furious artisans

    Paris X brings together music by the X-patriate Dane Rudhyar (1895-1985) and the X-centric Erik Satie (1866-1925), two Parisians whose personal acquaintance was slight but whose music and artistic vision offer a fascinating tapestry of similarity and difference. Satie, at first belittled as a minor talent and plagued by charges of insincerity and incompetence, has emerged as one of the most individual and most loved figures in French music: he became a leading inspiration to a whole generation of avant-garde musicians following the veneration accorded him by John Cage in the 1940s and ’50s. In contrast, after a run of early successes and years of substantial (though still under-recognised) compositional achievement, Rudhyar’s reputation has followed a very different spiral: discouraged by the climate of musical taste in the neoclassical 1930s, which did not value his dissonant, quasi-mystical idiom, he virtually abandoned musical composition between 1935 and 1976 and devoted most of his energies to astrology. His rediscovery by a younger generation of musicians in the 1970s precipitated the beginning of a late period of composition and, belatedly, the recognition of his importance in American ultramodernism.
    At first glance, Rudhyar and Satie offer a study in contrasts. Satie was the older of the two, but seems the younger at heart (“I came into the world very young in a very old time”, he once wrote). He was born in Honfleur in Normandie in 1866 to a Norman father and an English mother of Scottish descent (which accounts for his full name, Eric Alfred Leslie Satie). A serious composer whose music was equally at home in the café-cabarets of Montmartre, the world of avant-garde ballet and absurdist film, or in the service of the sui generis religiosity of his “Rose+Croix” period (the time of Uspud), Satie was a man of high eccentricity and possessed a uniquely inventive wit: he could by turns be charming, irascible and quarrelsome. As an artist he strove to free music from the grandiose excesses of romanticism: his mature compositions bear such titles as The Dreamy Fish, Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear, Flabby Preludes (for a dog) and Dessicated Embryos. Rudhyar was born Daniel Chennevière in Paris in 1895, to a family of mixed Celtic and Norman ancestry, and died over ninety years later in San Francisco. He came to America at the age of twenty-one, styling himself as a artist-savant, and became known as a composer, a poet, and an expert on what would today be called esoteric philosophy and comparative religion. Like Satie, he left a significant body of writings and published over fifty books, most of them on astrology. His music is characterised by an epic grandeur quite different from even the “serious” side of Satie.
The two men developed distinct attitudes to Paris, the city where they both initially made their mark. Rudhyar was born there, and grew up in an affluent part of the eleventh arrondissement. As a precocious adolescent he gravitated toward the musical institutions of the day, befriending persons of influence at the journal Revue S.I.M. and at the music publishers Durand et Cie. But his experience of the great city at the height of its glory led him to a surprising but determined conviction: that European culture, and Paris amidst it, was a world in decline, and the only hope for the future lay in escape from the old world to the newer civilization of America. All his life he held to an intuition that had come to him one September day, watching the whirling leaves in a forest on the outskirts of Paris: that human cultures, like the natural world, have seasons—periods of growth, maturity, decay, and rebirth. He felt he was living through the autumn of Western civilization, a period of decadence. The creative individual, he said, had a choice, either to remain amidst the beauty of the decaying world, like a leaf in autumn, or to be blown like a seed across the ocean and be embedded in the fertile soil of a New World. In 1916 he made up his mind, and left Paris for New York. He would not return to France for nearly half a century.
    Satie, in contrast, was a Parisian by adoption and by preference, having been brought to the city at the age of twelve to live with his father and stepmother following the death of his grandmother, who had raised Satie and his brother. Unlike the young Rudhyar he had a horror of Parisian officialdom, developing instead a consuming passion for the city’s café and cabaret culture. In 1887 he took up residence in Montmartre in a room near the famous Chat Noir cabaret, where he was briefly employed as pianist and conductor. Plagued all his life by poverty, he moved first to smaller accommodations “to escape his creditors,” then in 1898 to the southern suburb of Arcueil, where he remained for the rest of his life, living in a single room to which no visitor was ever admitted. He would walk into Paris and back each day, in all weathers, stopping off at numerous cafés en route to drink and to compose.