There is always a kind of drying out produced by language... For me... there is something prior to language: a sensation, a perception, something in search of its language, which cannot exist without language.
— Nathalie Sarraute in conversation with Alaine Robbe-Grillet at Cerisy, 1971
1 / “BUREAUCRATIC SONATINA”
A Musician's Day
An artist must regulate his life. Here is my precise daily schedule. I rise at 7:18; am inspired from 10:30 to 11:47. I lunch at 12:11 and leave the table at 12:14. A healthy horse-back ride on my property from 1:1g to 2:35. Another round of inspiration from 3:12 to 4:07.
From 5:00 to 6:47 various occupations (fencing, reflection, immobility, visits, contemplation, dex-terity, swimming, etc.).
Dinner is served at 7:16 and finished at 7:20.
Afterward from 8:0g to 9:59 symphonic readings out loud.
I go to bed regularly at 10:37. Once a week I wake up with a start at 3:14 A.M. (Tuesdays.) I eat only white foods: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, rice, turnips, sausages in camphor, pastry, cheese (the white vari-eties), cotton salad, and certain kinds of fish (skinned).
I boil my wine and drink it cold mixed with fuchsia juice. I have a good appetite but never talk when eating for fear of strangling.
fuchsia juice. I have a good appetite but never talk when eating for fear of strangling.
I breathe carefully (a little at a time) and dance very rarely. When walking I hold my sides and look steadily behind me.
Being of serious demeanor, it is unintentional when I laugh. I always apologize very affably.
I sleep with only one eye closed; I sleep very hard. My bed is round with a hole in it for my head to go through. Every hour a servant takes my temperature and gives me another.
For a long time I have subscribed to a fashion magazine. I wear a white cap, white socks, and a white vest.
My doctor has always told me to smoke. He even explains himself: "Smoke, my friend. Otherwise someone else will smoke in your place."
— Erik Satie, Mémoires d'un amnésique
2 / “FURNITURE MUSIC”
Structured as a Satie-style trinity, Ian Penman’s delightful ode to Satie is titled Erik Satie Three Piece Suite. The book includes a lexicon, a “Satie A-Z” wherein Penman defines “furniture” repeatedly, playing on Satie’s own penchant for reiteration as a formal gesture. In what follows, I mix Penman’s “furnitures” with my own . . .
FURNITURE (1)
Furniture Music or musique d'ameublement is a concept, future or jest dreamed up by Erik Satie circa 1917. In his own words, Satie sought to create "a music ... which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks at dinner, not dominating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometime fall between friends dining together. It would spare them the trouble of paying attention to their own banal remarks. And at the same time it would neutralize the street noises which so indiscreetly enter into the play of conversation. To make such music would be to respond to a need.
FURNITURE (2)
Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never one but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed.
— William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, as thought by Quentin in italics
FURNITURE (3)
The idea of mingling background and foreground is a characteristic Satie upending of givens, hierarchies, values. He adopts, as he often did, a pragmatic tone to talk about a dreamy thing. Impossible to separate fantasy from thesis, Furniture Music is both a blague and a serious proposal. This is Satie the conceptual artist, long before Conceptual Art. Imagine a music without an audience. If music is not listened to, what is it?
FURNITURE (4)
The founding irony of Furniture Music: he couldn't get people to treat it as such. At the time Satie brought it into the world, when even owning a radio still wasn't that common, his idea could only exist as performed rather than recorded music.
Ornella Volta: “So on 8 March 1920, during the intermission of a play by Max Jacob staged at the Galerie Barbazanges by Pierre Bartin, he launched this ‘utilitarian music’ which was emphatically not to be listened to. At the Galerie Barbazanges ... Satie did not achieve the result he had expected. Although invited to ‘walk about, eat, drink,’ the audience remained respectfully seated. Milhaud recounts: ‘It was no use Satie shouting: Talk, for heaven's sake! Move around! Don't listen! They kept quiet. They listened.’”
FURNITURE (5)
Another irony: Satie himself was the least likely person to use Furniture Music. He had next to no furniture, and did not live in a manner which was at all conducive to throwing dinner parties.
FURNITURE (6)
The poet Léon Paul Fargue, who knew Satie, called it musique maisonnière or “household music.”
FURNITURE (8)
The same thing happens with Satie’s Furniture Music as it does Vexations. John Cage takes the ambiguous jeu d'esprit of Vexations and "elevates" it into the artistic canon; two decades later, Brian Eno takes Furniture Music and repurposes it as Ambient Music. The elevator always goes from low to high.
FURNITURE (9)
Maybe György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna could be heard as furniture music for infinity.
FURNITURE (10)
T shows me how to paint the sky using watercolors. The horizon is where the sky starts, he says, lifting a pencil. He uses the pencil to draw a horizontal line across the dry paper. The line is closer to the bottom. T says one-third is a good fraction to fall back on for horizons. He then lays the paper to soak in a bin filled with water. He lights a cigarette. Horizon and water. Midway through the cigarette, T lifts the wet paper from the bin with both hands. He uses a flat brush to run a wash of Yellow Ochre over the wet page to warm the stark white. T paints quickly; the cigarette burns, dangling from his lip. T cleans the brush and adds Antwerp Blue to the top corner. He spreads the blue across the page with quick strokes. These are the clouds, he says of the white unpainted patches in the blue. Sky begins as horizon, or a line. Clouds begin as nothing, or negative space, on the page. This is the opposite of how a cloud appears in the sky. T says something elliptical about balance as he grinds the cigarette butt on the table. If we wanted a beach, he says, I would now take time to work Raw Umber into the foreground and shape the dunes. But we don't want a beach. He raises an eyebrow. Right? He paints the clouds fast, brushing a tiny amount of white over the negative spaces. The wetter the page, the softer the clouds. He doesn't blot. He waits. Is this what you wanted to see? He asks me twice.
FURNITURE (11)
More recent elevator music may be computer-generated, with the score being composed entirely via algorithms.
FURNITURE (12)
German artist Gerhard Richter used the word “analogy” when describing his artistic process and method. In an effort to destabilize the East/West, communist/capitalist binaries, those either/or dichotomies which he likened to ideologies, Richter sought analogies with “the smallest possible difference.”
3 / “POEM FOR CHAIRS, TABLES, BENCHES ETC.”
“Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches and unspecified sound sources” by La Monte Young, from Poem for Chairs, Tables, Benches, Etc. (La Monte Young, 1960). This “chamber opera” involves nothing more than moving tables, benches, and chairs around the stage. As a form, the “chamber opera” exists because Satie collapsed the boundary between the public performance of music and the intimate, bourgeois mode known as the chamber quartet, reserved for drawing rooms and salons.
4 / PICTURESQUE ENFANTILLAGES
Seeking a “suitable designation” for the micro-form that Satie’s music evokes, Roger Shattuck settles on a French phrase— “musique de placard (placard means both closet and poster), in the double sense of extreme intimacy and deliberate publicity.” Satie’s compositions are made for proximity; their ideal setting would involve “two or three friends around a piano who participate in the music as they would to sing a madrigal or a Christmas carol.” This “closet music” is slightly more “private than chamber music” and Shattuck believes that “the intimate works attained a special notoriety, like that of his private religious publication, Le Cartulaire” which gained a reputation through word of mouth.
By throwing “his little closet pieces in the face of traditional concert music,” Satie turned the tiny and private into a potential public, the same public that congregated around street lamps and sought to read posters and manifestos. His musique de placard “assumed the proportions of manifestos: poster music,” working the same “public privacy” as the drawings of Paul Klee or the poetry of Frank O’Hara. To conclude with Shattuck’s own conclusion to a chapter in his mesmerizing The Banquet Years:
With the inanity of furniture music, the intimacy of la musique de placard, and the stripped line of Socrate, Satie challenges us not to be impressed but to be bored. He says in effect: Here are the naked features of our world. If they provoke you or bore, you will have reacted constructively, for either way you will be forced to move. This is the meaning of a staggering sentence contained in one of his late notebooks, a sentence that describes his entire being: “Experience is one of the forms of paralysis.”
The child, like the true Bohemian, has not yet defined his life by excluding alternate ways of behaving. The "lessons" of experience can begin to cripple our freedom. There remains one form of paralysis which is even more devastating. In Satie's world the supreme heresy would have been the honeyed advertising slogan “They satisfy.” If experience is a form of paralysis, satisfaction is a form of death. In his hands music never became an exercise in self-contentment. It was a means of upholding our freedom.
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I prefer the Chopin that reaches me in the street from an open window to the Chopin served in great style from the concert stage.
– Witold Gombrowicz, Notebooks
They require a new kind of listening, for they are too brief and tenuous for concert performance. One must play them oneself on the piano, murmuring the texts which punctuate the spaces in the staff, watching the visible pattern of notation, and listening to that same pattern become melody. Among these three aspects of the work, one cannot distinguish which is frame and which is framed.
— Roger Shattuck on Satie’s Enfantines and miniature pieces