{"id":9406,"date":"2011-12-28T14:57:27","date_gmt":"2011-12-28T19:57:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=9406"},"modified":"2011-12-28T14:57:27","modified_gmt":"2011-12-28T19:57:27","slug":"midweek-music-break-erik-satie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2011\/12\/midweek-music-break-erik-satie\/","title":{"rendered":"Midweek Music Break: Erik Satie"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Early in RAMH<\/em>‘s history, a post here<\/a> 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<\/em>\u00a0thought.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite classical composers of thought music is Erik Satie<\/a>. (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<\/a>. Although the group’s music sprang from a sort of raucous, literally brassy<\/em> 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\u00a0Gymnop\u00e9dies<\/em>:<\/p>\n

[Below, click Play button to begin <\/em>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.]<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

[audio:variationsonthemebyeriksatie_bloodsweatandtears.mp3|titles=’Variations on a Theme by Erik Satie’|artists=Blood Sweat & amp; Tears]<\/div>\n

But Satie was a pianist, and composed almost exclusively for piano (including his original arrangement of the Gymnop\u00e9dies<\/em>). Among his other dream-state, not-quite-trance pieces are the ones he called the\u00a0Gnossiennes<\/em>.<\/p>\n

No one, apparently, knows exactly what the word\u00a0Gnossiennes<\/em>\u00a0means; Satie made it up, and never explained it. For some time Satie was involved in various sects ascribing to the tenets of gnosticism<\/a>, and an association between the words seems obvious. But nobody knows. At any rate, like the\u00a0Gymnop\u00e9dies<\/em>, 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<\/em>: moody, contemplative, and (yes) haunting.<\/p>\n

The Gnossienne<\/em>\u00a0known collectively as #5 actually consists of six separate pieces, or sections. Here, Hungarian pianist Klara Kormendi gives Gnossienne #5<\/em>\u00a0a thoughtful — thought-<\/em>y — presentation.<\/p>\n

[Below, click Play button to begin <\/em>Satie: Gnossienne #5.\u00a0While 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.]<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

[audio:gnossienne_no5_1_satie_klarakormendi.mp3, gnossienne_no5_2_satie_klarakormendi.mp3, gnossienne_no5_3_satie_klarakormendi.mp3, gnossienne_no5_4_satie_klarakormendi.mp3, gnossienne_no5_5_satie_klarakormendi.mp3, gnossienne_no5_6_satie_klarakormendi.mp3|titles=’Satie: Gnossienne #5’|artists=Klara Kormendi]<\/div>\n

I love<\/em>\u00a0working 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<\/em>. It always<\/em>\u00a0sounds like “something else.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0thought. One of my favorite classical composers of thought music is Erik Satie. (He was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2252,74,5],"tags":[2742,2743,2744],"class_list":{"0":"post-9406","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-midweek-music-break","7":"category-music","8":"category-06_writing","9":"tag-erik-satie","10":"tag-klara-kormendi","11":"tag-blood-sweat-tears","12":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-2rI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9406"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9432,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9406\/revisions\/9432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}