S.T. (orm)

I got so rained on today. It was unbelievable.

Looking through the archives, I am shocked to find that I have never yet elaborated on my admiration for a certain 'phonometrician' on this blog. Composer, pianist, and artist extraordinaire, he was notorious for the cryptic (yet, I assure you, absolutely logical in context of the music) comments he included on his manuscripts. There's probably a reason his name is one letter short of 'satire'. He was the Zappa of the late nineteenth century, giving his 'Pièces humoristiques' titles such as Embryons desséchés (a suite consisting of three short piano pieces, each named after a class of marine invertebrate; the third one finishes in a brilliant cadenza that you absolutely must hear sometime) and Sonatine bureaucratique (a parody of Muzio Clementi's style; as someone who was once forced to play that stupid clementi sonatina in C, I approve wholeheartedy). His character was also apparently in Moulin Rouge.

I speak, of course, of the great frenchman Erik Satie. Truly, the world lost a beautiful and original mind when he died in 1925. His Wikipedia article includes a poignant list of the items his friends found in his room after the funeral (no one except Satie himself had been inside for twenty-seven years). Excerpts are presented below.

• great number of umbrellas, some that had apparently never been used by Satie,
• a total of four pianos: two of which were back to back, two of which sat upside-down on top of the other two
• numerous unpublished compositions

These compositions included, of course, the outstanding work Vexations: a score of a single page, bearing the inscription, 'Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif, il sera bon de se préparer au préalable, et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses'. Modern interpreters usually believe this to mean that the piece should be played 840 times in a row.