In his piano works especially, Erik Satie (1866–1925) was a witty musical caricaturist. The eccentric French composer loved to satirize academic rules in general and the impressionistic titles of Debussy's compositions in particular, giving his own works such surrealistic names as Pieces in Pear Form and Dried Embryos, and annotating them with equally bizarre musical "Tres 'neuf heures du matin" (Very "nine in the morning"), "Corpulentus" (Corpulent), and so on. His comic spirit is equally embodied in the music itself, as this delightful selection of seventeen piano works amply proves. They are as spare, lively, and capricious as they are hauntingly melodic. In addition to the well-known Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, the pieces reproduced here include Sarabandes, Pièces froides, Poudre d'or, En habit de cheval, Morceaux en forme de poire, Embryons desséchés, Aperçus désagreables, Descriptions automatiques, and more. This volume, the largest collection of Satie's piano works yet published, has been reprinted on fine-quality paper from authoritative original editions, and sturdily bound to provide you a lifetime of study and enjoyment. In its pages are some of the most original and appealing achievements of a turbulent era in music, compositions that influenced such modern masters as Ravel, Milhaud, and Poulenc.
Author
Éric Alfred Leslie Satie (17 May 1866 – Paris, 1 July 1925; signed his name Erik Satie after 1884) was a French composer and pianist. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde. His work was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music, and the Theatre of the Absurd. An eccentric, Satie was introduced as a "gymnopedist" in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopédies. Later, he also referred to himself as a "phonometrician" (meaning "someone who measures sounds") preferring this designation to that of a "musician", after having been called "a clumsy but subtle technician" in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911. In addition to his body of music, Satie also left a remarkable set of writings, having contributed work for a range of publications, from the dadaist 391 to the American top culture chronicle Vanity Fair. Although in later life he prided himself on always publishing his work under his own name, in the late nineteenth century he appears to have used pseudonyms such as Virginie Lebeau and François de Paule in some of his published writings.
