ERIK SATIE: MUSIC FROM THE CLOSET

One and a half meters wide, two meters long, and three meters high. According to Contaime de Latour, one of the composer’s friends, these are the dimensions of the room in which Erik Satie was said to have lived in Rue Cortot 6 in Montmartre. Light fell through a triangular hole in the ceiling. The furniture consisted of a bed and a piano. Upon entering the room, one bumped against the bed and was forced to climb on to it. The bed was the only possible place to sit in this “closet,” which is how Satie occasionally tended to refer to his dwelling.

The twenty-one-year-old moved to Montmartre in 1887. In 1988, Rodolphe Salis hired him as the second pianist in the famous cabaret Chat Noir. New guests were announced by name to those present by a man dressed as a Swiss Guardian after striking the floor three times with his halberd. The walls of the Chat Noir were decorated with papier mâché to look like medieval walls and were hung with old armor and helmets. The waiters wore the official clothing of members of the Académie Française. Satie will have liked these ironic knocks, as they joined two of the young musician’s interests: his first piano teacher, church organist Vinot, got Satie interested in Gregorian music, medieval painting, and mysticism. In contrast, his uncle Seabird took the young Satie to the circus, later to cabarets in Montmartre. Thus contemporary music in the form of quotes and ironic parodies found their way into his compositions and their titles. Claude Debussy once criticized Satie’s works for their formlessness—several weeks later, a collection of works by Satie were published under the title of Trois Morceaux en forme de Poire, whereby the French word poire can mean pear as well as “numbskull” or “idiot.”

Alongside academic music, Satie, who did not like to distinguish between serious and entertaining music, was also interested in new, popular forms of music and art, the music of the cabaret, coffee concerts, and jazz. He wrote far more than seventy songs for chansonniers, set poems to music, wrote for the ballet, and later music to accompany the nascent silent film. His scores are studded with instructions for interpreters and often supplemented with drawings. These are in no way an end in themselves but belong to the artwork, so that only the interpreter can grasp the overall context of the work; the listener hears only a part of Satie’s concept. This demand on art availed itself of the multidimensionality of people’s perception. Satie worked with a wide variety of means and people in order to implement this demand. Montmartre constituted the biotope in which the various arts and artists could come together. Satie composed a piece for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, for example, based on an idea from Jean Cocteau’s Parade. Picasso designed the costumes and the stage set, Léonide Massine developed the choreography, and Ernest Ansermet conducted.

Although Satie had moved to the Arcueil at Paris’s doorstep in 1898, he remained connected to Montmartre, where the elements of his compositional techniques and his artistic stance found their spatial counterpart: Montmartre had been developing at a terrific speed since the mid-19th century; with industrialization and the train station came working-class apartments and garbage from the inner city.

With the aid of the quote and montage techniques, of repetitions and omissions, Satie composed outside of the prevailing currents in French academic music, against the Wagnerian development in music. His love of the historicizing gaze and Gregorian harmony were reflected in the eclecticism of the Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre, which was being built during this period. To Satie, the former Communards, the artists, the workers, the prostitutes, the pilgrims, the drinkers, and the criminals were lifeworlds that clearly distinguished themselves from the middle-class strollers on the Boulevard Haussmann. When he returned home in the early hours of the morning, he carried a hammer in order to defend himself against potential attacks. His mistrust of “serious” music was attested to in the insufficiency, the humor, and not lastly in the success of the popular music of the cabaret and the variety theater. Cubism, Surrealism, Dadaism in literature and painting strengthened his need for a type of music that did not aim for the manipulation feelings, for pathos and a sense of being overwhelmed. His music was meant to be musique d’ameublement—furniture music. It was meant to serve as a random article of everyday use, such as a closet.