Erik Satie

Personal Info

Known For Sound

Gender Male

Birthday 1866-05-17

Deathday 1925-07-01 (59 years old)

Place of Birth Honfleur, Calvados, France

Also Known As エリック・サティ

Erik Satie

Biography

Eric Alfred Leslie Satie (17 May 1866 – 1 July 1925), who signed his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist. He was the son of a French father and a British mother. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, but was an undistinguished student and obtained no diploma. In the 1880s he worked as a pianist in café-cabaret in Montmartre, Paris, and began composing works, mostly for solo piano, such as his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes. He also wrote music for a Rosicrucian sect to which he was briefly attached. After a spell in which he composed little, Satie entered Paris's second music academy, the Schola Cantorum, as a mature student. His studies there were more successful than those at the Conservatoire. From about 1910 he became the focus of successive groups of young composers attracted by his unconventionality and originality. Among them were the group known as Les Six. A meeting with Jean Cocteau in 1915 led to the creation of the ballet Parade (1917) for Serge Diaghilev, with music by Satie, sets and costumes by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine. Satie's example guided a new generation of French composers away from post-Wagnerian impressionism towards a sparer, terser style. Among those influenced by him during his lifetime were Maurice Ravel and Francis Poulenc, and he is seen as an influence on more recent, minimalist composers such as John Cage and John Adams. His harmony is often characterised by unresolved chords, he sometimes dispensed with bar-lines, as in his Gnossiennes, and his melodies are generally simple and often reflect his love of old church music. He gave some of his later works absurd titles, such as Veritables Preludes flasques (pour un chien) ("True Flabby Preludes (for a Dog)", 1912), Croquis et agaceries d'un gros bonhomme en bois ("Sketches and Exasperations of a Big Wooden Man", 1913) and Sonatine bureaucratique ("Bureaucratic Sonatina", 1917). Most of his works are brief, and the majority are for solo piano. Exceptions include his "symphonic drama" Socrate (1919) and two late ballets Mercure and Relâche (1924). Satie never married, and his home for most of his adult life was a single small room, first in Montmartre and, from 1898 to his death, in Arcueil, a suburb of Paris. He adopted various images over the years, including a period in quasi-priestly dress, another in which he always wore identically coloured velvet suits, and is known for his last persona, in neat bourgeois costume, with bowler hat, wing collar, and umbrella. He was a lifelong heavy drinker, and died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 59. Satie was born on 17 May 1866 in Honfleur, Normandy, the first child of Alfred Satie and his wife Jane Leslie (née Anton). Jane Satie was an English Protestant of Scottish descent; Alfred Satie, a shipping broker, was a Roman Catholic anglophobe. A year later, the Saties had a daughter, Olga, and in 1869 a second son, Conrad. The children were baptised in the Anglican church. ... Source: Article "Erik Satie" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Known For

Sound

2023
Echo Sonata

as Music

2023
2022
Limito

as Music

2021
Day

as Music

2021
Weekends

as Music

2020
Mitosis

as Music

2020
Cirque de Pic

as Music

2020
2019
Moth

as Music

2016
Satan Satie

as Music

2016
2013
Cookie

as Music

2003
Microscopías

as Music

1998
1996
1996
Brâncuși

as Music

1993
Cage

as Music

1992
Ghost Body

as Music

1989
Es lebe die R...

as Original Music Composer

1984
Piet Bekaert

as Music

1982
Kamraterna

as Music

1981
Genossinnen

as Music

1978
Satiemania

as Music

1974
Orson-Sade

as Music

1965
Gymnopédies

as Music

1963
1948
Lamp Unto My Feet

as Main Title Theme Composer

1931
Limite

as Music

1928
Misdeal

as Music

1924
Entr'acte

as Music

Actor

1978
Encyclopédie audiovisuelle du cinéma

as Self (archive footage)

1924
Entr'acte

as A man following the hearse (uncredited)