page_title: Erik Satie
section_title: Move to Arcueil
hierarchical_section_title: Erik Satie / Life / Move to Arcueil
caption_attribution_description: English: El bohemi by Ramon Casas. El Bohemio, Poet of Montmartre, is a portrait of composer Erik Satie (1866-1925) near the Moulin de la Galette in Montmartre, hangs in the Art Collection. The painting was donated to the Library by the Deering family and has traveled around the world to be included in major museum exhibitions.
context_page_description: Éric Alfred Leslie Satie, who signed his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist. Satie was an influential artist in the late 19th- and early 20th-century Parisian avant-garde. His work was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music, and the Theatre of the Absurd.
  An eccentric, Satie was introduced as a "gymnopedist" in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopédies. Later, he also referred to himself as a "phonometrician", preferring this designation to that of "musician", after having been called "a clumsy but subtle technician" in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911.
  In addition to his body of music, Satie left a set of writings, having contributed work for a range of publications from the dadaist 391 to the American culture chronicle Vanity Fair. Although in later life he prided himself on publishing his work under his own name, in the late 19th century he appears to have used pseudonyms such as Virginie Lebeau and François de Paule in some of his published writings.
context_section_description: By mid-1896, all of Satie's financial means had vanished, and he had to move to cheaper and much smaller lodgings, first at the Rue Cortot, and two years later, after he had composed the two first sets of Pièces froides in 1897, to Arcueil, a suburb some ten kilometres from Montmartre.  During this period he re-established contact with his brother Conrad for numerous practical and financial matters, disclosing some of his inner feelings in the process. The letters to Conrad made it clear that he had set aside his religious ideas.
  From 1899 on, Satie started making money as a cabaret pianist, adapting over a hundred compositions of popular music for piano or piano and voice, adding some of his own. The most popular of these were Je te veux, text by Henry Pacory; Tendrement, text by Vincent Hyspa; Poudre d'or, a waltz; La Diva de l'Empire, text by Dominique Bonnaud/Numa Blès; Le Picadilly, a march; Légende californienne, text by Contamine de Latour (lost, but the music later reappears in La belle excentrique); and quite a few more, many of which have been lost. In his later years, Satie would reject all his cabaret music as vile and against his nature, but for the time being, it was an income.
  Only a few compositions that Satie took seriously remain from this period: Jack in the Box, music to a pantomime by Jules Depaquit (called a "clownerie" by Satie); Geneviève de Brabant, a short comic opera on a serious theme, text by "Lord Cheminot"; The Dreamy Fish, piano music to accompany a lost tale by Cheminot; and a few others that were mostly incomplete, hardly any of them staged, and none of them published at the time.
  Both Geneviève de Brabant and The Dreamy Fish have been analysed by Ornella Volta as containing elements of competition with Claude Debussy, of which Debussy was probably not aware, Satie not making this music public. Meanwhile, Debussy was having one of his first major successes with Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902, leading a few years later to 'who-was-precursor-to-whom' debates between the two composers, in which Maurice Ravel would also get involved.
  In October 1905, Satie enrolled in Vincent d'Indy's Schola Cantorum de Paris to study classical counterpoint while still continuing his cabaret work. Most of his friends were as dumbfounded as the professors at the Schola when they heard about his new plan to return to the classrooms, especially as d'Indy was an admiring pupil of Saint-Saëns, not particularly favoured by Satie. Satie would follow these courses at the Schola, as a respected pupil, for more than five years, receiving a first (intermediate) diploma in 1908. Some of his classroom counterpoint-exercises, such as the Désespoir agréable, were published after his death. Another summary, of the period prior to the Schola, also appeared in 1911: the Trois morceaux en forme de poire, which was a kind of compilation of the best of what he had written up to 1903.
  Something that becomes clear through these published compilations is that Satie did not so much reject Romanticism and its exponents like Wagner, but that he rejected certain aspects of it. From his first composition to his last, he rejected the idea of musical development, in the strict definition of this term: the intertwining of different themes in a development section of a sonata form. As a result, his contrapuntal and other works were very short; the "new, modern" Fugues do not extend further than the exposition of the theme(s). Generally, he would say that he did not think it permitted that a composer take more time from his public than strictly necessary. Also Melodrama, in its historical meaning of the then popular romantic genre of "spoken words to a background of music", was something Satie avoided. His 1913 Le piège de Méduse could be seen as an absurdist spoof of that genre.
  In the meantime, other changes had also taken place: Satie was a member of a radical socialist party (he later switched his membership to the Communist Party in that area after December 1920), and had socialised with the Arcueil community: amongst other things, he had
caption: Satie, Moulin de la Galette ("The Bohemian"), Ramon Casas, (1891)
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