Erik Satie had a way with words. There have been few composers who found such obvious glee in the use of language. In written performance indications appended to his scores, he would ask musicians to play “without your fingers blushing” or “on the tips of your back teeth.” Eschewing the standard terminology of classical notation — appassionato, agitato, affettuoso, and so on — Satie’s music instead applies expression markings such as “white and immobile,” “as if you were congested,” and “on yellowing velvet.” It’s hard to know quite what to make of these terse little rejoinders. How do you strike a piano key whitely? Or in such a way that your fingers don’t blush?
Ian Penman, in his rather laconic new book about the composer, Erik Satie Three Piece Suite, pictures these epigrammatic advisories as “images from a reverie, or one-liners issuing from a second bottle of wine.” It’s a line of interpretation that goes back to the composer’s own time, when the mere act of reading his works’ titles in a concert program was apt to provoke howls of laughter from an audience, prompting some contemporary critics to contemn Satie’s use of language as a “distraction” from the music itself. Penman has no truck with such a separation. “His humour is not an eccentric supplement to the ‘real work,’” he writes, “but intrinsic.”
Other commentators question whether we should regard such textual interventions as gags at all. When I reached out to the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, founder of the group Apartment House, which will be performing Satie’s Socrate at this year’s Norfolk and Norwich Festival, he told me he never thinks “of anything by Satie as a joke.” The written performance indications, he said, simply serve as a reminder “to try to play his music well and with a beauty.” The pianist Mark Knoop agreed. “I do take them seriously,” he told me, “even if that means with an inner…
Auteur: Robert Barry
