(Credit: Wikimedia)

For centuries, music had been an event to witness, a grand spectacle played out in the concert halls, often with the aid of actors, sets, and props, all serving their parts in the piece’s arch-narrative. While such symphonies or operas were well beyond the reach of the European working class, even the day’s bars and restaurants would host resident street musicians who’d perform as an evening’s focal entertainment. Quietly dreaming up a radical rethink of music’s presence in life, French pianist Erik Satie envisioned a new approach to compositions whose legacy would only be felt decades later.

A restless and undisciplined young man in the newly formed French Third Republic, the teenage Satie found himself booted out of the respectable Paris Conservatory music school for his supposed indifference to the strict demands of the faculty’s programme. Similarly, finding himself dismissed from the 33rd Infantry Regiment after enlisting in the military, Satie moved to lodgings in Paris’ ninth arrondissement and embraced the life of a bohemian, writing his most famous minimalist pieces—1888’s three Gymnopédies and the following year’s first Gnossiennes.

Moving to the capital’s southern suburb, Arcueil, Satie lived off playing salon numbers and kitsch cabaret before enrolling himself in the Schola Cantorum for another stab at prestige, displaying greater focus as a mature student yet stifled by the orthodoxies of the institute. However, Satie’s intuitive rejections of the old vanguard were reflected in the emerging classical reaction against Wagnerian Romanticism spearheaded by Albert Roussel, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy—the latter orchestrating two of Satie’s Gymnopédies and bringing his work to a wider audience.

While well known for eschewing the latest technological innovations—allegedly using a telephone only once and ignoring all radio and recording opportunities—Satie found himself at the modernist fore, scoring impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s 1917 ballet Parade. Choreographed by Leonide Massine and featuring sets by Pablo Picasso, the surrealist one-act circus caused a vital ‘succès de scandale’ with its incorporation of typewriters, sirens and guns in its show—a provocative move during the First World War’s looming bloody end. Satie’s embracing of avant-garde radicalism would guide his next act of confounding creative theory.

According to cubist sculptor and painter Fernand Léger, he and Satie were dining together, exasperated by the “unbearable vulgar music” imposed by the clueless establishment. Leaving the premises, the latter reportedly exclaimed, “We must bring about music which is like furniture, a music, that is, which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as a melodious, softening [of] the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometimes fall between friends dining together. It would spare them the trouble of paying attention to their own banal remarks. And at the same time, it would neutralise the street noises which so indiscreetly enter into the play of conversation.”

Satie had toyed with such an idea years prior, the unpublished Vexations piece draped in conceptual instructions—”Arm yourself with clairvoyance”, “open your head”—and later memorably performed by John Cage’s 19-hour interpretation in 1963. Composing the first of his musique d’ameublement “Furniture” works in 1917, Satie sought to disregard music’s thematic motif tradition. He wanted to afford the space for any given performance to ad-lib around the short composition, its repeated musical refrain unconcerned with conceptual narrative and free to wander slightly with subtle variation. His first set was even sketched out in various mini-suites reflecting the arrival of guests, dining for lunch, and so on.

It’s a visionary idea that challenged the very notion of music’s meaning, rubbing the elites up the wrong way with its adoption of background music and actively encouraging the listener not to listen at all, but simply absorb subconsciously while socialising. As the title suggests, this pioneering new contextual sound space anticipated the fundamentals of ambient music by decades, eventually leading to the much-derided elevator muzak that later plagued shopping centres—a development Satie may well have found amusing.

Leaving behind a legacy that stretched into 20th-century classical and beyond with stellar records like Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports and Aphex Twin‘s prepared piano experiments on Drukqs, Satie’s artful eschewing of the limiting trend of classical music all those years ago left an indelible impression on pop and avant-garde. And we all owe a debt to whatever “vulgar” band disturbed his dinner all those years ago and prompted his enduring musical statement.