THOMAS LARSON

(Quillette July 9, 2025)

In 1963, eleven years after his 4’ 33”—a piece requesting a musician not play for a spell of precise time—John Cage staged a work, not of his own, but that of a past fellow traveler, called “Vexations.” The short work for piano, a kind of atonal sound-screen, was written in 1893. Its asymmetrical shape, like a craggy mountain ledge, runs out and comes back on itself and loses interest after a couple minutes. Its directionlessness seems to fulfill some yearning in its composer, as much hardship as joke: His accompanying note asks the performer(s) to play the piece 840 times in succession.

Cage and a dozen other players took turns at keeping the circling going for its 18-hour Manhattan premiere. Eventually, among the denizens of Greenwich Village, word got out that here was true innovation, a wacky, athletic marathon, exemplary of a new idea in the 1960s, performance art. More than quizzical interest greeted the piece and its unicorn deviser—the early twentieth century’s famously frivolous and mostly forgotten French composer, Erik Satie.

“Vexations” heralded the rebirth of musical stasis—a sequence of fragmented chord patterns, sans melody, on long repeat or played once and done. Of the style’s inertia, Satie commented that he was mimicking the comforting sameness of one’s couches and end tables; he christened the form musique d’ameublement: furniture music. In an interview 60 years later, the American composer Virgil Thomson who was around during the furniture heyday in the 1920s, studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, described the form to me as “music you sit in the presence of.” Music you absorb, endure, neglect, or, maybe, enjoy by drifting away from its tenuous hold. You may value it because lacking stickiness it allows you to do things other than listen to it as it plays. Today we know this musical wallpapering, which asks “less” of its listeners’ attention though it may still mesmerize an audience’s impassivity via its repetition—minimalism.

The style’s beautiful surface has been used for hypnotic effect in recordings and TV and movie soundtracks whether dramatic or banal: Brian Eno’s “music for airports,” John Adams’s Nixon in China, and the crystalline drones and wall-of-sound in Ludwig Göransson’s score for Oppenheimer. It’s perfect for a scene or a collage of scenes where repetitious patterns propel contrasts in narrative time, a countermotion to a train barreling through the Scottish Highlands or a ship cresting turbulent waves. You hear its unadorned simplicity add ballast to psychological and physical panoramas—when Max Richter soaks viewers in the fever dream of an inexplicable reality in The Leftovers, when Phillip Glass brings ecstatic grandeur to the daredevil surfers in the 100 Foot Wave, when Ludovico Einaudi underscores the human displacement of Amazon-warehouse vagabonds in Nomadland.

Satie the miniaturist loved shaping short tides of repetition, allowing brevity and charm the soon-over present of a poem. His economy shines in the well-known, evenly stated major ninth and major seventh chords of his Three Gnossiennes and Three Gymnopédies, one of the latter, a warm stone that graced the 1968 quadruple platinum second album of Blood, Sweat, and Tears. Those tender evocations were from Satie’s early period, 1884 to 1904, unassuming quietuses, which he penned during his 20s and 30s. Vexations, Three Pieces in Pear Form, Nose Cones, and Genuine Flabby Preludes (English translations), and a few other arch titles, require scant virtuosity, avoid passionate squalls, speak with mock heroic bluster or exotic frivolity, and, according to Roger Shattuck in The Banquet Years, the first cultural history of the fin de siècle avant-garde in France published in 1955, capture a “music that seems to move at a standstill.” Untying another tradition was Satie announcing to his gaily lit café patrons to only half-listen to him play—their conversations were part of the bar’s furnishings.

Satie’s best pal, Debussy, said he was a medievalist, born four centuries past his true era. Others agreed. His pianistic apéritifs made a fuss only with composers, and Satie, temperamentally lazy, earned little from his regular gigs in Montmartre bistros. (They were only half-listening.) His flat was unheated and without running water. He was called an “amateur bungler,” an indolent, a sideshow. The lack of recognition (and too much cognac) got to him. At age 40, he declared, “I’m dying of boredom,” and enrolled in the Schola Cantorum to study composition, counterpoint, and orchestration right. When I was in music school, my theory teacher said Satie, who graduated in three years (as I did), kept much of his nonchalance in his scores, except he added a lot of chromatic notes where they need not be.

During his final decade, Satie, nicknamed the Velvet Gentleman for owning seven identical chestnut-colored corduroy suits and walking the six miles most days from home to cabaret with bowler hat, pince-nez, and umbrella, was rediscovered around 1915 by the hyper-hip Parisians. They realized their “precursor” (Ravel’s term)—hungry, feral, defiant—was still alive, and among them. The cubist phenomenologists and Andre Breton welcomed this musical aristocrat and adopted his aesthetic: to valorize lightness, irony, assemblage, plus his penchant for vertical sonorities, lightly coiffured (despite his schooling), that dismissed color and harmonic drive. Alex Ross called the Satie effect, “the instant prolonged,” which meant tunes were more like lakes than rivers.

Postwar, dancers, playwrights, producers lined up to collaborate with him. The result, a series of ballets involving Picasso, Cocteau, Leon Massine, Sergei Diagilev, Blaise Cendrars, Andre Derain, and more. In one, the parodic set-design drama Parade, a cheeky scrim of fairground rinky-dink was also scored for gunshots, typewriting clacks, and slide whistles. Satie’s 1924 swan song, Relȃche, whose title translates as “Tonight’s concert is canceled,” erupted in argument, the stiff- and loose-collared factions slapping one another with their leather gloves. The painter Francis Picabia who did the décor and costumes for Relȃche (one bit of silliness was an onstage chess match, Man Ray vs. Marcel Duchamp) said of the plotless spectacle that “the ballet represented life with no tomorrow, life of today. Car headlights, pearl necklaces, advertising, music, men in evening dress, movement, noise, and play.”

When Satie died of cirrhosis of the liver, 100 years ago this month at the age of 59, he no doubt had little idea his quixotic, surrealist, and bricolage eccentricities would wellspring the century’s affair with minimalism and turn its anti-conventionality into one of the most conventional and copied of all musical forms.

For a hundred years, the minimalist utility has rearranged the content of art—in painting (Mondrian), tape loops (Steve Riley), film scores (Godfrey Reggio), gamelan orchestras (Lou Harrison), Nordic soundscapes (John Luther Adams), angelic pop (Sigur Ros), and Afro-Pop and Rap and Hip-Hop, D.J.s and producers sampling, from House to Gangsta, Biggie to Tupac. To trace Satie’s legacy into our age of pomo compilations comes a writer who adores Satie’s tiny oeuvre and massive influence—Ian Penman and his whimsically ephemeral meditation, Erik Satie Three Piece Suite.

Penman, blest with the best author name ever, is a grand explicator of the cross-generational sharing of pop, rock, and punk. For years he’s written deft criticism for City Journal, NME, and the London Review of Books, some of which is collected in his 2019 It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track. His Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors (2023) shows off his encyclopedist’s obsession with random order. Surveying the under-lauded, cranky narcissist of the 1970s New German Cinema, Penman samples the Fassbinder mystique in 450 takes, each a sentence or a paragraph long, leaping from one thing in particular to another. Egg-timing a nonlinear narrative, of course, never feels consequential, which is the point. Such postcard pensées accumulate not unlike Fassbinder’s gobbling of sausages and cabbage, cocaine and barbiturates, that killed him at 37 after writing and directing and often acting in 44 films and TV series.

Erik Satie is more decisively thought out. Penman’s suite—“Satie Essay,” “Satie A to Z,” “Satie Diary”—alludes to a set of tempo-shifting dance pieces and offers a range of angles and repose. The essay brings the composer’s dandyish peculiarities to life, sorting the role from the artist and finding them deviously intertwined. The A to Z catalogs friends, Cocteau and Suzanne Valadon, his one unrequited love, concepts like furniture music and the number three, and objects, an umbrella and microtones. The diary portion quotes from two recent years of the author’s morning ruminations—what he’s thinking about, listening to, or improvising at the piano. He overhears Satie sitting in a booth behind him or strolling with friends through the gardens of French expressionism. His widening gyre spans Satie’s heyday as well as avant-garde impudence still nagging our time.

In a sense Penman’s Satie commingles rather nicely with history’s Satie. Close readers will note that Satie’s compactness of his material mirrors Penman’s indexing lust—the touchdown, look-around, and quick exit. For example, in A to Z, fully half the short book, there’s four terse entries for NOTE: a “written symbol” of tone and duration on a musical staff; a record of something worth recording; Satie’s constant jottings of tunes and ideas as he walked; and, fun fact, the words “note” and tone” consist of the same four letters! Or skip about and here’s Penman appraising happiness, haunting, and hoarding, key reoccurrences in Satie’s life.

Accretion, clearly, not date-stamped biographical this, this, and this, the tried-and-true path of the life-writer, which has its place. But not for Penman. In the essay, he delays for 14 pages a potted bio of Satie’s life and begins, instead, with a 1924 photograph, later a short film, of Satie, Picabia, and René Clair, the latter pair, influential surrealists, cutting up like the early Beatles before a movie camera. The footage reveals Satie, 58, an OG merry prankster, loves any stage. Penman’s point is to portray Satie not as a tubercular Bohemian but a celebratory nuisance. Such gives agency to outsiders-to-come, those who mix “the funny-sinister and fantasy-grotesque” like John Cage, William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Eileen Myles, and countless fellow travelers whose quirks become their schtick.

What’s more, Penman makes the case for Satie as an autochthonous mystic of form. Nothing like him before in music has ever been. Satie creates “his own exact and proper forms . . . little musical sigils and spells that in effect proclaim: in order to be mystical, you don’t have to be symphonic.” Unlike Gustav Mahler’s mighty Germanic dramas, we hear Satie’s ear trained on the small things of the world, the delighted in and disposed of, that “more convincingly evoke a feeling of sacredness.”

With Satie, it is always a matter of form. Imbuing set forms—nocturne, prelude, waltz—with an inimitable personal touch. He takes a classic form and squints at it, walks around it, flutters away the dust. (It is a bit like Picasso taking Las Meninas by Velázquez and making it anew.)

In retrospect, how radical Satie’s approach—a feathery counterweight to the Wagnerian hysteria that swept European music and nurtured Nietzschean ideology—is. His music “doesn’t rely on dramatic development or expressive gestures.” Furniture music is “pure sound, tone and spatial awareness, with no separation of background and foreground. A new kind of listening—or not quite listening—space.”

Penman labels Satie’s “method” the art of displacement, the half-heard, the barely noticed, as much conceptual as real. The music is meant to evaporate, its failure to last, its experience. Performing Satie is a way of abutting the grandiosity of performance itself, for unlike Beyoncé or the Grateful Dead, his lean-to has collapsed before we can really use it. Satie’s stinginess is the outcome. What’s more, he values ordinariness, the Cageian sound context in which music and life are scored to interact, the more overlap, the better. As Satie seduces you with his brevity, the brevity also disenthralls you of any romantic yearning for more.

Illustrative, again, of this side-eye view of his own work is Satie’s remark about his three carnivalesque pieces, Desiccated Embryos. In them he steals two whole themes from Chopin and, to tip the cart, goes a bit mental with playing instructions: “Walk a bit. Going out in the morning. It’s raining. The sun is behind clouds. Pretty cold. All right.” And this bit of advice: “[Play] like a nightingale with a toothache.” To confound the beard-stroking fun, he adds, “this work is absolutely incomprehensible, even to me.”

Near the end, Penman trains his Marxist highlighter on Satie’s prescience.

All those in-between emotions it’s hard to name. Old time feelings in danger of disappearing. Staring into space vs staring at a screen. Digital culture nullifies our capacity for blankness, boredom, the ability to just happily accept the passage of time; just to let something break off, drift, straggle. Non-capitalist measures of time. Gambling, according to Walter Benjamin, converts time into a narcotic. . . . The embodiment—or disembodiment—of this tone, for me, may be the 1959 album Chet, [Chet Baker, the cool jazz trumpeter].

Indeed, the in-between of Penman’s three parts is key. How much his association of the stylistically unrelated echo one another effortlessly. Like swells from random sides and currents, breaking as a unified mix on the shore. Rightly placed last are the diary entries, which read less as filler and more to show us the sparks of his obsession.

Turns out this obsession is long-lived—years of buying books and records from charity shops; losing himself in the modern recordings of Satie, Ravel, Debussy, Bill Evans; listening full-eared to pianists Monk, Harold Budd, Morton Feldman “is to feel your sense of time being shifted sideways, decomposed, rearranged”; pieces of dreams he can barely remember that recall Satie’s ghosts; rewatching David Lynch films; rereading Francis Ponge, Thomas Bernhard, Roland Barthes; and dropping in this little nugget, the book’s summa cum laude: “Some of Satie’s better known piano pieces are like preambles or prefaces, but absent the feeling of anything to follow.” Terry Riley, the composer of In C and A Rainbow in Curved Air, agreed: Music need not progress to be interesting.

And then closing his book of hours, Penman parks on a truth about art’s fickle evolution, its undoing of its own traditions as its tradition, something we’ve known for the century since his passing but must be reminded how and how strong it’s become second nature:

Stare into space and let your thoughts drift where they may. Detach from the relentless push to always be at work that has invaded every possible facet of life today. To work on yourself has become an irremediable duty. To do the work. To be the best version. To be on a journey . . ..

This may be one of the reasons I love Genet’s writing . . . and Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles, Jean Rhys, Fernando Pessoa . . . who vistas of nothing much happening. Dust gathering.

Such a lovely blue sky today.