Tout Satie !

Tout Satie !, Erik Satie Complete Edition, Various Artists (Erato)

Vexations takes up 1.34 at the end of disc 5 of this 10-disc complete edition of Erik Satie whereas it is advised that it is played 840 times, could take 16 hours and very few people have ever sat through such a performance, so that's not 'complete', is it.

I ruined my 'classical' 'radio station', DGBooks Wireless, by adding in Vexations when the merrier late one night in thrall to Erik Satie and now wish I'd done what this box set does and just included one run through rather than all of the 840. But that is what Satie can do to you. He is singular, apparently outrageous and infectious and it's not until you've signed up to him unwontedly that you realize you were always more of a JS Bach fan after all.

He's good, though, and light years ahead of his time if not ours also because he made for himself his own flippant but very serious, minimal but wide-ranging, fleeting but eternal, way of doing it and, we might say, more truly avant-garde in being ahead of that which purported to be so. 

No composer was ever so idiosyncratic, certainly not without doing it so apparently genuinely or convincingly or being a few tricks ahead of all that game but I believe in him whereas I'd never ever believe in such self-styled radicals as Frank Zappa, Pierre Boulez or Jeremy Corbyn who somehow were who they were in some way inevitable. Satie couldn't have been predicted.

I've by no means played all ten discs yet and I'd find fault with the flick upwards of the two signature notes on the best of the Gnoissiennes, no. 1, as played by Aldo Cicciolini. No, no, that's far too quick. Satie, if anything, resorts to some sort of ragtime if in doubt or when joking, which he often is, but those Gnoissiennes and the famous Gymnopédies, his best-known pieces are to be luxuriated in at slower tempi.

This is a goldmine of otherwise irreverent, short piano composition, the joke sometimes seemingly beyond us. But the songs on disc 9 sound hilarious even without translations, the 'minimalism' outflanks anything that Philip Glass ever did by happening nearly a hundred years earlier and doing more with less, deliberately working within such a limited palette.

The short opera, Socrate, works within this limited palette and limited time scale to very moving effect and is very much the discovery of this acquisition.

There is much to be considered about ideas of 'artifice', Satie adopting his singular approach and sticking devoutly to it. All artists are artificial, though, it's 'art' even when purporting to be 'authentic' and so quite how much mileage there ultimately is in finding him affected is in some doubt.  Anything that was authentic wouldn't be art and so perhaps that argument turns round and makes Satie somehow the more authentic by being so thoroughly devoted to his artifice. But that discussion leads us into ever decreasing circles if we're not careful.