
1er juin 1921’ appears in late Oct 1921 at 20 francs (also ED2LS); Eschig, 1973
(ME 8092)
OS: Eschig, 1950 (for hire only)
prem.: Private performances include: 24 June 1918 by Jane Bathori and Satie,
chez Jane Bathori (Part 3 only)
16 Feb 1919 by Bathori and Satie (complete), chez la Princesse de Polignac, 57
Appendix 305
avenue Henri-Martin, Paris 16e

20 Feb 1919 with André Gide as reciter, chez les Godebski
21 March 1919 by Suzanne Balguerie and Satie (complete) at Adrienne Monnier’s
bookshop (La Maison des Amis des Livres), 7 rue de l’Odéon, Paris 6e
25 May 1919 by Balguerie and Satie (complete), chez Mme Berchut, 3 rue Edouard
Fournier, Paris 16e
14 Dec 1919, ? complete, chez Lucien Vogel
Public prem. with pf: 14 Feb 1920 by Jane Bathori and Suzanne Balguerie with
André Salomon (pf), SN, Salle de l’Ancien Conservatoire
Public prem. with orch: 7 June 1920 by Marya Freund. Orch cond. Félix Delgrange.
Festival Erik Satie, Salle Erard
1918
Conte pour un ballet
composed: [1918]
text: Louise Faure-Favier: Six contes et deux rêves (Paris, Editions Figuière,
1918), incl. ‘Conte pour un ballet’, ded. to Satie at the suggestion of Guillaume
Apollinaire (see Volta, 2000, pp. 839–40)
music: never started
Note: the concept of a dreaming child whose toys come to life and dance recurs in
Massine’s ballet Premier amour (using Satie’s Trois Morceaux en forme de poire),
which was produced alongside Satie’s Mercure in June 1924. The idea was very
much in the air at the time as the Debussy/Hellé ballet La Boîte à joujoux (1913),
Diaghilev’s La Boutique fantasque (1919), and the Colette/Ravel opera L’Enfant
et les sortilèges (1920–1925) demonstrate
1919
Nocturnes (5)
composed: ‘Aug–Nov 1919’

music: an initial set of 3 Nocturnes in D major for pf, to which a further 2 were
added (in F sharp minor and F major). Satie planned to publish 7 Nocturnes and
it seems likely from the ‘Harmonies pour les 5e–6e & 7e Nocturnes’ in BNF
9609(2), p. 20 (see Orledge, 1990, p. 195) that these were orig. meant to form
another set of 3 centered on F major, with the 4e Nocturne as a sort of interlude
between the 2 groups. However, only No. 5 was completed before Satie passed on
to other projects.
Première Nocturne (‘Aug 1919’)
Deuxième Nocturne (‘Sept 1919’)
Troisième Nocturne (‘Oct 1919’)

Quatrième Nocturne (‘Oct 1919’)
Cinquième Nocturne (‘Nov 1919’)
ded.: 1 à Madame Marcelle Meyer
2 à André Salomon
3 à Madame Jean Hugo
4 à Madame la Comtesse Etienne de Beaumont
5 à Madame Georges Cocteau
MSS: 1 BNF 9609(2), pp. 2–6 (draft, with descriptive commentary about an old
‘Will-o’-the-wisp’ that was withdrawn before publication. The orig. title was Faux
Nocturne)
2 BNF 9666, pp. 6–9 (rough draft)
3 BNF 9609(1), pp. 2–5 (rough draft)
4 BNF 9609(1), pp. 10–11 (draft; a neat copy of bars 13–16 can be found in BNF
9666, p. 10)
5 PLU
Sketches: 1 BNF 9609(2), p. 1
2 BNF 9666, p. 5 (intervallic plan)
3 BNF 9609(1), p. 1
4 BNF 9609(1), pp. 6–8 (unused sketches); p. 9 (first version of start)
5 BNF 9609(1), pp. 12–13 (unused sketches)
Note: Numerous sketches for the starts of other Nocturnes exist in BNF 9609(2),
pp. 7–14; 9609(3), pp. 4–15; 9609(4), pp. 1–13; 9673, pp. 1–3, 18–20. As these are
mostly in D major, it is likely that some at least were rejected trials for Nocturnes
1–3. However, Satie advertised a ‘6e Nocturne’ with Demets in 1920 (no price
given), and he told Robert Caby in 1925 that it was virtually complete and might
one day be pubd. The only contender for this title is the draft found in BNF
9609(2), pp. 15–18, which only lacks a left-hand part in bars 6–7. Although it is
based in D major, its modulatory range is far wider and it is much more chromatic
than in Nocturnes 1–3. Also, as Satie’s plans for the three Nocturnes (5–7) was
never carried through, it seems more likely that he decided to make a cyclic return
to D major. Likewise, the only contender for the ‘7e Nocturne’ comes in BNF
9609(4), pp. 6–8 as a 12-bar start, again in D, constructed from a large range of
one-bar cells. This has been completed, using Satie’s material in different ways, by
Robert Orledge, James Nye and Jamie Crofts.
pubn: 1–3: Rouart-Lerolle, 1919, wrappers printed in black on shiny noisette
paper (the version in red is probably later) (RL 11081, 11087, 11090); Salabert
4–5: Demets, 1920 (E1963/1965D), with advert for ‘6e Nocturne’ on final page;
Eschig
6 (ed. Orledge): Eschig, 1994 (ME 8686)
7 (completed Orledge, Nye, Crofts): SOUNDkiosk, Brighton, 2010 (SKPE 03).
Another Nocturne completed by Orledge from Satie’s start is available as SKPE 08
Nos. 1–6 in volume: Salabert, 2006 (EAS 19935)
prem.: 1: 18 March 1920 by Jane Mortier, Salle Pleyel
Appendix 307
1–3: 7 June 1920 by Ricardo Viñes. Festival Erik Satie, Salle Erard
4: 4 January 1923 by Jean Wiéner, ‘le quatrième concert Jean Wiéner, consacré à
Erik Satie et à Poulenc’, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées
5: ? 1921 by Marcelle Meyer
6: 29 May 1987 by Robert Orledge, Northcott Theatre, Exeter, UK
7: 15 May 2010 by Robert Orledge, Jamie Crofts, Friends’ Meeting House,
Brighton, UK
Marche de Cocagne
composed: ‘Nov 1919’

music: march for 2 tpt in C, later used as the outer sections of the second of the
Trois Petites Pièces montées (bars 1–8, repeated as 17–24)
MS: PLU
pubn: in facs. (dated ‘Nov. 1919’) in Almanach de Cocagne pour l’An 1920, p. 7
(Editions de La Sirène, 1920) with woodcut illustrations by Raoul Dufy (see Volta,
1979, p. 75); SOUNDkiosk, Brighton, 2011 (SKI 03, with 1921 Sonnerie)
Trois Petites Pièces montées (orig. Trois Petites Marches)
composed: Nov–Dec 1919. Orch completed ‘3 Jan 1920’

music: 3 short pieces for pf duet or orch (fl, ob, cl in B flat, bn, hn, 2 tpt in C, trbn,
perc, str) inspired by the stories of Pantagruel and his father Gargantua (1532–4)
by François Rabelais. No. 1 also exists as pf solo
1 De l’enfance de Pantagruel (Rêverie)
2 Marche de Cocagne (Démarche)
3 Jeux de Gargantua (Coin de Polka)
MSS: OS: PLU, formerly in F-Pca. 20pp., dated ‘3 Jan 1920’
No. 1 for pf solo: PLU (sold at Sotheby’s, London, 7 Dec 2001, lot 181). 1p. (with
facs. in catalogue) ded. ‘à Mme Juliet Henriquet’
BNF Rés. Vma 167. Corr. proofs for pf duet, 1920
pubn: No. 1 for pf solo: Editions de La Sirène, 22 Feb 1921, with 7 rue Pasquier
address (ED33LS); Eschig, 1968
Pf duet: Editions de La Sirène, 1921 (ED36LS); Eschig, 1977
OS: Editions de La Sirène, 1921 (ED65LS; parts ED50LS); Eschig, 1977 (ME
7795)
prem.: 21 Feb 1920, Comédie des Champs-Elysées. Orch cond. by Vladimir
Golschmann
For pf duet: 19 Dec 1920 by André Salomon and Satie
1920
Musique d’ameublement (Sons industriels)
composed: Feb–March 1920

music: 2 short ‘entr’actes’ for pf duet, 3 cl (in E flat, B flat, A), trbn. No. 1 may
be Satie’s version of the student song ‘Gaudeamus igitur’. No. 2 contains extracts
from Mignon’s Act 1 Romance (‘Connais-tu le pays, où fleurit l’oranger?’) in
Ambroise Thomas’ Mignon (1886), and the second theme of Saint-Saëns’ Danse
macabre (1874, bars 50–57)
1 1er Entr’acte (Chez un bistrot)
2 2d Entr’acte (Un salon)
MSS: FES. Score, 12pp. (SAT 7.2)
Ex-Archives Amédée Ozenfant, Paris (Marcelle Meyer coll.) 1p. March 1918.
Advertisement about aims of ‘furnishing music’ (see below); BNF 9601(1), pp.
1–9; 9601(2), pp. 3–5, 26–30; 9605(2), pp. 1–5 (sketches); 9585, p. 4 (modification
of main theme of Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre)
pubn: Salabert, 1998, ed. Ornella Volta (EAS 17141p), pp. 2–9, with other
‘furnishing music’ from 1917 and 1923. This includes Satie’s advertisement of
March 1918 for a ‘furnishing divertissement’ organised by the group of musicians
known as the Nouveaux Jeunes: ‘Furnishing music replaces “waltzes” and
“operatic fantasies” etc. Don’t be confused! It’s something else!!! No more “false
music” … Furnishing music completes one’s property; … it’s new; it doesn’t upset
customs; it isn’t tiring; it’s French; it won’t wear out; it isn’t boring’ (see Volta,
1988, pp. 27–8, no. 65);
SOUNDkiosk, Brighton, 2010 (score and parts ed. Orledge) (SKI 01)
prem.: 8 March 1920, Galerie Barbazanges by Marcelle Meyer and Andrée
Varaubourg (pf duet), with MM. Linger, Duquès and Picassou (clars). Performed
in the intervals of Max Jacob’s 3-Act comedy Ruffian toujours, truand jamais (now
in the BNF, Fonds Didier Gompel-Netter). An exhibition of children’s drawings
(Les Belles promesses) ran simultaneously at the gallery, and the whole event was
organised by Pierre Bertin, who played the role of Lucien in, and directed Jacob’s
play
Premier Menuet
composed: April–‘June 1920’

music: piece for pf, perhaps the first of an intended series of 3. For other Minuets,
see 1909 above, and BNF 9601(1), pp. 10–19; 9605(1), pp. 3–5 (1920)
ded.: à Claude Dubos[c]q
MSS: BNF 10042, copy for printer, 4pp, ‘June 1920’; BNF 9605(2), pp. 2–5,
draft; BNF 9605(1), pp. 1–3, sketches
pubn: in Feuillets d’Art, II/1 (Oct 1921), pp. 51–4 (without ded.); Editions de La
Appendix 309
Sirène, March 1922 (ED99LS); Eschig

prem.: 17 Jan 1922 by Marcelle Meyer. Salle de la Ville l’Evêque
Motifs lumineux
composed: [? Summer 1920]

music: ? 3 pieces for pf, with illustrations by Jules Dépaquit. Advertised by
Editions de La Sirène ‘by subscription, to appear in Oct–Nov 1920’. No music
known
La Belle Excentrique. Fantaisie sérieuse
composed: July–Oct 1920

music: 3 dances and an interlude (to cover costume changes, where necessary).
Written for the dancer Caryathis (née Elisabeth Toulemon; later Mme Elise
Jouhandeau) as a ‘fantaisie sérieuse’ for small orch (pic, ob, cl in B flat, bn, hn in
F, tpt in C, trbn, perc (2 players), str), or pf duet or pf solo
Grande Ritournelle (= Légende Californienne of 1905, with some revisions and a
new trio section)
1 Marche Franco-Lunaire (completed 26 Aug)
2 Valse du ‘Mystérieux baiser dans l’œil’ (completed 23 Sept)
3 Cancan Grand-Mondain (Sept–Oct)
Note: In Satie’s contract with Editions de La Sirène of 22 July 1921 (facs. in Volta,
1987, p. 38) the order is as above, but the total duration (‘12 minutes’) implies that
the Grand Ritournelle was played twice, between each of the dances. This order
therefore supersedes Satie’s original plan in BNF 9605(1), where the Grande
Ritournelle (milieu) comes only once, between dances 2 and 3. Satie signed his
contract with Caryathis on 15 Aug 1920 (F-Ptb)
ded.: A Madame Caryathis
MSS: OS: Ecole Normale de Musique, 114bis boulevard Malesherbes, Paris 8e, or
F-Pmmm (if planned transferral of archives is complete)
F-Pbd. Nos. 1 and 2 in pf solo version.
Pf duet version: PLU
FES. Orchestral plan and sketches, 11pp. (SAT 7.4). An early plan also exists
inside the front cover of Ho 193:24 which describes it as ‘Très Parisien’, and
shows that Satie envisaged a musical tour through ‘three periods’ of Parisian
popular entertainment, titled:
1 ‘1900: Marche pour une Grande Cocotte’
2 ‘1910: Elégance du Cirque (Ecuyère)’
3 ‘1920: Cancan Moderne’
Sketches and drafts: Grande Ritournelle: BNF 9629, pp. 26–7; Ho 193: 60 (as
Légende Californienne, c.1905); 9669, p. 1 (trio theme, 1920); Ho 193: 40, pp.
14–15 (1920)
No. 1: BNF 9605(1), pp. 7–8 (first draft); 9605(2), pp. 6–19 (numerous sketches
for final version, see Orledge, 1990, pp. 73–7); 9605(3), pp. 6–7 (trio for orch)
No. 2: BNF 9605(3), pp. 5–11 (draft)
No. 3: BNF 9605(3), p. 4 (rejected version); 9605(4), pp. 1–17 (sketches for final
version)
pubn: Pf duet: Editions de La Sirène, Dec 1922 (ED94LS); Eschig, 1950 (ME
8233); rev. ed. by Ornella Volta, Eschig, 1987 (also ME 8233)
Pf solo (Nos. 1, 2): Eschig, 1994 (ME 8685)
OS: Eschig, 1951 (ME 7835, 65pp., for hire only)
prem. (private): 8 Jan 1921 chez Pierre Bertin, 120 boulevard du Montparanasse,
Paris 14e
prem. (public): 14 June 1921, Théâtre du Colisée, danced by Caryathis. Orch
cond. Vladimir Golschmann
29 June 1921, Oasis Theatre (in the couturier Paul Poiret’s garden). Cond. Satie
Quatre Petites Mélodies
composed: Sept–‘Dec 1920’

music: 4 miniature songs for v, pf
1 Elégie (Lamartine; stanza 7 of ‘L’Isolement’ (April 1818), pubd in Premières
Méditations (1820)) (‘27 Sept’)
2 Danseuse (Cocteau) (‘8 Oct’)
3 Chanson (anon., eighteenth century) (‘25 Nov’)
4 Adieu (Radiguet: orig. titled ‘Mouchoir’, pubd in Les Joues en feu (‘Lettres d’un
Alphabet’) (Paris, François Bernouard) (Nov–‘Dec 1920’)
ded.: 1: à la Mémoire de Claude Debussy (En souvenir d’une admirative et douce
amitié de trente ans)
3: à Bertrand Guigan (first ed.)
MSS: Drafts: No. 1: BNF 9576, pp. 10–11. No. 2: BNF 9616, pp. 6–7. No. 3: BNF
9616, p. 11 (’25 Nov’); Ho 193: 73 (final copy, ‘Dec 1920’). No. 4: BNF 9574, pp.
6–7 (‘Dec 1920’)
Sketches: No. 1: BNF 9576, pp. 8–9. No. 2: PLU. No. 3: BNF 9616, p. 10 (first
version). No. 4: BNF 9574, pp. 1–4
pubn: No. 1: in La Revue musicale, 1/2 (Dec 1920): Musical supplement: Le
Tombeau de Debussy, No. X, p. 32
No. 2: in L’Illustration des modes, 1/3 (18 Nov 1920), pp. 84–5 with illustration
by Charles Martin, commissioned by Lucien Vogel
No. 3: facs. as Chanson à boire in the Almanach de Cocagne pour l’An 1921
(Editions de La Sirène), pp. 130–131
All 4: Editions de La Sirène, Dec 1922 (ED98LS); Eschig
prem.: Danseuse, Chanson, Adieu: 19 Dec 1920 by Jane Bathori and André
Salomon (pf), Galerie La Boétie
Appendix 311
All 4: 12 April 1921 by Pierre Bertin and Marcelle Meyer, Galerie Georges Giroux,
Brussels
Paul & Virginie
composed: ? April 1920–Dec 1923 (mostly July 1921–Oct 1922)

text: opéra-comique in 3 Acts based on the story by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.
Dialogue and lyrics by Jean Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet. The orig. libretto
(from which Satie worked) is now in the University of Syracuse, USA, and is all
in Radiguet’s hand (90pp., dated ‘Bassin d’Arcachon, le 16 septembre 1920’),
though it is possible that Cocteau dictated all or parts of this. Later editions
were prepared from a copy in the Cocteau Archives at Milly-la-Forêt: Raymond
Radiguet: Gli inediti (ed. Liliana Garuti Delli Ponti) (Parma, Ugo Guanda editore,
1967), pp. 58–159; and in Paul et Virginie (Paris, J.C. Lattès, Edition Spéciale,
1973), 119pp., where the Acts are as follows:
1: Le paradis perdu [on the Ile de Saint-Louis, now Mauritius]
2: Chez les sauvages [Paris]
3: Le vrai paradis [as Act 1]
Satie’s letter to Cocteau on 20 April 1920 suggests that he was part of the project
from its inception. The sketches in BNF 9576 even suggest that an operatic trilogy
was planned in the summer of 1920 comprising Paul & Virginie, Robinson Crusoé
and Don Quichotte. So the oft-quoted passage about Paul & Virginie being ‘read’
to Satie for the first time on ‘22 Nov’ 1920 was probably a piece of publicity for the
project by Cocteau, like his observation (also in Le Coq, No. 4 (Nov 1920)) that
Paul et Virginie will be Satie’s next work and his farewell to musical composition.’
Satie’s response to this was the last of the Quatre Petites Mélodies above, retitled
as his own ‘Adieu’ to Cocteau (see Whiting, 1999, pp. 508–9)
music: inc. opéra-comique, for which only a few sketches have survived, plus
Satie’s plans for Act 1 and a list of characters and their vocal ranges. However, André
Derain was brought in to design sets and costumes (on Satie’s recommendation)
in the summer of 1921 and Satie is known to have reached Act 2 in the ‘genre
Rossini’ in Sept 1921 (see Orledge, 1990, p. 236). He wanted Pierre Bertin to play
Paul in Oct 1921 and signed a production contract with Jacques Hébertot for the
Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 26 Nov.
In May 1922, however, Cocteau turned his sights towards Diaghilev’s Ballets
Russes, and Satie (who was not keen on Hébertot) accepted this change in early
Nov. Diaghilev planned to include the work in his ‘Second French Festival of
Opéras-Comiques 1924–5’ in Monte Carlo (in ‘2 Acts’), but before this (in Dec
1923) Satie had already abandoned the opera, due to Cocteau’s incessant ‘intrigues’
and perhaps to his own lack of progress in writing the light, spontaneous score he
thought appropriate.
As Satie never destroyed his scores and 1922 was otherwise a musically non-
productive year, it is possible that more of Paul & Virginie will come to light, and
perhaps lead to a re-evaluation of Satie’s later career. Probably the music would
have been similar to that of Satie’s recitatives for Gounod’s Le Médecin malgré
lui, which helped divert his attention from the opera in the latter half of 1923.
After Satie broke with Cocteau in Jan 1924, the latter approached other composers
to complete Paul & Virginie, incl. Poulenc (Aug 1924), Henri Sauguet (1931)
and Nicolas Nabokov. Only Sauguet began work on it (1931–3), using Satie’s
annotated libretto (containing ‘musical intentions rather than musical notes’). But
all either composer actually finished was a setting of the opening Chanson de
Marins [La ‘Belle Cubaine’] from Act 1, leaving Cocteau’s opera as an interesting
curiosity that never reached the stage
MSS: F-Ppc. Notebook containing 9pp. of pencil sketches, inked over in black
(pp. 1–7, 9–10) with the start of the Chœur de Marins in its second (1922) setting
on p. 18 and verse 1 of its text on the cover (beginning: ‘Ils étaient tous jeunes &
beaux/ Sur la “Belle Cubaine” oh! ho!’). On p. 1 are the words: ‘La Mélodie et son
accompagnement feront corps/ Légère, très levée & pétillante comme champagne,
telle doit être la musique de Paul & Virginie’ (cited in Volta, 1989, p. 70)
BNF 9671, pp. 7–13. Complete text of La ‘Belle Cubaine’ from Act 1 (5 verses)
and musical sketches in G minor for first setting of verse 1 (? 1922). (Extracts in
Orledge, Music & Letters, 1990)
F-Ppc. Notebook with 3pp. of abandoned sketches for La ‘Belle Cubaine’ and the
text of verse 1 (? 1922)
BNF 9576, p. 5. Sketch in 1913 Enfantines style, with humorous text, relating to a
dance by Paul, and a song by Virginie that ‘made the monkeys weep’ (Sept 1920).
On pp. 6–8 are sketches in similar style for Robinson Crusoé and Don Quichotte
(see Volta, 1988, pp. 17–19)
BNF 9607, pp. 2–3. Brief sketches, c.1923
US-NYpm (Koch coll., No. 1180, box 121): Plans for division of Act 1 into 11 scenes
on pp. 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 of a 96-page lined notebook (‘Le Fénelon’). Satie abandoned
these plans with the start of Act 2 on p. 11. Also ½ sheet of MS paper containing
‘Diverses Tessitures de “Paul & Virginie” considerées au point de vue “timbre”’
(see Orledge, 1990, pp. 237–8). Here, La Marquise (Virginie’s wicked aunt in
the 1973 ed. of the libretto) is cast as the ‘Comtesse d’Herbeville’ (coloratura
soprano) and her sidekick ‘Le Comte’ is cast as ‘Le Baron’ (light tenor). This, and
the subdivision of Act 1 into only 2 scenes confirms that Satie worked from an
earlier libretto
pubn: Chœur de Marins (for tenor solo, chorus of tenors, pf, ed. Orledge),
Salabert, 1995 (EAS 19336)
1921
Alice au Pays de Merveilles (Alice in Wonderland)
composed: [July–Aug 1921]

Appendix 313
text: scenario (lost) for a ballet based on Lewis Carroll’s classic story compiled by
Louise McCutcheon-Norton (later Mrs Edgard Varèse) at Satie’s request. Henri-
Pierre Roché also briefly worked on the scenario in Aug 1921, but found it boring
and too complicated (according to his diaries in US-AUS)
music: lost or never started
Supercinéma
composed: [summer 1921, ? July–Oct]

text: scenario (lost) for a ballet by Satie and Derain for Rolf de Maré’s Ballets
Suédois. Mentioned in letters from Satie to Derain as being postponed until the
1922 season (5 Sept 1921)
music: lost or never started (see Volta, 1992, p. 118)
La Naissance de Vénus
composed: [summer 1921, ? Aug 1921–1922]

text: scenario (lost) for a ballet, perhaps inspired by Botticelli’s painting, by Satie
and André Derain, intended for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Satie mentions the
project in letters to Derain, and the ballet was scheduled to appear in the 1922
Spring season at the Paris Opéra, alongside Stravinsky’s Les Noces (see Volta,
1992, p. 114)
MSS: FES. Project by Derain, 12ff (see Catalogue of Satie sur scène Exhibition,
2000, no. 93)
Sonnerie pour réveiller le bon gros Roi des Singes (lequel ne dort toujours
que d’un œil)

music: fanfare for 2 tpt in C
MSS: US-NYpm (Koch coll., No. 379, box 65). Score, 1p., ‘30 Aug 1921’; BNF
9615(4), pp. 18–19, draft; 9670, p. 6, sketch
pubn: in Fanfare No. 1/1 (1 Oct 1921), p. 11; Editions BIM (Bulle, Switzerland),
1981 (BIMTP 4); SOUNDkiosk, Brighton, 2011 (SKI 03, with 1919 Marche de
Cocagne)
prem.: 27 Oct 1921, Queen’s Hall, London. Cond. Eugène Goossens (in selection
of fanfares before concert)
5 July 1927, His Majesty’s Theatre, London (before curtain for Jack in the Box).
Festival Satie, organised by Diaghilev
Le Roi de la grande Ile
composed: ? Autumn 1921

text: lyric poem by Maurice Le Sieutre titled Canalise ou le Gueuleton Noir, 7
verses (beginning: ‘Le Roi de la grande Ile un grand repas donnait’)
music: song for solo v, for which Satie supplied a ? folksong melody
MSS: PLU. Listed in Catalogue autographe Berès (Hôtel Drouot, 20 June 1977,
No. 74), 1p.
pubn: in Almanach de Cocagne pour l’An 1922 (Editions de La Sirène), pp. 184–5
1922
Les Archidanses (Suite d’Archidanses)
composed: [Winter 1922–3]

text: project by Satie and André Derain, possibly for Diaghilev, for a ballet of ‘20
minutes ou 200 sécondes’ in 2 parts, plus an interlude, with 6 dancers and 3 décors
(with 3-1-4 dances in each)
MSS: F-Pbd. MS 11 111/12, 12ff. Scenario and costume designs (incl. those for a
monster and a female dancer by Derain). Titled ‘Suite d’Archidanses entièrement
créé par Monsieur Erik Satie, musicien insigne, et Monsieur Derain, peintre
idoine’. Some of Derain’s designs were used for Comte Etienne de Beaumont’s
production of Jack in the Box in May 1926; BNF 9395(3), p. 20, sketch ‘Pour
Derain’
(See Volta, 1992, pp. 101–5, and Satie sur scène catalogue, 2000, pp. 88–9,
exhibits 89–95)
1923
Divertissement (La Statue retrouvée)
composed: Feb–May 1923 (project of Dec 1922–30 May 1923)

text: scenario (lost) by Jean Cocteau commissioned by Comtesse Edith de
Beaumont in Dec 1922 for a Masked Ball at her Paris Hôtel in May 1923. The
Divertissement was to feature the newly restored eighteenth-century organ in her
music room. For this brief and final part of the entertainment, the creative team for
Parade was reassembled: Picasso was brought in to design the sets and costumes
in Feb 1923, and Massine to regulate the choreography in April
music: 53 bars for org, with tpt at end
1 Entrée (Mouvement de Marche) (after 24 May)
2 1ère Recherche
Appendix 315
3 2ème Recherche
4 A deux (vers la statue)
5 [Retraite] with tpt (17–24 May)
MSS: BNF 9608, pp. 2–9, neat org score; 9607, pp. 5–11, sketches
pubn: Salabert (ed. Orledge), 1997 (EAS 19337p)
prem.: 30 May 1923 during Masked Ball (L’Antiquité sous Louis XIV, or Le
Bal baroque) at the Hôtel of Comte Etienne de Beaumont, 2 rue Duroc, Paris
7e (the Divertissment being the 17th and final tableau vivant, involving Mme
Olga Picasso, the Marquise de Médicis, and Mme Daisy Fellowes as the Statue
awaiting discovery. As a last-minute replacement for Mme René Jacquemaire,
Daisy inspired Satie to add the opening Entrée). With Germaine Tailleferre (org,
see Ludions below)
Tenture de Cabinet préfectoral
composed: ‘28 March 1923’

music: 12 bars of ‘furnishing music’ for small orch (pic, cl in B flat, bn, hn, tpt in
C, perc, str) commissioned (via Milhaud) by Mrs Eugene Meyer (Junior) for her
home at 2201 Connecticut Avenue, Washington DC
ded.: à Madame Eugène Meyer
MSS: F-Ppc. Score, 1p.; F-Pbd. Sketch, 1p. (facs. in Rey, 1974, p. 124)
pubn: Salabert, 1973 (OS in Musique d’ameublement, pp. 2–3: EAS 17141); rev.
ed. by Ornella Volta, 1998 (score: EAS 17141p, pp. 8–9; parts: EAS 17141m)
Ludions
composed: Spring 1923, finished by 18 May

text: five short, whimsical poems by Léon-Paul Fargue, as pubd in their first
versions in Intentions, 2/13 (March 1923), pp. 1–5. This was the house journal
of Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres, at 7 rue de
l’Odéon, Paris 6e. Satie omitted the ‘Air de Julienne’, ‘Merdrigal’ and ‘Lanterne’
on p. 4 and rearranged the other poems in the order: 5, 1, 3, 2, 4 (in terms of the
list below)
music: 5 short songs for v, pf (and org)
1 Air du Rat
2 Spleen
3 La Grenouille américaine
4 Air du Poète (Papouasie) (‘May 1923’)
5 Chanson du chat
MSS: Ho 193: 42. Neat copies of Nos. 1–5, labelled ‘Chant & Piano: Madame
Jacquemaire’ on cover
Fondation Polignac, Ker-Jean, Domaine de Kerbastic, 56520 Guidel, Brittany

(coll. Comte et Comtesse Jean de Polignac): VS ‘Pour Madame Jacquemaire’,
15pp., ‘Mai 1923’. With texts of 3vv. of No. 5 copied in full
PLU (formerly F-Pca). Neat copy of No. 2, made to send to USA
FES (SAT 2.2): Complete sketch of all 5 songs on pp. 1–19 of a separate notebook,
dated ‘15 mai 1923’ at end. At this stage the songs were ready to copy into Ho
193: 42
BNF 9606, pp. 2–9. Additional org part for private premiere, with ‘Orgue: Mme
Jacquemaire’ on cover (see below); 9594, p. 5. Ordering and tonality plans for
cycle
Sketches: No. 1: BNF 9594, p. 4 (v part), pp. 6–7 (rejected 1st version); 10–13
(rejected 2nd version); 14–15 (final version); 7, 10, 12–13, 16, 18–21 (sketches)
No. 2: BNF 9594, pp. 2 (rhythmic sketch); 3 (text with variants); 8–9 (rejected 1st
version in invertible counterpoint)
Nos. 3–4: in FES sketchbook above
No. 5: BNF 9594, pp. 4–5, 21 (v part); 22 (draft)
pubn: No. 2 in facs. in Sélection, III/6 (April 1924). No. 4 in facs. in Les Feuilles
libres, VI/35 (Jan–Feb 1924), pp. 332–3, and in The Transatlantic Review, 1/5
(May 1924), pp. 368–9
All 5: Rouart-Lerolle, June 1926, brick-red wrapper (RL 11578); Salabert;
SOUNDkiosk, Brighton, 2012 (rev. ed. by R. Orledge with org, pf as at private
prem.) (SKI 02: with 3 additional Ludions set by the ed. in Satie’s 1923 style)
prem. Private: 30 May 1923 during Masked Ball (L’Antiquité sous Louis XIV,
or Le Bal baroque) chez Comte Etienne de Beaumont, 2 rue Duroc, Paris 7e,
during tableau vivant in section ‘Le Printemps’. By Mme René Jacquemaire (later
the Comtesse Marie-Blanche de Polignac), Marcelle Meyer (pf) and Germaine
Tailleferre (org, in No. 1 and introductions to Nos. 2–5). BNF 9606 and the
Polignac coll. VS above show that No. 5 had 3 verses (instead of 2 in the 1926
ed.). BNF 9606 shows that the introduction was played ‘4 fois’, thus serving to
complete the cycle.
Note: It was at this premiere that the Comte de Beaumont forgot to name Fargue as
the author of the poems in his introduction, after which the two became enemies.
In his anger, he also mistakenly blamed Satie for the omission
Public prem: 21 Dec 1923 by Jane Bathori and Satie (pf), Salle des Agriculteurs.
8 March 2011 (in rev. SOUNDkiosk ed.) by Jane Manning (S), Robert Orledge
(pf), Rose Theatre, Kingston-upon-Thames, UK
Couleurs
composed: [? summer 1923]

text: scenario (lost) for an abstract ballet by Satie and Derain for Diaghilev’s
Monte Carlo season in 1923–4 (see Volta, 1992, p. 109)
Appendix 317
Scènes nouvelles [Recitatives] for Gounod’s opéra-comique ‘Le Médecin

malgré lui’ [1858]
composed: July – 15 Dec 1923 (Act 1 by 25 Aug; Act 2 by 11 Sept; Act 3 by 6

Oct. Orch. Nov – 15 Dec)
text: libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré first performed (with Molière’s
spoken dialogue from 1666) at the Théâtre-Lyrique, Paris on 15 Jan 1858
music: 9 sections of recitative for vv and orch (2 fl, 2 ob, 2 cl in B flat, 2 bn, 2 hn in
F, 2 tpt in C, timp, str) for Diaghilev’s Monte Carlo production of Gounod’s 3-Act
opéra-comique as a fully sung opera in Jan 1924
MSS: US-NH. OS, 94pp., with final ‘Octuor’ score written by Georges Auric,
21pp. Plus 11pp. showing its adaptation from Gounod’s ‘Quintette’ (transposed
into G major)
US-Wc. 1924 orch. parts by copyist, but lacking those for timp and tpt
F-Ppc (copy in FES). VS with some orch. indications – fl, str – in 8 notebooks of
‘scènes nouvelles’, 137pp. music in total. Incl. sketches for No. 1
Sketches and preparatory material: BNF 9595(1). Typed libretto annotated by
Satie of passages to be set as Nos. 1–9, 15pp.
BNF 9595(2). Rhythmic plans for recitatives on left-hand pp., running parallel to
copied texts on right-hand pp., 73pp.
BNF 9595(3). No. 2, plus ranges of singers: Martine (mezzo); Sganarelle
(baritone); Valère (bass); Lucas (tenor). Also guides to preparing OS, 20pp.
BNF 9595(3bis). 3 postcards giving bar lengths of recitatives with key signatures,
in preparation for writing OS of 94pp.
BNF 9595(4), pp. 1–13. Nos. 3–4 (sketches for Act 2 sc. 2–4)
BNF 9595(5), pp. 3–11. No. 5 (sketches for rest of Act 2); pp. 12–19; Nos. 6–8
(sketches for Act 3, up to the ‘Quintette’ in E major)
BNF 9595(6), pp. 1–13. No. 9, up to final Octuor (sketches for rest of Act 3)
pubn: OS: Aerial Kites Press, Liverpool, 2001, 153pp. (incl. ‘Octuor-final’). 58
bound copies, Nos. I–VIII with scenic illustrations in colour
prem.: 5 Jan 1924 by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at Casino de Monte Carlo. Sets
and costumes by Alexandre Benois, choreography by Bronislava Nijinska. Cast
incl. Serge Lifar. Cond. by Édouard Flament. Further perf. took place on 13, 19
and 22 Jan 1924. (Satie’s name was (? deliberately) omitted from the souvenir
programme prepared by Louis Laloy)
First revival: 16 (and 19) April 2004. Yale Opera, Morse Recital Hall in the
Sprague Memorial Hall. Dir. by Marc Verzatt. Cond. by Ransom Wilson (duration
1 hour 25 minutes)
1924
Concurrence
composed: [? early 1924]

text: scenario (lost) for a ballet planned by Satie and Derain for Diaghilev’s ‘Second
Festival Français in Monte Carlo in 1924–5. (Note: A ballet titled Concurrence with
scenery and costumes by Derain, music by Auric and choreography by Balanchine
was perf. by the Ballets de Monte Carlo at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris
on 12 April 1932, and the two may share a common basis in a humorous song
about two tailors perf. by Xanrof at the Chat Noir cabaret (see Volta, 1992, p. 107))
Quadrille
composed: [? early 1924]

text: scenario (lost) for ballet by Satie and Georges Braque for Diaghilev’s Ballets
Russes (Satie received an advance for this on 6 April 1924)
music: lost or never started. The ballet was to be based on Chabrier’s Souvenirs
de Munich (1885–6, a set of quadrilles for pf duet based on themes from Wagner’s
Tristan und Isolde. See Volta, 1992, p. 117)
Mercure [Les Aventures de Mercure]
composed: late Feb–16 May 1924 (Tableau 1 by late March; Tableau 2 by 9 April;
Tableau 3 by 17 April. Orch. mid-April–16 May)
text: Scenario in 3 ‘incidents’ by Comte Etienne de Beaumont. ‘Poses plastiques’
by Picasso
music: ballet score for orch (pic, fl, ob, 2 cl in B flat, bn, 2hn, 2 tpt in C, trbn, tuba,
perc, str) commissioned by the Comte de Beaumont for his Soirée de Paris series
1 Ouverture (Mouvement de Marche)
TABLEAU 1
2 La Nuit
3 Danse de tendresse (a transposed and extended version of the Fugue-Valse,
c.1906)
4 Signes du Zodiaque
5 Entrée et danse de Mercure
TABLEAU 2
6 Danse des Grâces
7 Bain des Grâces
8 Fuite de Mercure
9 Colère de Cerbère
Appendix 319
TABLEAU 3 (‘au pieds de l’Etna’)

10 Polka des Lettres
11 Nouvelle Danse
12 Le Chaos [Apparation du Chaos] (Nos. 10 and 11 combined in the Polka tempo
of No. 10)
13 Final: Rapt de Proserpine
ded.: à Madame la Comtesse Etienne de Beaumont
MSS: FES (ex-coll. Henri de Beaumont): OS, 79pp., titled Les Aventures de
Mercure; Pf. red., 19pp., titled Mercure (SAT 7.1). This shows that bars 11–16 of
No. 4 and bars 1–16 of No. 11 were added after the pf. red. was complete
FES: Typewritten scenario, 3pp., by Beaumont from which Satie worked (see
Orledge, 1998, pp. 229–49)
Ho 193: 63. 9 postcards showing page plan for OS of 79pp., with section lengths,
keys and titles. Overall title: Les Aventures de Mercure. No. 12 titled Apparition
du Chaos
BNF 9596(2). Typed plan for ballet, 1p., by de Beaumont, with pencil annotations
by Satie giving orig. plan of tonalities, section lengths and timings (which were
expanded during composition). No. 13 is marked ‘Cubisme’ by Satie
Sketches and drafts: No. 1: BNF 9596(2), pp. 3, 18, 14–16 (final version)
No. 2: BNF 9596(2), pp. 4–5 (p. 4 marked ‘Apollon & Vénus’ from orig. plan)
No. 3: BNF 9635, pp. 4–9 (draft of Fugue-Valse, see movement list above)
No. 4: BNF 9596(2), pp. 5 (rejected version), 6–9, 12–13 (final version)
No. 5: BNF 9596(1), pp. 3–5
No. 6: BNF 9596(1), pp. 6, 8–12
No. 7: BNF 9596(1), pp. 1, 12–15
Nos. 8–10: BNF 9596(1), pp. 14–15, 16–17, 18–19
No. 11: BNF 9596(1), pp. 20–21 (bars 17–32); 9622(2), pp. 6–7 (bars 1–16, added
later)
No. 12: BNF 9596(1), pp. 22–4
No. 13: BNF 9622(2), pp. 1–3
pubn: OS: Universal Edition, 1977 (UE 16886)
Pf red.: Universal Edition, July 1930, 20pp. (UE 9987)
prem.: 15 June 1924 at Théâtre de la Cigale, Montmartre (as part of a Soirée
de Paris organised by Comte Etienne de Beaumont, which also incl. Milhaud’s
ballet Salade). Sets (‘Poses plastiques’) and costumes by Picasso, choreography
by Léonide Massine (who danced the role of Mercure), lighting by Loïe Fuller.
Orch cond. Roger Désormière (who was forbidden by Satie to repeat any of the
movements during the scenery changes)
Relâche [Ballet instantanéiste]
composed: late May–20 Oct 1924 (Act 1 by 27 July; Act 2 by 27 Aug. Orch. late
Aug – 20 Oct)
text: As ballet Après-dîner in 1 Act (9 scenes) by Blaise Cendrars (Nov 1923, with
Satie’s contract signed on 23 Nov). Scenario pubd in Sanouillet, 1966, pp. 255–6.
No music composed
As ‘Ballet instantanéiste’ Relâche in 2 Acts by Francis Picabia (Feb 1924), using
some ideas from Après-dîner. Scenario pubd in Sanouillet, 1966, pp. 256–7 (incl.
orig. plan for filmed interlude between Acts). The commencement of the score was
delayed by the intervention of Mercure from Feb to mid-May 1924. For the film
interlude Cinéma (26 Oct–10 Nov 1924), see below
music: ballet score for small orch (fl, ob, cl in A, bn, 2 hn, 2 tpt in C, trbn, perc
(2 players), str). This uses popular songs (like Cadet Rousselle in Nos. 11, 12, 15;
Savez-vous planter les choux? in Nos. 1, 6, 20; and Xanrof’s Flagrant délit in Nos.
8, 13) and was referred to as an ‘obscene’ or ‘pornographic’ ballet by Satie. The
movement titles below come from the OS and Nos. 1and 2 were also used in the
opening sequence of Cinéma (see below):
ACT 1
1 Ouverturette [Ouverture]
2 Projectionette [Projection]
3 Rideau
4 Entrée de la Femme
5 ‘Musique’ entre l’entrée de la Femme et sa ‘Danse sans musique’
6 Entrée de l’Homme
7 Danse de la Porte tournante (l’Homme et la Femme)
8 Entrée des Hommes
9 Danse des Hommes
10 Danse de la Femme
11 Final
ACT 2
12 Musique de Rentrée
13 Rentrée des Hommes
14 Rentrée de la Femme
15 Les Hommes se dévêtissent (La Femme se rhabille)
16 Danse de Borlin et de la Femme [Danse de l’Homme et de la Femme]
17 Les Hommes regagnent leur place et retrouvent leurs pardessus
18 Danse de la Brouette (La Femme et le Danseur)
19 Danse de la Couronne (La Femme seule)
20 La Danseur depose la Couronne sur la tête d’une spectatrice
21 La femme rejoint son fauteuil
22 La ‘Queue’ du Chien (Chanson Mimée) [Petite danse finale]
MSS: F-Psalabert (? now in BNF): OS, 134pp., ‘Oct 1924’;Pf red., 71 pp.
BNF 9622(1), p. 12. Tonal plan and first draft of movement lengths for Act 1
BNF 9622(4), p. 1. Ibid., for Act 2
BNF 9678. Plans for pagination of OS, with keys and section lengths, Acts 1 and
2, 8pp.
Appendix 321
Ho 193: 75. Plan for pagination of movements in OS, pp. 69–134 (Act 2) on
postcard from Georges Braque (with No. 17 titled: Les Hommes regagnent leur
place et se dévêtissent)
Ho 193: 74. 21 fragments showing Satie’s attempts to bisect Relâche into 2
mirrored and proportionally subdivided Acts during the orchestration in Aug–Sept
1924 (see Orledge, 1990, p. 183)
Sketches and drafts for ACT 1 (BNF 9622(1–3):
No. 1: BNF 9622(1), pp. 4, 6–7 (draft of Marche), 8 (Largo introduction), 16–17
(melodic sketches)
Nos. 2, 3: BNF 9622(1), pp. 9–10, 11
No. 4: BNF 9622(2), pp. 14–17; 9622(5), p. 20 (sketches in F)
Nos. 5–7: BNF 9622(3), pp. 1–3, 4–7, 8–9
No. 8: BNF 9622(1), p. 1 (first version); 9622(2), pp. 10–11 (final melody);
9622(3), pp. 10, 12–13 (draft)
Nos. 9, 10: BNF 9622(3), pp. 10–11, 14–17
No. 11: BNF 9622(1), pp. 2–3, 5; 9622(2), pp. 12–13; 9622(3), pp. 20–23 (sketches)
ACT 2 (BNF 9622(4–5), with recurring material from Act 1 not written out in
full. Satie, pressed for time, simply indicates the sections to be used, with their
transpositions in Act 2):
Nos. 12–15: BNF 9622(4), pp. 2–5, 6–9, 10–13, 14–15
No. 16: BNF 9622(4), pp. 16–20; 9622(5), pp. 1–3 (revision of bars 21–37)
No. 17: BNF 9622(5), pp. 4–7
No. 18: BNF 9622(5), pp. 8–11 (with calculation of how 5/4 bars fit in with the
overall scheme of 2/4 bars in units of 8); Ho 193: 76 (5 bars, noteheads only,
miscopied page)
Nos. 19, 20: BNF 9622(5), pp. 12–15, 16–18
No. 21: No draft as this is a literal repetition of No. 4 up a semitone
No. 22: BNF 9622(1), p. 13; 9622(5), pp. 20–21 (only first 4 and last 4 bars written
out. The rest derives from No. 2 letter A, down a minor third)
For other sketches of popular songs, see BNF 9622(1), pp. 14–15; 9622(2), pp.
4–5 (‘Pour [Rolf] de Maré’)
pubn: OS: Salabert (for hire only), 140pp. marked ‘©1926’ (EAS 17195)
Pf red.: Rouart-Lerolle, Dec 1926, 45pp., with coloured frontispiece by Picabia
(RL 11577). 500 copies on Alfa Lafuma paper, no separate de luxe copies appear
to exist; Salabert
prem.: 7 Dec 1924 (with public dress rehearsal on 4 Dec) by Rolf de Maré’s
Ballets Suédois, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Scenery and costumes by Picabia,
choreography by Jean Börlin. With Börlin as ‘L’Homme’ and Edith Bonsdorff as
‘La Femme’. Orch cond. Roger Désormière. 12 performances were given in 1924–
5, though the orig. premieres planned for 17, then 27 Nov had to be cancelled at
the last minute due to the illness of Börlin (see Orledge, 1990, pp. 177–84)
Cinéma. Entr’acte symphonique de ‘Relâche’
composed: 26 Oct – 10 Nov 1924

music: score for small orch (fl, ob, cl in A, bn, 2 hn, 2 tpt in C, trbn, perc (2 players),
str) to accompany film interlude by René Clair between the Acts of Relâche. The
opening sequence, with Satie and Picabia firing a cannon on the roof of the Théâtre
des Champs-Elysées, was shown with Nos. 1 and 2 of Relâche before the curtain
rose for Act 1 (No. 3: Rideau). Clair’s surrealist film was shot, entirely on location
in Paris, in June 1924 (see Orledge, 1990, p. 242). Although Picabia was shown
the finished film on 3 July, Satie had to write to Clair to ask him for the final details
of the scenes involved on 23 Oct. Clair’s analysis of the film in 346 sequences can
be found in Clair, 1970, pp. 115–40. Satie’s revolutionary synchronised score, in
which self-contained segments are to be repeated ad lib to fit the film, is divided
into 10 titled sections:
1 Cheminées, ballons qui explosent (OS and Pf. red., Fig 1)
2 Gants de boxe et allumettes (Fig. 3)
3 Prises d’air; jeux d’échecs et bateaux sur les toits (between Figs 5 and 6)
4 La Danseuse; et figures dans l’eau (ibid., Figs 7–8)
5 Chasseur; et début de l’enterrement (ibid., 9–10)
6 Marche funèbre (ibid., 11–12)
7 Cortège au ralenti (ibid., 13–14)
8 La Poursuite (ibid., 17–18)
9 Chûte du cerceuil et sortie de Börlin (Fig. 24)
10 Final (écran crevé et fin) (between Figs 25 and 26)
MSS: US-AUS. OS, 56pp., ‘Nov 1924’
Ho 193: 77. Tonal plan and sections lengths, 1p.
BNF 9678. Plan for pagination of OS with key scheme and section lengths, 4pp.
lettered A–D
BNF 9677(9). Timings for film, 1p. (15 minutes film, plus 1’ 10” for opening
projection sequence). Not by Satie
BNF 9622(6), pp. 6–21. Continuous draft with orch. indications; with material
found on OS pp. 39–41 coming first on pp. 3–5 (these are the 21 bars between Figs
18 and 20 of the pf red.)
pubn: OS: Salabert (for hire only), ‘©1926’
Pf red.: Salabert, 1972 (EAS 10761)
Pf duet arr. (by Milhaud): Rouart-Lerolle, July 1926 (RL 11573)
prem.: 7 Dec 1924 (with public dress rehearsal on 4 Dec) at Théâtre des Champs-
Elysées (with Relâche). Orch cond. Roger Désormière. Photography by Jimmy
Berliet. Director: René Clair. Assistant Director: Georges Lacombe. Producer:
Rolf de Maré. Cast incl: Jean Börlin, Francis Picabia, Erik Satie, Man Ray, Marcel
Duchamp, Marcel Achard, Pierre Seize, Louis Touchagues, Rolf de Maré, Roger
Lebon, Mamy, Georges Charensol, Mlle Friis
Appendix 323
Untitled compositions for piano, edited for publication by Robert Caby
(pubd by Salabert, 1968, unless otherwise indicated)

[Prière] c.1893
pubn: in Pages Mystiques, Eschig, 1969 (ME 7714) with Vexations and some
Harmonies (see BNF 9674, p. 20)
[Petite ouverture à danser] c.1897
MS: BNF 10054(3). Piece in Gnossienne style, without dynamics, phrasing or
barlines (MC 302)
[Caresse] (March 1897)
MS: BNF 9575(1), with sketches for the Pièces froides (MC 398)
[Rêverie du pauvre] (1900)
MS: BNF 9600, ff. 4v–5r (numbered 20–21) (MC 399). This is the accompaniment
to Massenet’s song Les Enfants (1882) transposed into D flat for Vincent Hyspa’s
March 1900 parody as Les Eléphants
[Petite musique de clown triste] (1900)
pubn: Eschig, 1980 (ME 8398). This is ‘C’est la fille de ma tante’ from Louis
Varney’s operetta La Femme de Narcisse (1891) used for Hyspa’s parody Les
Joies de l’Exposition in April 1900 (see BNF 9600, ff. 3v–4r (numbered 18–19))
[Douze petits chorals] (c.1906–9)
MS: BNF 10033(11), p. 1 (MC 356). Choral No. 12 is the introduction to the
Petite Sonate of 1908–9: the others are Schola Cantorum exercises
[Nostalgie/Froide Songerie] (c.1906–8)
pubn: as Nos. 1–2 of Musiques intimes et secrètes (MC 377)
[Airs/Essais/Notes (x3)/ Exercices (x5)/ Harmonies/ ([Songerie vers ‘Jack’])/
Bribes/ Choral/ Gambades/ Petite Danse] (1897–1919)
MSS: BNF 10054(2), ff. 2v, 1r ([Songerie vers ‘Jack’]) and other fragments (pubd
ed., p. 6). These are the result of Satie’s chromatic adaptation of the folksong
melody The Keel Row in Jan 1897
Ho 193: 16, ff. 7r–8v ([Exercices] on ed. p. 12, c.1905)
BNF 9615(4), p. 14 ([Air], ? 1914)
BNF 9577, pp. 9–11 ([Gambades], 1905). This is an early draft of the ‘Chanson
andalouse’ for the operetta Pousse l’amour
BNF 9673, p. 12 ([Petite Danse], found among unused sketches for the Nocturnes,
1919)
pubn: in Carnets d’esquisses et de croquis (MC 363)
Note: the other pieces edited by the late Robert Caby can be found under the
entries for 1908–9 and 1912 in the main body of the catalogue. M. Caby has also
orchestrated many of Satie’s pf pieces, and scores and parts are available from
Editions Salabert. He arranged 16 of the pieces in 1968 as a Quatuor intime et
secret (Paris: Salabert, 1979) in response to Satie’s deathbed regret that he had
never completed a string quartet. For fuller details, see the Catalogue of Musical
Works in Gillmor, 1988, pp. 325–42.
For Satie’s own arrangements, see Aline-Polka (1899) and L’Aurore aux
doigts de rose (1916). He also made many arrangements of popular songs by other
composers for his own use as cabaret pianist to Vincent Hyspa and others between
1898 and 1911. These include Paul Delmet, Laurent du Rillé, Georges Tiercy,
Emile Debraux, and even Bizet and Offenbach – whose ‘Ronde’ from Le Brésilien
turns up in Hyspa’s song Le Président aux Concours des animaux gras in 1899
(Ho 193: 25, pp. 20–21). Alternatively, Hyspa often had a popular tune in mind on
which he based his irreverent ditties, which he then passed on to Satie to arrange
– as in Les Complots (1898–9), Félix à Lens (1899) or Le Zébre à Félix Faure
(1898). See Ho 193: 23, 25, and Whiting, 1999, pp. 204–11 for fuller details. As
nearly 100 songs are involved, and the sources are extremely complex, this aspect
of Satie’s composing career has not been fully documented here. I am indebted to
Steven Moore Whiting for his help with this complex and relatively little-known
period in Satie’s life, as well as to Thierry Bodin, Pietro Dossena, Ann-Marie
Hanlon, Sylvia Kahan, Caroline Potter and Ornella Volta for their invaluable
assistance in updating the present catalogue.
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Œuvres completes, vol. IX (Lausanne: Marguerat, 1950); trans. Rollo Myers in
A Call to Order (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1926), 3–77
‘Parade’, Comœdia (21 December 1920): 1
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‘Erik Satie’, Fanfare 1/2 (15 October 1921): 21–5

‘Picasso’, Les Feuilles libres 5/34 (1923): 217–32
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217–23; reprinted in Erik Satie (Liège: Editions Dynamo, 1957) and in Revue
musicale 386–7 (1985): 32–8
‘L’exemple d’Erik Satie’, Revue musicale 6 (1925): 97–8
Rappel à l’ordre (Paris, 1926); trans. Rollo Myers as A Call to Order (London:
Faber and Gwyer, 1926)
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(Wallace Fowlie (ed.)), The Journals of Jean Cocteau (London: Museum
Press, 1957), 36–8; reprinted in My Contemporaries (Margaret Crosland (ed.))
(London: Peter Owen, 1967), 47–50
(Andre Fermigier (ed.)), Jean Cocteau entre Picasso et Radiguet (Paris:
Hermann, 1967)
Cœuroy, Andre, ‘La Musique et les lettres: Hommages littéraires a Erik Satie’,
Revue musicale 5 (1924): 283–4
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(March 1924): 284–5
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‘Further Aspects of Contemporary Music’, Musical Quarterly 15/4 (1929):
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Abeles as A History of Modern Music (Cleveland: World Publishing Company,
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sciences humaines 6–7 (1974): 1–25
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Liège, Institut Provincial d’Etudes et de Recherches Bibliothéconomiques,
1982)
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français et Erik Satie’, Comœdia (16 and 23 January 1920)
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(London: Oxford University Press, 1951)
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Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1967)
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(28 July 1928): 5
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1929): 6
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His Texts from 1900 to 1925’ (Unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford,
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Association 133/1 (2008): 1–31
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New York Times (6 September 1925): section 7, p. 7
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the Twentieth Century (New York: Praeger, 1957), 232–95
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Etude (Philadelphia) 60 (1942): 816, 849, 855
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Flammarion, 1985)
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14–19
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1926): 1
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Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1978)
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129–35; reprinted in Revue musicale 386–7 (1985): 83–9
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Texas at Austin, 2005)
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27–8, 166
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Hill, Barbara Ferrell, ‘Characteristics of the Music of Erik Satie that Suggest the
Id’ (DMA dissertation, University of Colorado, 1966)
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Howe, Martin, ‘Erik Satie and His Ballets’ Ballet 5/8 (1948): 25–32, 37–9, 53–4;
6/1 (1948): 25–30
Hugnet, Georges, L’Aventure Dada (1916–22) (Paris: Galerie de l’Institut, 1957);
revised edn (Paris: Seghers, 1971)
Hugo, Valentine, ‘Le Socrate que j’ai connu’, Revue musicale 214 (1952): 139–45;
Hurard-Viltard, Eveline, Le Groupe des Six ou le matin d’un jour de fête (Paris:
Meridien- Klincksieck, 1987)
Hyspa, Vincent, Chansons d’humour (Paris: Enoch, 1903)
Jacob, Dom Clément, ‘Erik Satie et le chant grégorien’, Revue musicale 214
(1952): 85–94; reprinted in Revue musicale 386–7 (1985): 90–99
Jacob, Max, Correspondance (Paris: Editions de Paris, 1953)
Jacob, Maxime, ‘L’Exemple d’Erik Satie’, Vigile 2 (1930): 123–35
Jankélévitch, Vladimir, Le Nocturne: Fauré/Chopin et la nuit/Satie et Ie matin
(Paris: Albin Michel, 1957): 123–216
Jean-Aubry, Georges, ‘Erik Satie – A Musical Humorist’, Music Student 9 (1916):
135–6
La Musique française d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Perrin, 1916); trans. Edwin Evans
(London: K. Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1919)
‘The End of a Legend’, The Chesterian 6 (1924–5): 191–3
Jeanne, Paul, Les Théâtres d’ombres à Montmartre de 1887 à 1923: Chat Noir,
Quat’zArts, Lune Rousse (Paris: Les Presses modernes au Palais-Royal, 1937)
Jeanne, René, ‘Le Cinéma aux Ballets Suédois’, Les Nouvelles littéraires (13
December 1924): 7
Jeanneret, Albert, ‘Parade’, L’Esprit nouveau 4 (1921): 449–52
‘Socrate’, L’Esprit nouveau 9 (1923): 989–95
Jensen, Erik Frederick, ‘Satie and the “Gymnopédie”’, Music & Letters 75/2
(1994): 236–40
Jourdain, Francis, Né en 76 (Paris: Les Editions du Pavilion, 1951), 244–7
Jourdan-Morhange, Hélène, Ravel et nous (Paris: Editions du Milieu du Monde,
1945)
Mes amis musiciens (Paris: Les Editeurs Français Réunis, 1955)
Jullien, Philippe (trans. Anne Carter), Montmartre (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977)
Kerdyk, René, ‘Quand Erik Satie écrivait à Vincent Hyspa’, Paris-Midi (17 May
1937): 2
Kington, Miles (ed.), The World of Alphonse Allais (London: Chatto & Windus,
1976)
Kisling, Moïse, ‘Souvenir de Satie’, Revue musicale 214 (June 1952): 107–10
Koechlin, Charles, ‘Erik Satie’, Revue musicale 5/2 (March 1924): 193–207;
‘Erik Satie’, Journal des débats (16 May 1926)
La Grange, Henri-Louis de, ‘Satie revisité’, Contrepoints 6 (1949): 171–2
Lajoinie, Vincent, Erik Satie (Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 1985)
Laloy, Louis, ‘Au Théâtre des Champs-Elysées – Reprises de “Parade”’, Comœdia
(23 December 1920): 1
‘“Mercure” aux Ballets Russes’, Comœdia (2 June 1927): 1
La Musique retrouvée, 1902–27 (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1928)
Lambert, Constant, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (London: Faber, 1934),
115–25; extracts (trans. Marcelle Jossua) appear in ‘Erik Satie et la musique
abstraite’, Revue musicale 214 (1952): 101–6
Lange, Elisabeth, ‘Das Komische als Symptom – das Beispiel Erik Satie’, Avant
Garde Critical Studies 16 (2004): 117–42
Lannes, Roger, ‘Souvenirs d’une croisade – Darius Milhaud a évoqué hier Erik
Satie’, L’Intransigeant (12 December 1938): 2
Lanser, René, ‘Notes et souvenirs’, Le Matin à Anvers (9 July 1925)
Léger, Fernand, ‘Satie inconnu’, Revue musicale 214 (1952): 137–8; reprinted in
Revue musicale 386–7 (1985): 100–101
Leiris, Michel, ‘L’Humour d’Erik Satie’, La Nouvelle Revue Française 26/1
(1938): 163–4
Lesure, François (ed.), Erik Satie (Catalogue of the exhibition held at the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France between 26 May and June 1966) (Paris:
Senlis, 1966)
Levie, Alison, French Art Deco Fashion: In Pochoir Prints From the 1920s
(London: Schiffer Publishing, 1998).
Lockspeiser, Edward, The Literary Clef: An Anthology of Letters and Writings by
French Composers (London: John Calder, 1958)
Lyle, Wilson, ‘Erik Satie and Rosicrucianism’, Music Review 42 (1981): 238–42
Maré, Rolf de, ‘A propos de Relâche’, Comœdia (27 November 1924): 2
‘The Swedish Ballet and the Modern Aesthetic’, The Little Review 11 (1925–
6): 24–8
Les Ballets Suédois (Paris: Editions du Trianon, 1931)
Marks, Martin, ‘The Well-Furnished Film, Satie’s Score for Entr’acte’, Canadian
University Music Review 4 (1983): 245–77
Martin, Marianne, ‘The Ballet Parade: A Dialogue Between Cubism and
Futurism’, The Art Quarterly, new series, 112 (Spring 1978): 85–111
Massine, Léonide, My Life in Ballet (London: Macmillan, 1968)
Massot, Pierre de, ‘Vingt-cinq minutes avec: Erik Satie’, Paris Journal (30 May
1924): 2
‘Hommes d’aujourd’hui: Erik Satie’, L’Ere nouvelle (14 September 1924): 2
‘Quelques propos et souvenirs sur Erik Satie’, Revue musicale 214 (1952):
125–8
Francis Picabia (Paris: Seghers, 1966)
Mauclair, Camille, ‘Le Souvenir de Péladan’, Les Nouvelles littéraires 4/125
(1925): 1
Mayr, W., ‘Entretien avec Erik Satie’, Le Journal littéraire 24 (1924): 11
Mellers, Wilfrid, ‘The Classicism of Erik Satie’, The Listener 18 (1937): 318
‘Erik Satie and the “Problem” of Contemporary Music’, Music & Letters
23/3 (1942): 210–27; reprinted in Mellers, Studies in Contemporary Music
(London: Dennis Dobson, 1947), 16–42
(trans. Marcelle Jossua), ‘Erik Satie et la musique fonctionelle’, Revue
musicale 214 (June 1952): 33–7
‘Film Music: The Musical Problem’ in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, 5th edn (London, 1954), vol. III: 103–4
Caliban Reborn: Renewal in Twentieth-Century Music (New York: Harper &
Row, 1967; London: Gollancz, 1968)
Mesens, E.L.T., ‘Hommage à Erik Satie’, Sélection 3/10 (1924): 535–8
‘Le Souvenir d’Erik Satie’, Revue musicale 214 (June 1952): 147–51
Messager, André, ‘Les Premières – Théâtre des Champs-Elysées – Relâche’,
Le Figaro (9 December 1924): 5
‘Les Premières. Ballets Russes – Jack-in-the-Box d’Eric [sic] Satie’, Le Figaro
(7 June 1926): 3
Metzger, Heinz-Klaus and Rainer Riehn (eds), Musik-Konzepte 11 (special Satie
edition) (January 1980)
Michelet, Victor-Emile, Les Compagnons de la hiérophanie: Souvenirs du
mouvement hermétiste à la fin du 19e siècle (Paris, Dorbon-Ainé, 1937)
Milhaud, Darius, ‘Les dernières oeuvres d’Erik Satie et les premières oeuvres
d’Henri Sauguet’, Les Feuilles libres 5/37 (1924): 46–8
Etudes (Paris: Claude Aveline, 1927)
‘Les derniers jours d’Erik Satie’, Le Figaro littéraire (23 April 1949): 5
Notes sans musique (Paris: Julliard, 1949); trans. Donald Evans (London:
Dennis Dobson, 1952; reprinted London: Calder and Boyars, 1967)
‘Lettre de Darius Milhaud’, Revue musicale 214 (June 1952): 153
Ma Vie heureuse (Paris: Belfond, 1974)
Monnier, Adrienne (trans. Richard McDougall), The Very Rich Hours of Adrienne
Monnier (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976)
Morand, Paul, Journal d’un attaché d’ambassade 1916-17 (Paris: Gallimard,
1996)
Motherwell, Robert, The Dada Painters and Poets – An Anthology (New York:
Wittenborn, Schulz Inc., 1951)
Myers, Rollo, ‘The Strange Case of Erik Satie’, Musical Times 86/1229 (1945):
201–3
‘Quelques réflexions sur le rôle de la musique dans le ballet contemporain’,
Polyphonie 1 (1947–8): 66–70
Erik Satie (London: Dennis Dobson, 1948; reprinted New York: Dover, 1968)
‘Importance de Satie dans la musique contemporaine’, Revue musicale 214
(1952): 77–81
‘Notes sur Socrate’, Revue musicale 214 (1952): 81–4
‘The Significance of Satie: A Centenary Tribute’, Music and Musicians 14
(1966): 16–17, 41
‘A Music Critic in Paris in the Nineteen-Twenties: Some Personal
Recollections’, Musical Quarterly 63/4 (1977): 524–44
‘Esoterik Satie’, Music and Musicians 27 (1979): 74–5
Nichols, Roger (trans. and ed.) and François Lesure (ed.), Debussy Letters
(London: Faber, 1987)
Ravel Remembered (London: Faber, 1987)
The Harlequin Years: Music in Paris 1917–1929 (London: Thames & Hudson,
2002)
Nyman, Michael, ‘Cage and Satie’, Musical Times 114/1570 (1973): 1227–9
Oberthür, Mariel, ‘Les Cabarets artistiques au pied de la colline de Montmartre’
(dissertation, third cycle, University of Paris IV, 1979)
‘Erik Satie et les cafés de Montmartre’, in Ornella Volta (ed.), Erik Satie à
Montmartre (Paris, Musée de Montmartre, 1982), 10–14
(trans. Sheila Azoulai), Cafés and Cabarets of Montmartre (Layton: Gibbs M.
Smith, 1984)
Orledge, Robert, Debussy and the Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982)
‘Satie’s Approach to Composition in His Later Years (1913–24)’, Proceedings
of the Royal Musical Association 111 (1984–5): 155–79
Satie, Koechlin and the Ballet uspud’, Music & Letters 68/1 (1987): 26–41
‘Satie at Sea, and the Mystery of La “Belle Cubaine”’, Music & Letters 71/3
(1990): 361–73
Satie the Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
‘The Musical Activities of Alfred Satie and Eugénie Satie-Barnetche, and their
Effect on the Career of Erik Satie’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association
117/2 (1992): 270–297
Satie Remembered (London: Faber, 1995)
‘Erik Satie’s Ballet “Mercure” (1924): From Mount Etna to Montmartre’,
Journal of the Royal Musical Association 123/2 (1998): 229–49
‘Understanding Satie’s “Vexations”’, Music & Letters 79/3 (August 1998):
386–95
‘Erik Satie’s Ballet uspud: Prime Numbers and the Creation of a New Language
with Only Half the Alphabet’, Musical Times 150/1908 (Autumn 2009): 31–41
Oxenhandler, Neal, Scandal and Parade: The Theater of Jean Cocteau (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1957)
Paris, Alain, ‘A la recherche d’Erik Satie’, Le Courrier musical de France 52
(1975): 130–131
Penrose, Roland, Picasso: His Life and Work (New York: Harper Brothers, 1958)
Perloff, Nancy, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment and the Circle of
Erik Satie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
Pernoud, Georges, ‘Erik Satie a cinquante ans’, A la page: L’Hebdomadaire des
jeunes 24 (1966): 898–907
Peter, René, Claude Debussy (Paris: Gallimard, 1931; revised edn 1944)
Peterkin, Norman, ‘Erik Satie’s “Parade”’, Musical Times 60/918 (1919): 426–7
Picabia, Francis, ‘Erik Satie’, Paris Journal (27 June 1924): 1
‘Instantanéisme’, Comœdia (21 November 1924): 4
‘Pourquoi j’ai écrit “Relâche”’, Le Siècle (27 November 1924): 4
‘Pourquoi “Relâche” a fait relâche’, Comœdia (2 December 1924): 1
‘Erik Satie’, L’Ere nouvelle (8 July 1925): 3
(Olivier Revault d’Allones (ed.)), Ecrits, Vol. 1: 1913–20 (Paris: Belfond,
1975)
(Olivier Revault d’Allones and Dominique Bouissou (eds)), Ecrits, Vol. 2:
1921–53 et posthumes (Paris: Belfond, 1978)
Vive Erik Satie/Francis Picabia (Liège: Editions Dynamo, 1957)
391. Revue publiée de 1917 à 1924 par Francis Picabia (Réédition intégrale
présentée par Michel Sanouillet) (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1960)
Picard, Gaston, ‘L’Ecrivain chez Erik Satie’, Le Figaro: Supplément littéraire (11
July 1925): 2
Polignac, Princesse Edmond de, ‘Memoirs’, Horizon 12/68 (1945): 110–141
Politis, Hélène, ‘Sermons humoristiques: les Ecrits d’Erik Satie’, in Ecrits pour
Vladimir JankéIévitch (Paris: Flammarion, 1978)
Porter, David, ‘Recurrent Motifs in Erik Satie’s Sports et divertissements’, Music
Review 39 (1978): 227–30
Poulenc, Francis, ‘La Musique de piano d’Erik Satie’, Revue musicale 214 (1952):
23–6; reprinted in Revue musicale 386–7 (1985): 102–5
Moi et mes amis (Paris: Editions La Palatine, 1963); trans. James Harding as
My Friends and Myself (London: Dennis Dobson, 1978)
Prieberg, Fred, ‘Erik Satie’, Musica (Kassel) 9 (1955): 366–9
Prunières, Henry, ‘Socrate d’Erik Satie’, Revue musicale 386–7 (1985): 6–7
Radiguet, Raymond, ‘Parade’, Le Gaulois (25 December 1920): 4
Rašin, Vera, ‘“Les Six” and Jean Cocteau’, Music & Letters 38/2 (1957): 164–9
Raval, Marcel, ‘Cariathys [sic] à l’Olympia’, Les Feuilles films 25 (1922): 64–5
Ravel, Maurice, Contemporary Music (Houston: Rice Institute Pamphlets, 1928),
vol. 15, 131–45
Ray, Man, Self-Portrait (London: Andre Deutsch, 1963; reprinted London:
Bloomsbury Press, 1988)
Renshaw, Rosette, ‘Erik Satie (1866–1925)’, Nouvelle Revue Canadienne 1/2
(1951): 76–80
Rey, Anne, ‘Dada et Ie pré-surréalisme dans l’œuvre d’Erik Satie’ (dissertation,
University of Paris, 1967)
Erik Satie (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974)
Richard, Marius, ‘Une Controverse Musicale: Claude Debussy et Erik Satie’, La

Liberté (13 January 1932): 2
Richardson, John, A Life of Picasso, vol. I (London: Pimlico, 1991)
Ries, Frank, The Dance Theater of Jean Cocteau (Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1986)
Roberts, W. Wright, ‘The Problem of Satie’, Music & Letters 4 (1923): 313–20
Rogers, M. Robert, ‘Jazz Influence on French Music’, Musical Quarterly 21/1
(1935): 53–68
Roland-Manuel, Alexis, Erik Satie. Causerie faite à la Société Lyre et Palette, le
18 Avril 1916 (Paris: H. Roberge Irnprimeur, 1916)
‘Adieu à Satie’, Revue Pleyel 15 (1924): 21–2
‘Satie tel que je l’ai vu’, Revue musicale 214 (1952): 9–11
Rorem, Ned, ‘Notes on “Parade”’, Opera News 45 (28 February 1981): 8–18
Rosen, Michael, ‘Terms Used in Percussion: Erik Satie’s Parade’, Percussive
Notes 26/3 (1988): 38–9
Rothschild, Deborah Menaker, Picasso’s ‘Parade’ (New York: Sotheby’s
Publications/The Drawing Center, 1991)
Roussel, Albert, ‘A propos d’un récent festival’, Le Gaulois (12 June 1926): 3
Roy, Jean, ‘Satie poète’, Revue musicale 214 (June 1952): 55–7
‘Erik Satie’ in Présences contemporaines, musique française (Paris: Nouvelles
Editions Debresse, 1962), 15–55
‘L’Original Erik Satie’, Musica 138 (1965): 13–15
‘Erik Satie: Le mythe et la réalité’, Panorama de la musique 29 (1979): 6–9
Ruppel, K.H., ‘Monsieur le Pauvre’, Melos 33 (1966): 205–9
Sandro, Paul, ‘Parodic Narration in “Entr’acte”’, Film Criticism 4/1 (Fall 1979):
44–55
Sanouillet, Michel, Picabia (Paris: Editions du Temps, 1964)
Dada à Paris (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1965)
Francis Picabia et ‘391’, vol. I (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1960); vol. II (Paris:
Eric Losfeld, 1966)
‘Erik Satie et son “violon d’encre”’, Travaux de linguistique et de littérature
publiés par le centre de philologie et de littératures romanes de l’Université de
Strasbourg 7/2 (1969): 167–80
Santi, P., ‘II “point de depart” di Satie’, Chigiana 23 (1966): 183–99
Sasser, William Gray, ‘Le développement du style d’Erik Satie’, Revue musicale
214 (1952): 111–17
Satie, Conrad, ‘Erik Satie’, Le Cœur 2/10 (1895): 2–3
Satie, Erik, Oui. Lettres d’Erik Satie adressées à Pierre de Massot [1922–4] (Alès:
Editions PAB, 1960)
(Henri Borgeaud (ed.)), ‘Trois lettres d’Erik Satie à Claude Debussy (1903)’
Revue de Musicologie 48 (1962): 71–4
(Ornella Volta (ed.), trans. Frieda van Tijn-Zwart), Texten (Amsterdam: Em.
Querido, 1976)
(Ornella Volta (ed.)), Ecrits (Paris: Champ-Libre, 1977; revised edn 1981)
(ed. Ornella Volta), Le Piège de Méduse, comédie lyrique en un acte de M.

Erik Satie, avec musique de danse du même Monsieur (with cassette recording)
(Paris: Le Castor Astral, 1988)
Sauguet, Henri, ‘Vive Satie!’, La Bataille (5 July 1945): 4
‘Souvenirs et reflexions autour d’Erik Satie’, Revue musicale 214 (1952): 95–
9; reprinted in Revue musicale 386–7 (1985): 106–10
‘Erik Satie’, Le Courrier musical de France 52 (1975): 129
(Pierre Ancelin (ed.)), ‘Henri Sauguet. L’Homme et l’œuvre’, Revue musicale
361–3 (1983): 237–49
Saunders, William, ‘Erik Satie’, Musical News 53 (1 September 1917): 131–3
‘Erik Satie’s Forms and Harmonies’, Musical News 53 (8 September 1917):
147–8
Schloezer, Boris de, ‘Reflexions sur la musique: Le cas Satie’, Revue musicale 5
(1924): 173–6; reprinted in Revue musicale 386–7 (1985): 44–7
Schmitt, Florent, ‘Erik Satie’, Montjoie! 1/11–12 (1913): 11-12
Schwarz, Arturo, Almanacco Dada (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976)
Shattuck, Roger, ‘Satie et la musique de placard’, Revue musicale 214 (1952):
47–54
‘Erik Satie. Composer to the School of Paris’, Art News Annual 27 (1958):
64–8, 186–91
The Banquet Years (London: 1955; revised edn, New York: Vintage Books,
1968): 88–145
Shaw-Miller, Simon, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music from Wagner to Cage
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
Skulsky, Abraham, ‘Erik Satie’, Musical America 70 (15 November 1950): 5, 32,
36
‘Satie Controversy?’, Musical America 70 (15 December 1950): 12
Steegmuller, Francis, Cocteau: A Biography (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970)
Storm, John, The Valadon Drama: The Life of Suzanne Valadon (London:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1959)
Stravinsky, Igor (with Robert Craft), Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (London:
Faber, 1959; reprinted 1979)
Sullivan, K.M., ‘Erik Satie’s “Vexations”’, SONUS 27/1 (2006): 70–76
Sypher, Wylie, Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature (New York: Vintage
Books, 1960)
Templier, Pierrc-Daniel, Erik Satie (Paris: Editions Rieder, 1932); trans. Elena and
David Frcnch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969)
Thomson, Virgil, ‘La place de Satie dans la musique du XXe siècle’, Revue
musicale 214 (1952): 13–15 (trans. by Marcelle Jossua from The Musical
Scene, 118–20)
Thorman, Marc, ‘John Cage’s Letters to Erik Satie’, American Music 24/1 (2006):
95–123
Tinan, Mme Gaston de, ‘Memories of Debussy and His Circle’, Recorded Sound
50–51 (1973): 158–63
Tomasi, Gioacchino, ‘Erik Satie e la musica del surrealismo’, in Studi sui

Surrealismo (Rome: Officinia Edizioni, 1976)
Townsend, Christopher, ‘The Last Hope of Intuition: Francis Picabia, Erik Satie
and René Clair’s Intermedial Project Relâche’, Nottingham French Studies
50/3 (2011): 43-66
Trippett, David, ‘Composing Time: Zeno’s Arrow, Hindemith’s “Erinnerung”, and
Satie’s “Instantanéisme”’, Journal of Musicology 24/4 (Fall 2007): 522–80
Valotaire, Marcel, Charles Martin (Paris: Les Artistes du Livre, 1928)
Varèse, Louise, Varèse: A Looking-Glass Diary. Vol. 1: 1883–1928 (New York:
Norton, 1972)
Veen, J. van der, ‘Erik Satie’, Mens en melodie 8 (1953): 389–94
Verkauf, Willy (ed.), Dada: Monograph of a Movement (London: Alec Tiranti,
1957; reprinted 1961)
Vinay, G. (ed.), Nuovi percorsi musicali: Erik Satie e la parigi del suo tempo
(Forli: Lim, 2001)
Viñes, Ricardo, ‘Tres aristocratas del sonido: semblanzas dc Claude Debussy, Erik
Satie y Maurice Ravel’, La Nacion (suplemento literario) (11 February 1934),
also published as a booklet in Buenos Aires, 1934 (16pp.)
Volta, Ornella, Erik Satie: D’Esoterik Satie à Satierik (Paris: Editions Seghers-
Humour, 1979)
L’Ymagier d’Erik Satie (Paris: Editions Van de Velde, 1979; reprinted 1990)
(ed.), Erik Satie à Montmartre (Catalogue of the exhibition held at the Musée
de Montmartre between December 1982 and April 1983) (Paris: Musée de
Montmartre, 1982). In this Volta contributes the articles: ‘Satie sur la butte’
(5–9) and ‘L’itinéraire d’Erik Satie à Montmartre’ (21–30)
(ed.), Satie dans les salons (Catalogue of the exhibition held at the Centre
Culturel Arturo Lopez, 12 rue du Centre, Neuilly-sur-Seine between 12 March
and 23 April 1985) (NeuiIly: Imprimerie Schnieder, 1985)
‘Dossier Erik Satie: L’os à moelle’, Revue internationale de musique française
8/23 (1987): 5–98. Contains the following articles by Volta: ‘Le rideau se lève
sur un os: quelques investigations autour de Satie’ (7–10); ‘Cinéma’ (11–15);
‘Genevieve de Brabant’ (16–32); ‘Gnossiennes’ (33–6); ‘La Belle Excentrique’
(37–40); ‘Sports et divertissements’ (41–53); ‘uspud’ (54–79); ‘Editions et
manuscrits’ (81–92); ‘Travaux universitaires autour d’Erik Satie’ (93–4); ‘Avis
de recherche’ (95–8)
(ed.), Erik Satie & la tradition populaire (Catalogue of the exhibition held
at the Musée des Arts et des Traditions Populaires, 10–30 May 1988) (Paris:
Fondation Erik Satie, 1988)
(trans. Michael Bullock), Satie Seen Through His Letters (New York: Marion
Boyars, 1989)
‘A la recherche d’un fantôme: Paul & Virginie d’Erik Satie’, Revue
internationale de musique française 10/29 (1989): 47–70
Satie et la Danse (Paris: Plume, 1992)
Erik Satie: bibliographie raisonnée (Paris: Mairie d’Arcueil/Fondation Erik

Satie, 1995)
Erik Satie: Correspondance presque complète (Paris: Fayard/IMEC, 2000).
Vuillermoz, Emile, ‘La Musique: Les Ballets Suédois’, Excelsior (29 October
1923): 3
‘Ballets Suédois: Relâche’, Excelsior (6 December 1924): 5
Watkins, Glenn, Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer
Books, 1988)
Weber, Eugene, France. Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986)
Wehmeyer, Grete, ‘Saties Instanteismus’, in Musicae scientiae collectanea:
Festschrift Karl Gustav Fellerer (Cologne: Volk, 1973), 626–39
Erik Satie (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1974)
Whiting, Steven Moore, ‘Erik Satie and Parisian Musical Entertainment, 1888 to
1909’ (Master’s dissertation, University of Illinois, 1984)
‘Musical Parody and Two “Œuvres posthumes” of Erik Satie: The Rêverie du
pauvre and the Petite musique de clown triste’, Revue de Musicologie 81/2
(1995): 215–34
‘Erik Satie and Vincent Hyspa: Notes on a Collaboration’, Music & Letters
77/1 (1996): 64–91
Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1999)
Wiéner, Jean, ‘Un grand musicien’, Arts 1/25 (13 July 1945): 4; (20 July 1945): 4
‘Aimer Erik Satie’, L’Humanité 43/645 (4 September 1946): 3
Allegro appassionato (Paris: Belfond, 1978)
Wilkins, Nigel, ‘The Writings of Erik Satie: Miscellaneous Fragments’, Music &
Letters 56/3 (1975): 288–307
‘Erik Satie’s Letters to Milhaud and Others’, Musical Quarterly 66/3 (1980):
404–28
(ed. and trans.), The Writings of Erik Satie (London: Eulenburg, 1980)
‘Erik Satie’s Letters’, Canadian University Music Review 2 (1981): 207–27
Index of Names
Adams, Courtney 99, 143–4 Bertrand, Eugène 8, 257

Albright, Daniel 92, 96, 126, 195 Beuys, Joseph xviii, 189–209, 223, 225–7
Allais, Alphonse 69, 79 Kukei, akopee-Nein! Braunkreuz,
Andersen, Hans Christian xv, 9 Fettecken, Modellfettecken 189,
Andriessen, Louis 183 199, 201–7
Ansermet, Ernest 2, 149, 301–2 Sibirische Symphonie 1. Satz 189–90
Apollinaire, Guillaume xvii, 74, 79, 98, Bois, Jules 59, 260
104, 122, 124, 125–7, 129, 132, Börlin, Jean 111, 178, 180, 321–2
134–5, 142, 150, 152, 155, 157, Bourdieu, Pierre 24
159, 325 Brancusi, Constantin 10, 86, 234, 236
Calligrammes 122–3, 125–7, 132 Braque, Georges 5, 86, 284, 318, 321
Aragon, Louis 175, 177 Breton, André 13, 83, 175, 177–8
Arcueil xiv, 4–6, 9, 11, 80 Bryars, Gavin 225, 230, 233
Arias, Enrique Alberto 34–5
Astruc, Gabriel 139 Cage, John xviii, 66, 93, 95–6, 100, 106,
Auberge du Clou 8, 88, 257 183–5, 188–90, 192–3, 208–227,
Auric, Georges 1–3, 24–5, 28–9, 36, 107, 229–30, 232–4, 236, 239, 242, 259,
110, 177, 301, 318 303
Les Fâcheux 1 Calvocoressi, Michel–Dimitri 29, 287
Cardew, Cornelius 229–30, 241
Ballets Russes xvii, 124, 137, 151, 155, Carroll, Lewis xv, 9, 35, 299, 313
158–60, 264, 299, 301–2, 313, 317 Casella, Alfredo 12
Ballets Suédois 12, 108, 177–8, 321 La Giara 12
Bathori, Jane 73, 296, 299, 304–5, 310, Cendrars, Blaise xviii, 108, 177, 320
316 Cézanne, Paul 10–11, 85, 144–5
Baudelaire, Charles 103–4, 124, 134, Chabelska, Marie 158–60
138–9 Chabrier, Emmanuel 124
Bayreuth 188, 206 Souvenirs de Munich 318
Beaumont, Edith de (Comtesse) 6–7, 306, Chaplin, Charlie 160
309 Chat Noir
Beaumont, Etienne de (Comte) 108, 173, cabaret 31, 178, 318
175, 181, 265–6, 314–6, 318–9 journal 7, 51, 69, 252
Beethoven, Ludwig van 10, 229 Chennevière, Rudhyar 39, 43
fake Beethoven MS allegedly owned Chopin, Frédéric
by Satie 32 Sonata in B flat minor 46, 97–8,
Béhar, Henri 32, 79, 84 109–11
Bergson, Henri xvi, 20–6, 35, 46–7 Clair, René xiii, 8, 111, 120, 178, 322
Berners, Lord (Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson) Clementi, Muzio
3–4 Sonatina in C (op. 36) 45, 303
Bertin, Pierre 76, 285, 308, 310, 311 Cocteau, Mme Georges 306
Cocteau, Jean xiii, xiv, xvi, 3, 7, 9, 13, Ecorcheville, Jules 30

77, 99, 104–8, 120, 137–44, Ecorcheville, Mme Jules 262
146, 149–50, 152–6, 159, 160, Ecole d’Arcueil 3
173–4, 176–7, 180, 188, 239, 297,
299–302, 310–12, 314 Fabert, Henri 73, 296
Collaer, Paul 9, 30, 171, 264 Fargue, Léon-Paul 83–4, 299, 302, 316
Contamine de Latour, Patrice (aka Lord Fauré, Gabriel 6, 12, 124, 240
Cheminot) 58, 77, 88, 98, 249–52, Feldman, Morton 93, 96, 233–4, 240
257, 259, 265–8, 273 Neither 238
Courbet, Gustave
L’Enlèvement à Ornans 138 Gleizes, Albert 140, 297
Cousin, Victor xiv, 162, 303–4 Gounod, Charles
‘Chanson de Magali’ (Mireille)
Dada xvi, 26, 32, 79, 84, 92, 103, 108, 299
112, 175, 178, 180–1, 211, 218 Le Médecin malgré lui xvii, xviii, 1,
Darty, Paulette 3, 263, 269, 271–2, 274, 77, 161–73, 181–2, 312, 317
277, 281, 285 Gross, Valentine (later Hugo) xiv, 4,
Davis, Mary E. 98, 105, 118, 120, 127, 141, 146, 288, 306
131 Guérin, Jacques 3
Dawson, Christopher 71–2, 77, 80
Dayan, Peter 73, 121–2, 124–6 Higgins, Dick xviii, 185–93, 204, 209,
Debussy, Claude 6, 8, 10–11, 14–15, 27, 226–8
46, 55, 65, 69, 85, 90, 92, 99, 124, Hobbs, Christopher 229–30, 255
129, 145, 234–7, 241, 268, 278, Hugo, Victor 67, 138
283, 286, 297, 310 preface to Cromwell 138
Boîte à joujoux, La 305 Huré, Jean 24–5
Gymnopédies (Satie orch. Debussy) 251 Hutcheon, Linda 33, 38, 44–5
Mer, La 129, 133, 297 Huyghens, Christiaan xv, 147–8
Pelléas et Mélisande 10, 81, 241 Hyspa, Vincent 49, 72, 88, 243, 257,
Debussy, Claude-Emma (‘Chouchou’) 286 264–5, 269, 272–3, 276, 323–4
Debussy, Emma 287
Deleuze, Gilles 33, 36 Indy, Vincent d’ 1, 12, 275, 278
Denith, Simon 43–5
Dépaquit, Jules 77–8, 264–5, 281, 284, Jacob, Max 155
309 Ruffian toujours, truand jamais 112,
Derain, André 6, 10, 86, 155, 264, 311, 308
313–4, 316, 318 Jankélévitch, Vladimir 32, 79, 188
Diaghilev, Serge xiii, xvii, xviii, 1, 2, 104, Jordan-Morhange, Hélène 302
107, 137, 140, 149, 151–2, 158–63, Jourdain, Francis 5
167–9, 173–4, 264, 299–302, 305, Jaques-Dalcroze, Emile 140
311, 313–4, 316–8 Jarry, Alfred 30, 79
Duchamp, Marcel 86, 110–11, 121, 199, Ubu Roi 79
217, 322
Dukas, Paul 4, 77, 298 Koechlin, Charles 268
Le sang de Méduse (ballet project) 77 Koklova, Olga (later Picasso) 152, 155,
Durey, Louis 2 157, 315
Dvořak, Antonín Kra, Suzanne 67
Humoresque 211–5, 218
Index of Names 343
Laloy, Louis 1–2, 317 Péladan, Sâr Joséphin 49–50, 64, 187–8,
Larionov, Mikhail 159 193, 254–5
Lejeune, Emile 148, 247 Perloff, Nancy 147
Levinson, André 139 Picabia, Francis xviii, 13, 86, 108, 110,
Lopokova, Lydia 156, 159, 302 121, 175, 177–81, 320–2
Lyre et Palette xv, 247, 271, 298–9, 301 Picard, Gaston 67
Picasso, Pablo xiii, xiv–xviii, 7, 9, 10,86,
Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) 86, 110, 104–5, 107–8, 123, 137–58, 173–7,
113, 127, 322 181, 296, 299, 314, 318–19
Marconi, Guglielmo 148 Pickford, Mary 156
Maré, Rolf de 12, 177–8, 313, 321–2 Plato xiv, 162, 173, 303–4
Marinetti, Filippo 139–40 Poueigh, Jean 31–1, 36, 39, 107, 137
Marnold, Jean 31 Poulenc, Francis 1–3, 65, 161, 177, 307,
Martin, Charles xiv, xvii, 102–3, 155,19, 312
123, 128–32, 291–2 Les Biches 1
Martineau, Paul 28 Proust, Marcel 199–100, 254
Massine, Léonide xiv, xvii, 7, 104, 108, Le Bois sacré cher aux arts et aux
137, 153, 158–9, 173–4, 301, 305, muses 91
314, 319
Mesens, E.L.T. 4 Radiguet, Raymond 14, 16, 310–11
Meyer, Agnes (Mrs Eugene) 315 Les Joues en feu 14
Meyer, Marcelle 3, 264, 288–9, 291, 293, Ravel, Mme Joseph 285
306–9, 311, 316 Ravel, Maurice 12, 29, 67, 72, 90, 184,
Meyerhold, Vsevolod 139–40 250–1, 255, 271, 297
Milhaud, Darius 1, 4, 6–7, 79, 112, 135, Enfant et les sortilèges, L’ 305
264, 266, 285, 297–8, 315, 319, Ronsard à son âme 72
322 Richardson, John xiv, 152–3, 155–6
Milhaud, Madeleine xv, 4–5, 13 Roché, Henri-Pierre 3, 144, 298
Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 77, 79, Roland-Manuel (Alexis) 3, 12, 19, 23, 29,
81–2, 172 39, 67, 79, 252, 260, 263, 285, 295
Monet, Claude 10–11, 85, 124, 133, 145, Rose-Croix xvi, 8, 49–66, 187–8, 190,
176 193, 253–5
Montmartre 6, 30, 49, 86–7, 140, 179, Rousseau, Henri (Le Douanier) 79
187, 207, 234 Charmeuse de serpents, La 294
Morand, Paul 137 Roussel, Albert 1, 12, 298
Mortier, Jane 1, 25, 286, 306 Rubinstein, Ida 139
Nietzsche, Friedrich 32–3, 36, 207, Saint-Point, Valentine de 289–90

227–8 Saint-Saëns, Camille 112
Nijinsky, Vaslav 137, 140 Danse macabre 308
Nyman, Michael 183, 186, 214, 224–5, Salis, Rodolphe 31, 69, 178
229–30 Satie, Conrad 1–2, 4–5, 12–13, 51, 54,
250–2, 259–60, 264, 294
Olivier, Fernande 10 Sauguet, Henri 1–3, 312
Orledge, Robert xiii, 45, 58–60, 66, 68, Sauret, Henriette 68–9
70, 74–5, 96, 119, 122, 162–3, 179, Froid, Le 69
184, 214, 291, 297, 307, 316 Schola Cantorum 1, 6, 11–12, 45, 90, 107,
243, 275, 277–9, 323
Schubert, Franz 131 Varèse, Edgard 140, 297–8

alleged author of ‘Mazurka’ 46, 97–8, Varèse, Louise (Norton) 313
109 Verlaine, Paul 67, 73, 124
Séré, Octave (pseudonym of Jean Poueigh) Verley, Albert
30–1, 36, 39 Aurore aux doigts de rose, L’ 298–9
Seurat, Georges 138, 153 Viñes, Ricardo 3, 25, 262, 271, 283–,
Shattuck, Roger 4, 92 285–7, 290–1, 295, 299, 307
Shakespeare, William Vogel, Lucien 7, 102, 115, 117–18, 291–3,
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 139–40, 305, 310
297 Volta, Ornella xiii, xix, 31, 77–8, 83, 97,
Stravinsky, Igor 7, 12, 65, 85, 99, 140, 117, 223, 243
154, 211, 237, 297, 313
Wagner, Richard 85, 90, 103, 107–8,
Tailleferre, Germaine 3, 315–16 120–1, 187, 197, 205–7, 226–8,
Thévenaz, Paul 140 237, 318
Thomson, Virgil 183–4, 210–11 Wagnerism xviii, 8, 10, 92, 99–100,
Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 10–11, 85–6, 104, 188, 225, 255–6
124, 145 Webern, Anton 93, 184
Hangover, The 86 White, John 229–30, 233
Tzara, Tristan 86, 175 Whiting, Steven Moore 29, 37, 43, 45,
69, 72, 75, 116, 121–2, 163, 176,
Uccello, Paolo (né di Dono) 157 179, 243, 324
Udine, Jean d’ 137 Wiéner, Jean 9, 307
Utrillo, Miguel (Utrillo y Molins, Miquel) Wilkins, Nigel 72, 76, 79
88, 152, 257 Wolff, Christian 95, 215, 233, 259
Valadon, Suzanne Zola, Emile 138

relationship with Satie 2, 68, 86, 88, Zupančič, Alenka 21, 35–7
93–4, 227, 236, 257–9
Portrait of Erik Satie 94
Index of Works
Index of works by Satie (including projects and sketches)
Acte, Un 293 Danses Romaines 255–6

Adieu, see Quatre Mélodies Descriptions automatiques 27–8, 283, 285
Alice au Pays de Merveilles 312–13 Désespoir agréable 277
Aline-Polka 265, 324 Deux Choses 297
Allegro 248 Deux Préludes pour un chien 282
Allons-y Chochotte 274 Dieu Credo rouge 279
Angora Ox, The 77, 268, 270 Dîner à l’Elysée, Un 264–5
Aperçus désagréables 9, 277–8 Dîner de Pierrot, Le 281
Archidanses, Les 314 Diva de ‘l’Empire’, La 6, 271–2
Avant-dernières pensées 63, 298 Douceur d’oublier 271
Dreamy Fish, The 11, 77, 266, 267–8
Bâtard de Tristan, Le 256–7
Belle Excentrique, La 14, 273, 309–10 Eginhard. Prélude 258
Bonjour Biqui, Bonjour! 93, 258–9 Elégie [1887] 98, 249
Bons mouvements, Les 272 Embarquement pour Cythère 302
Embryons desséchés 25, 28, 34, 39,
Chanson 250 40–41, 46, 97–8, 109, 286
Chanson barbare 268 En Habit de cheval 11, 147, 151–2, 282
Chanson Hongroise 120, 252 Enfance de Ko-Quo, L’ (Recommandations
Chanson médiévale 275 maternelles) 288
Chapitres tournés en tous sens 27–8, 287 Enfantillages pittoresques 289
Chemise, La 281
Chez le docteur 273–4 Fables de La Fontaine 299
Chœur d’adolescents 278–9 Fâcheux exemple 277
Choses vues à droite et à gauche (sans Fantaisie-valse 247
lunettes) 290, 302 Fête donnée par des Chevaliers Normands
Cinéma, see Relâche en l’Honneur d’une jeune
Cinq Grimaces pour ‘Le Songe d’une nuit Demoiselle (XIe siècle) 8, 256
d’été’ 141, 297–8 Fils des étoiles, Le 49, 147, 237, 255, 257
Concurrence 318 Fugue-valse 275
Conte pour un ballet 305
Conteur magique, Le 280 Geneviève de Brabant xviii, 77, 182,
Couleurs 316 265–6, 268
Croquis et agaceries d’un gros bonhomme Gnossiennes 7, 30, 63, 66, 96–7, 232, 257;
en bois 28, 286, 287 Nos. 1–3: 131, 252–3; No. 5: 252; No.
6: 253, 262
Danse 253, 270 Grand Singe, Le 281
Danses de travers, see Pièces froides Gymnopédies 7, 9, 66, 69, 92, 213, 229,
Danses Gothiques 2, 60–62, 69, 256, 258 232, 234, 251
Heures séculaires et instantanées xiv, 7, Omnibus automobile, L’ 273

67, 73, 98, 123, 293–5 Ontrotance 259
‘Obstacles venimeux’ 41–2
Pantins dansent, Les 289–90
Impérial-Oxford 273 Parade xiv–xviii, 2, 6, 8, 26, 30, 34, 49,
103–8, 120, 137–60, 172–4, 181,
J’avais un ami 272 231, 296, 299–302, 314
Jack in the Box 77–8, 264, 268, 313–14 Passacaille 275
Je te veux 237, 263 Paul & Virginie 182, 311–12
Peccadilles importunes 289
Légende Californienne 273 Petit Recueil des fêtes 269–70
Leit-motiv du ‘Panthée’ 253–4 Petite Sonate 278, 323
Ludions 83, 315–16 Piccadilly, Le 232, 271
Pièces froides 65–6, 262–3
Marche de Cocagne 307, 313 Danses de travers 65
Marienbad 276–7 Piège de Méduse, Le xvi, 7, 19, 28–9, 34,
Médecin malgré lui, Le (Gounod, 49, 63, 76–84, 182, 284–5
recitatives by Satie) xvi–xviii, 1, Poudre d’or 267
77, 161–73, 181–2, 312, 317 Pousse l’amour 269, 274, 323
Mémoires d’un amnésique 27, 31–2, 147, Prélude de ‘La Mort de Monsieur Mouche’
184 266–7
Menuet basque 280 Prélude de la Porte héroïque du ciel xvi,
Menuet lent 280 49–50, 58–62, 260
Menus propos enfantins 288–9 Prélude du Nazaréen 8, 65, 256
Mer est pleine d’eau: c’est à n’y rien Prélude du ‘Prince de Byzance’ 254
comprendre, La 297 Prélude en tapisserie 275
Mercure xvii, 13, 108, 173–7, 201, 275, Préludes flasques (pour un chien) 283
305, 338–40 Premier Menuet 308–9
Messe de la foi 260 Première pensée Rose-Croix, see
Messe des pauvres 188, 190, 194, 196, Modéré
199, 206, 260–62 Prisonnier maussade, Le 280
Modéré (Première pensée Rose+Croix) Profondeur 279
46, 253 Psaumes 262
Motifs lumineux 309 Psitt! Psitt! 277
Musique d’ameublement xvi, 34, 99,
112–13, 188; 1917 set: 303; 1920 Quadrille 318
set (Sons industriels): 308; Tenture Quatre petites mélodies 310–11
de Cabinet préfectoral: 315 ‘Adieu’ xv, 14–17
‘Elégie’ 14
Naissance de Vénus, La 313 Quatuor (1er, 2d) 250
Nocturnes 30, 305–6, 323
Noël 88, 257 Rambouillet 276
Nouvelles Pièces froides (pour un chien) Relâche xvi, xviii, 6–8, 12–13, 49, 108,
275–6 120, 177–82, 185, 319–21
Cinéma 109–11, 322
Ogives xvi, 7, 49–63, 65, 69, 120, 251–2, Rêverie sur un plat 296
286 Roi de la grande Ile, Le 314
Oiseaux, Les 276 Roxane 259
Index of Works 347
Salut Drapeau! 254 Tenture de Cabinet préfectoral, see

San Bernardo 286–7 Musique d’ameublement
Sarabandes 147, 250 Trois farces de tabarin 302
Socrate xiv, xviii, 1–4, 11–14, 73–4, 81, Trois mélodies [1887] 249
93, 108, 162, 173, 181, 231, 236, Trois mélodies 299
241, 303–5 ‘Le Chapelier’ 45, 162
Sonatine bureaucratique 19, 45, 98, 144, Trois morceaux en forme de poire xix, 45,
303 147, 234–5, 253, 255, 265, 268,
Songe-creux 280 270–71, 305
Sonnerie pour réveiller le bon gros Roi des Trois Nouvelles Enfantines 288
Singes (lequel ne dort toujours que Trois petites pièces montées 34–5, 307
d’un œil) 313 Trois poèmes d’amour xvi, 67–76, 81–3,
Sonneries de la Rose-Croix 49, 60, 62, 296
190, 194, 196, 199, 201–8, 254–5 Trois Valses distinguées du Précieux
Sons industriels, see Musique dégoûté, Les 63, 71, 295–6
d’ameublement
Sports et divertissements xiv, xvi, xviii, uspud 8, 60, 77, 88, 96, 256, 257, 259, 262
7, 29, 63, 83, 101–3, 107, 115–35,
175, 225, 278, 291–3 Valse-ballet 248–9
‘Choral inappétissant’ 101–2, 107 Veille du combat, La 303
‘La Pêche’ 132–4 Véritables Préludes flasques (pour un
‘Le Bain de mer’ 103, 127–31, 147 chien) 25, 28, 67, 283–4
‘Le Water-chute’ 131–2 Verset laïque & somptueux 267
Statue retrouvée, La (Divertissement) 7, Veuf, Le 265, 270
173, 314–15 Vexations xv, xvii, 7, 11, 57, 65–6, 93, 95–6,
Supercinéma 313 99, 113, 185–6, 188–90, 209–11,
Sylvie 98, 249 213–28, 229–30, 236, 259, 323
Vieux sequins et vieilles cuirasses 28, 31,
Tendrement 268–9, 274 45, 186, 287–8

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Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature

Je me dédie cette œuvre. E.S.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

List of Figures  vii

1 Satie’s Personal and Musical Logic 1

2 Satie and the Meaning of the Comic 19

3 Satie’s Rose-Croix Piano Works 49

4 Satie as Poet, Playwright and Composer 67

6 Exploring Interart Dialogue in Erik Satie’s Sports et

7 Parade: ballet réaliste137

8 Collaborative Works in Satie’s Last Years 161

9 History, Homeopathy and the Spiritual Impulse in the Post-war

10 After Satie: Howard Skempton in Conversation

Appendix: Chronological Catalogue of Satie’s Compositions and

Select Bibliography  325

5.1 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, ‘The Hangover’ (portrait of Suzanne

6.1 Le Bain de mer, Satie’s score. Typ 915.14.7700, Houghton

1.1 Satie, ‘Adieu’: first version 14

2.1 Satie, Heures séculaires et instantanées, I (‘Obstacles venimeux’):

3.1 The 23 horizontal notes in Ogives no. 1 52

5.1 Satie, Vexations 95

6.1 Satie, Le Water-chute: descending scale passage 131

Pietro Dossena is a musicologist, composer and pianist. He is the author of an

Grace Wai Kwan Gates is a PhD candidate at Kingston University, focusing on

Matthew Mendez is an independent scholar specialising in the study of

Helen Julia Minors is Senior Lecturer in Music at Kingston University. She

by Stephanie Schroedter (2012) and La musique française: esthétique et identité

Robert Orledge is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool

Caroline Potter is Reader in Music at Kingston University, London. An established

Christine Reynolds studied French and Spanish at King’s College, University

Simon Shaw-Miller is currently Professor of History of Art at Bristol University.

Howard Skempton is a composer, teacher, performer and adjudicator. He

The British composer Howard Skempton, a lifelong Satie admirer, explains

The Idea can do without Art.

Let us mistrust Art: it is often nothing but Virtuosity.40

Satie’s case is extraordinary … He’s a mischievous and cunning old artist. At

Satie’s musical logic, which reveals a process of self-discovery with many

Example 1.1 Satie, ‘Adieu’: first version

Example 1.2 Satie, ‘Adieu’: second version

Example 1.3 Satie, ‘Adieu’: final version

The Prince of Humorists, that’s Erik Satie.1

period Satie participated in a unique way in contemporary musical debates as

Part I: Humour and Context

Bergson and the Contemporary Context

Humour has been a concern of many influential philosophers from ancient to

The materiality of humour contests many Modernist expectations and

an eccentricity’.24 If a comic gesture is made, society responds with a gesture that

Throughout his career, Satie’s reputation as a humorist was largely constructed

his anti-establishment and humorist reputation from 1912 to 1914 through

The Véritables Préludes Flasques (pour un chien) open a series of pianistic

to his non-professional status. Jean Marnold is particularly incensed at the overt

Part II: Overcoming the Barriers

Humour dates surprisingly quickly and is a very culturally specific form of

and overt examples of humour within Satie’s works for a twenty-first-century

1. Explicit reference to the comic: setting music to a comic text; alluding to

Repetition is a prominent feature of many of Satie’s works and is a compositional

structuralist terminology, this feature has been described as ‘motivic assemblage’

Therefore, a series of consecutive jokes without an inner connection does not

example as irresponsible or trivialising. The existence of irony’s edge in Satie’s

[Aggressive:] He hypocritically uses the stylistic devices of this sentimental

(1) straightforward hints or warnings presented in the authorial voice (titles,

errors of fact, judgment); (3) contradictions within the work (‘internal

List of Figures vii

1 Satie’s Personal and Musical Logic 1

2 Satie and the Meaning of the Comic 19

3 Satie’s Rose-Croix Piano Works 49

4 Satie as Poet, Playwright and Composer 67

7 Parade: ballet réaliste137

8 Collaborative Works in Satie’s Last Years 161

Select Bibliography 325

1.1 Satie, ‘Adieu’: first version 14

3.1 The 23 horizontal notes in Ogives no. 1 52

5.1 Satie, Vexations 95

6.1 Satie, Le Water-chute: descending scale passage 131