Pipedown is the campaign to get rid of the scourge of unwanted piped background muzak, whether on hold on the telephone, in a restaurant, or queuing in a supermarket. The late pianist Alfred Brendel was a major supporter of the group and on one occasion in a restaurant he discreetly cut the wire leading to a speaker to kill the noise.
The concept of background or “ambient” music has a long pedigree. The idea was coined by one of France’s most eccentric classical composers Erik Satie, who died 100 years ago on July 1st, 1925.
Satie produced what he referred to as musique d’ameublement, or furniture music, part of the noise of the background surroundings. But when he played this music on the piano he found that people were “disappointingly attentive”.
Satie is best known for his haunting Trois Gymnopédies, three short piano compositions which ought, he insisted, to be performed in different ways: his first Gymnopédie should be played lent et douloureux (slowly and painfully), the second lent et triste (slowly and with sadness), and third lent et grave (slowly and seriously).
Erik Satie: The eccentric 20th century French composer who coined the idea of ambient or background music
Alison Healy: On discovering what the rebels ate during the Easter Rising
Poor Mouth, Rich Reputation – Frank McNally on fellow Flannorak and pioneering publican, Mick Gleeson
A Hill to Die On - Frank McNally on celebrating the summer solstice at Tara
The composer was born in Honfleur in Normandy in 1866 to a French father and British mother. He was named Eric but later changed the “c” to “k”. His father encouraged his early musical interest, enrolling him at the Conservatoire de Paris where the teachers found him lazy and dull but this did not prevent him from establishing a career in the musical world. In the late 19th and early 20th century he created hundreds of compositions with his work noted for its dissonance and unpredictability.
Satie collaborated with Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and the choreographer Leonide Massine for the ballet Parade which included the use of unorthodox “instruments” such as a typewriter, milk bottles, a pistol and a foghorn.
His music often surprises the listener, moving suddenly from soft or low to crashing bars. Through his unusual discoveries he brought wit to his themes with playful titles such as “Three Pieces in the Shape of Pear,” “Veritable Flabby Preludes for a Dog”, and “Do not Drink your Chocolate with your Fingers.”
If his topics were strange, then his life in Paris was unconventional in the extreme. Stories about Satie range from the fanciful to the extraordinary, while some may be apocryphal or were told as a joke.
For example, he often wore a flamboyant yellow corduroy suit of which he had seven identical versions. He slept on a camp bed under which he recklessly kept lit candles to keep himself warm.
Another of his quirky subjects related to the colour white. Satie wanted his music to be pure and for some time he ate all-white food to engender the composition of his “white” music. A heavy drinker who liked brandy and absinthe, he also had a fondness for white wine boiled and mixed with fuchsia juice. As money was tight, Satie decided to move from the bohemian world of Montmartre to Arcueil, a poorer suburb south of the capital.
But he still immersed himself in the avant-garde Parisian cafés where he composed many of his later works while turning his entire life in the city into an artistic performance. He was interested in the occult and ancient religions – a friend jokingly called him Esoterik Satie.
Satie died in a hospital in Paris of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 59. When friends cleared his home they found it covered in cobwebs, cluttered with bundles of unpaid bills, piles of unopened letters, musical notebooks and scores of old umbrellas, many of them unused.
Bizarrely, there were also two grand pianos, one on top of the other, and inside the top piano they found a score for a piece Vexations, with an instruction: “Repeat 840 times”.
Several buildings in Paris are named after Satie. They include a conservatory in the 7th arrondissement, a high school in the 14th, and the Centre Culturel Communal Erik Satie in Arcueil which promotes artistic activities.
Aside from this, Satie’s work continues to occupy a unique place in musicology, especially for the simplicity of the Gymnopédies which have endured for many generations. In 1980 the jazz singer Cleo Laine and flautist James Galway produced a version for voice and flute; the same year the electronic music pioneer Gary Numan released a track called Trois Gymnopédies(First Movement) which appeared on the B-side of his single We Are Glass. Satie wrote a film score and his music has featured in movies directed by Woody Allen and by the French film director and screenwriter Louis Malle.
Erik Satie was known as ‘a wizardly godfather of modernism.’ His hypnotic music often comes under the categories of most relaxing or easy listening, and his calming playlist includes Gnossiennes, Sarabandes and soothing waltzes. Last Saturday, the classical music station, BBC Radio 3, devoted an entire day to his music, dubbing it, naturellement, as a “Satie Day”, which for his admirers led to considerable ‘Saties-faction’.
