walking upstream…
Erik Satie
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Erik Satie began as a choirboy in Honfleur before becoming Montmartre's most contrarian bohemian, writing spare, unornamented piano miniatures like the Gymnopedies that quietly rejected the heavy Romanticism of his French contemporaries. Dismissed twice from the Paris Conservatoire as hopeless, he enrolled at the Schola Cantorum in 1905, at thirty-nine, determined to earn the technique his teachers had refused to credit him with. Later works such as Parade, made with Picasso and Cocteau, and the symphonic drama Socrate pushed further into deadpan repetition and deliberate understatement, ideas that looked backward toward plainchant and forward toward minimalism at once. Long treated as a charming eccentric, he was rediscovered as a genuine avant-garde forefather by the American experimentalists who followed him, above all John Cage.
the sound in question
1918
SocrateErik Satie
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Gustave VinotSacred music / Organ
In 1874, eight-year-old Erik was sent to live with his grandparents in Honfleur, who enrolled him with Gustave Vinot, organist and choirmaster at the church of Saint-Leonard, to keep him from the temptations of the seaside cafe-concerts. Vinot, trained at the Niedermeyer school for sacred music, taught the boy plainchant, Gregorian melody stripped of harmony and pulse. He left for Lyon in 1878 without warning his pupils, but the four years stuck: Grove Music Online credits Vinot with 'stimulating' the devotion to chant Satie never abandoned, resurfacing first in the barless, modally frozen Ogives.
listen: upstream & here
1874
No known recordingGustave Vinot
1886
OgivesErik Satie
listen forNo recording of Vinot's own organ playing survives, and he left no compositions of his own, only a habit of ear. Listen instead for what that habit produced: the Ogives move in a single unaccompanied line, harmonized in bare parallel chords with no cadence pulling toward resolution, the same suspended, floor-less quality as a monastery chant sung without a beat. Nothing 'develops' the way a Conservatoire education would demand; the melody simply repeats, the plainchant habit turned into a compositional method decades before minimalism had a name.
Albert Roussel1920s · Contemporary classical / Impressionist
At thirty-nine, already dismissed by one teacher as 'worthless,' Satie enrolled as a mature student at the Schola Cantorum in October 1905, determined to fix a technique nobody had ever credited him with. He earned a counterpoint diploma there in 1908 under Albert Roussel, a relationship real enough that Satie's own biographer, lecturing decades later, still called Roussel simply 'his old teacher.' Grove Music Online traces Satie's post-Schola work directly to that training: a 'sparser, more contrapuntal approach,' pursued toward what Satie called a modern fugue built on 'short-winded, elliptical subjects,' the method behind the Fugue litanique in En habit de cheval.
listen: upstream & here
1906
Le poeme de la foret (Symphony No. 1), Op. 7Albert Roussel
1911
En habit de cheval — II. Fugue litaniqueErik Satie
listen forRoussel's own 1904-06 symphony Le poeme de la foret still moves like inherited French Romanticism: lush, developing, swelling toward resolution. Listen instead for the discipline Satie carried out of Roussel's classroom rather than his orchestra: in the Fugue litanique, a short, angular subject enters, gets stated, restated, argued with in strict counterpoint, and never builds to a big Romantic climax. It is fugue as exercise turned into fugue as personality, terse where Roussel is expansive, but built on the same contrapuntal machinery Satie spent three years earning.