O Mundo de Claudia

A Gymnopediac Bargain

This was a bargain: a 2 CD Set of Erik Satie’s Piano Music for 8 Euro at FNAC. Not bad.

I’ve always loved Gymnopédie no. 1 – Lent et douloureux. Here’s a sample…

“Trois Gymnopédies is an example of what has often been called Satie’s ‘cubist’ style of composition. In these cubist works, Satie treats his musical material as if it were a piece of sculpture, viewing it from a number of different angles by essentially composing the same piece several times over. Satie called this an 'entirely new form which [he had] invented', but the links with the much older theme-and-variations form can be clearly discerned, once it has been grasped that there is no clear ‘original theme’, as in a set of variations by, say, Mozart. Any one of the three pieces can be seen as the original, and each of the three as a variation on the other two.” In here.

Satie was probably an eccentric: his pieces had odd, to say the least, titles like “Embryons Desséchés”,”Pièces Froides” or “Sonatine Bureaucratique”. He wrote precise and ...hmmmm…strange instructions for the musicians who would play his pieces. These are the instructions to play “Vexations”:

“To play this motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities. “

He was friends with Picasso and…he founded his own church. He was also the “inventor” of Furniture Music, i.e. background music. He was surely ahead of his time :-)

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