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At the centenary of the death of Erik Satie, the music critic Ian Penman wants to minimize the few garish facts that people could have resumed on the subject of his new book. It takes 37 pages, for example, before mentioning the combinations and identical hats that the French composer wore every day. At no time does he claim that these combinations were yellow or that he only ate white food. . . Titbits which contributed to the reputation of Satie as a charming curiosity.
Instead, Erik Satie Three Piece Suite Show how unfair he is for someone who spent his life destroying clichés and opening new artistic avenues to be known only by a set of received ideas. Satie (1866-1925) rubbed shoulders with innovators like Debussy, Duchamp and Picasso. For Penman, he always had one step ahead. The first real musical impressionist; “Naturally” a surrealist. His avant-garde ideas are prior to minimalism and conceptual art by decades. It was an “ambient pioneer”.
The musical ideas of Satie are incredibly clear. Most of his works are the length of pop songs, their shape near the installation of the most familiar chorus versa to modern listeners and full of earworms. Today, it dominates compilations and reading lists that are easy to listen to called as “peaceful classic vibrations”. This fate may have terrified many radicals of his time, but Penman imagines that he is strangely approaching his ambitions. In 1918, Satie proposed the idea of ”furniture music”; To play in the background during dinner, meetings, civic functions or office work.
Penman's books tend to showcase revolutionary guests. Fassbinder thousands of mirrorsWho won the RSL Ondaatje prize last year, was a fragmentary study by the German filmmaker self -destructive and ridiculously productive Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Musicians in It bothers me at home, this curved trackA collection of 2019 tests, exploded forms from nowhere. For many writers, Penman is considered the musical critic of the music critic. He started writing for the NME in the late 1970s while his recent long pieces, that David Bowie or Walter Benjamin is enriching and enriching. He brings this same quality to his exploration of Satie.
The first section of Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is a continuous biographical account. The second is, like the music of Satie, Lapidary and Melancholy: a series of prose miniatures. The inscriptions relate to various Belle Époque, Fin-de-Siècle figures and the figures of the 20th century, retracing the musical after-parts of Satie in the life and the time of Penman. The threads can be found in surprising places. Bill Evans, Burt Bacharach – Of course. The Dawson? Penman makes him fit.
Satie liked to bring her pieces together by three. In this area, he liked the structure of the tripartite fugue: a musical theme is stated, developed in a vertiginously developed and finally returns to the house. But the third part of Erik Satie Three Piece Suite represents additional broadcast. It is a free “newspaper” of Penman's experience to listen to Satie over time: entries dated from 2022, telling dreams, associations, wandering thoughts.
But is it like a Satie to show us these chances and ends? Or is it contrary to the spirit of music? Despite the costumes of Satie and the meticulous self-presentation, the alcoholic composer lived in a small room full of unplayable pianos and years of unopened letters. Penman tells us that every day Satie has taken notes, collecting them in a hat: “It is also a kind of hoarding”. But we do not receive any of this from music. Indeed, a concern for Penman is “the contrast between the spare economy and crystalline of his music and the misery of the way he lived”. I was wondering if Penman's approach here looked more like the hat of the notes of Satie than for the refined experience of listening to it.
It is only after having plunged into other biographies that I understood how Penman had stripped. The figure emerges whole, despite or perhaps because of this. Without the burden of a too simple biographical inventory, this impressionist work of criticism is agile, lives or creating poignant moods. I left without much idea of, let's say, what Satie succeeded as a young man, or how he landed a job by playing the piano in Boho Boho of Belle Époque Paris. But I had a strong idea of his sensitivity, and I now find myself revisiting his music obsessively.
Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman Fitzcarraldo editions 12.99 £, 224 pages
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