Erik Satie
Overview
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
. His work was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
, repetitive music
Repetitive music
Repetitive music is music that features a relatively high degree of repetition in its creation or reception. Examples includes minimalist music, krautrock, disco , some techno, some of Igor Stravinsky's compositions, barococo, and the Suzuki method...
, and the Theatre of the Absurd
Theatre of the Absurd
The Theatre of the Absurd is a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction, written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, as well as to the style of theatre which has evolved from their work...
.
An eccentric, Satie was introduced as a "gymnopedist" in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the .
Quotations
"It is divided into three movements, which closely approximate a symphony in form. The first, 'From Dawn to Noon on the Sea', begins with a thin, hauntingly grayed quality and grows animated in such a spiritual manner that it is hard to see how Debussy's friend Erik Satie could have forsaken his customary elegance to remark that he particularly enjoyed the part at a quarter past eleven."
From the (unattributed) sleeve-notes on the 1988 RCA Victor release of Claude Debussy's La Mer.
nothing but an icy loneliness that fills the head with emptiness and the heart with sadness.
about artist/model Suzanne Valadon|Suzanne Valadon at the end of their love affair