Penman Erik Satie Three Piece Suite

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80427-154-4
Verlag: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Composer, pianist and writer Erik Satie was one of the great figures of Belle Époque Paris. Known for his unvarying image of bowler hat, three-piece suit and umbrella, Satie was a surrealist before Surrealism and a conceptual artist before Conceptual Art. Friend of Cocteau and Debussy, Picabia and Picasso, Satie was always a few steps ahead of his peers at the apex of modernism. There's scarcely a turn in postwar music, both classical and popular, that Satie doesn't anticipate. Moving from the variety shows of Montmartre's Le Chat Noir to suburban Arcueil, from the Parisian demi-monde to the artistic avant-garde, cult critic Ian Penman's masterful Erik Satie Three Piece Suite is an exhilarating and playful three-part study of this elusive and endlessly fascinating figure, published to mark the centenary of Satie's death.

Ian Penman is a British writer, music journalist and critic. He began his career at the NME in 1977, later contributing to various publications including The Face, Arena, Tatler, Sight & Sound, The Wire, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Harper's and City Journal. He is the author of the collections Vital Signs: Music, Movies, and Other Manias (Serpent's Tail, 1998) and It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019). His first original book, Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023), won the RSL Ondaatje Prize for Literature and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography in 2024.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Penman, Ian

Leseproben

ALPHABET

His friend, the poet J. P. Contamine de Latour, said that Satie was like ‘a man who knew only 13 letters of the alphabet but who had nevertheless decided to create a new literature with only these means.’

ANGEL (1)

I sometimes think there’s something just a bit angelic about Satie. A twinkly smile with a hint of celestial knowledge. Approaching asexual. Blurry, with well-defined edges. Umbrella wings. Soft, caressing, harp-like music with an undertow of unassuageable melancholy. Evanescent, but sensibly turned out; always clothed in the one identical outfit. Angels, too, wear the same raiment all their lives… whether that life is infinite, or a single flickering spark.

ANGEL (2)

Angelus Novus: painted 1920 by Paul Klee, purchased 1921 by Walter Benjamin. This is no angel feathery and glowing. This is an angel in rehab, all nonplussed and forlorn. An angel made of paper cuts. An angel of jutting angles, like Duchamp’s bottle rack. A startled flea from a dark blue bottle. A Dürer etching via an old Archie comic. A short-sighted angel, whose eyes look huge and round when he removes his glasses. A backward-looking melancholy baby.

{See also: KLEE

ANGEL (3)

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in his influential theological summa De Coelesti Hierarchia (On the Celestial Hierarchy), classified angels as made up of three (3) distinct orders: Highest, Middle and Lowest.

APOLLINAIRE

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918). Critic, phrase-maker, poet, soldier. There are votive cults around Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the Comte de Lautréamont and others from that era – why not Apollinaire? Even if you’re not a total fan, it still seems slightly baffling. He may have been the first genuinely modern poet. He died young and left a great-looking photograph, from spring 1916: jagged profile, bandaged temple, wounded infantryman. He coined the terms ‘Cubism’ in 1911 and ‘Surrealism’ in 1917; first in private correspondence, then in his programme notes for the Cocteau–Picasso–Satie production Parade. Cocteau, tongue half in cheek, called their collaborative work ‘realistic’; Apollinaire went one louder:

This new alliance … has given rise, in Parade, to a kind of surrealism, which I consider to be the point of departure for a whole series of manifestations of the New Spirit that is making itself felt today and that will certainly appeal to our best minds. We may expect it to bring about profound changes in our arts and manners through universal joyfulness…

In 1917, Apollinaire wrote one of the first pieces of Surrealist literature: his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias), subtitled Drame surréaliste. It became the basis for Francis Poulenc’s opera Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1947). Poulenc retained both the farcical and the more serious aspects of the original, which, according to one critic, evinced a ‘high-spirited topsy-turveydom’ that conceals ‘a deeper and sadder theme – the need to rediscover a France ravaged by war’. And the ‘farcical’ aspects? The opening sounds exactly like the music for a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

{See also: BLAISE; COCTEAU; PARADE; POULENC

ARCHICEMBALO

A keyboard instrument dreamed up by Nicola Vicentino in 1555. Only one instrument which can play his 31-note octave system survives from the Renaissance: the Clavemusicum Omnitonum Modulis Diatonicis Cromaticis et Enearmonicis, built by Vito Trasuntino of Venice in 1606. Vicentino (1511–1575 or 1576), from north-eastern Italy, was a true Renaissance man: composer, early adopter of microtones, music theorist, scholar of ancient Greek music. In 1555 he published his most famous work, L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Ancient music adapted to modern practice), which phrase might also describe what Satie thought he was doing.

{See also: MICROTONES

ARCUEIL

Parish in the southern suburbs of Paris where Satie lived and worked for a quarter of a century, and where his remains remain buried to this day (1925–2025).

The walk that Satie regularly made between Arcueil and the centre of Paris is between 4 and 5 km each way. A good way to keep yourself trim, especially if you have a sedentary job or calling. Journalists and pianists alike sit for long stretches of time at the keyboard – Satie was both.

Arcueil contains a + u + e + i, but not a single ‘o’. This seems apt. Satie’s music feels very a + e + i + u, with not so many ‘o’s. Ogives is the only piece that springs to mind. As it happens, the name Arcueil was recorded for the first time in the twelfth century as Arcoïalum, meaning ‘place of the arches’.

Arcueil’s other most famous, infamous or notorious citizen is the Marquis de Sade; he, unlike Satie, is buried elsewhere.

{See also: OGIVE; PARADE (2)

AURIC

Georges Auric (1899–1983). French composer and member of the Satie-centric musical collective Les Six. Like Satie, Auric studied composition with Albert Roussel at the Schola Cantorum. By the mid-1930s, Auric had repudiated the somewhat elitist attitudes of his youth in favour of a more populist approach. Associated with various leftist groups (including the Association des Écrivains et des Artistes Révolutionnaires or AEAR). Adopted four compositional strategies:

1. to participate collectively with other leftist artists;
2. to reach a wider audience by writing in more popular idioms;
3. to write music aimed at a younger audience;
4. to express his political views more directly in his music.

Music criticism was another important part of Auric’s career. He promoted the ideals of Cocteau and Les Six – known as esprit nouveau – and criticized the ‘pretentiousness’ of Debussy, Saint-Saèns and Wagner. Auric collaborated with Jean Cocteau on the music for all six of JC’s major films and worked on René Clair’s celebrated musical À nous la liberté. He went on to provide the soundtrack music for an extraordinary range of films – and an extraordinary number of very good ones – including: Bonjour Tristesse; The Innocents; Lola Montes; Rififi; The Wages of Fear; Passport To Pimlico; The Lavender Hill Mob.

{See also: COCTEAU; JC; SIX; SOUNDTRACK

BACHARACH

In the Wikipedia entry for Burt Bacharach, his music is classified as all three of the following: orchestral pop, easy listening, lounge pop. I don’t know why, but this feels just the tiniest bit slighting, as if he is being put in his proper place: Don’t get above yourself now, this is where you belong! But said entry does add: ‘Bacharach’s music is characterized by unusual chord progressions and time signature changes, influenced by his background in jazz, and uncommon selections of instruments for small orchestras. He arranged, conducted and produced most of his output.’

Some related songs I’m thinking of right now: ‘Do You Know The Way To San Jose’; ‘Wichita Lineman’; ‘Galveston’; ‘Guess I’m Dumb’; ‘My Autumn Done Come’.

Some related songwriters and arrangers I’m thinking of right now: Al DeLory; Clare Fischer; Lee Hazlewood; Gary McFarland; Mike Melvoin; Jack Nitzsche; Marty Paich; Jimmy Webb; Brian Wilson. It’s not just some grumpy-old-guy truism to say that there will never be anything like this again. Specific historical circumstances produced these people in this time and this place, learning how to write, play, arrange, record and produce; sculpting exquisite melancholy and swooning fatalism within pop music’s sublimely compressed spacetime.

{See also: EASY LISTENING; MILHAUD; SAUDADE

BLAGUE

Strictly speaking, in a Google Translate kind of way, blague simply means joke. But it may be nearer, in spirit if not exact meaning, to the English expression: ‘Is he taking the piss?’

A jest or ludibrium, a leg-pull or send-up. A bite-the-hand-that-feeds-you game with the idea of correct form, formality, decorum; what is fit and proper; the way things have always been done. All Satie’s mocking, knocking or détournement of good form was carried out with a sly, puckish wit. (It’s apt, even today, to give one a fit of the giggles.) He employed artifice to show up artifice; deployed perfect manners to send up bourgeois propriety. He never excluded himself from the joke – after all, it’s more fun that way. As if light mockery and earnest silliness have their own secret logic, like a child’s game that takes up an entire summer holiday.

A few related terms: pince-sans-rire, or deadpan; clownerie, or clowning; bêtise, or...