Erik Satie (1866-1925) spent much of his career as a bohemian fixture of Montmartre's cafés, writing spare, unornamented piano miniatures like the Gymnopédies that quietly rejected the heavy Romanticism of his French contemporaries. Later works such as Parade (with Picasso and Cocteau) and the symphonic drama Socrate pushed further into deadpan repetition and deliberate emotional understatement, ideas that looked backward toward plainchant and forward toward minimalism at once. Long treated as a charming eccentric in his own lifetime, he was rediscovered as a genuine avant-garde forefather by the mid-century American experimentalists who followed him, above all John Cage.

the sound in question

1918

SocrateErik Satie