Eccentric Satie

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.

The Moog synthesizer — the first commercial synth and the mother of all analog synthesizers — made electronic music available to the masses. Robert Moog created the instrument with the intent to make futuristic gear more affordable to all musicians, and an explosion of experimentation followed in the wake of its release. Mort Garson famously made an album intended to help your plants grow, compositions from the baroque period took on new life, and even members of the Beatles were getting in on the trend. Erik Satie would not be spared from the craze when the The Camarata Contemporary Chamber Orchestra, who had previously recorded a pair of  relatively straight-laced collections of his work, decided to incorporate Moog synth into their third installment. According to the liner notes, the producer claims to have been possessed by the spirit of Satie himself, mirroring Satie’s peculiar claim that he was a vessel for a medieval cleric. The Moog player, who was unfamiliar with the instrument before having the responsibility foisted upon him, allegedly has no recollection of having even done the album. Whatever possessed them to make this thing, it’s one of the weirdest Moog albums out there — and that’s saying a lot.

Erik Satie never composed for guitar. In fact, he never composed for anything but solo piano, save for a handful of vocal pieces and a couple of seldom-performed ballets. The guitar has a long history in classical music, dating back to the 17th century baroque guitar (or earlier, depending on your definition of what qualifies as a guitar), but it wasn’t an instrument Satie showed interest in. It’s hard to know how he would have responded to Anders Miolin’s arrangements of his piano works on classical guitar, but it’s clear the music takes on a brand new character with such a different choice of timbre. Modern interpretations of Satie are often played on different instruments, but typically in radically different contexts. Miolin, who entered a prestigious music academy at 15, takes on the task with the seriousness of a prodigy. It’s still classical music, but the gentle tone of Miolin’s guitar pierces the somber veil of Satie’s refrains, making way for flecks of bright light to shine through.

Riri Shimada may be Japan’s most unusual disciple of Satie. Some famous interpreters, like Satsuki Shibano or Aki Takahashi, are known for playing Satie’s works with exacting rigor. Shimada, from the beginning, seemed more interested in the avant-garde. She was present during the 1977 Continuous Performance No. 3 alongside fluxus pioneer Takehisa Kosugi and several others, warping one of the composer’s most vaunted compositions into a bizarre work of musical theater. In 1982, she would reunite with Kosugi, imbuing Satie’s famous Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies with the otherworldly power of his virtuoso violin. A year before, however, she would record a pair of concerts that were preserved on record as The Other World of Erik Satie. The standout of the set is a duo with tenor sax player Mototeru Takagi in which Shimada plays a series of Satie’s piano pieces while he freely improvises. On each of Shimada’s early Satie experiments, she pushes the boundaries of classical interpretation as she relinquishes some of the power to her collaborators; with Takagi at her side, music coming up on a century old becomes brand new.

Mitsuto Suzuki is mostly known for this work at Square Enix, composing for video games like Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Lightning Returns (both confusingly named direct sequels to the original Final Fantasy XIII). Before landing at his most famous gig, Suzuki was a young kid obsessed with synthesizers, following in the footsteps of techno-pop supergroup Yellow Magic Orchestra. In 1994, he released his debut EP Voices of Planet under the name ARP-2600, paying homage to his favorite modular synth. (A few years later, he would even be acknowledged by one of his YMO idols and included on the Haruomi Hosono-curated Daisy World Tour compilation.) As Suzuki continued to find his voice, he began pivoting away from techno and channeled his love of electronic music into an ambitious project of ambient adaptations of Erik Satie pieces. The thumping beats of his early endeavors are still here, but they’re stretched out amidst a sea of quiet soundscapes. It would ultimately serve as an important bridge between his early and late career endeavors, strongly resembling the work he would eventually contribute to iconic RPGs.

Satsuki Shibano is one of Japan’s most serious interpreters of Satie. Her lifelong obsession with the composer started in 1977 when, while still studying at a music university, she saw a recital of his music at an art museum. She approached the event organizer and asked to be introduced to the pianist, Jean-Joël Barbier, who saw her promise and brought her to Paris for two and a half years of study. Upon returning to Japan, she played her own recital — it was the start of her journey to become the premier interpreter of Satie in her own country. At first, she mostly played it straight, in a style extremely similar to her mentor; eventually, she would find her own voice. On Belle de Nuit, Shibano has over three decades of experience under her belt as she tackles what many consider to be Satie’s most serious pieces. The Nocturnes are notable for containing none of his regular eccentricities — no wacky notation or off-the-wall instructions. Haunting electronic interludes by Shibano’s close collaborator Yoshio Ojima follow each Nocturne, punctuating her performance with a darkness befitting the somber atmosphere.

Tori Kudo exists far outside the world of classical music. He’s a champion of the Japanese underground, building himself into a folk hero through stints in legendary groups like Fushitsusha, Ché-SHIZU, and his own Maher Shalal Hash Baz. Since the late ’70s he’s embodied an uncompromising DIY spirit, playing fast and loose with an almost effortless spontaneity, whether he’s playing contemplative surf ballads or dissonant noisy rock. Kudo continues to play music that’s bewildering and beautiful, offering his take on a lesser known work by Erik Satie on Ein Traum für dich — a small segment from Pièces froides (1987) stretched out into a 20 minute elegy. He’s assisted here by DJ and sonic wizard Kayo Makino; the piano passages are chopped, doubled up into cacophonous swells, and augmented with the chirping of crickets and a downpour of rain.

Satie’s eccentricities continue to be debated by every new generation of performers that discover his work. His work not only invites ambiguity but revels in it, leaving vague directions on the sheet music that, often, seem to have been more for his own amusement than the benefit of the musician. At the top of Vexations (1893), Satie scrawled the following: “In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.” Was this an instruction to play the piece over 800 times, or simply a suggestion should you happen to be insane enough to want to try? It barely mattered; everyone seemed to agree it would be an impossible undertaking. American composer and musical philosopher John Cage, however, did believe it was possible — and in 1963 assembled a team of 11 pianists to perform Vexations in shifts at New York’s Pocket Theatre. It took nearly 19 hours. Four years later, David Toop would be the first to do it all by himself, playing a grueling 24 hour marathon. The musician’s interpretation of Satie’s tempo instruction of “très lent,” or “very slowly,” could make hours worth of difference. Jeroen van Veen would be the first to record all 840 repetitions for an album, and his read of the piece is on the slower side — clocking in at just under a full day’s worth of music. In true mischievous Satie spirit, it’s unclear if there’s even a real expectation for someone to listen to all of it.

Free improvisation is, undoubtedly, one of the most unusual venues for Erik Satie’s music. Although Satie was an innovator and a disruptor in his day, he’s since been enshrined in classical music’s pantheon and his compositions are considered sacred. Taking massive creative liberties with the music on the sheet — or worse, ignoring the will of the composer entirely — is unthinkable to anyone hoping to make a serious claim to understand Satie’s work. Keshavan Maslak (on sax) and Katsuyuki Itakura (on piano) probably don’t care much for the stuffy formalism of classical music, but they seem to understand the appeal of Erik Satie perfectly well. For the most part, they respect the central melodies of the pieces they choose to play with, mutating them into new passages as they circle into new repetitions. Occasionally, the pieces do become unrecognizable, but that’s part of the point; they’re familiarizing the listener with roads well-traveled before going off the beaten path. And after all, Satie loved to play with his performers and make them squirm — it’s only fair to serve a bit of that energy back at him.

Japanese kankyō ongaku (environmental music) has long been understood to be a natural evolution from fluxus. It’s a style of ambient music defined by its connection to the spaces in which it’s meant to be played, shaped by the happening-based performance art of 1960s avant-garde. The thread connecting both movements is the influence of Erik Satie, the 19th century composer who arguably first conceptualized ambient music. Continuous Performance No. 3 is the perfect missing link to prove the theory. Led by fluxus composer Takehisa Kosugi, an ensemble featuring Akio Suzuki, Riri Shimada, and a young Hiroshi Yoshimura – the veritable godfather of kankyō ongaku – performs a mind-bending rendition of Satie’s Sports et divertissements augmented with electronics, a physical performance element, and what the back label calls “environmental sound.” Side A is an experimental work that hardly qualifies as ambient music, but it shows that Yoshimura was thinking about music as an function of physical space even before he was composing music to be played in designer homes or department stores. And to strengthen the connection even more: the B side is simply a field recording collected by a river.

Founded in 1972 by conductor and lutist Ichiro Okamoto, Danceries was an ensemble that played medieval and Renaissance-era music on period-appropriate instruments. They were a skilled bunch of classically trained Japanese musicians, touring Europe and sticking strictly to a repertoire of medieval compositions in their early days. In 1974, Okamaoto says, they were asked to mix some traditional Japanese music into their performance while doing a show in France. They were hesitant at first but reluctantly agreed. “To our surprise,” Okamoto wrote in the liner notes of their 1981 album, “the European instruments imbued it with a rich, new color.” Since then, they continued to experiment with playing more modern music. One of their more unusual fusions is a collection of works by Erik Satie. Alongside the popular Gymnopédies are some of the lesser performed vocal works. It’s a bizarre mishmash of styles, performed with the rigor of well-trained performers while having levity that can only come with not caring that they’re taking the music way out of context.

Though Brian Eno is usually considered the father of ambient music, its philosophical origins begin with Erik Satie. In 1917, he began work composing his Furniture music series, which were designed to be an ignorable ambiance rather than a performance that demanded your attention. The compositions were short and meant to be repeated indefinitely, including instruction for the type of setting they were envisioned to be played in. (“At a bistro,” “in a vestibule,” “during a lunch or civil marriage.”) The Furniture music was only played once during Satie’s lifetime, on March 8, 1920, at the Galerie Barbazanges in Paris. Despite being informed of the experiment, attendees sat and paid close attention the moment the music started, enraging Satie. Derek Baron’s Crooked Dances might be closer to what Satie expected on that day. Baron plays a run through the composer’s Danses Gothiques (1893) and other piano pieces, welcoming the sounds of their New York apartment and the commotion of roommates going about their day. “Go on talking! Walk about! Don’t listen!,” Satie is reported to have shouted to patrons at the Galerie — more than 100 years later, he’s finally being tuned out.