furious artisans

Paris-X: Musica Obscura of Dane Rudhyar and Erik Satie

Page 2 of 4 Neither man had much patience with musical academia. Satie was accepted as a piano student at the Paris Conservatoire in 1878, at the age of twelve, but loathed the seven years he spent in what he described as this “local penitentiary.” One teacher’s report from these years dismissed him as “a quite insignificant pupil,” while his piano teacher Émile Descombes called him the “laziest student in the Conservatoire.” (Five years on he reached the intermediate piano class of Georges Mathias, who called him “worthless.”) He seems to have been a gifted pianist, but rather lacking in motivation and lazy about practicing. Rudhyar likewise had little formal musical education, but was drawn to the Paris Conservatoire as an eighteen-year-old to study counterpoint (much the same motivation would lead Satie back to formal musical study at the Schola Cantorum at the age of thirty-nine). Because of his mother’s acquaintance with the composer and pedagogue Emile Pessard, Rudhyar was allowed to attend classes at the Conservatoire without being formally enrolled—fortunately so, as he found himself “completely unimpressed” by the teaching and soon abandoned his studies. By that time, Europe was at war.     Only slender evidence exists of any meeting between the two men. Satie evidently got to know of the precocious young Rudhyar (then still known by his birth name, Daniel Chennevière) and seems to have preferred to keep his distance. In a recently discovered letter to an unidentified woman, undated but probably from 1914, Satie wrote: “Je suis venu mercredi, pour vous saluer. Je perçus le jeune Chennevière: cela me fit fuir...” (“I called around on Wednesday to say hello. But I noticed young Chennevière there and promptly took to my heels.”) We do not know the reason for Satie’s aversion to the young student. For his part, Rudhyar developed a disdain for Satie’s music and his whole artistic personality. He accords extremely harsh treatment to the older composer in an article entitled “Erik Satie and the Music of Irony,” published in 1919 in the American periodical The Musical Quarterly. Rudhyar takes the view that Satie’s music is an example of the decadence he considered had settled not merely over modern French music but over the whole of European civilization. He blames this in part on the unhealthy breeding ground that was fin-de-siècle Paris:     “Paris... came to be a centre for this sterile individualism, this mundane irony. Too many talents, too many intellects were drawn together by the irradiation of thought proceeding from this unique and monstrous city. And the many brains thus assembled, owing to the lack of a normal, cosmic development brought about by keeping in contact with the soil, in touch with the soul of their race, have denied each other in common, mutually devoured each other, in an enervating atmosphere of mockery and envy, glorifying their fanatic individualism, superexalted to the point of a mad search for originality at any price. Of this typically Parisian spirit, mocking, facetious, fond of mystification, destructive and in most cases incapable of production,... Erik Satie is the very incarnation... He is a typical product of the beginning of this century, of this exhausted civilization which jeers in order not to look death in the face. And he is the buffoon, who cracks his punning jokes in increasing number, pushing them to extravagance, in order to make the neurotic beings who march past him laugh despite themselves, these luxurious adventurers who flock to shake off their thoughts in contemplation of his poverty. “ In this ringing condemnation we can see also the young composer’s disillusionment with European culture as a whole, and perhaps the implicit belief that his newly adopted land, America, held the seeds of the music of the future.     Whatever their personal aversions or animosities, their music was brought together by a mutual friend, the poet and dancer Valentine de Saint-Point. For her “Metachory” performance in Paris in December 1913 Satie offered a work entitled Les pantins dansent. When a subsequent Metachory performance was staged at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House in April 1917, she programmed not only Satie but two specially written orchestral works by Rudhyar. The programme also featured, under the title “Hymne au Soleil,” Rudhyar’s orchestral arrangement (suggested by the conductor, Pierre Monteux) of Satie’s Prelude to Le fils des Etoiles. In a sense, then, Richard Cameron-Wolfe’s pairing on this disc of Rudhyar and Satie revives the connection between the two composers initiated by Valentine de Saint-Point in the 1910s.     << Start < Prev 1 2 3 4 Next > End >>