Gymnopédie, No. 1 (jazz version)

In 1905 Erik Satie joined the Schola Cantorum, a school specialized in religious music, to study fugue, counterpoint and orchestration. In five years he completed his training, his music took on a more rigorous and academic dimension, and he started to shape his own style. As a result he wrote En Habit de Cheval. In 1910, a group of young musician followers of Maurice Ravel called “Jeunes Ravêlites” told him of their admiration for his work prior to his learning into the Schola Cantorum. In 1912 he was successful with his brief humoristic pieces for piano and during the following years he was part of the vanguardist trends that emerged in Paris.

From 1915 to 1925 Satie was the inspiration for the “Group of Six”, made up of the musicians Arthur Honegger, G. Tailleferre, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud, Louis Durey and Georges Auric, whose bond was their fascination for the ballet Parade with music by Satie and the collaboration of the poet Jean Cocteau, premiered in 1917. Cocteau explained the spirit of the group in his article Le coq et l’arlequin and participated with Satie in five stage pieces. Together with Milhaud, Satie devised the “furniture music” project, which proposed a kind of music as a decorative element similar to what we know today as “background music”.

From 1919 he established a connection with Tristan Tzara, founder of the Dada movement, and other musicians from his school, contributing to Dadaist work 391. In 1923 the “School of Arcueil” was formed around his figure, whose representatives were Henri Cliquet-Pleyel, Roger Desormières, Maxime Jacob and Henri Sauguet. In 1924 he composed his own Dadaist ballets Daleist ballets Relâche and Mercure, and the soundtrack for René Clair’s subrealist movie Entr’acte. Satie has gone down in music history for his antiacademic and nonconformist style. His unorthodox production and sense of humor make him an unusual composer. In 1925 he contracted pleurisy and he was admitted to a hospital where he died after a few months.