![]() ![]() Having embraced Dada, surrealism and mysticism, he was thought a trickster. He became the avatar of Muzak and musical meaninglessness. He may have been seen as a visionary by a few, but many more dismissed him as a simpleton. Satie was seriously neglected for decades, of interest mainly as an object of curiosity, a kooky composer of agreeable treacle. Milhaud’s message to the typical Bay Area college student, whose record collection invariably included pianist Aldo Ciccolini playing Satie along with the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company, was: Yes, love Satie, but don’t trivialize him. No one in Satie’s circle - which included the likes of Debussy, Cocteau, Picasso, Man Ray and Duchamp - had any idea that this intriguing, charmingly sociable composer, however eccentric, lived like this. Stepping into this room, Milhaud said he was overwhelmed by its sadness. When Milhaud, who taught at Mills College in Oakland during a big 1960s Satie revival, would describe the astonishing scene, his gentle eyes would become moist. There was a small bed and no place to work. He also had identical umbrellas and was never without one. Satie had multiples of the same formal suits, shirts, shirt collars and ties, which were the sum of his wardrobe. Strewed everywhere were years’ worth of unopened letters and parcels. One upright piano was piled on top of another, the strings on both broken. After the composer died in 1925, Darius Milhaud helped Satie’s brother, Conrad, clean up the cramped space, and what he discovered has become part of the Satie legend. Satie never let a soul into the modest one-room abode in Arcueil, a suburb of Paris, where he had lived for 28 years. Imagine for a minute that Satie was still alive and that we might catch a glimpse of him in his apartment playing one of his pieces on the piano via Zoom. We have, in fact, all become inhabitants of Satie Land. But, then, in his strange music, his irreverent prose, his inexplicable mannerisms, his radical attitudes and his incomprehensible inconsistencies, Satie may just be what we need: With the insight of a genius and an oddball’s mischievous wit and miraculous wisdom, he turned everything on its head. It might seem an extraordinary thing that a late 19th/early 20th century French composer - and one whose music has had a history of having been dismissed for its seeming simplicity, seeming naiveté and seeming single-mindedness - resonates so effectively in our confused, upside-down world. Watching him stay the course in personal expression, each repetition seeming to bring out a different pent-up emotion, summed up a huge range of what felt like our shared feelings. ![]() Levit later told the New York Times that he was fully aware of the protest marches in the U.S. I had merely planned to check out the endurance effort but became fixated and wound up getting many of my daily 10,000 steps by walking back and forth between Levit’s stream on my computer and the television in another room with the live broadcast of demonstrations in Los Angeles over the George Floyd killing. He took only the occasional bathroom break, allowing viewers to clock, in real time, the rate of depletion of a heroic pianist’s energy and its effect on the psyche over 15½ hours. Yet two days later, just as America was erupting in mass social protest, pianist Igor Levit, broadcasting from a Berlin studio, gave an incomparable example of keyboard angst by repeating Satie’s “Vexations,” surely the most vexatious single page of music there is, 840 times. ![]()
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