Volume 37, Number 4 · March 15, 1990
Mascot of Modern Music
By Roger Shattuck
Erik Satie
by Alan M. Gillmor
Twayne, 387 pp., $29.95
Satie Seen Through His Letters
by Ornella Volta, translated by Michael Bullock
Marion Boyars, 239 pp., $35.00
The eccentric cabaret-classical musician Erik Satie (1866-1925) floated with the fragile equilibrium of a hang glider pilot through l'air du temps at the turn of the century. Just by staying in place he passed through a succession of seemingly contradictory periods and styles. During the Eighties and Nineties he combined piano playing in the bohemian night spots of Montmartre with exotic incidental music for Rosicrucian gatherings. In the fertile decade before World War I, reaching forty, Satie returned to school to study counterpoint. Soon after he was rediscovered as an anti-Wagnerian pioneer by his two old friends Ravel and Debussy. Parade, the ballet Satie dreamed up with Cocteau, Picasso, and Massine for Diaghilev in 1917, launched him into several years of collaboration with the Dadaists. His 'furniture music' ('Don't listen! Keep talking!' he instructed his listeners) displays a subtle relation to his writing in 'Memoirs of an Amnesiac.'
Review, 2215 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |