In Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite, a study of the avant-garde pianist, Ian Penman resists the urge to categorise Satie neatly, avoiding the reductive tendencies that often plague biographies. Satie’s life was full of contradictions. His compositions are “old as sand yet strangely contemporary”, shifting between high culture and popular music, not fully belonging to either. The term surrealism was first publicly used in reference to him, yet he was never formally part of the movement. He rejected “the safety net of group, school or solidarity”, though he found a church.
Penman does not impose an all-encompassing thesis. He avoids reading Satie’s life through the often overstated lenses of his sexuality and alcoholism. Instead, he embraces Satie’s life as a series of bizarre episodes, some of which are indistinguishable from dreams, rather than as a composite whole.
The book is divided into three sections: an essay, an A-Z Satie dictionary, and a personal listening diary. Through this fragmented approach, Penman strives to capture Satie’s essence by leaning on anecdotes, personal reflections and a host of “tutelary deities”, figures who share something of Satie’s spirit – “warped bachelors with a lonely but productive ethos”.
Satie appears as an extinct type. His world obeyed a different “sense of time”, one that was “slower, and differently noisy”. He was also radically ahead of his time. Surrealism, conceptual art and ambient music all owe the Honfleur native a great debt.
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His musique d’ameublement, or furniture music, was an early instance of background music, designed to “soften ... the noises of knives and forks” without demanding attention. “Furniture music completes one’s property,” he declared, urging audiences not to focus on it; to pay attention was to snuff out the atmosphere it was trying to create. Satie’s compositions appeal to our “capacity for blankness”, while at the same time they reshaped how people listen to music.
Once described as “more heard about than heard”, Satie now lingers in the air. His Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes “eternally circle people’s minds like pollen”. Penman treasures his entire oeuvre for embracing the “forgotten realm of quiet moments”. In a world that rarely slows down and in which silence seldom lingers, Satie’s music remains an antidote, an invitation to embrace repetition and emptiness.
