erik satie: the 4-handed piano & other works

Erik Satie (05-17-1886 to 07-01-1925) was a French composer and writer. While his music is widely celebrated during our time, he was actually ridiculed for his unorthodox compositions. In fact, studying at the Paris Conseravtoire, he was sent home by his teachers who thought him talentless. He was able to rejoin the school after more than two years. However, to no improvement. Frustrated, he joined the military instead but lasted only for a few weeks.
Although Satie (along with friend and contemporary Claude Debussy) is (wrongly) considered by most to be a classical composer, his pieces actually resemble the music of minimalists and avant-garde musicians of our time. He was fond of calling his compositions "furniture music", which means that it should not be intrusive but meant to be more as a background (like furniture). He was also not comfortable being called a musician and always introduced himself as a gymnopedist, which was probably the inspiration for his most famous pieces - the "Gymnopedies" - a trio of similar piano pieces (which is strangely missing in this collection). He was also caught on several occasions as calling himself a phonometrician - a person who measures and writes down sounds. But Satie was not the overly serious artist he was considered by many. In fact he liked giving his compositions odd titles such as "Drivelling Preludes (For A Dog)". Some of his pieces also contain weird instructions to the performer such as "...play this motif 840 times".
A widely influential composer, he is considered to be an inspiration by most of our top avant-garde musicians. Everyone from Ryuichi Sakamoto to ambient musician Brian Eno are disciples of Satie's "furniture" music philosophy. This alone proves that, like most true artists, Satie's thinking was well ahead of his time.

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