#Pianist's life

[lydiaplain]

Every Day ~ this is life 🎶

[worldwidewandress]

"i felt my desolation more than ever..."

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Around 1939 or '40 there was this lovely, ample-bosomed blonde girl who was my older brother's girlfriend. Her name was Natalie. She lived across the little side street on which we played stickball. The room that held my piano, my studio, if you will, faced her windows. We were up on the fifth floor, and Natalie was across the street on the second floor. There were a number of times in the summer when Ray, my brother, threw open the window, sat on the sill with his leg up, and Natalie would be like Juliet, except she was below, not above, at her window. The two would gaze and gesture to one another. It was quite a distance from the fifth floor to the second floor across the street, and, you know, with kids in between playing stickball, it wasn't quite the situation where they could converse. So they developed a kind of sign language. One afternoon, Ray must've been in the throes of some great wave of passion. He sat me down, literally grabbed me by the arm, and put me on the piano bench. He knew that I could play the piano version of Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. He pointed to the music and said, "Play!" Then he went and sat on the sill while I played as loudly as I could, with the appropriate feeling. I played this love music while my brother sat on the sill making these great swooping gestures as if he were sending the music out the window down across the street to Natalie's window. I was twelve or thirteen and Ray was close to eighteen at the time. I felt like Cyrano de Bergerac. A musical Cyrano de Bergerac.

     —Leon Fleisher, in Just Kids from the Bronx by Arlene Alda (ed.)

Photo: The Bronx, 1939, by Sid Grossman via MCNY

[brainfreeze27]

[sweepinguptheemeraldbar]

✨️Falk being Falk✨️

A compilation from Oberhausen, 18/10/24

He is having a thought!

Frolicking through the meadows

"Oh look! A squirrel!

"I am a literal GOD"

Bugs when you lift up a rock

He skedaddle away

"I am one with the keyboard and the keyboard is one with me"

"'Aight, imma head out"

Pyre content sold separately.

[starryvomit]

for to be loved in the right ways is the most healing of all. 🌼

[mojaves]

now. Now. do i start sebposting. i kind of want to start sebposting

[blackswaneuroparedux]

I am by far your superior, but my notorious modesty prevents me from saying so.

- Erik Satie

To his contemporaries and peers Erik Satie was something of an enigma. Just a few of his quirks included claiming he only ate white foods, carrying a hammer wherever he went, founding his own religion, eating 150 oysters in one sitting, and writing a piece with the instruction to repeat 840 times! As a composer, Satie paved the way for the avant-garde in music and became a very influential figure in the classical music of the 20th century whose works still sound fresh today.

Born into a poor and difficult childhood in the Normandy harbour town of Honfleur on 17 May 1866, Satie would always be an outsider. The Paris Conservatoire to which he was enrolled by his stepmother, herself a pianist, became for him “a sort of local penitentiary” during his teens; he left with no qualifications and a reputation for being lazy. He signed up for military service in 1886 and dropped out within the same year. Immersing himself in the bohemian life of Montmartre, he became linked with the popular music scene and eked out a living as an accompanist, playing at the Chat Noir cabaret. Always on the periphery, and forever out of money, he later downgraded from the cramped room in which he lived to the less fashionable Parisian suburb of Arcueil, where he holed up in isolation and squalor – no visitors set foot in the room during the near-30 years he lived there.

Much has been made of the eccentricities of this flâneur, who was always seen in a grey velvet suit, and yet underlying Satie’s music is his serious desire to create something new. You can hear it in his popular piano pieces: the haunting scales and rhythms of the Trois Gnossiennes written under the spell of Romanian folk music, and the meditative world of Gymnopédies, where, as in a cubist painting, motifs are “seen” from all sides. At a time when French composers were looking to escape the shadows of Wagner’s epic Romanticism, the French composer’s stripped-back mechanical sound, inspired by the humble barrel organ, offered a radically simple approach.

Satie preferred originality to the mundane. The composer of the famous Gymnopedies, could never be accused of having an uninteresting personality. For one, his outgoing fashion statements always caused a stir. During his Montmartre years, he had 12 identical velvet corduroy suits hanging in his wardrobe, which earned him the nickname ‘The Velvet Gentleman’, and in his socialist years, he donned a bowler hat and carried an umbrella.

Debussy helped to draw public attention to Satie, orchestrating two of his Gymnopédies, yet Satie had to wait until much later in life to attain celebrity status. While still earning a living writing salon dances and popular cabaret songs, and after suffering a creative crisis, he enrolled himself at the Schola Cantorum in Paris at the age of 39. Rather than finding him validation, his studies seem to have fuelled his hatred of convention - it’s with more than a hint of bitterness that he claims to put “everything I know about Boredom” into the Bach chorale of his masterful Sports et Divertissements piano pieces. But notoriety led to a succès de scandale and when it came it came with a bang in Parade, his surreal, one-act circus ballet for Diaghilev. Into the orchestral score, which featured jazz and cabaret tunes, were thrown typewriters, sirens and a pistol - just the kind of noises a wartime audience would normally pay not to hear. With its rigid cubist costumes by Picasso - which restricted Massine’s choreography - and a promotional push from Cocteau, it was provocative enough to secure Satie’s position at the vanguard of modernism.

Yet Satie was continually frustrated in his attempts to be accepted as an artist in high society France - his failure to establish himself at the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts, to which Debussy had won a scholarship, only compounded his resentment. Was this treatment by the cultural elite fair? Certainly his determination to antagonise his audience in his late ballets did little to endear him to the critics, but the fierce criticism he received in Paris was also a sign of things to come. Pierre Boulez would later poke fun at Satie’s lack of craft, while composer Jean Barraqué - another proponent of 12-tone music - would deride Satie as “an accomplished musical illiterate … who found that his friendship with Debussy was an unhoped-for opportunity to loiter in the corridors of history”.

Satie is perhaps, to this day, the most audacious and original composer when it comes to naming his works e.g. Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies. With Satie you will not see symphonies, concertos or opus numbers. Satie possessed a wicked sense of humour and his mockery, both of himself and others, became an inspiration for many of his irony-tinged works. His Sonatine bureaucratique is a spoof of Muzio Clementi’s Sonatina Op. 36 and contained many witticisms in the score. For example, he writes Vivache (vache being French for cow) instead of the original Italian tempo marking Vivace.

Whether in the collage-like miniature piano parodies he wrote during the World War I, his creation of a theatre format that has endured over the years, or in his collaboration with Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso y Sergei Diaghilev, there is a liveliness of imagination and a hunger for innovation that made Erik Satie In the torch bearer of the vanguard in his work. Satie would influence so many so strongly that years later some of his closest friends became radical artists, for example. ManRay, the sculptor Constantin Brâncusi, and Marcel Duchamp, or a much younger group of Paris-based composers like Les Six.

Satie, a known drinker of absinthe, and apparently every other alcohol available, died of cirrhosis at the age of 59 in Arcueil, France in July 1925. But his compositions, especially those deceptively simple-sounding solo piano works, find life today through recitals, concerts, and great movie scores. Although he died in poverty with little success to his name, today Erik Satie is acknowledged as a founder of 20th-century modernism, who changed the face of music.

Personally I do find Satie's music enriching, But I also find that his calculated wackiness is culturally apt. Pieces like ‘3 Pieces in the Shape of a Pear’, ‘Flabby Preludes for a Dog’ and ‘Desiccated Embryos’ rewardingly deflate Wagnerism's excesses in a characteristically French way.

[lizzygrantsbsf]

girlhood is being hit on by your music teacher

[apporutte]

I FOUEN THE 15K BTS RPF FANFICTION I WROTE WWHEN I WAS IN MIDDLW SCHOOL IM LOSIRNGVIT

[things-you-may-need-to-hear]

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[silvermalkin]

I have so many other things I should be working on but Tokyo Debunkers happened so now I have an OC oops!

She's best friends with Sho, but has a star-cursed romance with Rui!

The natural accidentals represent her quest back to normal life/ healing from the scars her ex-boyfriend left on her psyche

close up on the mini where I tried to mimic their style

[saturnisfallingdown]

its suuuch a basic choice but i do not CARE. clair de lune is my fav piano composition forever and always

[octildaodds]

[wigglys-dikrats]

matt dahan is my favourite character in the guy who didn’t like musicals

[thecinematicshots]

Movies to watch when you're feeling lonely