#sati (composer)

[sixty-silver-wishes]

everyone shut up this is ACTUALLY what fans of different composers are like

Mahlerians are PROUD TO BE ABSOLUTELY INSUFFERABLE DRAMA QUEENS, THE LIKES OF WHICH EVEN THE WAGNER CULT COULD NEVER SO MUCH AS ASPIRE TO BE. WE ARE ONE WITH THE UNYIELDING EBB AND FLOW OF THE BOUNDLESS UNIVERSE, DAMN IT ALL!

Shostakovich fans are like Mahler fans except they actually understand what sarcasm is. We also all really like the Muppets for some reason. Most of us own cats and likely have at least one mental illness.

Liszt fans are either tweenagers who love anime or salty old pianists who know a disturbing amount about music theory. These two factions are constantly at war.

Copland fans are either very, very far right or very, very far left. Either way, neither side actually listens to all of Copland's repertoire.

Tchaikovsky fans are either Russian grandmas or LGBT orchestra kids on Tiktok. Either those or the one noob who heard there were cannons once.

Wagner fans. Yes, there are the cringey neo-Nazi Wagnerians, but anti-Nazi Wagnerians are a whole new level of chaotic good. They spend their time dreaming up the most disastrous, chaotic Ring productions possible, with the sole purpose of making Richard Wagner's entire family simultaneously spin in their graves. They take "death of the author" to a whole new level and constantly run on nothing but 100% pure spite. You want a Wagnerian who would beat up Wagner in a Denny's parking lot on your side.

Prokofiev fans will unironically say "ackshually...". That's it.

Dvorak fans are homeschool kids. They're either soul-crushingly innocent or devastatingly horny.

Sousa fans are just high school band directors who try to convince themselves they like Sousa to get through the semester.

Joplin fans constantly argue over whether Joplin's music should be played twice as quickly or twice as slowly than it's actually written. Also sick of hearing about Janis.

Chopin fans are exactly like Liszt fans, except there are 20% more "uwu softboi flowercrown" edits of Chopin than Liszt floating around on Instagram and Tumblr.

Holst fans will drag you into an alleyway and beat you up with their bare hands if you so much as mention The Planets.

Bernstein fans are either horny theatre kids or communists, but it's more likely they're both at once. They are very opinionated about recordings, and express their approval of the ones they like by gyrating excessively to them. If you put a Bernstein fan, a Mahler fan, and a Shostakovich fan in one room, they will either topple a national government or have a threesome.

Ravel fans are inherently Wes Anderson fans. You can be friends with one for years without knowing a single thing about their personality.

Schoenberg fans are like Mahlerians but with worse memes.

Brahms fans are... I have never met a Brahms fan. I'm sure they exist, but I'm pretty sure my own taste in music scares them off.

Paganini fans are almost always TwoSet kids, particularly the ones who try to convince people that "classical music isn't boring because it's basically metal." If you tell them Paganini played viola, they will spontaneously combust.

Rachmaninov fans are ultimately really chill, but are often socially awkward. If you ask a Rachmaninov fan "how are you?", they will most likely respond with "you too."

Schumann fans are Mahlerians on medication.

Stravinsky fans think they're chaotic and unhinged and listen to the most obscure underground shit, but in all actuality they just decided to enter their edgy phase after a lifetime of being sheltered and forced to listen to nothing but Handel by their parents. Possibly homeschooled.

Ysaye fans are like Paganini fans, except they're depressed graduate music students with permanent calluses on their fingers.

Debussy fans go to art school, decide they don't like art school, but have been doing art school too long to turn back, so they can't get out of art school. They may be high on weed at any given moment.

Satie fans are just possessed vessels of Erik Satie. Death cannot hinder Erik Satie. Erik Satie will return to this mortal plane. Search your feelings. You are already Erik Satie.

[sleepinginmygrave]

we need to start a club of taylor regulus exclusionist 😔/j

BUT LIKE SERIOUSLY THAT MAN DOES NOT LISTEN TO TAYLOR

like mAYBE mitski and like one or two lana songs but NOT taylor.

james is a taylor boy tho

YES YES YES😔

FRRR i can get that he listen to lana & mitski (live love laugh them ngl) but he's overall very much not a pop person (he's just like me fr 😋)

oh yeah i could see that !!! but i don't see him as a big fan tbh he just listen to a few songs to me😞 idk why to me he gives off strong frank sinatra vibes

[tinyicis]

Look. Look it's Satie with cat ears

[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.

[rayatii]

So I'm on a Discord server for classical music lovers, and there are a few chatbots for famous composers (yes, I do not support AI all that much, but sometimes these chatbots are just entertaining). And earlier this month, I copy-pasted the following question to every composer bot chat channel on the server:

And here are the responses I got:

Händel:

Bach:

Stravinsky:

Chopin:

Shostakovich:

Beethoven:

Mozart:

Satie:

So I guess in conclusion, all these composers from different eras of classical music are saying that there is more to music than pleasantness/unpleasantness, and that it should be diverse.

[yemu1102]

Sorry for the disturbance my dearest masters, I just want to figure out how many great composers and musicians, and their family and friends have come to the afterlife.

If there are someone I accidentally missed, please let me know and I will add their names to this list. The list is arranged in no particular order, and I show my respect to everyone.

Here we go——

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart @wolfgangus-mozartus , and his mini form @bratty-prodigys and the father Johann Georg Leopold Mozart @fatherofgeniuses

Antonio Salieri @antoniosalieri-official

Ludwig van Beethoven @beethoes and @beethoven-sir

Franz Liszt @franzliszt-official , and his lover Carolyne Sayn Wittgenstein @carolyne-sayn-wittgenstein and his student Marie Louise Baskerville @marie-louise-baskerville (thanks for Monsieur Chopin’s help!)

Fryderyk Chopin @chopinski-official , and his sister Emilia Chopin @emilia-chopin ; his student (also) Marie Louise Baskerville @marie-louise-baskerville and Madame George Sand @georgesand-official your name will appear on the list of writers too if there are more writers come here…I promise…

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy @mendyson , and his sister Fanny Cäcilie Mendelssohn @fanny-mendelssohn-official and his wife Cécile Mendelssohn @cecile-mendelssohn (thanks for miss Baskerville’s help!)

Hector Louis Berlioz @berliozussy-official

Robert Schumann @robertschumann-official and Clara Schumann @claraschumann-official

Richard Wagner @richardwagnermage and @richardwagner-official (maybe?)thanks for Litz’s help!

Johannes Brahms @johannesbrahms-official

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky @tchaikovsky-pyotr

Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff @s-v-rachmaninoff

Aram Ilitch Khatchaturian @aram-khachaturian

Sergei Prokofiev @sprkfv

Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich @shosty-official

Éric Alfred Leslie Satie @eric-al-satie

TBC��

[dailyenglishvoca]

Today's song is Stay a While, Starchild by Sati featuring the Vocaloid Kaito

[tooscreamforme]

Help, I'm becoming obsessed with a composer who died in 1925 the same way I obsess over modern metal band members! I mean look at this man and tell me he wouldn't have the same following as Noah Sebastian and Vessel if he were around now

The vibe is a vibe. He wrote a piece called Vexation which is meant to be repeated 840 times. He was thrown in jail for 8 days for crimes against art. He was in a cult briefly. He was friends with Picasso and Debussy. He flunked out of music school and went back at 40. He wrote joke instructions in his sheet music. He took a hammer everywhere he went. 100 umbrellas were found in his home when he died.

[sivavakkiyar]

my god

I’m actually crying

[opera-ghosts]

OTD in Music History: Composer and French cultural icon Erik Alfred Leslie Satie (1866 - 1925) is born in France. The son of a French father and a British mother, as a young man, Satie briefly studied at the Paris Conservatory -- but was an undistinguished student who failed to obtain a diploma. In the 1880's, he worked as a cafe pianist in Montmartre, where he began composing solo piano works, including his most famous set, the "Gymnopedies." (He also wrote music for a Rosicrucian sect to which he was briefly attached.) After a spell during which he composed little, Satie enrolled at a second music academy -- Vincent d'Indy's (1851 - 1931) "Schola Cantorum" -- as a mature student. His studies there were far more successful than those at the Conservatory, and from 1910 onward he became the focus of successive waves of young composers who were attracted by his unconventionality and originality. Among them were the group known as "Les Six," and a 1915 meeting with Jean Cocteau (1889 - 1963) led to the creation of the ballet "Parade" (1917) for impresario Serge Diaghilev (1872 - 1929), with music by Satie, sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973), and choreography by Leonide Massine (1896 - 1979). Satie had a tremendous impact on pushing French music away from lush post-Wagnerian impressionism and towards a sparer, terser style. Among those directly influenced by him during his lifetime were Maurice Ravel (1975 - 1937) and Francis Poulenc (1899 - 1963), and he is also often cited as influence on later composers such as John Cage (1912 - 1992). Satie was also one of the first "Dadaist" cultural figures -- some of his later works were given purposely absurd titles like "True Flabby Preludes (for a Dog)" (1912) and "Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Man" (1913). PICTURED: An original copy of one of Satie's printed business card, identifying him as "Erik Satie, Composer of Music." He wrote a short social message on this copy in his trademark calligraphic handwriting.

[winslowleachthecomposer]

I think I've said this before but it will never cease to be completely and utterly baffling for me to peek into the classical music tags and be sniped through the retina with classical composer twink yaoi

i genuinely mean no insult to anyone, i'm simply on too low a plane of existence for it to not cause me immense irreparable psychic damage every time

[sixty-silver-wishes]

some composers ranked by how likely you'd be able to beat them in a fight:

Mahler: 1/10. No way you're taking him down. He looks short and has a history of heart issues, sure, but this man was fucking ripped and not enough people are talking about this. We're talking six hour hikes, rowing, mountain climbing, biking, swimming, all that. Gustav Mahler never skipped leg day. Best thing you can try to do is push him off his conducting podium, but if he survives the fall, you're screwed. Man will personally eviscerate you in front of the entire orchestra and still make you play at his inconsistent-as-shit rehearsal tempi until he decides you’re dismissed afterwards.

Vivaldi: 9/10. Look at him. Dude had asthma. Plus he's a priest, and while fighting many priests is understandable, it’s Vivaldi. You'd have to be a dick to want to pick a fight with him, but it's doable.

Tchaikovsky: 8/10. Throw one punch and then he'll just start crying. But he does have access to the tsar and everyone loves him, so if you manage to beat him in a fight, all of Imperial Russia will think you're a monster. Best not to try.

Shostakovich: 5/10. It depends on if he's alone or not. If it's just him, no problem. Just break his glasses and push him down the stairs before he can tell you that he thought you were better than this, you monster. However, if Sollertinsky is there with him, which he usually is pre-1941, you're totally done for. If he sees you so much as laying a finger on Shostakovich, Sollertinsky will personally insult you in 25 different languages in ways you will never recover from. He'll go after all of your insecurities, including ones you didn't even know you had. Just ask a certain music critic named Krokhmal, who once denounced Shostakovich, so Sollertinsky saddled him with the nickname “Carbohydrates” for the rest of his life (“Krakhmal” means “starch” in Russian). It isn’t pretty.

Wagner: 6/10. He probably started the fight anyway, but no matter if you win or lose, he'll tell everyone that it was your fault regardless. Still, punching Wagner would be extremely satisfying, so it’s your call.

Ravel: 9/10, easy. Not sure why you would want to fight Ravel, but tell him that his socks don't match, and he'll be caught so off guard you can easily land several punches in.

Satie: 0/10. Don't even try to fight Satie. Just don't. You'll black out from a blunt-force umbrella to the head and wake up to your shoes replaced with live fish.

[saltinabox]

i drew the aforementioned erik satie im his biggest fan

[tinyicis]

Composers as animals - 3

[blackswaneuroparedux]

30 May 1917

To Jean Poueigh

Sir and dear friend,

What I know is that you are an ass-hole, and, if I dare say so, an unmusical ass-hole. Above all, never again offer me your dirty hand.

Erik Satie

3 June 1917

To Monsieur Jean Poueigh, Head Flop, Chief Gourds and Turkey,

You are not as dumb as I thought. Despite your bonehead air and your short-sightedness, you see things at a great distance.

Erik Satie

5 June 1917

To Monsieur Fuckface Poueigh, Famous Pumpkin and Composer for Nitwits,

Lousy ass-hole, this is from where I shit on you with all my force.

Erik Satie

Erik Satie, letters to a critic.

Eccentric. Weird. Unusual. All words regularly used to describe both the character and work of Erik Satie, a celebrated French pianist of limited technical expertise whose compositions attracted attention far and wide thanks to their offbeat angular jaunty nature and their overriding brilliance.

When it came to accepting criticism, however, Satie was less successful.

On 18 May 1917 a ballet named Parade premiered at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, with music by Satie, writing by Jean Cocteau and set design courtesy of Pablo Picasso. Much to Satie’s annoyance, this impressive roster of talent somehow failed to rescue the show from a savaging by Jean Poueigh, a music critic with whom Satie had shaken hands after the event. Having read the review, and feeling particularly betrayed after their fleeting contact, Satie wrote him a note. And then he sent another. And then another.

Sensibly, Poueigh remained silent, instead choosing to sue Satie for slander.

Erik Satie was sentenced to eight days in jail for his troubles, and Cocteau was arrested for screaming obscenities in the courtroom.

[internetgiraffekid1673]

I'd like to add some of my slightly lesser known pals:

If it sounds like the composer has an inside joke with you, it's Satie

If it sounds like the composer had a hangover on the score mid-process, it's Berlioz

If it sounds like the composer was in charge of designing cruel and unusual punishment for the bass clef instruments, it's Pachelbel

If it sounds like the composer is trying to blast you with the orchestra until you're as deaf as he is, it's Beethoven.

If it sounds like the composer might be a vampire, it's Bach.

If it sounds like the composer is trying to set the violins on fire, it's Vivaldi.