Erik Satie. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Arcueil, a working-class suburb south of Paris, July 1925. Erik Satie has been dead for a few days, and his friends climb for the first time into the room where he lived for twenty-seven years without ever letting anyone in, literally: no human being, as far as is known, had crossed that threshold since 1898. What they find has entered the mythology of the twentieth century: an orderly, hallucinatory poverty, dozens of umbrellas, many never opened, the famous identical grey velvet suits bought in bulk in the days of his velvet gentleman period, two pianos stacked one on top of the other, the pedals tied up, used as an archive; and behind the piano, in notebooks and among papers, compositions nobody had ever heard, among them the pieces we now know as the Vexations and the furniture music. And then the letters: bundles of letters addressed and never sent, many to the same person, Suzanne Valadon, the painter with whom he had had, thirty years earlier, the only documented relationship of his life, six months in 1893. He had written them for decades, carrying on a conversation with someone who was no longer there.
It is easy to stop at the portrait of the eccentric, and Satie himself had built it with care: the founder of a personal church with a single worshipper, the man who ate only white foods according to a humorous piece of his own, the composer who titled his works Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear to answer those who reproached him for lacking form. But behind the character stood one of the most radical musical minds of the century. The Vexations, a single sheet with the instruction to repeat the motif eight hundred and forty times, anticipate minimalism and conceptual music by half a century: when John Cage had them performed in full in New York in 1963, with a relay of pianists and a duration of eighteen hours, the twentieth century discovered it had had a prophet in a one-room flat in Arcueil. Musique d’ameublement, furniture music designed not to be listened to, is the exact prophecy of every ambient playlist and every supermarket soundtrack: Satie had understood, a century in advance and with cheerful horror, that music would become an environment.
The final paradox is that the loneliest man in French music was also its most influential: Debussy orchestrated him, Ravel revered him, the young composers of Les Six elected him father, Cocteau and Picasso worked with him on Parade, and Cage made him the patron saint of half the American avant-garde. All this while every evening, for twenty-seven years, he walked back to Arcueil, ten kilometres, towards a room where no one could enter. The unsent letters are the most honest key to the character: a man who had turned distance from others into a language, and melancholy into a form of precision. His music does exactly this, and that is why it does not age.