Welcome back to my recording of the complete piano works of Erik Satie.
Volume Six includes an array of character pieces, mostly from the period when Satie was writing a lot of character pieces.
There's the jaunty prélude to "The Death of Mr. Fly", which was a play by "Lord Cheminot" whose text has never been found and which was likely never performed.
The pieces in "Old sequins and old armor" have text about, respectively, a wealthy guy playing with his gold, a dance in which all the participants get murdered, and a nightmare about an anachronistic battle that results in the coronation of Charles X267a. The second one in this set is unusually simple and seems to have been written in a day to fill out the set for a deadline. I think we can all relate.
Speaking of relatable, after that comes some more Vexations. There's a Grothendieck Prime's worth of Vexations on this installment. Alexander Grothendieck was a really interesting person and I think his commitment to political activism alongside his mathematical work is very admirable.
After the Vexations, there is a Bach chorale harmonization Satie wrote while he was studying at the Schola Cantorum. Robert Orledge included this in his complete edition, alongside some, but not all, of Satie's other exercises from that period. I'm not really sure why he did this, but in any case it means that I have to record them.
Next, there's two posthumously-published sets of pieces for children. In these, there are several of Satie's textual insertions, mostly insulting children. One of the pieces, the third one in "L'Enfance de Ko-Quo", says "If you get in the habit of behaving nicely, you might end up as a Field Marshal. And who knows? Your head might be blown off by a cannonball. Which is a fine thing for a boy!" I think that this piece has a lot to teach us about the military-industrial complex and also gender.
(Also included among the pieces for children is an unused sketch for another "Enfantine", and an unused sketch for "Menus Propos Enfantins", a set of pieces which you may remember from Volume 3.)
"Les Pantins dansent", or "The Puppets dance", was written to accompany a dance/poem by Valentine de Saint-Point, an artist who was involved in an impressive range of artistic and political movements. This was Satie's second attempt at this piece; the first version is also interesting and perhaps I'll record it in a later volume.
Then there's even more Vexations, because I broke up the aforementioned 57 Vexations into two halves. Will it never end? Satie wrote Vexations soon after the end of the only romantic relationship he is definitively known to have had, and shoved the piece in a drawer where it was only found after his death. While you listen to these, I recommend that you think about how it's sort of nice but also sort of perverse that people play through this extremely long piece a century after it was written. This is one of the things that classical music is all about - a conversation across centuries with someone who was in a rough emotional state at the time and probably did not expect people in the future to care very much about what they were writing. I also recommend that you think about heartbreak, loneliness, yearning.
The pieces in "Chapters turned every which way" have text about, respectively, an annoying woman nagging her husband (what the fuck, Satie), someone slowly and painfully carrying a very large rock, and the gay friendship between two prisoners, Jonah and Latude, who, despite being separated by millennia, relate to each other, meditate together, and dream of freedom. The last performance note, above three loud and gorgeous chords, tells you to "enlarge your impression".
The last piece on the album is an untitled sketch from around 1914 that Orledge found and liked enough to publish in his edition. I'm glad he did; it's a lovely little piece with really nice harmonies.
Volume Six was recorded on a piano in Northampton, Massachusetts, with a portable digital recorder, over the course of a week in February 2021.
If you like this project, want it to continue, and/or want to experience other weird projects from me in the future, please consider giving me money.
If you have any questions or comments, good or bad, please contact me through the link on the right.
See the notes of Volume One for more information about this project.
credits
released March 5, 2021
performed, recorded, mixed, and mastered by Carrie Z
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