His piano pieces influenced many modern composers. Erik Satie is the forerunner and founder of such musical movements as impressionism, primitivism, constructivism, neoclassicism and minimalism. It was Satie who invented the genre of “furniture music”, which does not need to be listened to specifically, an unobtrusive melody that sounds in a store or at an exhibition.
In 1888, Satie wrote the work “Three Gymnopedies” (fr. Trois gymnopedies) for solo piano, which was based on the free use of non-chord sequences. A similar technique has already been used by S. Frank and E. Chabrier. Satie was the first to introduce sequences of chords built in fourths; this technique first appeared in his work “The Son of the Stars” (Le fils des étoiles, 1891). This kind of innovation was immediately used by almost all French composers. These techniques became characteristic of French modern music. In 1892, Satie developed his own system of composition, the essence of which was that for each play he composed several - often no more than five or six - short passages, after which he simply docked these elements to each other.
“The performance struck me with its freshness and true originality. “Parade” just confirmed to me to what extent I was right when I so highly valued the merits of Satie and the role he played in French music by contrasting the vague aesthetics of the dying impressionism with his powerful and expressive language, devoid of any pretentiousness and embellishment." ( Igor Stravinsky. Chronicle of my life.) Erik Satie met Igor Stravinsky back in 1910.
Under his direct influence, such famous composers as Claude Debussy (who was his friend for more than twenty years), Maurice Ravel, the famous French group “Six”, in which Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric and Arthur Honegger are most famous, were formed. The work of this group (it lasted a little over a year), as well as Satie himself, had a strong influence on Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich heard Satie’s works after his death, in 1925, during a tour of the French “Six” in Petrograd. His ballet Bolt shows the influence of Satie's music.
Having invented in 1916 the avant-garde genre of “background” (or “furniture”) music that does not need to be specifically listened to, Erik Satie was also the discoverer and forerunner of minimalism. His unobtrusive melodies, repeated hundreds of times without the slightest change or break, sounding in a store or in a salon while receiving guests, were ahead of their time by a good half century.
A pleasant, unobtrusive melody that doesn’t invite you anywhere, doesn’t tell about great passions, people don’t pay much attention to it at all, but it creates a comfortable environment - just like furniture... That’s what it’s called - “furniture music”. The creator of this peculiar phenomenon is the French composer Erik Satie. But, of course, his services to world art lie not only in this - many musical trends that flourished at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries and in the 20th centuries have their roots in the work of Satie.
Like all talented people, Erik Satie showed early musical abilities and a love of music - but his parents did not pay attention to this at first: there were no artists in the family, his father was a port broker. The boy began to seriously study music only at the age of twelve, when the family moved from Honfleur, where Erik Satie was born, to Paris. He entered the Paris Conservatory twice - at thirteen and at eighteen, but never finished: the first time he was expelled after two and a half years, since his studies could not be called successful, the second time he himself left the conservatory because studying was not interesting. He joined the army, after a year of service he returned to the capital and worked part-time as a tapper in a cafe. However, this did not interfere with the composer’s creativity - and in 1888 the piano cycle “Three Gymnopedies” was born. What was remarkable about him? The composer used free relationships of non-chords in it. It cannot be said that no one had used this harmonic technique before Satie - for example, Cesar Franck did it, but Satie subsequently developed it - in “Son of the Stars,” written in 1891, sequences of non-chords were built in fourths. As for the Three Gymnopedies, Claude Debussy, whom Satie met in a cafe in Montmartre and became friends with, suggested orchestrating them. It was thanks to his friendship with Satie that Debussy overcame his youthful passion for Wagnerian music.
Extravagance has always distinguished Erik Satie. This quality was manifested in everything - in the apt sayings with which his notes are full, in the habit of writing his works in red ink and, of course, in the music itself. In 1892, he created a very unexpected method of composition - several short passages (no more than six) are combined with each other in different combinations, and in this way a play is composed. In an even more original way, in 1893, he expressed his annoyance at Suzanne Valadon, the composer’s beloved, who was by no means distinguished by a gentle character. The composer composed a piece which he called “Vexations” (from French this can be translated as “Irritations” or “Troubles”). The piece sounds monotonous, ideally reflecting the state of a person experiencing troubles, and in itself is not particularly long, but the author instructs the pianist to repeat it many times, and how many times exactly is up to the performer to decide. True, the composer did set a limit: a maximum of eight hundred and forty times. Depending on the tempo (which Satie also left to the musician’s discretion), this can range from twelve hours to a day. However, some other works of that period were written in a similar style: “Chimes of the Rose and Cross”, “Gothic Dances” and others. Devoid of contrasts and sharp transitions, some pieces were not even divided into bars. True, the composer did not require them to be repeated hundreds of times, but in style they were reminiscent of “Trouble.”
Since 1898, Satie lived in Arceuil, a suburb of Paris. “The Hermit of Arkay” - that’s what they called him; he preferred not to meet with anyone, only occasionally visiting Paris to present a new work. However, the composer was almost unknown to the general public until in 1911 he organized a series of concerts from his works. Satie's works attract attention not only with their unusual style, but also with their extravagant titles: “Dried Embryos”, “Automatic Descriptions”, “Three Pieces in the Shape of Pears”.
In 1915, the composer met. On his initiative, Satie took part in the creation of a ballet for the troupe (the libretto was written by Cocteau, and the design was done by Pablo Picasso). The ballet, presented in 1917, was called “Parade”, and to say that Satie’s ballet music shocked the audience is to say nothing: deliberately primitive, with the howling of sirens, the clatter of a typewriter and other non-musical sounds... But the composer had even more original idea - in 1916, he proposed to couturier Germain Bongard a wonderful psychological technique: unobtrusive music should be played in salons and stores, influencing customers. After two years, Bongar ordered him such music, and it was written, but the implementation of the idea was prevented by military actions. Pieces from “Furniture Music Invented by Erik Satie” (precisely invented - the composer considered it something more technical than creative) were performed only in 1919, during the intermission of Satie’s musical drama “Socrates”, written on the text of Plato’s dialogues.
The death of the "Hermit of Arkay" in 1925 went unnoticed by the music world. A true surge of interest in Satie's work followed in the mid-20th century, when it became obvious how ahead of his era the composer was.
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Satie was born on May 17, 1866 in the Norman city of Honfleur (department of Calvados). When he was four years old, the family moved to Paris. Then, in 1872, after the death of their mother, the children were sent back to Honfleur.
In 1888, Satie wrote Trois gymnopédies for solo piano, which was based on the free use of non-chord sequences. A similar technique has already been used by S. Frank and E. Chabrier.
In 1879, Satie entered the Paris Conservatory, but after two and a half years of not very successful studies, he was expelled. In 1885 he again entered the conservatory - and again did not graduate.
In 1892, he developed his own system of composition, the essence of which was that for each play Satie composed several - often no more than five or six - short passages, and then joined these elements to each other without any system.
This work of Satie influenced the young Ravel. He was a senior comrade of the short-lived friendly association of composers, the Six. It did not have any ideas or even aesthetics, but everyone was united by a commonality of interests, expressed in the rejection of everything vague and the desire for clarity and simplicity - exactly what was in Satie’s works. Satie became one of the pioneers of the idea of the prepared piano and significantly influenced the work of John Cage.
Satie was eccentric, he wrote his works in red ink, and loved to play pranks on his friends. He gave titles to his works such as “Three Pieces in the Shape of Pears” or “Dried Embryos.” In his play "Vexation", a small musical theme must be repeated 840 times. Erik Satie was an emotional person and, although he used the melodies of Camille Saint-Saëns for his “Music as Furnishings,” he sincerely hated him.
As a result of excessive alcohol consumption, Satie received cirrhosis of the liver and died on July 1, 1925 in the working-class suburb of Arceuil near Paris.
Satie himself, until his fiftieth birthday, was practically unknown to the general public, a sarcastic, bilious, withdrawn person; he lived and worked separately from the musical beau monde of France.
Satie became known to the general public thanks to Maurice Ravel, who organized a series of his concerts in 1911 and introduced him to good publishers, and three years later - thanks to Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons, where at the premiere of Satie’s ballet “Parade” (choreography by L. Massine, scenery and costumes by Picasso ) in 1916 there was a big scandal, accompanied by a fight in the auditorium and shouts of “Down with the Russians!” Russian Boches! Sati became famous after this scandalous incident. Nevertheless, they note that the music of “Parade” was clearly influenced by “Spring” by Igor Stravinsky, as well as the work of many composers.
Having invented in 1916 the avant-garde genre of “background” (or “furniture”) music that does not need to be specifically listened to, Erik Satie was also the discoverer and forerunner of minimalism. His haunting melodies, repeated hundreds of times without the slightest change or break, sounding in a store or in a salon while receiving guests, were ahead of their time by a good half century.
The death of Erik Satie went almost unnoticed, and only in the 50s of the 20th century his work began to return to the active space. Today, Erik Satie is one of the most frequently performed piano composers of the 20th century.
Under his direct influence, such famous composers as Claude Debussy (who was his friend for more than twenty years), Maurice Ravel, the famous French group “Six”, in which Francis Poulenc is best known, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric and Arthur Honegger, were formed. The work of this group (it lasted a little over a year), as well as Satie himself, had a strong influence on Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich heard Satie’s works after his death, in 1925, during a tour of the French “Six” in Petrograd. His ballet Bolt shows the influence of Satie's music.
For a decade, one of Satie's brightest followers was Igor Stravinsky, continuing the Parisian period of his work. Heavily influenced by Satie, he moved from the impressionism (and fauvism) of the Russian period to an almost skeletal style of music, simplifying his writing style. This can be seen in the works of the Parisian period - “The Story of a Soldier” and in the opera “The Maura”.
A fragment from a critical biography of the eccentric composer Erik Satie, which is being prepared for publication in Russian.
Following the book about John Cage, Ad Marginem and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art are publishing a biography of Erik Satie, compiled by Mary E. Davis, in the Critical Biographies series.
It presents the eccentric French composer, whom his contemporaries called “the greatest genius” and “a talentless provocateur,” as a man ahead of his time and anticipating modern celebrity culture.
Colta.Ru publishes a preface to this biography translated by Elizaveta Miroshnikova.
“Sati (Erik Alfred Leslie Satie, abbr. Eric). French composer, born in Honfleur (1866-1925), author of three Gymnopedies for piano (1888), the ballet “Parade” (1917) and the oratorio “Socrates” (1918). His deliberately simplistic style is often imbued with humor.”
La Petit Larousse illustration
Erik Satie, the poet of minimalist aesthetics, would have felt sympathy for this staccato biography in Petit Larousse illustré (Little Illustrated Larousse), a dictionary first published in 1856 that has staked its claim as the first French guide to the “evolution of language and the world.”
For those who can read between the lines, the brief description conveys a lot about Sati: the eccentric character already shines through in the manner of writing the name - with a “k”, rather than through the familiar and ordinary “s”; the mention of Honfleur immediately moves the action to a picturesque Norman port town and brings to mind the natives of these places - from the landscape painter Eugene (Emile - error in the original) Boudin to the writer Gustave Flaubert.
The three works listed in the text mark the history of art in Paris - from the cabaret of the fin de siècle era in Montmartre, where Satie presented himself to the public as a “gymnopedist”, to the Chatelet theater, where, at the end of the First World War, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes showed a scandalous production of the ballet “Parade” ”, and to the exquisite salons of the Parisian elite, where, after the end of the war, the premiere of the classicist “symphonic drama” “Socrates” took place.
As for the “deliberately simplified” style and humor, they both stem from the mixture of high art and popular culture, which was characteristic not only of Satie, but of all modernist art. Viewed this way, the Little Illustrated Larousse article is a tantalizing glimpse of man, music, and creativity, all contained in fifty words.
Longer descriptions of Satie's life and work appeared only after 1932, when Pierre-Daniel Templier published the first biography of the composer (Pierre-Daniel Templier. Erik Satie. - Paris, 1932). Templier's advantage was that he belonged to Erik Satie's close circle - his father, Alexandre Templier, was a friend of the composer and a neighbor in the Parisian suburb of Arceuil, and they were both members of the Arceuil cell of the Communist Party.
The biography written by Templier appeared in the series of books “Masters of Ancient and Modern Music”, and Satie immediately found himself in the company of Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart, Debussy and Stravinsky. The book was illustrated with photographs and documents provided by Erik Satie's brother Conrad, and its purpose was to create a more realistic image of the composer, whose death less than ten years had passed and who was praised by some as "the greatest musician in the world" and vilified by others as a mediocre provocateur. (Ibid., p. 100).
Templier's book consists of two parts: the first part contains a detailed biography of Satie, and the second contains a detailed annotated chronological list of works.
Over the next sixteen years, as the composer gradually faded from public memory and his music disappeared from concert halls, this biography was the only source of information about Satie, and even now it is one of the most authoritative studies of the early years of the composer's life and work.
While Satie's star was fading in France, Rollo Myers's first English-language biography, published in 1948, aroused interest in the composer in the United States and Great Britain (Rollo Myers. Erik Satie. - London, 1948). By this time, a number of influential composers and critics had already acted as Satie's lawyers, emphasizing his role as a musical pioneer and original writer.
Virgil Thomson, one of the main advocates, proclaimed Erik Satie "the only representative of twentieth-century aesthetics in the Western world" and argued that Satie -
“the only composer whose works can be enjoyed and appreciated without any knowledge of the history of music” (Virgil Thomson. The Musical Scene. - New York, 1947. p. 118).
John Cage, another diehard admirer, declared Satie "essential" and considered him
“the most significant servant of art” (John Cage. Satie Controversy. In the book John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz. - New York, 1970. P. 90).
But perhaps the most important thing that Cage did was that in his essays, at concerts and in his own writings, he brought Satie to the attention of the post-war American avant-garde and promoted Satie's aesthetics as a powerful alternative to the more hermetic types of modernism - as an antidote to the mathematically verified approach of Schoenberg, Boulez and Stockhausen.
Surprisingly, the cultural shifts of the 50s and 60s contributed to the rise of Erik Satie's popularity, and his music began to be performed not only in concert halls, but also in less obvious places - jazz clubs and rock festivals.
The mass popularity of Satie's music reached its peak when the rock band Blood, Sweat and Tears arranged two Gymnopedies and released it as the title track on their album of the same name in 1969; the album sold three million copies and received a Grammy Award for Best Album of the Year, and Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie received a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Instrumental Composition.
The foundation for this crossover was laid by historian Roger Shattuck in his groundbreaking study The Years of Feasting (1958, rev. 1968), where he cemented Erik Satie's position as a modernist icon and fashion figure, placing him alongside Guillaume Apollinaire , Alfred Jarry and Henri Rousseau - the most original representatives of the French avant-garde (Roger Shattuck. The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I. - New York, 1968).
This group, according to Shattuck, formed the core
“a dynamic milieu known as bohemia, a cultural underground tinged with failure and fraud that, over several decades, crystallized into a conscious avant-garde that brought the arts to a level of astonishing renaissance and perfection” (Preface to the Vintage Edition, in Ibid).
For readers of the time, Satie's status as the progenitor of experimental music - as well as rock music performed by groups styled after the Parisian avant-garde - was unshakable.
At the end of the 20th century, the understanding of Sati as an icon of nonconformism began to weaken somewhat. A large number of specialized musicological studies, in which Satie's manuscripts and sketches were carefully studied, constituted the first comprehensive analysis of the composer's works.
From this analysis emerged the modern recognition of his contribution to art, as well as a new understanding of his meticulous composition technique. The focus shifted from biography to the composing process, and it became clear that Satie was important not only for the avant-garde, but also for figures who were fully integrated into the musical mainstream, such as Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky.
Satie, no longer seen only as a musical eccentric, became part of a long chain of musical history, linking him with Mozart and Rossini, as well as with Cage and Reich. Satie's image has been significantly enhanced by the emergence of works exploring the non-musical aspects of his work, in particular his literary opuses, from the complete edition of his literary works in 1981 to the publication of his "virtually complete" correspondence in 2002.
Satie's original views and unique way of expression fit perfectly into his life and work. Satie was a prolific and original writer; Although most of his works remained unpublished until today, some of his essays and comments were published in specialized music magazines and even in quite popular publications in France and the USA during the composer’s lifetime.
Among them were autobiographical sketches written over the years; Each essay is remarkable in its own way, since you can find a fairly significant amount of information there, despite the almost complete absence of facts and total irony.
The first essay of this kind is entitled “Who Am I” and represents the initial section of the entire series “Notes of a Sclerotic”, which was published in the magazine S.I.M. (magazine of the International Musical Society - Société International de Musique. Translation is given from the Russian edition: Erik Satie. Notes of a mammal. Translation from French, compilation and comments by Valery Kislov. - St. Petersburg, Ivan Limbach Publishing House, 2015) from 1912 to 1914 .
“Anyone will tell you that I am not a musician. This is true. Even at the beginning of my career, I immediately classified myself as a phonometerographer. All my works are pure phonometry... Only scientific thought dominates in them. Besides, I find it more pleasant to measure sound than to listen to it. With a phonometer in hand, I work joyfully & confidently. And what did I not weigh and measure! All Beethoven, all Verdi, etc. Very curious" (Ibid., p. 19),
Sati begins.
A year later, in a brief for his publisher, Satie paints a very different picture, declaring himself a “dreamer” and equating his work with that of a group of young poets led by Francis Carcot and Tristan Klingsor. Identifying himself as "the strangest musician of his time", Satie nevertheless declares his importance:
“Myopic from birth, I am farsighted by nature... We must not forget that many “young” composers consider their mentor as a prophet and apostle of the current musical revolution” (Quote translated by the translator).
And even shortly before his death, he writes in the same confusing tone, seasoned with bitterness:
“Life turned out to be so unbearable for me that I decided to retire to my estates and while away my days in an ivory tower - or some kind ( metal) metal. So I became addicted to misanthropy, decided to cultivate hypochondria and became the most ( leaden) the most melancholy of people. It was a pity to look at me - even through a lorgnette made of fine gold. Hmmm. And all this happened to me through the fault of Music” (Translation is given from the Russian edition: Erik Satie. Notes of a mammal. Translation from French, compilation and comments by Valery Kislov. - St. Petersburg, Ivan Limbach Publishing House, 2015. Page 120).
Phonometerographer, dreamer, misanthrope: as is clear from these essays, Satie was fully aware of the power of image and throughout his life he carefully built and cultivated his public image. The ironic pose when describing himself corresponded to the non-standard and periodically changing presentation of himself in society - this process began in his youth and continued until his death.
Such changes in image are documented in photographs, self-portraits and, of course, in the drawings and paintings of his friends who captured Satie: from a fin de siècle sketch by the artist Augustin Grass-Mick, who depicted the composer in the company of such stars as Jeanne Avril and Toulouse. Lautrec, to portraits made in the 1920s by Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and Francis Picabia.
As these works testify, Satie was acutely aware of the connection between public image and professional recognition, and throughout his career as a composer he “tailored” his appearance to his artistic goals and objectives.
For example, working in various cabarets in Montmartre in his youth, Satie looked like a real representative of a bohemian, then he began to wear only corduroy suits, and of the same model (he had seven identical corduroy suits); as a composer of pseudo-sacred music, he founded his own church in the 1890s and strutted the streets in a cassock; When Satie had already become a respected figure of the avant-garde, he began to wear a strict three-piece suit - more bourgeois than revolutionary.
In a word, everything clearly indicates that Satie quite consciously conveyed with his appearance both different essences and his art, creating an inextricable connection between personality and vocation.
This biography - another of many - examines the deliberate fusion of public image and artistic vocation (that is, what Erik Satie did throughout his life) as the setting for his creative work.
Against the backdrop of dramatic changes in wardrobe and public image, Satie’s creative legacy takes on new perspectives. When the culture of “stars” and “celebrity”, so natural for us today, was just being born, Erik Satie already clearly understood how valuable and important it is to be unique, and therefore easily recognizable - “to be not like everyone else.” Clothes helped him do this and no doubt played a significant role in the visual representation of the breakthroughs in his art.
, Pianist
Erik Satie(fr. , full name Eric Alfred Leslie Satie, fr. ; May 17, 1866, Honfleur, France - July 1, 1925, Paris, France) - an extravagant French composer and pianist, one of the reformers of European music of the 1st quarter of the 20th century.
His piano pieces influenced many modern composers. Erik Satie is the forerunner and founder of such musical movements as impressionism, primitivism, constructivism, neoclassicism and minimalism. It was Satie who invented the genre of “furniture music”, which does not need to be listened to specifically, an unobtrusive melody that sounds in a store or at an exhibition.
Satie was born on May 17, 1866 in the Norman city of Honfleur (department of Calvados). When he was four years old, the family moved to Paris. Then, in 1872, after the death of their mother, the children were sent back to Honfleur.
In 1879, Satie entered the Paris Conservatory, but after two and a half years of not very successful studies, he was expelled. In 1885 he again entered the conservatory, and again did not graduate.
Why attack God? Perhaps he is as unhappy as we are.
Sati Eric
In 1888, Satie wrote the work “Three Gymnopedies” (fr. ) for solo piano, which was based on the free use of non-chord sequences. A similar technique has already been used by S. Frank and E. Chabrier. Satie was the first to introduce sequences of chords built in fourths; this technique first appeared in his work “The Son of the Stars” (Le fils des étoiles, 1891). This kind of innovation was immediately used by almost all French composers. These techniques became characteristic of French modern music. In 1892, Satie developed his own system of composition, the essence of which was that for each play he composed several - often no more than five or six - short passages, after which he simply docked these elements to each other.
Satie was eccentric, he wrote his essays in red ink, and loved to play pranks on his friends. He gave his works titles such as “Three Pieces in the Shape of Pears” or “Dried Embryos.” In his play "Vexation", a small musical theme must be repeated 840 times. Erik Satie was an emotional person and, although he used the melodies of Camille Saint-Saëns for his “Music as Furnishings,” he sincerely hated him. His words even became a kind of calling card:
In 1899, Satie began working part-time as a pianist at the Black Cat cabaret, which was his only source of income.
Satie was virtually unknown to the general public until his fiftieth birthday; a sarcastic, bilious, reserved person, he lived and worked separately from the musical elite of France. His work became known to the general public thanks to Maurice Ravel, who organized a series of concerts in 1911 and introduced him to good publishers.
But the general Parisian public recognized Satie only six years later - thanks to Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons, where at the premiere of Satie’s ballet “Parade” (choreography by L. Massine, scenery and costumes by Picasso), a big scandal took place, accompanied by a fight in the auditorium and shouts of “Down with the Russians!” Russian Boches! Sati became famous after this scandalous incident. The premiere of “Parade” took place on May 18, 1917 at the Chatelet Theater under the direction of Ernest Ansermet, performed by the Russian Ballet troupe with the participation of ballet dancers Lydia Lopukhova, Leonid Massine, Woitsekhovsky, Zverev and others.
Erik Satie met Igor Stravinsky back in 1910 (by the way, the famous photograph taken by Stravinsky as a photographer visiting Claude Debussy, where all three can be seen, is also dated this year) and experienced a strong personal and creative sympathy for him. However, closer and more regular communication between Stravinsky and Satie occurred only after the premiere of Parade and the end of the First World War. Erik Satie is the author of two large articles on Stravinsky (1922), published at the same time in France and the USA, as well as about a dozen letters, the end of one of which (dated September 15, 1923) is especially often cited in the literature dedicated to both composers. At the very end of the letter, saying goodbye to Stravinsky, Satie signed with his characteristic irony and smile, this time a kind one, which did not happen to him so often: “You, I adore you: aren’t you the same Great Stravinsky? And this is me - none other than little Erik Satie.". In turn, both the poisonous character and the original, “unlike anything” music of Erik Satie aroused the constant admiration of “Prince Igor”, although neither close friendship nor any permanent relationship arose between them. Ten years after Satie’s death, Stravinsky wrote about him in the Chronicle of My Life: “I liked Satie at first sight. A subtle thing, he was all filled with slyness and intelligent anger.”
In addition to Parade, Erik Satie is the author of four more ballet scores: Uspud (1892), The Beautiful Hysterical Woman (1920), The Adventures of Mercury (1924) and The Performance Is Canceled (1924). Also (after the author’s death) many of his piano and orchestral works were often used for staging one-act ballets and ballet numbers.
Erik Satie died of cirrhosis of the liver as a result of excessive alcohol consumption on July 1, 1925 in the working-class suburb of Arceuil near Paris. His death went almost unnoticed, and only in the 50s of the 20th century his work began to return to the active space. Today, Erik Satie is one of the most frequently performed piano composers of the 20th century.
Satie's early work influenced the young Ravel. He was a senior comrade of the short-lived friendly association of composers, the Six. It did not have any common ideas or even aesthetics, but everyone was united by a commonality of interests, expressed in the rejection of everything vague and the desire for clarity and simplicity - exactly what was in Satie’s works. He became one of the pioneers of the idea of the prepared piano and significantly influenced the work of John Cage.
Under his direct influence, such famous composers as Claude Debussy (who was his friend for more than twenty years), Maurice Ravel, the famous French group “Six”, in which Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric and Arthur Honegger are most famous, were formed. The work of this group (it lasted a little over a year), as well as Satie himself, had a strong influence on Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich heard Satie’s works after his death, in 1925, during a tour of the French “Six” in Petrograd. His ballet Bolt shows the influence of Satie's music.
Some of Satie's works made an extremely strong impression on Igor Stravinsky. In particular, this applies to the ballet “Parade” (1917), the score of which he asked the author for almost a whole year, and the symphonic drama “Socrates” (1918). It was these two works that left the most visible mark on Stravinsky's work: the first in his constructivist period, and the second in the neoclassical works of the late 1920s. Heavily influenced by Satie, he moved from the impressionism (and fauvism) of the Russian period to an almost skeletal style of music, simplifying his writing style. This can be seen in the works of the Parisian period - “The Story of a Soldier” and the opera “The Maura”. But even thirty years later, this event continued to be remembered as nothing other than an amazing fact in the history of French music.
