Satie Seen Through His Letters

This whimsical book about the eccentric Parisian composer Erik Alfred Leslie Satie (1866-1925) confirms his position as one of the most bizarre personalities in music history. Gathered by a determined iconographer, thedirector of the Satie Foundation in Paris, and arranged somewhat chronologically by topic, such as "Friends," and "Lawsuits," these lettersto Cocteau, Debussy, Milhaud, Picasso, Ravel and Stravinsky, among others,many of which have not been previously published, give us a picture of Satie the friend, student, neighbor, composer and musical influence, and of the only adherent to a religion that he founded. Illustrated with line line drawings by Cocteau, Magritte and Picasso, as well as Satie's own musical scores and logos, this book will entrance and delight those interested in Parisian cultural life in the early 20th century.

A composer who dabbled in the Dada movement, a Bohemian “gymnopédiste” of fin-de-siècle Montmartre, and a legendary dresser known as “The Velvet Gentleman,” Erik Satie cut a unique figure among early twentieth-century European composers. Yet his legacy has largely languished in the shadows of Stravinsky, Debussy, and Ravel. Mary E. Davis now brings Satie to life in this fascinating new biography. Satie redefined the composer’s art, devising new methods of artistic expression that melded ordinary and rarified elements of words, visual art, and music. Davis argues that Satie’s modernist aesthetic was grounded in the contradictions of his life—such as enrolling in the conservative Schola Cantorum after working as a cabaret performer—and is reflected in his irreverent essays, drawn art, and music. Erik Satie explores how the composer was embraced by avant-garde artists and fashionable Parisian elite, and how his experiences inspired him to create the musical style of Neoclassicism. Satie also employed the power of the image through his infamous fashion statements, Davis contends, and became part of a nascent celebrity culture. A cogent and informative portrait, Erik Satie upends the accepted history of modernist music and restores the composer to his rightful pioneering status.

Erik Satie (1866-1925) was a quirky, innovative and enigmatic composer whose impact has spread far beyond the musical world. As an artist active in several spheres - from cabaret to religion, from calligraphy to poetry and playwriting - and collaborator with some of the leading avant-garde figures of the day, including Cocteau, Picasso, Diaghilev and René Clair, he was one of few genuinely cross-disciplinary composers. His artistic activity, during a tumultuous time in the Parisian art world, situates him in an especially exciting period, and his friendships with Debussy, Stravinsky and others place him at the centre of French musical life. He was a unique figure whose art is immediately recognisable, whatever the medium he employed. Erik Satie: Music, Art and Literature explores many aspects of Satie's creativity to give a full picture of this most multifaceted of composers. The focus is on Satie's philosophy and psychology revealed through his music; Satie's interest in and participation in artistic media other than music, and Satie's collaborations with other artists. This book is therefore essential reading for anyone interested in the French musical and cultural scene of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

(Amadeus). Claude Debussy was the father of the modern era in classical music. His innovations liberated Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartok to write their iconoclastic works, and his harmonic inventions are still heard in American jazz. Though he was among the most compelling figures of the Belle Epoque, his life is little known to all but scholars; and of his considerable musical output, only Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun , La mer , and Clair de lune are widely known. Harvey Lee Snyder addresses this cultural neglect by presenting the composer and his music, without jargon or biographical trivia, in a richly detailed, accurate narrative that reads like a novel. Here is the story of a poor, unschooled Parisian boy swept by odd coincidences to the Paris Conservatory at age ten. Here is a brilliant man struggling to invent a tonal language capable of expressing his unique musical vision, finding inspiration not in Bach and Beethoven but in Mallarme's poetry and the paintings of Whistler and Turner; a man determined to end two centuries of Germanic domination of European music. Here is a reclusive, gentle man whose misguided love affairs ended in scandal and scorn. His hard work failed to end decades of poverty and debt, but when he died in 1918, he was and has remained the foremost French composer of the twentieth century.

'Eye hEar The Visual in Music' employs the concept of the visual in proximate relation to music, producing a tension: 'is it not the case that there is a gulf between painting and music, between the visible and the audible? One is full of colour and light yet silent; one is invisible and marvellously noisy.' Such a belief, this book argues, betrays an ideological constraint on music, desiccating it to sound, and art to vision. The starting point of this study is more hybrid (and hydrating): that music is never employed without numerous and complex intersections with the visual. By involving the concept of synaesthesia, the book evokes music?s multi-sensory nature, stops it from sounding alone, and offers music as a subject for art historians. Music bleeds into art and visuality, in its graphic depiction in notation, in the theatre of performance, its sights and sites. This book looks at music in its absolute guise as a model for art; at notation and the conductor as the silent visual fulcra around which music circulates; at the music and image of Erik Satie; at the concert hall as white cube; at the symphonic film '2001: A Space Odyssey'; and at the liminality of John Cage and Andy Warhol.

This annotated selection of more than five hundred letters by the groundbreaking composer and avant-garde icon covers every phase of his career. This volume reveals the intimate life of John Cage with all the intelligence, wit, and inventiveness that made him such an important composer and performer. The missives range from lengthy reports of his early trips to Europe in the 1930s through his years with the dancer Merce Cunningham. They shed new light on his growing eminence as an iconic performance artist of the American avant-garde. Written in Cage’s singular voice—by turns profound, irreverent, and funny—these letters reveal Cage’s passionate interest in people, ideas, and the arts. They include correspondence with Peter Yates, David Tudor, and Pierre Boulez, among many others. Readers will enjoy Cage's commentary about the people and events of a transformative time in the arts, as well as his meditations on the very nature of art. This volume presents an extraordinary portrait of a complex, brilliant man who challenged and changed the artistic currents of the twentieth century.

French Music Since Berlioz explores key developments in French classical music during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This volume draws on the expertise of a range of French music scholars who provide their own perspectives on particular aspects of the subject. D dre Donnellon's introduction discusses important issues and debates in French classical music of the period, highlights key figures and institutions, and provides a context for the chapters that follow. The first two of these are concerned with opera in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, addressed by Thomas Cooper for the nineteenth century and Richard Langham Smith for the twentieth. Timothy Jones's chapter follows, which assesses the French contribution to those most Germanic of genres, nineteenth-century chamber music and symphonies. The quintessentially French tradition of the nineteenth-century salon is the subject of James Ross's chapter, while the more sacred setting of Paris's most musically significant churches and the contribution of their organists is the focus of Nigel Simeone's essay. The transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century is explored by Roy Howat through a detailed look at four leading figures of this time: Faur Chabrier, Debussy and Ravel. Robert Orledge follows with a later group of composers, Satie & Les Six, and examines the role of the media in promoting French music. The 1930s, and in particular the composers associated with Jeune France, are discussed by Deborah Mawer, while Caroline Potter investigates Parisian musical life during the Second World War. The book closes with two chapters that bring us to the present day. Peter O'Hagan surveys the enormous contribution to French music of Pierre Boulez, and Caroline Potter examines trends since 1945. Aimed at teachers and students of French music history, as well as performers and the inquisitive concert- and opera-goer, French Music Since Berlioz is an essential companion for an