.jpg)
Date: 1st July 2025, on the exact centenary of his passing
Erik Satie (Honfleur, 1866 - Paris, 1925) was a composer and pianist who lived on the fringes, both physical/geographical and artistic, of the French musical establishment.
After moving to Montmartre at a very young age, he haunted cafés, cabarets and academies with the same irreverent spirit he brought to the score.
Satie evades conventional labels: neither Romantic nor Impressionist, but decidedly revolutionary. His stripped-down aesthetic cracked the boundaries of traditional musical forms. Contemporary critics dismissed him as a dilettante, yet farsighted colleagues from Debussy to Ravel recognised him as a pioneer.
A life marked by stubborn independence and mocking irony united his art with a philosophy of absolute freedom.
Today, a hundred years after his death, Satie remains the emblem of those who, escaping the limits of labels, redefine music’s very borders. To celebrate the occasion, here are ten fun facts that reveal his most eccentric and visionary side.
- The father of “ambient”: Musique d’ameublement
In 1917 Satie coined the term “musique d’ameublement” (“furniture music”): pieces meant not to be listened to attentively, but rather to blend with background noises, an astonishing forerunner of ambient music and the muzak heard in public spaces. - Vexations: 840 repetitions of pure zen
His most extreme piece lasts only a few bars, yet the manuscript instructs that the motif be repeated eight hundred and forty times. He added the advice: “It would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobility.” The first complete performance, organised by John Cage in 1963, required 11 pianists and ran for 18 hours and 40 minutes. Performers say the line resists memorisation, forcing constant sight reading, and listeners, too, find themselves unable to hum it even after hours of hearing it. - Memoirs of an Amnesiac
In this collection of some of his writings, Satie calls himself a “phonometrographer”, not a musician. He enjoyed to measure sounds with phonometers, phonoscope and motodynaphones, jotting them down faster than any composer; phonology, he joked, is the future and it pays better. With irony he denounced humans’ dereliction of their duties of care and education towards their “fellow-creatures”, of how we keep animals segregated in artistic ignorance: pigeons without geography, fish without oceanography, horses without dance and nightingales that know nothing of clefs or keys. Humans and beasts, he said, share the same incomplete education. To breathe beauty he lived among forgeries of masterpieces: a fake Rembrandt, an invented Teniers and a counterfeit Beethoven Tenth Symphony, which he called “colossal”. In this carousel of paradoxes Satie unmasked academic conformism, turning provocation into poetics and claiming that imagination, not authority, is the true measure of art. - A minute-by-minute agenda
The same book contains the famous table “An artist must regulate his life”, in which he scheduled his day to the second: wake at 7:18, inspiration from 10:23 to 11:47, a three-minute lunch at 12:11, horse riding until 14:53, more creation from 15:12 to 16:07, then “various occupations” until 18:47. After a four-minute dinner he read symphonies aloud from 20:09 to 21:59 and went to bed at 22:37. His menu was entirely white: eggs, sugar, grated bones, camphorised sausages and more. He slept on a round bed with a hole for his head while a servant took his temperature every hour. He breathed “a little at a time”, walked clasping his sides, laughed only by accident and apologised. Beneath its manic precision the timetable reveals Satie’s playful overturning of every rule. - A DIY church
In 1892 he founded the Église Métropolitaine d’Art de Jésus Conducteur, proclaimed himself “Parcier et Maître de Chapelle” and issued edicts of excommunication against critics and colleagues. Satie was its sole member. He preached voluntary poverty and a music “without sauerkraut”, meaning free of Wagnerism. The suspension of his publications through the Metropolitan Church of Art and his following third abortive attempt at application to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1896, marks the conclusion of what is sometimes considered Satie's "Mystic Period"; Gothic style documents remained, showing that for Satie even religion could become theatre for the imagination. - The Velvet Gentleman
In 1895 the penniless but ambitious 29-year-old Satie bought seven identical grey-velvet suits. He always carried an umbrella, opening with the sunshine to shield his face, closing it in the rain lest it be spoiled. For the rest of his life he only and always wore those seven suits and kept the umbrella at hand. Children, charmed by his impeccable appearance, dubbed him the Velvet Gentleman, and the name stuck. - Two pianos, one atop the other
After his death friends entered his tiny Arcueil studio. In one locked room they found hundreds of identical black umbrellas; in another they saw two pianos stacked one on top of the other: he played the lower instrument and used the upper as a cupboard for unopened letters. - Parade: total art with Picasso and Cocteau
The 1917 ballet Parade united Satie (music), Jean Cocteau (scenario) and Pablo Picasso (sets and costumes). The ballet was composed by Léonide Massine for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The pit featured sirens, typewriters and lottery wheels, additions that alarmed Satie and scandalized Paris. Fairground tunes, rendered with alienating accents and relentless meters, create extremely simple, almost dehumanized music that peaks in the portrayal of the two protagonists. Parade also brought jazz to the theatre for the first time: the ragtime danced by the American Girl is genuine period jazz. - The mature student at the Schola Cantorum
Now almost forty, Satie returned to study at Paris’s Schola Cantorum after hearing Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, which he found “absolutely astounding.” Determined to improve his technique (against Debussy’s advice) he enrolled in 1905 and continued until 1912, working with Vincent d’Indy and Albert Roussel. He proved it is never too late to start anew, becoming a far more conscientious and successful student than in his youth. - Lost-and-found ballet: Jack in the Box
Thinking he had left the score on a bus, Satie shelved this ballet. It was only after his death that the manuscript was found, safe inside a notebook tucked behind his piano (together with another unpublished score, his puppet opera Geneviève de Brabant) and premiered posthumously with the Ballets Russes in 1926.
Listen to and collect Satie today
Would you like to immerse yourself in his most famous pages? Our Amazon showcase features the new vinyl “Satie – Classical Music Masterpieces”, a journey through the French composer’s most significant works, renowned for their innovative avant-garde spirit that deeply influenced twentieth-century music. The vinyl offers a warm, authentic listening experience, capturing the delicate nuances and unique atmosphere of his compositions. From the celebrated Gymnopédies to the Gnossiennes, every track has been mastered with care to ensure maximum fidelity.
Prefer video? Enjoy our YouTube compilation:
Happy centenary, Monsieur Satie.