Erik Satie

Apparently Mozart was a fan of toilet humour. In 1782, he wrote a piece for his friends called Leck mich im Arsch, which means “Lick me in the arse”. He’s also said to have written the piece Leck mir den Arsch fein recht schön sauber (Lick my ass right well and clean). The score can be seen here.

The great French composer Erik Satie also favoured unusual song titles, such as:

Three Pear-shaped pieces

Dried up Embryos

Three Real Flabby Preludes (for a dog)

Pieces to make you run away

Bureaucratic Sonata

Satie also gave odd instructions to performers, such as ‘wonder about yourself’, ‘don’t make your fingers blush’, ‘[play] from the top of your back teeth’ and ‘be clairvoyant’. He developed a reputation for eccentricity, with Stravinsky saying “he was certainly the oddest person I have ever known”

Satie “never washed but cleaned himself with a pumice stone instead’. Once he bought seven identical grey suits and matching hats. He “spent many hours in the company of local street urchins, enjoying their chatter and enthralling them with stories he made up”.

Alfred Eric Satie was born in Honfleur, on the northern coast of France, on May 17^th, 1866. “He was an autodidact who spoke seven languages fluently”, but was a lazy student. He didn’t make the grades at the Paris Conservatoire, and was expelled in 1882. Four years later he joined the army, but “he found military life distasteful and intentionally courted illness to relieve himself of duty”. He caught bronchitis and was discharged in 1887.

He published his first work in the late 1880s, but had little success, and, in 1905, went back to music school for three years. This gave his work ‘a more academic and rigorous quality’, but he’d already developed a distinctive style before joining the school.

Satie described his style as ‘furniture music’, a kind of pleasant background noise: “it serves the same purpose as light, heat, and all forms of comfort.” His relaxing, slow, repetitive tunes can be seen as early examples of minimalism or ambient music, decades ahead of their time.

What to hear: Any of his piano works

Why: He was way ahead of his time. That doesn’t mean much on its own, as Ornette Coleman was way ahead of his time, and his music is horrible. Satie’s piano works actually sound nice.