Erik Satie

Satie strips music down to essentials—simple melodies, bare harmonies, hypnotic repetition, and a flat affect that's either mystical or ironic depending on your mood. He avoids development, climaxes, and Romantic emotional display, creating music that exists in a perpetual present tense. His harmonies are modal and static, his forms intentionally anti-dramatic, his aesthetic one of deliberate simplicity that influenced minimalism decades later.

He was close to Debussy, who orchestrated his Gymnopédies, though their friendship soured over mutual influence anxiety. The young Cocteau, Picasso, and Diaghilev embraced him as an ally against Romantic pretension. He influenced Les Six (especially Poulenc and Milhaud) who saw him as a patron saint of anti-Romanticism. John Cage worshipped him and introduced his work to America, recognizing a kindred spirit in questioning musical assumptions.

His early works are the famous Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes—spare, enigmatic, revolutionary. Then came a fallow period where he worked as a cafe pianist, followed by late studies at the Schola Cantorum at age 40. His mature period includes the ironic piano pieces with absurd titles (Dried Embryos) and the ballet Parade, which scandalized Paris. He ended as the elder statesman of Les Six, vindicated after years of obscurity.

Satie lived for years in a tiny apartment in Arcueil where he walked the 10km to Montmartre daily, always wearing his trademark grey velvet suit. After his death, friends discovered his room contained 12 identical velvet suits, two grand pianos placed one atop the other, and behind the pianos, a vast collection of umbrellas he'd never used. The man was as deliberately odd as his music.

Satie composed 'Vexations,' a brief piano piece with instructions to play it 840 times in a row—the first work of extreme duration minimalism, predating La Monte Young by decades. The first complete performance in 1963 (organized by John Cage) took over 18 hours.

Satie is everywhere and nowhere—the Gymnopédies are concert staples, but most pianists stop there. His ironic pieces (Embryons desséchés) appear occasionally, and Parade surfaces when orchestras want to program early modernism. There's vast unexplored territory in his songs and later piano works. He's trendy again thanks to minimalism's popularity and ambient music's influence.