Jeremy Denk at the NYRB:
Erik Satie was the truest bad boy of musical modernism in the hypercompetitive market of Paris before World War I, crammed with aspiring bad boys. He took up pieties and profaned them. He took up blasphemy and somehow blasphemed against that. His music is ingeniously confounding. It received no shortage of vicious criticism, and Satie responded in kind. A postcard to the critic and composer Jean Poueigh began, “Monsieur Fuckface…Famous Gourd and Composer for Nitwits.” He lost the ensuing libel suit, adding to his eternal financial woes. Among his many achievements, he’s near the top of the (long) list of self-destructive classical composers.
The most appropriate essay about Satie would itself scandalize, forcing readers to laugh while being ridiculed, all the while summoning the spirit of the age. Perhaps a series of bot tweets or AI semitruths? In that spirit I asked ChatGPT to opine on Satie and modernity, and in seconds it homed right in on my intended angle: Satie as antidote to the pretensions of classical music.
more here.
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