The sea is excited – I hope it will not break on the stone – no one can get it together againField (Eric Sati, “Sports and Saboteurs”)
The composition means together. What suits each other, what is not, but what are the criteria for this? At the age of 40, Eric Sati again asked himself when he stood in the middle of his career as the composer and therefore studied the counterpoint in Schola Cantorum in Paris again: apprenticeship on how to order and collect tones.
His colleagues smiled that Sati, this terrible musical scene, wanted to get a certificate as a serious composer at the conservative institute of the composer and the theoretician of Vincent D’Idi. Fortunately, Sati was by no means composed in the style of Schola Cantorum. Against. With the question of how to collect sounds, he dealt with the fact that his time was ahead of his time.
The boundaries between sound and noise
At the beginning of the 20th century, the music experienced the expansion of harmony and the phase of departure. Claude Debussy, Arnold Shonberg and Igor Stravinsky combined central works in which everything was possible: dissonances were no longer necessary to dissolve, tonal binding to the main tone was no longer mandatory, and sometimes the chords were so complex that they were only perceived as sounds by listeners.
The border between sound and noise has also become smooth. This was an update in the direction of utopian future music.
Figure of a Chinese pocket player. SATIE-URDIVE, May 18, 1917.
Photo:
AKG/Alliance Picture
Eric Sati’s musical innovations, however, are included in several opposite directions. He collects melodies and harmony together, as no one dared to do before him. But he not only adds tones, he also lowers them. Suddenly, only a clearly insignificant subordinate voice left in the piano remains, repeating the only tone or accompanying figure that you otherwise would not pay attention, and Sati is now very naked for listening.
This has a meditative effect, but not in the sense of consecration, but in annoying experience: a meeting with something familiar, which is decided from its usual context and now just there.
The liberation of contemporaries
His contemporaries took this with strange. This brought him a comedian call, an image that he sometimes confirmed. A deeper study of Eric Sati began only later, when, obviously, the idea of linear progress was not free from contradictions in art.
The contrast between the simple and the complex is repeatedly outdated in the compositions of Eric Sati. This applies not only to the sound of the votes, but also when compiling parts of the form. Gotiques Danses from 1893 are extremely simply composed, some would even say that the composer made it too easy.
Good dozen pieces, even in turn, follow mystically charged chords, repeatedly gather again and again. A series of nine piano works was created. What can be immediately analyzed with a look at the assessments can hardly be heard, because when you hear that you are immersed in a state of delight in this process of repetitions and similarities, you can also see this as a player, as soon as you try to remember this music.
The listener is in the trance
In terms of a simple structure, it turns into a labyrinth, repetitions become traps for memory, a trance into which listeners threaten to transmit to the player. Eric Sati not only expands the criteria of music, he asks them from scratch. What creates a connection, what distinguishes him? There is no didactic progression in collagen piano. On the contrary, the logic of changes in various sound blocks is often a mystery to listeners. From time to time you can find a solution, sometimes you cannot find it.
Sati has retained the distance from traditional composition models. Richard Wagner’s leitmrative technology – labeling people through a recognizable melody – elegantly leads Sati. In the miniature form “Les Quatre Coins” from bicycle sports and divertis, active actors, four mice and a cat are characterized by only one note with a striking motive. This does not create the recognition effect that you expect from Leitmotif, but the constellation of five separate tones becomes a starting point for a turbulent action.
Sati’s intentions were labyrinthum and venerable, but their awareness, on the other hand, is clear and heard. His calligraphic notation is the same, the set of piano is beautiful and bright. Despite all mysterious events in his compositions, Sati always retains the point of ideal time.
Contradictions formed his life
When Eric Sati sometimes breaks out of absolute music and puts small stories into his assessments, he does not do this regarding the traditional common work of art. Levels break up. It is often impossible to establish a plausible connection between text and music, completely except that the simultaneous performance of words and music was directly prohibited by the composer. It also does not make sense for practical reasons. Because many of these piano miniatures are so short and advanced that the simultaneous performance of text and music would have crushed the audience.
Eric Sati was looking for a connection and at the same time does not trust him – this contradiction also formed his personal life. In the 1890s, in the midst of an esoteric wave in France, Sati moved in the unclear sects of the descendants of Rosquage. He brilliantly came out of sectarian access, namely, having founded his own sect in 1892, “L’Eglise Métropolitaine d’Arsus de Jésus Denducteur”, with himself as the only participant.
Later, Dadaists noted him as a kind of predecessor of their movement, but he did not like to join them. The Communist Party, in which he became a member in 1920, also remained strange for him. “My dear communist friends are huge bourgeois in art,” Sati said.
Sati had an instinctive political judgment. The enthusiasm for the war, which recorded his colleagues on the composer throughout Europe in 1914, was strange for him. A few months before the start of the war, he wrote the Italian comedy Piano “Italian Comedy”, which he provided with the history of comments: the Vulgar Saramouche explains the “beauty of the military stand” to those present. “You are very smart there, you will scare the civil face.” Such comments were not desirable in chauvinist France.
The role of an outsider
For this reason, it is quite possible that the decades of Sati’s friendship with the nationalist, as Claude Debussy broke up. The premiere of the Parade experimental ballet in 1917, cooperation between Jean Kokano, Pablo Picasso and Sati, fell into a scandal, the authors were offended as “Boches”, a stupid German.
As if interesting, the role of an outsider can be in the posthumous artist Vita – in real life it is by no means pleasant. Like many composers before and after it, Eric Sati died of the consequences of his consumption of alcohol on July 1, 1925 at the age of 59.
Thomas Bachli, a writer, lives in Berlin. The author of the book “My name is Eric Sati, like everyone else”
