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Satie's Approach to Composition in His Later Years (1913–24)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1984

Robert Orledge
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Extract

Music requires a great deal from those who wish to serve her … A true musician must be subjugated to his Art; … he must put himself above human miseries; … he must draw his courage from within himself, from within himself alone. (Erik Satie: ‘The Musical Spirit’, published in Séléction, III année, no. 6 (April 1924))

More has been written about why Satie composed than about how he composed; about the aesthetic implications of his precursive art for the present century than about the techniques of his art itself. My aim is to attempt to redress the balance, in part at least; to try to focus on some of the problems Satie encountered as he sought to satisfy the increased demand for his music which followed his sudden rise to the forefront of public attention largely due to the efforts of Ravel, Ricardo Viñes and Jean Cocteau over the years 1911 to 1915. If I look to anything as a model, it is Patrick Gowers’ pioneering paper on ‘Satie's Rose Croix Music (1891–1895)’ which explored Satie's use of systematic harmonic devices, working methods and formal experiments from the evidence of his manuscript notebooks. To the best of my knowledge, no such complementary study relating to Satie's later years has yet appeared in print, though Gowers’ thesis’ does discuss Satie's compositional methods in the Nocturnes of 1919.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 111 , 1984 , pp. 155 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 The Royal Musical Association and the Authors

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References

1 Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, xcii (1965–5), 1–25.Google Scholar

2 F-Pn MSS 9573–9678 (168 notebooks) and the 29 notebooks now in the Houghton Library of Harvard University. I have limited this paper to a discussion of the Bibliothèque Nationale notebooks, both because they contain sketches and drafts for all the major works composed between 1913 and 1924, and because the Harvard notebooks (mostly sketches for earlier songs) do not contradict my findings in any way.Google Scholar

3 Erik Satie: his Studies, Notebooks and Critics, University Library, Cambridge, Ph.D nos. 5374–76 (1965). Appendix 2 briefly discusses Satie's ‘Compositions conceived harmonically’ (Ph.D 5375, 291–3), and my exx. 2a, 10a and 10b appear in exx. 62–3 (Ph.D 5376, 194–6), though I only discovered this after completing the present paper.Google Scholar

4 ‘Erik Satie and the Concept of the Avant-Garde’, The Musical Quarterly, lxix (1983), 110.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 110.Google Scholar

6 Stanley Satie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London, 1980), xvi, 517.Google Scholar

7 The original French text is published as item 37 in Erik Satie: Écrits (réunis, établis et annotés par Ornella Volta), (Paris, 1977), 48–9. The ordering comes from a transcription made by Pierre-Daniel Templier around 1930 from a (badly) typed copy made by Satie. This was lent to Templier by Conrad Satie, but is now lost. The final sentence is found only on the cover of F-Pn MS 9611.Google Scholar

8 Cited in Nigel Wilkins' comprehensive collection of ‘The Writings of Erik Satie: Miscellaneous Fragments’, Music and Letters, lvi, (1975), 292.Google Scholar

9 See Wilkins, op. cit., (1975), 293.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 The full text is given in Wilkins, op. cit., 291.Google Scholar

11 The page numbers refer to the orchestral score (OS), published by Salabert, Paris (E.A.S. 16425; 115 pp.).Google Scholar

12 See Music and Letters, lxiii (1982), 294.Google Scholar

13 MS, 58pp., now belonging to the Frederick R. Koch Foundation on deposit in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. This shows Parade (plus chorus text and other declamatory insertions) in its original shorter state (as in the printed reduction) without the opening ‘Choral’ (OS, 2–3) and the ‘Final’ (OS, 98–114). F-Pn MS 17677 (5) provides these later additions in piano duet format.Google Scholar

14 All page numbers refer to the vocal score (VS) published by Max Eschig, Paris (E.D.2.L.S.; 71 pp. of music). This is a reproduction of the 1919 score published by Editions de la Sirène.Google Scholar

15 It then passes back to Part 1, Portrait de Sacrale, beginning in mid-phrase with the material found on VS, 4 bar 8.Google Scholar

16 There are even the starts to two whole-tone scale nocturnes in F-Pn MS 9673, I and 20, but neither proceeded beyond the usual four bars, and both abandon whole-tone harmonies during their third bars.Google Scholar

17 See Wilkins, Nigel, ‘Erik Satie's Letters to Milhaud and Others’, The Musical Quarterly, lxvi (1980), 427.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Excluding the 108 bars in the opening ‘Projection’ and ‘Entrée de la Femme’ which do not feature in Satie's original plan.Google Scholar

19 Page numbers are from the piano reduction published by Rouart-Lerolle, Paris in 1926 (RL 11577; 45 pp. music).Google Scholar

20 This motif is itself simply constructed from bar I and seven repetitions of bar 2.Google Scholar