Ian Penman, Erik Satie, Three Piece Suite

 Ian Penman, Erik Satie, Three Piece Suite (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

'Maverick' isn't a bad word for Erik Satie but it hardly does him justice. Avant-garde before the fact, one of those people whose whole life seems to be their work of art but with Satie, although it was surely highly contrived, he seems like a thoroughly convincing original while many avantistes are trying far too hard.

I'm more of a Gnoissienne man than Gymnopedie by now, perhaps, but a return to John McCabe's recordings brought them back as fresh and mysteriously magical as the treasured LP had of them in the 1970's. Ian Penman's short-ish book can be read in a pleasurable day and does a fine job of describing the aesthetic, the man and his idiosyncratic music while admitting,

we inherit a certain language to talk about music which only glancingly reflects how much of it really makes us feel. Especially fuzzy, inadequate or maladroit when it's music that makes us feel unanticipated joy.

If writers weren't so compelled to try to define the undefinable, the language being insufficient, there wouldn't be anywhere near as much ink spilt.

Ian's three pieces are a brief life, an A-Z and a 'diary'. The book becomes rather more about Penman than Satie which is a tendency hagiographers sometimes tend towards, often to the detriment of their work. While he is good enough company and provides a sympathetic account of his subject in the process, one does wonder from time to time whether he realizes it's not really about him.

The studied attire of always velvet, corduroy, bowler hat and umbrella might make us think of Gilbert & George. The brief love affair, the austerely self-sufficient lifestyle, the subversive art, the antithesis of Wagner and the apotheosis of fin de siecle Paris that he so very rarely seems to have left, are all elements in what appears to be a deep devotion to his calling. In his hands, less is more with his Vexations taking 16-18 hours to perform, repeating the same short tune over and over if not in finitum then it must feel like it, but most of his pieces being no more than three minutes long. Except there's nothing small scale about the lingering expanse and timelessness in the Gnoissiennes, redolent of classicism but drifting elsewhere. It's best not to go overboard and even try to find les mots justes for it, like 'supernatural', it's better just to let it happen.

There is a vast map of music- we all make our own for ourselves- in which, say, Mozart leads to Beethoven and Beethoven to Brahms and most of the hundred years that follow him and Satie has to be put in somewhere ahead of Ravel whose Gaspard de la Nuit, a much more recent enthusiasm here, gets favourable mentions but Ian Penman was a 70's NME man, an obsessive who has heard everything and a jazz man, not a mainstream man and so while he loves his Theolonious Monk, Chet Baker et al, he is surprised by the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues but while I'd be overwhelmed and in due course even bored by his assiduous tastes, he gets a lot of things right and I'm glad to intersect with him on Satie.

The Complete Piano Music is 10 discs. It could be a long hard summer and I might need all the help I can get. It's unlikely to remain un-ordered indefinitely.