Before the World Fell Apart: Satie, Escudero, and the Birth of Musical Uncertainty
When Erik Satie died a century ago, the world was barely ready for his brand of minimalism. Six decades later, when Patricia Escudero reinterpreted his work on synthesizer, everything fell into place.
What’s the soundtrack to this groundless moment?
There’s no single answer, of course, but it’s probably not classical music—at least not the big symphonic stuff most of us associate with the genre. Many large-ensemble works sound ponderous today, artifacts of an era before artists were encouraged to express ambivalence and anxiety. This began to shift around the end of the 19th century, the point at which classical music begins to sound “modern.” And if we have a single person to thank for that, it might well be Erik Satie.
Before now, much of Western art and music attempted to impose order and rationality over our subjective experience. Satie was among the first composers to ask “when (and what) is now?”—and then steadfastly refuse to provide an answer. And a recent reissue of a forward-looking (or is it backwards-looking?) recording of his music takes the whole concept of linear time and throws it out the window.
Satie Sonneries is the sole release of the mysterious Spanish keyboardist Patricia Escudero. Using early synthesizers and production techniques, she refracts Satie’s haunting pieces through a curiously dissociative lens. As the album was recorded in 1987, this reframing seems deliberate. Had it been recorded using contemporary instruments, it likely would’ve sounded glossy and dated, thanks to the sheen of ‘80s-era keyboards. Instead, the album does something remarkable, sounding simultaneously trapped in time and timeless.
The album cover—featuring the only confirmed image of Escudero—shows a young woman standing inside what appears to be an Art Nouveau train station. It’s an apt metaphor for an artist who left us with a mysterious package and then vanished. And it’s a little of what listening to these familiar pieces feels like: Quietly jarring and utterly transportive. In conjuring both these eras but fully inhabiting neither, it’s the perfect soundtrack for our own dissociative moment.
Erik Satie: The Birth of Minimalism
Éric (later Erik) Satie was born in 1866. During his lifetime he found a modest measure of fame both for his eccentric, often startling musical compositions and for his eloquent commentary, which appeared in publications ranging from obscure dadaist journals to Vanity Fair. Still, Satie died—and for the most part lived—nearly penniless.
A fairly miserable piano student, Satie compensated with inventiveness. His first important works, the three Sarabandes of 1887, established him as both a provocateur and an innovator. Written in enharmonic notation—in essence, deliberately rendered to be more difficult to read—they hinted at things to come. Soon, many of his pieces would lack the time signatures and standard bar structures that performers count on to guide their tempo, cadence, and phrasing. Anything and everything, it seemed, was up for grabs.
One of Satie’s most famous (or notorious) pieces was “Vexations,” composed around 1893. There’s some dispute, but it’s now generally understood that for the piece to be performed as intended, it must be played 840 times in succession. During its first known public performance, on September 9, 1963, it was performed by a relay team that included John Cage, Joshua Rifkin, and future Velvet Underground member John Cale. Supposedly, a single audience member, one Karl Schenzer, made it through the entire performance, which lasted 18 hours. Maybe he was interested in taking advantage of the unique payment plan, which refunded $.05 of the $5 ticket price for each 20 minutes attended. Supposedly, at the conclusion, one audience member shouted “Encore!”
It’s tempting to read the composer’s fascination with time as a commentary on his world. The Europe of Satie’s day was in flux, with centuries-old hierarchies and norms fragmenting under the crush of modernity. Many of the forces that shape our current experience—consumerism, globalism, a disruption of gender roles and a growing dependence on technology—were already in play, and in this anxious and unsettling time Satie pointed the way forward—musically at least—with unique humor and an engaging strangeness. (Phillipp Blom’s The Vertigo Years, by the way, is a highly readable aid to understanding the era.)
Satie on Synth
A noted consumer of absinthe (and seemingly every other available alcohol), Satie died of cirrhosis at the age of 59, but his compositions—especially his deceptively simple-sounding solo works for piano—find continuing life today though recitals, concerts, and film scores. And, um, Coldplay.
Which brings us to the elusive Patricia Escudero. Her Sonneries expands on Satie’s wide-openness, taking the composer’s daring use of negative space off the page and into the realm of, well, space itself. The haunting timbres of analog synthesizers place us in the early 1970s, an era in which pop culture was infused by dread of a dystopian future: A Clockwork Orange, THX 1138, Soylent Green and The Omega Man were all released between 1971 and 1973. Many of Escudero’s performances touch upon this anxiety, adding a pitiless and robotic undertow to the original compositions.
This approach may not resonate with purists, though one could argue it’s faithful to Satie’s willful lack of direction. At times using the native flexibility of the synthesizer to give completely different voicings to each hand’s part (notably in “Etre Jaloux De Son Camarada (sic) Qui A Une Grosse Tete”), at others adding seemingly random and automated whirrs and squiggles—like the ones that give “Valse Du Chocolate Aux Amandes” a peculiarly unhinged quality—the interpretations explode Satie’s compositions completely.
What’s more, the recordings themselves are punctuated by what we would typically describe as audio defects: Clicks, pops and scratches, some of which are apparently the result of the inconsistent quality of ‘80s-vintage magnetic recording tape. But rather than detracting from the experience, they only heighten the sense of having discovered an artifact, one somehow simultaneously both ancient and dropped from the not-too-distant future.
Satie’s stranger, often inconclusive and lesser-known pieces are given new life here. But it’s the “hits” (like that first “Gymnopedie,” which kicks off the album) that are the most satisfying. The familiar opening chords—a spidery, questing and never-quite-resolving call-and-response—are teased out into deep space and given an unsettling backdrop: A toneless whoosh; the sound of cosmic wind, perhaps, or the last gasps of a dying star.
Satie in Space
Perhaps this was where Satie himself wished to be. In his day, the topic of space travel was very much in the public consciousness. Though the Wright brothers wouldn’t make their first powered flight until 1903, when Satie was already 37, Jules Verne had published De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon) in 1865, the year before the composer’s birth.
We don’t know what, if anything, Erik Satie thought of outer space, whether the anxieties of early 20th-century life instilled in him a yearning to be free of gravity’s bonds. But his moody and strange compositions flaunted a resistance to convention, to tidy endings, to the resolution for which most listeners yearn. Patricia Escudero’s unnervingly beautiful Satie Sonneries gives those pieces new life, one that sounds as timely as it does out of time.