page_title: Sports et divertissements
section_title: Music and texts
hierarchical_section_title: Sports et divertissements / Music and texts
caption_attribution_description: English: Cropped, adjusted version of PD image on Commons
context_page_description: Sports et divertissements is a cycle of 21 short piano pieces composed in 1914 by Erik Satie. The set consists of a prefatory chorale and 20 musical vignettes depicting various sports and leisure activities. First published in 1923, it has long been considered one of his finest achievements.
  Musically it represents the peak of Satie's humoristic piano suites, but stands apart from that series in its fusion of several different art forms. Sports originally appeared as a collector's album with illustrations by Charles Martin, accompanied by music, prose poetry and calligraphy. The latter three were provided by Satie in his exquisite handwritten scores, which were printed in facsimile.
  Biographer Alan M. Gillmor wrote that "Sports et divertissements is sui generis, the one work in which the variegated strands of Satie's artistic experience are unselfconsciously woven into a single fragile tapestry of sight and sound — a precarious union of Satie the musician, the poet, and the calligrapher...At turns droll and amusing, serious and sardonic, this tiny Gesamtkunstwerk affords us as meaningful a glimpse of the composer's subconscious dreamworld as we are ever likely to get."
context_section_description: Satie's Préface for Sports describes the work as an amalgam of drawing and music, omitting any reference to his extramusical commentaries and calligraphy. His prose poems are carefully threaded throughout the scores so that they may be read along with - but not easily spoken over - the piano part.
  Gillmor observed that "In several of the pieces Satie indulges in a kind of Augenmusik wherein the musical score is an obvious graphic representation of the activity being depicted." In others the score is often closely linked to the text - such as in La Pêche - and the subtle details may not be perceived merely by listening. Performance of the music alone lasts between 13 and 15 minutes.
  Préface
  "This publication is made up of two artistic elements: drawing, music. The drawing part is represented by strokes – strokes of wit; the musical part is depicted by dots – black dots. These two parts together – in a single volume – form a whole: an album. I advise the reader to leaf through the pages of this book with a kindly & smiling finger, for it is a work of fantasy. No more should be read into it.
  For the Dried Up & Stultified I have written a Chorale which is serious & respectable. This Chorale is a sort of bitter preamble, a kind of austere & unfrivolous introduction. I have put into it everything I know about Boredom. I dedicate this Chorale to those who do not like me. I withdraw." - ERIK SATIE
  1. Choral inappetissant (Unappetizing Chorale) - Grave
  Seriously. Surly & cantankerous. Hypocritically. More slowly. In the second half of his Préface Satie offered a rare "explanation" of one of his favorite musical jokes. He used the chorale form - that "symbol of Protestant piety and music pedagogy" much employed by Bach - in several compositions to thumb his nose at the academic, the stupid and conformist. Satirical examples are found in his piano duet Aperçus désagréables (Unpleasant Glimpses) (1908), the orchestral suite En habit de cheval (1911), the Choses vues à droite et à gauche (sans lunettes) for violin-piano duet (1914), and the ballet Parade (in the revised 1919 version). The brief Choral inappetissant is built of sour, unsingable phrases that snub the whole purpose of the genre. Here it serves to warn off the serious-minded from the light-hearted frivolity that ensues.
  Beneath the date of the score (May 15, 1914) Satie noted, "In the morning, on an empty stomach."
  2. La Balançoire (The Swing) - Lent
  Slowly. Pendulum-like staccato quavers in the left hand underscore four poignant melodic phrases, including a quotation of L'escarpolette from Georges Bizet's 1871 piano suite Jeux d'enfants. Satie's text for this piece is frequently cited as an exemplar of his haiku-like prose poems:
  It's my heart that is swinging like this. It isn't dizzy. What little feet it has.
  Will it be willing to return to my breast? 
  3. La Chasse (Hunting) - Vif
  Fast. Satie's first-person narrative is one of his most whimsical literary creations, an absurdist nature-setting in which rabbits sing, nightingales hide in burrows, and owls breast-feed their young. As for the hunter, he uses his rifle to shoot nuts out of the trees. This is presented in the typical "hunting rhythm" of 6/8, with bugle fifths in the treble and a concluding gunshot in the bass.
  4. La Comédie Italienne (The Italian Comedy) - A la napolitaine
  In a Neapolitan manner. Scaramouche,  a cowardly braggart from Commedia dell'arte, tries to wax eloquent on the joys of military life. He is mocked with a courtly, ornamented tune that quickly goes awry with displaced accompaniments and ambiguous harmonies. Steven Moore Whiting wrote of this piece, "It is as if Satie had discovered in 1914 the same formula that Stravinsky would apply in Pulcinella six years later."
  5. Le Réveil de la Mariée (The Awakening of the Bride) - Vif, sans trop
  Lively, but not too. In this boisterous aubade members of a wedding party arrive to rouse the newlywed bride from her marriage bed. Charles Martin's original 1914 illustration showed the group crudely throwing tomatoes at the bedroom window. The music quote
caption: Satie's score for Le Yachting
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