page_title: Pièces froides
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Pièces froides / Background
caption_attribution_description: House at 6 Rue Cortot, Montmartre, Paris, home of Erik Satie from 1890 to 1898
context_page_description: The Pièces froides are two sets of piano pieces composed in March 1897 by Erik Satie. Unpublished until 1912, they marked Satie's break from the mystical-religious music of his "Rosicrucian" period, and were a harbinger of his humoristic piano suites of the 1910s.
  Biographer Rollo H. Myers placed the Pièces froides high among Satie's piano works, writing, "Only a born musician of the finest sensibility could have conceived these limpid and so essentially 'musical' pieces which ought to be in the repertory of every pianist who is more interested in music than virtuosity."
  A third set of Pièces froides, written in 1907 but shelved by the composer, was published posthumously.
context_section_description: The title Pièces froides—which can also be translated as Cold Rooms or Cold Cuts —has been viewed as a punning allusion to the dire poverty Satie experienced during his last years living in Montmartre. In July 1896, he had been forced to move from his room at 6 Rue Cortot into an unheated ground floor closet (he called it a "cupboard") in the same building, which the landlord offered him for 20 francs per quarter. The space was so small that Satie's camp bed all but blocked the door shut, and on frigid nights he kept warm by sleeping fully dressed with the rest of his clothing piled on top of him. These conditions were hardly conducive to composing, but one prospect gave him hope over the bitter 1896–97 winter.
  Satie's friend Claude Debussy had long lobbied the Société Nationale de Musique (SNM) to perform his music, even though the group's director Ernest Chausson reportedly "almost fainted" after looking through some of the scores. In 1896 Debussy took matters into his own hands by orchestrating the first and third of Satie's Gymnopédies,  and persuaded the Société to program them. Gustave Doret conducted the premiere at the Salle Érard in Paris on February 20, 1897. The critics (led by Satie's arch-enemy Willy) were hostile, but the pieces were warmly received by the audience. This event stirred Satie, who had composed almost nothing since 1895, into a renewed (if short-lived) burst of creativity. Within a month, he had completed the Pièces froides.
  Having observed how Debussy arranged his music, Satie attempted to orchestrate two numbers from this set—the first of the Airs à faire fuir and the second of the Danses de travers—for the SNM. On March 22, he joked to his friend Louis Lemonnier, "I am going to play you these symphonic pieces on the tormented slide-trombone and make you block up your ears." But after 19 trials, he got no further than nine bars and abandoned the project. In the end, the Société remained uninterested in his work, and Satie lapsed into another creative silence that lasted until after his move to the distant Parisian suburb of Arcueil in October 1898.
caption: 6 Rue Cortot in Montmartre, Paris, where Satie lived from 1890 to 1898.
exif: {"Image Make": "PENTAX Corporation", "Image Model": "PENTAX Optio 330GS", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Optio 330GS Ver 1.10", "Image DateTime": "2007:05:29 10:37:08", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "366", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 50, 53, 48, 0, 0, 0, 12, 0, 1, 0, 20, ... ]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "41892", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6835", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/160", "EXIF FNumber": "24/5", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2007:05:29 10:37:08", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2007:05:29 10:37:08", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "23/10", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "14/5", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "29/5", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2048", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1536", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "41766", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "0", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "38", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Hard", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "3"}