Satie Slowly

Philip Corner has strong opinions about the way Satie should be played. Ever since his participation in the landmark first full recital of Vexations (1893) — alongside a group of other musicians including John Cage, who organized the performance in 1963 — something has been bothering him about the way the late composer’s oeuvre is normally interpreted. Satie’s scores, often written in the barest of notation, left plenty of guesswork for the performer. If there were notes, they were cryptic messages or sly jokes, instructing the musician behind the stand to play “like a nightingale with a toothache” or insisting they “don’t cough.” One direction that often appears is to play a piece “lent,” meaning “slowly” in French. When Reinbert de Leeuw began releasing the complete piano works of Satie on LPs in the mid ’70s, he performed them more slowly than anyone had up until that point, influencing the tempo that people would take Satie for decades to come. Corner believes you should still go slower. “They resist all ‘added expressivity,’” he writes in the liner notes of Satie Slowly. “They make those who indulge sound ridiculous. Yet nothing is lacking in them.” For Corner, playing Satie should be a holy meditation between composer and performer. As a listener, you can hear how he humbles himself; every note is a new test of discipline and a reminder that, to Corner, Satie’s pieces are perfect the way they are.