I think I heard it more or less since childhood.
Most people don’t intentionally listen to 100-year-old music, sure, but you’re underestimating how much we absorb this stuff as background music in ads, movies, TV shows etc.
Most classical music is very niche but a few pieces become cornerstones of popular culture -- think of “flight of the bumblebee” or the William Tell overture. Satie has a disproportionate number of hits. His style is exceptionally simple, distinct and timeless.
If you’re older I can understand why it seems perplexing but it’s true in my experience.
But what you said was:
Youtube is probably hugely responsible for Erik’s modern popularity.
That makes it sound like people weren’t aware of this music before YouTubers started picking it up. That’s very much not the case.
If you’re just talking about name recognition rather than the music itself, I suppose that’s possible as I don’t think his name was all that widely known. You’d have to show that it is more widely known now, though.
My guess would be that his music is familiar to quite a large fraction of people, but that most still don’t know his name.
I’m not trying to be snobby about this -- there’s plenty of catchy classical music I really like where I can only vaguely guess at the composer. I just happen to know and like Satie. It helps that a lot of his music is relatively easy to play for an amateur pianist like me.
From there went deep in research on whosampled.com.
My favourite interpretation of Satie's is played by Reinbert de Leeuw. He plays very slow, playing just a bit behind the beat, with astonishing precision and expressiveness.
When I used to play piano, I once timed myself playing them to my own preference. As I recall, it was around 11 minutes at the speed that makes sense to me.
Chacun a son gout. (Satie himself claimed to only eat foods that are white, after all.)
Music website: https://gnossiennes.mousereeve.com/ (slightly better on Desktop).
Talk: https://youtu.be/ANYMii3Sypg
Abstract: https://www.thestrangeloop.com/2019/minimalist-piano-forever...
It doesn't use markov chains (to my knowledge) but can generate some pretty impressive sounding Bach-like preludes / fugues using a weighted rule based approach across notes and melodic phrases.
I highly recommend
Eric Satie's complete piano works on 2 x CD
has all the music from this wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Erik_S...
I tried to play some of these on classical guitar and failed dismally.
You simply have to decide to hear it.
Both, but mostly for his music. Listen to Gymnopédie No. 1 and Gnossienne No. 1 for good beginner pieces.
But apparently hackernews loves to point out how "weird" he was.
Some of the world's most cherished music is much older than that. Is it your general expectation that musical compositions, regardless of merit, will inevitably lose their appeal over time?
Older music is filtered by the brains of the people who experienced it when it was new. A consensus forms on what music was good and should be remembered. There's a nostalgia bump in popularity that lags about 20-30 years behind as middle-aged folk (the people with money and influence) replay the songs from their younger days. That's where "classic rock" and the like come from.
After that, the music is filtered again by people who encounter the previously filtered music for the first time. Music that survives this filter becomes essentially a permanent part of the culture. Here you find pieces like Scott Joplin's The Entertainer and Benny Goodman's version of Sing, Sing, Sing.
So if you're encountering century-plus old music, it's generally the stuff the stuff that our culture has flagged as being the best of its time (by one of several measures, not necessarily the most enjoyable) and still worthy of appreciation. Or it's music nerds doing their thing.
As a little art project, I recently made a version for MS-DOS and AdLib [2] that starts with a piano-like sound and gradually distorts the timbre every repetition by flipping a random bit in the AdLib’s registers.
I never made a recording of it because I was envisioning it as an “if you got to see it in person, cool” type of thing, but I should probably go back and do that
Live performances of Vexations are illuminating in their own right.
But as a reminder for those who don't know: from the score it's clear Satie was satirizing the practice of composers taking on the long, boring process of drilling inane counterpoint exercises in the hope of eventually writing "serious" music, only to teach themselves the singular lesson of how to write long, boring phrases of music.
Probably he's also satirizing the arbitrariness of the received wisdom, as evidenced by his surprising voice-leading decisions for the phrase in Vexations. (Digression-- I find the common-practice prohibition on parallel fifths funny given there are near-constant parallel fifths sounding as an accident of the harmonic series, especially prominent in step-wise basslines in the cello or bass part. Did Rameau or anyone every address that? I don't remember...)
Counterpoint is like any other musical technique. If you're a hack you can get it "right" and never say anything expressive with it. But if you have a creative musical sensibility it can add interest and complexity that wouldn't be possible otherwise.
An instrument sounding at the partial a compound perfect fifth (fifth plus octave) above another voice's fundamental can certainly disappear into the timbral texture. But that's quite different from an instrument sounding a simple perfect fifth above another instrument.
Check out the famous parallel fifths at the beginning of Rondes printanières from Rite of Spring. That's strings and winds articulating pitches which are a perfect fifth apart. Simple perfect fifths moving in parallel like that in the bass of the orchestra (or, really, in any range of the piano) are conspicuous and stand out.
It's unlikely that parallel fifths were prohibited during common practice period both because compound ones would accidentally blend into the sounding harmonic series of the other voice, and because simple ones stick out when compared to thirds or sixths.
Moreover, parallel fifths don't stick out any more than, say, parallel fourths. But parallel fourths had long been standardized in practice and theory as part of fauxbourdon.
I can just imagine Satie playing fauxbourdon with fifths-- because, why not?-- and a teacher telling him it's wrong and therefore not to do it. And then we get Vexations, and Debussy, Mahler, Ravel, Polenc, Stravinsky and many others thumbing their noses at the prohibition, creating a new allowance for them that persists into modern film scores even without the initial irony of those composers.
The pieces were more conventional than I was expecting. I like the album and the music, it's a different side to Satie more reflective of the era, provides some context and perspective on his works.
kaonwarb•7mo ago
Still looking forward to listening!