Early in RAMH‘s history, a post here covered what I always think of as “thought music”: music to listen to while doing things other than music — specifically, things which require mental activity: writing, programming, art… — music, ideally, to stimulate thought.
One of my favorite classical composers of thought music is Erik Satie. (He was something of an oddball character, I gather; Wikipedia calls him “an eccentric,” which says pretty much the same thing.) Like many (most?) Baby Boomers, I first encountered him by way of the band called Blood, Sweat, & Tears. Although the group’s music sprang from a sort of raucous, literally brassy jazz-rock-blues core, their self-titled second album opened with a quiet flute/guitar/triangle piece, “Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie.” (The first section of that cut morphed into a second, all horns, which provided a springboard to the more characteristic “sound” of the rest of the album.) Here’s that take on Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies:
[Below, click Play button to begin Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:29 long.]
But Satie was a pianist, and composed almost exclusively for piano (including his original arrangement of the Gymnopédies). Among his other dream-state, not-quite-trance pieces are the ones he called the Gnossiennes.
No one, apparently, knows exactly what the word Gnossiennes means; Satie made it up, and never explained it. For some time Satie was involved in various sects ascribing to the tenets of gnosticism, and an association between the words seems obvious. But nobody knows. At any rate, like the Gymnopédies, these pieces share (almost? entirely?) no features in common with the works of, say, Bach, Beethoven, Wagner… Not only does the music not overpower; it doesn’t even assert itself — it makes no point and has no real discernible narrative arc. Yet it’s also strangely beautiful: moody, contemplative, and (yes) haunting.
The Gnossienne known collectively as #5 actually consists of six separate pieces, or sections. Here, Hungarian pianist Klara Kormendi gives Gnossienne #5 a thoughtful — thought-y — presentation.
[Below, click Play button to begin Satie: Gnossienne #5. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. Taken together, the six pieces in this clip are 14:31 long.]
I love working to this. And because of the unconventional structure, I find I can listen to it over and over for hours, with the individual tracks shuffled, without getting any sense of, like, I need to hear something else. It always sounds like “something else.”
