I have carried the music of Erik Satie within me for decades now. I cannot honestly remember the time I first heard it as so much has permeated through our multimedia society to such an extent that a world without Trois Gymnopedies I or Gnossiennes II would seem downright weird and unusual. All I can positively remember is his music being used to advertise drinking chocolate some time in the 1970s in the UK; it probably entered my conscious sphere then. But the moment it did, it came as a revelation ... the simplicity of the call and response of the bass and chords ... the sinewy flow of the melody ... the subtle melodic alterations from one instance to another ... and overarchingly, the leisurely pace at which it wove itself into your head. Foolishly my six year old mind must have thought 'hey...I could do that ...' because it landed there and became a fundamental part of the internal soundtrack that all of us use to colour our dull lives at their most colourless.
My first adult pay packet was spent on a Marantz tape deck, an Aiwa amplifier, a Pioneer turntable and a used copy of a boxed set of Satie's complete piano works, plus a cassette of Debussy's orchestrations for Gymnopedies. My mother was quite justifiably furious; she didn't get her full digs off me that month and didn't speak to me for some days. To my simplistic and self-concerned mind that just gave me more time to immerse myself in the enormity of my discovery and play my way through all six of the records (which was not actually as complete an account as the much pored-over and absorbed sleeve notes indicated) in relative peace. One day during our conversational hiatus she knocked on my bedroom door to ask what it was that I was playing as it was so beautiful. My mother's digs were paid on time from that day onwards - I had learned a lesson from her.
And she nailed the description perfectly. Satie's music is clever. It's subtle. It's inviting. It's sensuous. It's almost other-worldly. But she got the word in first: above all else, it's a thing of complete and perfect shimmering beauty. No wonder they use it to advertise soap and cars and toothpaste and razor blades and holidays and chocolate drinks and hair products. Even if the thing you're thrusting upon people is a cheap piece of glitzy garbage it's going to seem beautiful if you overlay artistic photography with anything from Sarabandes. His music almost reeks of sex, but never in a way that would make you suspect motive or personal preoccupation. You might want to use the music for romance, but it's so distractingly wonderful that you might lose the thread of what you were doing in the first place.
And it's not just the beauty of the pieces that captivate me; it is those extra-terrestial qualities that are so utterly bewitching. Faure, Ravel and Debussy are marvellous enough, but Erik Satie stands apart from them all, 'thumbing his nose at the great aesthetic and artistic preoccupations of the day', as Jeremie Rousseau so accurately noted. The melodies never quite fit within the norms of major and minor, nor even within what one expects from a key. Accidentals come and vanish faster than the realisation that what you think you heard was not actually what was played. Was that part the same as the last time? Or was it played once more? Or once less? And where did he learn those harmonics from? Could all of this really have come from within the head of man who earned a living playing piano in a cabaret?
Of course it did. He just knew how to soak up what he heard better than anyone else. Play Ogives and I hear Gregorian Chants almost directly, in the same way I can hear the solitary figure of young Robert Johnson deep within the music of Led Zeppelin. This man was using fifths and ninths like no one ever dreamed of using them before. Sure he went to the Paris Conservatoire, but he was a mediocre student at best and had to go for musical re-education at the Schola Cantorum under Roussel; he even upped the ante by giving his very first compositions Opus numbers 62 and onwards to make him seem more musically mature than he was. He really need not have bothered.
So why am I doing this? Catharsis? Perhaps it is. When I heard that tape of Debussy's orchestration of Satie's work I was given a lifetime's inspiration to do something inside the frame of Erik's work. It is only recently that I have been mechanically able to do this; it has been in my head since I was eighteen years old and earning a wage at a tedious occupation. Maybe cabaret pianists feel the same way when they hanker for music that is in their heads and hearts rather than on the page in front of them. All I know is that I love this man's music more than just about any other and want someow to be a part of it, however vanishingly.
A cover for a CD of this music is available here and a CD label is available here. A full ISO file for the CD is available here as well as the CDT and CUE files required to burn the disc. Download all files to the same folder and then burn the CD. (I recommend IMGBURN but you may have your own personal favourite program for the job, such as NERO). If you are using an Apple Mac then I suggest you use Firestarter FX which seems to do the trick. Note that burning the file straight in OSX will not work due to bugs with OSX and the use of CUE Sheets.
Listeners who only want to stream the tracks live into Winamp (etc) may like to use the playlist available here. Also, under the title of each track beneath there is a link allowing you to listen to a streamed preview. The 'start' button on the left will stream the music to you via Last FM. The band link will take you to my last FM web page and the track link will take to to the Last FM player page for that track .
As ever, the music is free for all to hear and enjoy and share. Comments are highly welcome.
Mike Dickson, Edinburgh, May 2008
No one us really sure what the title means, but Joseph Prostakoff tells us that he assumes it is 'a vague allusion to Cnossus, Knossos or Gnossos', the city on Crete where the mythical Minotaur was confined within the labyrinth by King Minos and eventually slain by the hero, Theseus.
Gnossiennes No. 1 [5:14] 9.8Mb
Mike Dickson – Gnossiennes IInstrumentation:
Gnossiennes No. 2 [1:58] 3.7Mb
Mike Dickson – Gnossiennes IIInstrumentation:
Gnossiennes No. 3 [3:58] 7.4Mb
Mike Dickson – Gnossiennes IIIInstrumentation:
Gnossiennes No. 4 [3:44] 7.0Mb
Mike Dickson – Gnossiennes IVInstrumentation:
Gnossiennes No. 5 [3:38] 6.8Mb
Mike Dickson – Gnossiennes VInstrumentation:
Gnossiennes No. 6 [2:42] 5.0Mb
Mike Dickson – Gnossiennes VIInstrumentation:
These tracks also appear on the album Six Consequences, released in 2007. For the sake of completion they are also included here. They are identical to the previously released versions. The title has various meanings. One is given as 'a dance accompanied by song and performed by naked Spartan girls'. Modern research has shown that the Gymnopædia was actually an Apollonic celebration in ancient Sparta where men of all ages danced, not naked, but unarmed.
Trois Gymnopedies No. 1 [3:49] 7.1Mb
Mike Dickson – Trois Gymnopedies IInstrumentation:
Trois Gymnopedies No. 2 [2:55] 5.5Mb
Mike Dickson – Trois Gymnopedies IIInstrumentation:
Trois Gymnopedies No. 3 [2:38] 3.0Mb
Mike Dickson – Trois Gymnopedies IIIInstrumentation:
Wikipedia has this to say about Ogives: 'In Gothic architecture, ogives are the intersecting transverse ribs of arches that establish the surface of a Gothic vault. An ogive or ogival arch is a pointed, "Gothic" arch, drawn with compasses as outlined above, or with arcs of an ellipse as described. A very narrow, steeply pointed ogive arch is sometimes called a "lancet arch.". Villard de Honnecourt, a 13th century itinerant master-builder of Picardy in the north of France, was the first writer to use the word ogive. The French term's origin is considered obscure by O.E.D.; it might come from the Late Latin obvita, the feminine past participle of obvire, to resist, i.e. the arches resisting the downward thrust of the structure's mass.'
In later Gothic styles, an ogival arch is a decorative arch delineating a void with a pointed head, formed of two ogee, or S-shaped curves.'
Mike Dickson – Ogives IInstrumentation:
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The sarabande is a slow triple-metred dance first mentioned in Central America having been popular in the Spanish colonies in the 16th century before moving back across the Atlantic to Spain where it was duly banned for obscenity. The word later came to represent the traditional movement of a suite in the baroque period, whose form was revived in the 20th century by Satie and Debussy as well as such unlikely composers such as Britten and Vaughan-Williams.
Sarabandes No. 1 [5:27] 10.2Mb
Mike Dickson – Sarabandes IInstrumentation:
Sarabandes No. 2 [4:09] [6:18] 11.8Mb
Mike Dickson – Sarabandes IIInstrumentation:
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This notorious piece has hardly ever been recorded or performed, save for a few brave attempts by the likes of John Cage and friends. The piece comprises a short choral passage that is exquisitely difficult to memorise, the various sections being simlar enough to each other to cause confusion. Although the passage is short, Satie's score instructions are for the motif to be played '840 times consecutively to oneself, it will be useful to prepare oneself beforehand, and in utter silence, by grave immobilities.'
Why 840 times is anyone's guess, but the difficulty of the piece means that great concentration has to be used to get even a few repetitions correct. Visitors to this site are no doubt delighted to learn that the full 840 iterations are not attempted here - I manage about eight or nine, played on different pianos each at different positions and distances from the listener.
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