Eric (later Erik) Alfred Leslie Satie, also known as the Velvet Gentleman, was “born very young into a world grown very old,” (as he put it,) in Honfleur, Normandy, France, in 1866. He was alive all his life until his death in 1925.

 

     Learning to play the piano as a boy, he would find music to be his only solace in a troubled youth. Journeying to Paris as a young man, he soon fell in with the nutty, unconventional Montmartre Bohemians and finally began to feel at home.

 

     A composer for the Rosicrucian Order, (which he later left in disgust,) the café Le Chat Noir, and the famous Moulin Rouge club, Satie’s rhythmic music was more inspired by barrel organs and the cabaret circuit than the romantic classical “genius music” that other composers at that time were trying to follow.

 

     In fact, it was exactly against such misguided thinking that Satie was trying to fight. Whilst so many were taking music far too seriously and trying to “follow on from Wagner,” Satie was completely opposed to this approach.

 

     Ever thinking outside the box, Satie found that by not following the “rules” of music, he was not limited in his art and could do whatever he wanted. Though but a few grasped this idea at the time, it would have a pivotal effect on music in the later part of the century.

 

     And to those who took music, and indeed themselves, too seriously, Satie would always direct his pointed verbal wit. When a rather well-to-do lady, upon discovering that Satie lived in a one-roomed garret with no amenities, asked him how he was able to wash, he sarcastically replied,  

 

  “Madame, I do not wash; I rub myself all over with a pumice stone every night!”

 

She probably believed him! No-one pompous was safe with Satie around; he even challenged the Director of the Paris Conservatoire to a duel for not getting back to him about a proposed ballet!

 

     So that was Satie. In short, he was a playful composer who ignored the rules, thought for himself, and had FUN!

 

     He broke free from the chains of academia, baffled the bourgeoisie, composed the first measured film score, drank too much absinthe, formed his own religion of which he was the only member, (but he could excommunicate people,) and wrote some beautiful music.

 

     There are many more things that could be said about Satie, some of which would be true. For as the Velvet Gentleman himself once said,

 

     “Although all our sources are false, we cannot verify them.”

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